Travel

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.

It’s hard to beat escaping into a book – but for bookworms looking for an escape that jumps off the page, there are plenty of hotels that cater to a love of all things literary. From a Cornish coastal retreat that’s been immortalised in fiction to a book-strewn adults-only resort on a South Pacific island, here are eight of the best hotels in the world for book-lovers. The only question that remains is what holiday reading to take with you. Carbis Bay Hotel, Cornwall A luxury beachfront resort just outside St Ives, Carbis Bay Hotel appears as The Sands Hotel in two of Rosamunde Pilcher’s novels, The Shell Seekers and Winter Solstice.

Whenever I take a train journey, I am filled with dread. Despite always booking assistance, I am terrified there won’t be someone at my destination with a ramp to help me and my powered wheelchair on to the platform. Many a time has my travel companion – or a complete stranger – had to straddle the train and the platform to stop the train doors closing with me stuck inside. I have frequently arrived at my destination late and stressed, left with the impression that my time doesn’t matter. What on earth could I be late for – surely nothing important? So I have read with horror, but not surprise, the recent stories of disabled people being abandoned or mistreated when travelling on planes and trains.

When Thailand's tourist board mistakenly used a photo of West Beach on the Isle of Berneray in Scotland to promote the tropical paradise of Kai Bae Beach, it took a British expat with a keen eye to spot the error.  But perhaps the confusion shouldn't come as a surprise. With ivory dunes tumbling down to turquoise waters and the occasional chatter of a faraway pod of dolphins, the beaches of Uist, a collection of islands in the Outer Hebrides, could easily be mistaken for some of the most popular bays in the Seychelles or Caribbean. The only giveaways are the brisk breeze that nips your ears and the dearth of other visitors. The beaches here are regularly voted some of the most beautiful in the world.

Posing as a marine biologist and with Soviet agent Anya Amasova posing as his wife, James Bond checked into Hotel Cala di Volpe in the The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). Their mission: to gather intelligence aboard super-villain Karl Stromberg’s secret underwater lair, somewhere in the Tyrrhenian Sea between Sardinia and the Italian mainland. In the meantime, they stay in a spacious suite with exposed wooden beams and open ocean views (where Amasova also vows to kill Bond when the mission is over). When I stayed at Cala di Volpe this year, I saw no villainous marine lair, just Tommy Hilfiger’s super yacht. The hotel has retained its Bond glamour through the years and offers the super-rich (and some super-famous) a more private experience than St Tropez or Monaco.

It was starting to feel rather spooky on the pathway to Finisterre. Only two days before I’d been in the celebratory environs of Santiago de Compostela with its endless arrivals of jubilant pilgrims. Now dark clouds were scudding across the Galician hills in the distance and the only sound I could hear was the wind blowing – in an accusatory manner, it seemed – through the trees beside me. While Santiago de Compostela marks the official end of the famous Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, with the purported remains of St James the apostle in the basement of its cathedral, a minority of hardy souls continue for another 86 kilometres to the Galician coast.

In Ratslaukums, Riga’s central square, there is an ugly brutalist building which encapsulates the contested history of Latvia’s beautiful, battered capital. This modernist eyesore was erected in 1970, when Latvia was part of the Soviet Union. It was built as a museum dedicated to Lenin’s crack troops, the Red Latvian Riflemen, who helped him overthrow the Tsar and win the resultant civil war. Without them, the Russian Revolution might have been stillborn. Today the content of this museum is completely different. The only relic of the Latvian Riflemen is the Soviet statue in the street outside.