Travel

Imagine dividing up your holiday time between your farmhouse in Tuscany, your villa on the French Riviera, your Mallorcan townhouse, your cottage in the Cotswolds and your apartment in Chamonix. Instead of dealing with the hassle of renting such properties, or the upkeep of owning each one of them, you just turn up and everything is ready and familiar.  Belgians Hilde and Henrik love the concept of co-owning five holiday homes, enjoying two or three weeks in each a year. ‘Everyone treats the house as if it’s their own, and we even found the fridge half full of beer when we arrived at Soller [in Mallorca],’ says Henrik, in his late fifties.

Spending Christmas Day abroad is, as they say, ‘Marmite’ – you either love the idea, or you hate it. But it seems there are plenty of us who love it. The Association of British Travel Agents estimates that five million Britons will escape abroad for Christmas and new year this month, with yesterday expected to be the busiest day for departures. Many are destined for sun-soaked destinations such as the Canary Islands, Southern Spain, Turkey, Barbados, the Middle East and Mexico. And I know exactly what the appeal is. My husband, young son and I have spent six of the past eight Christmases overseas – most of them at our second home just south of Valencia in Spain, another in Dubai and one in Cape Town. ‘Don’t you miss being at home?

While most travelers compile bucket lists of dream destinations, some revel in the pursuit of everywhere. Self-styled “extreme travelers” are seduced by hard-to-reach islands like Norway’s Bouvet, South Africa’s Prince Edward Islands and hundreds of other geographic oddities, in the same way children are tantalized by Disney World. In this subculture, visits to forbidden destinations like Guantánamo Bay, the Gaza Strip and India’s Andaman Islands, where the missionary John Allen Chau was murdered by spear-brandishing natives in 2018, confer status. And so do visits to pariah states and conflict zones, at least until Russia invaded Ukraine. The close-knit, extreme-travel community, who you might think would be an anything-goes bunch, is divided over the war.

Oh, Vienna. Home to Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Freud, the Danube, waltzing and coffee house culture, to name but a few. Famous for its history and culture, the Austrian capital’s cobbled streets fizz with stories of ages past.  In my opinion, there is no better time to visit than in the winter – and the run-up to Christmas in particular. This city knows how to do Christmas. The streets are lit with a plethora of Christmas lights, some of which have acquired fame in their own right (I am told a friendly rivalry exists between the fans of the chandeliers on Graben – designed to create the impression of a gigantic outdoor ballroom – and the ‘curtain of lights’ around the corner on Kohlmarkt).  But the biggest draw of all are Vienna’s Christmas markets.

The faded splendour of 1980s Margate is the backdrop for Sam Mendes’s new film Empire of Light, starring Olivia Colman and Colin Firth. Coming to UK cinemas on 9 January, it’s about a romance in the north Kent seaside town and the revival of a striking 1930s cinema with a distinctive brick ‘fin’ tower. Renamed briefly as the Empire Cinema during filming in the spring, Margate's Grade II-listed Dreamland Cinema takes a starring role. In reality it's part of the Dreamland amusement park complex that’s had 102 years of rollercoaster fortunes.

No disrespect to the hotel industry: staying in a hotel room, especially when there is someone nice with you, can be exciting and sexy. Staying in a hotel room on your own, though, can be exceedingly sad, boring and unsexy. Unfortunately, I’ve experienced more of the latter type of hotel stopover (a squalid hotel room in Addis Ababa as the occupants on the other side of the thin walls went at it like gangbusters being a particular abject experience that lingers in the mind). It makes paying a wad of cash for a lonely night even more galling.

Ambling through the Christkindlmarkt, Munich’s biggest Christmas market, feeling distinctly tipsy after my third (or maybe my fourth?) mug of Glühwein, I experienced a strange sensation, something I hadn’t felt in ages. For the first time in a long while, I realised I was feeling rather festive. Back in Britain, I’m the archetypal Christmas grouch – but leave me in a German Christmas market for a few hours and I become a big kid again. This is the first year since Covid that Munich has been able to mount a proper Christmas market season. That might not sound like such a big deal to Brits, but it’s headline news in Bavaria.

Many things about Belgium are impenetrably mysterious to the incoming foreigner: the commune system, which language to use, how to politely eat moules. But few are as cryptic as the menu of sauces that accompany Belgian frites. Ketchup, tartare, barbecue and mayonnaise seem fine. But what is Samourai? Andalouse? Mega?  Unlike many great Belgian things that have successfully been exported (Trappist beer, chocolate, Tintin, speculoos biscuits, Audrey Hepburn), frites can only be experienced on home turf. And my, aren’t they so Belgian. First, the friteries or fritkots in Dutch – chip shop kiosks found wedged on to street corners and in city squares – are totally egalitarian and the service is totally grumpy.

The next time you arrive at London’s Heathrow Airport, you might be forgiven for wanting a welcome fit for a king. Yet under the now nearly three-month-old reign of King Charles III, there is a persistent rumor that Buckingham Palace, that symbol of the British monarchy since its acquisition by America’s favorite monarch George III in 1763, is going to pass out of private hands and into public ones. There has been talk of its being turned into a giant permanent art gallery and museum, showing off treasures from the Royal Collection Trust. There's even chatter of — and I can hear the gasps from here — its being transformed into a five-star hotel. You, too, can pay an exorbitant amount of money to sleep where kings and queens have trod.

Turin at the end of August is pleasingly melancholic. The city has emptied after the feast of Ferragosto on August 15 and won’t fill up again till September. Solid bourgeois streets, with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings now housing banks, are deserted save for the occasional confused tourist. What brings others to Turin in August I cannot say. For me, it was a wedding in Milan at the end of the week and the prospect of a little vacation ahead of it. Turin was a whim. I was meant to meet a college friend in Genoa on Monday, but my Sunday-night redeye from New York was canceled. Saturday was the only option, and so I was left at a loose end. Options abounded: I could stay overnight in Milan and head to Genoa with my friend the next day.

If you’re going to visit Costa Rica, my advice is to steer clear of all the stuff that looks most exciting in the brochure: the zip-wires, the thermal springs and the white-water rafting. I’m not saying you won’t enjoy it. Nor realistically – especially if you’ve kids in tow – are you likely to be able to avoid it. Just be aware, though, that the best bits, as always, are the ones most tourists don’t see. Corcovado National Park in the remote south-west, for example. Well, I say ‘remote’. But actually, oddly enough for a country swathed in rainforest, hardly anywhere is truly inaccessible because of the remarkably good roads and the even more impressive local airline.

I wanted to hate it. In the weeks leading up to my trip to Paris, I was told incessantly about how much of a dump it was, about how I'd be faced with overflowing bins and skilled pickpockets. I was even warned against drinking the tap water.  According to some, to be properly British means hating the French. And there's plenty to take against: rude waiters, deliberate incompetence in maintaining their side of the Channel crossing, awkward double-cheek kissing, obsessiveness about cheese, astounding corruption in farming subsidies. My trip to France had one rule: do not enjoy it. Do not let them win. But I have a confession to make. It wasn’t long before I realised that perhaps not all elements of the French character are détestable.

In a sleepy side street around the corner from Centraal Station, there’s a restaurant I return to whenever I’m in Antwerp. From the outside it doesn’t look like much – a perfunctory shopfront, more like a takeaway café – but inside it’s charming, like eating in someone’s home. Welcome to Hoffy’s, a cosy Yiddish enclave renowned for comforting, nourishing cuisine in the centre of this flamboyant, unruly city. For me, this kosher restaurant sums up the spirit of Antwerp, a cultural crossroads since the Middle Ages, a refuge for outsiders of every sort.