Travel

Blazing sunshine. Endless traffic. Horns honking. Wine bars heaving. Trance music blasting. Street hawkers calling. Coastal wind (called the "Cape Doctor" by locals) whistling. Grit in one eye, the other looking over my shoulder. Hair flying in every direction. To explore central Cape Town is to be gut-punched: by an evolving backdrop of sublime nature and the complexity of the human condition. To visit the city’s world-class restaurants, concept stores and co-working sites is to share a street with the sick, hungry and homeless. Look up, and you’re hypnotized by the monolithic mountains beyond; a brief distraction from the painfully obvious disparity. From some angles it feels like the Mother City is being wrapped in a tight hug.

I have been reading Ronald Blythe’s Next to Nature which came out in October, just a few months before the great man’s death aged 100. And so a weekend holiday in Suffolk was calling to me. I went to Aldeburgh, on the coast, north of the river Alde. The town appears to be thriving – full of bustling cafés and London money. It is fashionable and chic. In many respects it is a world away from Blythe’s Akenfield. But there is much here to charm you. I lingered by a wonderful second-hand bookshop, Reed Books 4, its window display with Peter Kent’s Fortifications of East Anglia, George Ewart Evans’s The Farm and Village and Hugh Barrett’s recounting of a rural Suffolk morning in Early to Rise. Is this what Scruton meant by oikophilia? Here was heart-warming local pride.

Tourism is well and truly back in Japan, with packed flights and full hotels during the popular sakura (cherry blossom) season last month. And from today, all eyes will be on Hiroshima as it hosts the 49th G7 summit – an event that Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has promised will showcase the ‘charms of our country’. So what can visitors expect from the city best known as where the world’s first atomic bomb was used in warfare in 1945? While Tokyo will no doubt be top of the to-do list for anyone on a flying visit to Japan, during a recent tour of the country it was western Honshu, where Hiroshima is located, that charmed us the most.

Standing at the security check-in at the Passport Office in Peterborough, my hands felt suddenly clammy, despite having been made to wait outside in a chilly wind until my allotted appointment time. This moment had been a long time coming – but from eavesdropping on others in the queue I knew it could all yet go wrong. ‘I was here two weeks ago but I’d filled in something incorrectly on the form,’ said the woman in front of me to the staff member searching her bag. Meanwhile, the man behind flew into a panic when asked to show proof of an appointment booking on a mobile phone. ‘Oh hell, my wife booked this so everything’s on her phone,’ he told the security staff, only to be despatched back outside.

Nestled in the Apennine Mountains due east of Rome is the region of Umbria, a hidden gem at the heart of Italy. It's characterized by lush green countryside, rolling hills carpeted in olive groves and picturesque medieval hilltop towns. The region has the beauty of Tuscany but without the mobs of tourists. Its food is the best Italy has to offer — fresh, traditional, high-quality and spectacularly tasty. The senses, then, are satisfied — but Umbria also harbors a rich religious legacy. Home to some of Catholicism’s most titanic saints — Francis and Clare of Assisi and Benedict of Nursia — and dotted with ancient and medieval churches of great beauty, it's as much a pilgrim’s paradise as it is a tourist’s Italian dream.

The first time I set eyes on a Brompton, well over a quarter of a century ago on the Lincolnshire coast, I thought it was a child’s bike. When the owner returned, he took great delight in demonstrating its folding mechanism, untangling the metal tubes and cables. I decided I wanted one but delayed making the purchase until I reached retirement.  Much of the decade since then has been spent travelling solo to well over 100 countries across six continents – with my Brompton in tow. It has accompanied me to 42 European capital cities and several African countries. Unlike conventional road bikes, the great advantage of the Brompton is its portability.

“What the f—” “Don’t look directly at it. I’m serious, that thing is cursed.”  My childhood best friend Sofie has just scooped me up from the epicenter of weirdness that is Denver International Airport, one hand on the steering wheel, the other blocking my view of a thirty-five-foot, bright blue fiberglass horse rearing at nothing in particular. I’m sleep-deprived, but I’m not seeing things. “Why are its eyes burning red?” “Not sure. The man who built it died during construction. Blucifer fell on him and severed a main artery.” I’ve no energy left for questions. I’m fresh from nine hours in a tin can sitting next to an effusive new “friend,” insistent on sharing conspiracy theories linked to our destination.

I’d heard that KwaZulu-Natal province in South Africa delivers life-changing memories. Roaming Shaka Zulu’s hunting ground. The Big Five. Bushveld soil on your shoes. Falling asleep to the music of the night, curtains open in anticipation of a burning sunrise. I flew there for a thrilling, once-in-a-lifetime safari experience. And I got it. While sitting on the toilet. It’s a unique frustration, hearing the phone ring out, from the bathroom. My first morning at Thanda Safari transports me back to my teenage years in the 2000s; the last time I had a house phone. “I’m coming!” I shout to no one in particular, having quickly dashed to my digs, post-crack of dawn game drive. “Miss Everett! Oh, thank goodness! You ARE there! You must not leave your room!

Whether it's train fares, energy bills or the supermarket shop, prices are rising and belts are tightening. But if you’re desperate to get away from it all, it’s still possible to have a break on a budget – however many people you’re taking with you. From cosy couples’ cabins to beach houses big enough for two families, and from Scotland to Sussex, these seven boltholes offer spring getaways with plenty of wow factor – and all cost no more than £50 per person per night. For couples  Tahuna Bothies, Aberdeenshire Sleeps: 2-4Price: From £100 a night (£50 each for two people)  [Lee Fowlies] These wooden huts on a corner of Scottish coast are a stargazer’s dream.

When you hear the word flamenco you probably think of a lady dancing in a polka-dot dress, stomping her feet, accompanied by guitars and singing. And in the fair capital of Andalucía, Seville, you would have no problem finding such a sight. All across the old town, around the cathedral and in the lee of its 12-century minaret turned cathedral bell-tower, glamorous flamenco dancers are busy at it, stirring up passion on the cobbled streets and in the city-centre tourist shows. There’s no denying such flamenco demonstrations will raise your pulse and the tourists, not surprisingly, love them.

As the pandemic gently recedes into history, many of us have been embracing the liberties that have followed. For anyone whose work relied on a desk, a chair and a computer, video-conferencing services such as Zoom left us questioning long-held assumptions about the need for those increasingly anachronistic offices to which we once trudged. The thought of traipsing across town to sit in front of the same computer perched on a slightly different desk suddenly felt absurdly outdated.   But just as we became accustomed to typing in our slippers, more adventurous feet began to itch. Being stuck in a corner of the sitting room all day could be just as stifling as those open-plan offices we thought we'd escaped.

While many travel addicts went into hibernation during the pandemic, as public health scolds around the world turned our joyful compulsion into a sin, I kept roving despite the hassles. On an Easter Week trip to the Dominican Republic in 2021, I watched police battalions forcibly remove masked people from the streets of Santo Domingo at the 8 p.m. curfew. I spent a fortune on Covid tests for visits to Germany, Azerbaijan, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and various Caribbean ports. And I was badgered about wearing masks, even outdoors, on three continents.

‘Côte d’Ivoire, eh?’ said the businessman in the seat next to me on the Air France flight from Paris to Abidjan, as he flicked through the wine list. ‘Perfect place to have an affair.’ Seriously? I’d had endless friends prior to my departure sniggering that I – middle-aged white female – was tragically going to West Africa as a sex tourist, to patrol the bars and beaches, barnet possibly culturally appropriated into dreadlocks, in the hope of snagging a ripped Rasta (will I get cancelled for writing all that?) or two. And Mr 7A was now indicating it was an ideal destination for a planned romantic getaway too. Crikey! I pondered his words as he hesitated between the Chablis and the Pouilly-Fumé.

The first thing you should know about Montenegro is that it is wildly more dramatic than you might imagine. It would be frankly rude not to pull up on its precarious mountain roads and gawp. In summer the Adriatic shines; in autumn the mountains compete with New England for glorious, rich colours. The second thing you should know is that there is a relaxing lack of big-hitting sights. And anything you do want to do won’t take long. Even the most beautiful and Venetian of the tiny Balkan state’s towns take an afternoon at most to peruse, leaving plenty of time for lingering coffee stops and long fish lunches in the family konobas strung along the coast (which, if you were pushing it, you could drive end to end in around three hours).

‘You’ll see when you get there,’ my friend said. ‘There’s just a different vibe in Montreal.’ He wasn’t wrong. I travelled from Toronto by train – a five-hour journey made infinitely more bearable by the impressive landscapes that flashed past the window – to find that Montreal is a tale of two cities. Still distinctly North American – and Canada’s second most populous metropolis – Montreal is dotted with all the chrome skyscrapers and wide, bustling intersections you would expect. Yet around each corner there is also a dose of seemingly incongruous European flavour: a cobbled street, an old stone church, a statue in a tree-lined square. For every modern vista, there is a strip of café culture that kids you into thinking you have strolled down a French avenue.