- Readers tips to the UK's best castles
Been there readers recommend their favourite castles across Britain for history, family fun and gory tales of battles past
Hermitage Castle, Hawick, Scotland
Liddesdale was described by George McDonald Fraser as the bloodiest valley in Britain. It was at the nexus of the murderous clan feuds which fed the Border Reiver conflicts and rent this lonely, stunningly beautiful part of Britain for 400 years. The Hermitage stands as a lonely reminder of that bloody past: massive, sinister, brooding, a dark H-shaped monument to power, politics and cruelty. It was there that Sir Alexander Ramsay of Dalhousie was starved to death by Sir William Douglas in 1342. An earlier Lord, De Soulis, was boiled to death at the castle because he sold his soul to the devil. The Hermitage's history feels soaked into its cold stones. It is effectively a ruin but there remains a grim evocative beauty about the building and its wilderness setting. The Reivers bequeathed us the words "bereave" and "blackmail": Liddesdale still whispers those words today. jonbb
• historic-scotland.gov.uk
Blackness Castle, near Linlithgow, Scotland
A 15th-century castle shaped like a ship on the shore of the Firth of Forth. Steep and scary ruins, rugged and rocky, perfect for clambering around with small children (really!). A small jetty projects into the river and there are fantastic views to the Forth Bridges. gkirrin
• historic-scotland.gov.uk
Edzell Castle, Perthshire, Scotland
The distinctive red sandstone ruin of Edzell Castle in Angus is perfect for exploring, but the real treasure is finding an Italian Renaissance garden nestling at the foot of a Scottish glen. This walled garden or pleasance was originally built in 1604. Triangular beds of dwarf box hedging create intricate designs while the wall is home to 16th-century German carvings using heraldic and symbolic imagery, plus flower-filled recesses. You won't meet one of the former guests – Mary Queen of Scots – but will you encounter the ghost of the White Lady? northernfi
• 10km north of Brechin on the B966; historic-scotland.gov.uk. Adult £4.70, Child £2.80
Kilchurn Castle, Argyll
A beautiful 15th-century castle ruin which sits beside the impressive waters of Loch Awe and nestles between the magnificent mountains of Argyll and Bute. My husband and I visited on a July evening this year and were lucky enough to share the experience with only the sheep and swooping swallows. We were free to explore the grounds, climb the castle towers and take in the breathtaking views at our leisure. Sipper
• Loch Awe, Argyll & Bute. Access on foot from Dalmally or boat from Loch Awe pier. Both on A85 road.
historic-scotland.gov.uk
WALES
Castell Coch (the Red Castle), Wales
This castle can be seen emerging from the trees on a hillside beside the M4 (junction 32). It has a fairytale appearance even when passing at speed, but entering the castle takes this feeling of enchantment further. Unlike most castles this one is relatively modern (although built on ancient foundations) and is the result of money and Victorian imagination taken to the extreme. It was built as an elaborate holiday retreat for the 3rd marquess of Bute, to a design by William Burges, at the end of the 19th century. Its walls are beautifully decorated with intricate paintings of many things, including Aesop's Fables in one room. The furniture and decor is wonderfully over the top and bizarre and brings history to life in a refreshing way. lkerbiriou
• cadw.wales.gov.uk
Carreg Cennen Castle, Carmathenshire, Wales
Perched on top of – and carved out of – a huge crag, Carreg Cennen is one of the most surprising and romantic castles. From the medieval walls down the passage cut in the edge of the crag to the natural cave which runs beneath the castle, it's like something out of a wild fantasy story. Kids will love attacking the walls and we can all lose ourselves in the darkness below. Spooky, but torches are available for hire at the foot of the hill. Archaos
• cadw.wales.gov.uk Adults £3.70, children 5-16 £3.30
Castell y Bere, Abergynolwyn, Wales
Castell y Bere is a Welsh castle built by Llewellyn the Great in around 1221. It was besieged by the English in 1283 then later abandoned. It is a fabulous ruin with remains of towers, walls and a barbican. It is like stepping back in time when you walk up the path to the castle entrance. The views from the towers are of peaceful green hillsides that rise to heights above the castle. It is easily accessible, completely free and often deserted. rachbrock
• Take the Llanegryn turn off the A493 and follow the road to near the end of the valley, Castell y Bere signposted. cadw.wales.gov.uk. Entrance free.
Caernarfon Castle, Gwynedd
Why travel all the way to southern France to see one of Europe's finest medieval castles? While not on the scale of Carcasonne, Caernarfon has plenty of excitement of its own to offer.
It retains an angular, massive, military and almost industrial character (the closest comparison I can think of are 1940s flak towers I once saw in Vienna). As its purpose was to help subjugate the last area of strong Welsh resistance to the invading Anglo-Normans and symbolise royal authority, this isn't surprising. Come to think of it, Prince Charles' investiture as Prince of Wales in the castle doesn't seem too surprising either.
Though dominating the town, the castle really comes into its own when you (literally) get inside the walls. These are thick enough to contain a labyrinthine maze of passages linking the multi-layered, multi-levelled towers. You can easily become disoriented and enjoyably lost: I'd say it's the kind of place you could scamper round for hours with the kids, but to be honest I had hours of entertainment scampering round it as a supposedly responsible adult.
Add beautiful views across the Menai Strait and Snowdonia from the ramparts and the relatively unspoilt walled town (there's also a particularly good curry restaurant in one of the side streets yards from the castle) and you have a near-perfect day out. fivewindows
• 8 Castle Ditch, Caernarfon, Gwynedd LL55 2AU; caernarfon-castle.co.uk
Raglan Castle, Abergavenny
A majestic ruin of a once splendid castle just inside Wales. From a distance it looks surprisingly small but on closer inspection, Raglan offers a good hour's worth of exploring. There are nooks and crannys aplenty for both the kids and brave adults to seek out; a water filled moat adds to the splendour, helping you to imagine yourself in the 15th century when the local gentry spent their days walking the long gallery or enjoying the fountain in the one of the two courtyards. That is until it was raised to the ground during the English civil war. And for a final spectacular, climb the steps to the top of the tallest tower to admire the views and see the castle in all its beauty. Re-enactors patrol the grounds, giving demonstrations of musket loading and firing. Whitemoon
• Raglan, Abergavenny; cadw.wales.gov.uk. Adult - £3.00, Concession - £2.60, Family - £8.60
Caerphilly Castle, Glamorgan
This is a largely unknown gem, just seven miles north of Cardiff. As well as being a fine example of medieval castle architecture, it's the second largest castle in the UK (after Windsor), with a tower which out-leans Pisa's, and the most amazing water defences – so much more than a moat, trust me. Small children will love it, and will adore the life-size working replica medieval siege engines which get fired on special days in the summer. Buy some of the famous cheese in the town after your visit. KDBristol
• Five miles north of junction 32 on the M4, in the town of Caerphilly; caerphillycastle.com. Adult - £3.60, Concession - £3.20, Family - £10.40
ENGLAND
Warkworth Castle, Northumberland, England
As any 12-year-old will tell you, the castle at Warkworth is a text book example of a motte and bailey. It was set out in 1200 and was the favoured residence of the Percy family from the 14th to the 17th century. We love it because there is plenty of scope for children of all ages to use their imagination. Stand in the shadowy passage of the gatehouse and picture missiles being dropped through murder holes on to would-be attackers, wander through the buttery, once stacked with beer barrels, or imagine a banquet in the Great Hall. The tiny port of Amble, framed through the ruined windows, is worth a stop for fish and chips at the end of your visit. morpethwriter
english-heritage.org.uk
Norham Castle, Northumberland, England
This is one of the most beautiful castles I have ever visited. It has an action-packed past. Look it up and try to work out how its history has impacted on the stones. It has barbicans that still inspire a closer look and inner baileys with mysterious buildings. Even better, it is rarely visited and overlooks the Tweed river. Some of its more illustrious neighbours don't come close. Turner painted it, Scott gave it a verse in his poetry and Mons Meg helped to bring it down. This is one of my favourite places. You will not be disappointed. Take a picnic. There is currently restricted access to the castle keep due to falling masonry, but the rest of the site is still open. The Sheep Gate is closest to the car park - just find your way through a gate, no one else will be there! NitromoorsFlashback
• Norham Village, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland TD15 2JY; english-heritage.org.uk.
Lindisfarne (Holy Island), Northumberland, England
A beautiful, tidal island with a majestic castle on a rocky outcrop above the North Sea. The castle faces the imposing Bamburgh Castle, and has views of the Farne islands. You can only cross at low tide, so make sure you check the timetable! Miles of sand, rockpools and rugged walks, it is amazing at dawn seeing the sun rise over the sea and castle. I loved it so much I got married there. culprit
• Marygate, Holy Island, Berwick-upon-Tweed TD15 2SJ; lindisfarne.org.uk, nationaltrust.org.uk
Chillingham Castle, Northumberland
Chillingham Castle in Northumberland is as haunting as it name suggests – the castle enjoys numerous ghost stories, as well as dungeons and quite a disturbing torture chamber. The castle played a key role in bloody border battles throughout medieval history. Also a private residence, the often eccentric displays of personal belongings and home-cooked provisions in the kitchen really provide the visitor with an intimate experience of a key historic site. Landscaped gardens and tours to see truly wild cattle ensure something for everyone. Lijun
• Chillingham, Alnwick, Northumberland, NE66 5NJ; chillingham-castle.com. A family ticket is £18
Bamburgh Castle, Northumberland
Perched on the Northumberland coastline, Bamburgh Castle has to be one of the most dramatic, beautiful buildings in England. Explore the history of the site and see archaeological excavations in progress, but to experience the true beauty of this place take a walk along the often deserted beach (coats and scarves are a must). Looking back you get a breathtaking view of the castle standing proud above the sand dunes. The nearby town of Seahouses offers delicious fish and chips at the end of the day. Ali81
• Bamburgh, Northumberland, NE69 7DF; bamburghcastle.com
Corfe Castle, Swanage, Dorset
Just north of Swanage, on the way to Wareham this castle is one of the most stunning in the country. Blown up by Oliver Cromwell, the ruins dominate the town and for me no visit to Dorset is complete without a visit here. The views from the top of the castle of the surrounding country side are amazing, and the history of the castle can be felt everywhere. Once a very important Anglo-Saxon castle, most of the ruins that remain are from the time of Henry II. A castle not to be missed. didotwite2001
• The Square, Corfe Castle, Wareham, Dorset BH20 5EZ; nationaltrust.org.uk. Adult £6.20, child £3.10
Lulworth Castle, Dorset
An outstanding looking castle of fairytale grandeur. It's free to get into the grounds, free to park and only £10 to get into the castle itself. When we visited, there was a wizard in the castle in full costume, which added to the fairytale atmosphere. Just down the road from Lulworth Cove as well. Perfect day out. scottbrawn
• East Lulworth, Wareham, Dorset; lulworth.com
Norwich Castle, Norfolk, England
Norwich Castle is my local, and I've known it since I was small. It dominates the city of Norwich, where you can't really move without stumbling over some bit of medieval history - a church every 50 yards, a bit of city wall here, an ancient pub there. But Norwich Castle tops it all - quite literally - from its Norman mound. It's never fallen into ruin because it's never been out of use. The keep is all open inside, and feels strangely small after you've looked up at it from outside. It certainly gives you an idea of what it must have been like for the Normans, crammed together in a stinky, smoky hall. And you get a sense of everything that's gone on since. It was a prison for hundreds of years, and must have been pretty grim, but now I find it rather homely. It's got an art gallery (with stalwarts from the Norwich School of Painters) and even, slightly bizarrely, a rather good but compact natural history museum. hereward99
• Castle Meadow, Norwich, Norfolk NR1; museums.norfolk.gov.uk/default.asp?Document=200.21. Castle ticket £6.20, children £4.40
Rye Castle Museum, East Sussex, England
More than a castle, Rye's 13th-century Ypres Tower forms part of the citadel of this ancient town, one of the seven Cinque Ports of Kent and Sussex. It was built in 1249 under the orders of Henry III to defend England from the French who just over a hundred years later raised Rye to the ground, leaving only the fort intact. You'll find spiral stone staircases, panoramic views and horrific instruments of torture. You can try on helmets and armour and lie on a bed in one of the cells in the narrow turrets. Children are kept busy with competitions or treasure hunts and outside they can clamber over canons in the Gun Garden. With its cobbled lanes, ancient buildings and 900-year-old church, huddled together with the castle inside the citadel, Rye is an impressive and beautiful historic town. Millyu
• 3 East Street, Rye, East Sussex, TN31 7JY; ryemuseum.co.uk/. Adults £3.00, concessions £2.50. Children free when accompanying family
Beeston Castle, Cheshire
There are not many family friendly attractions in the UK that allow pet dogs within their grounds, but Beeston Castle in Tarporley, Cheshire is one exception.
It's super to explore on a fine day and picnics are welcome.The pretty sloping grounds often host reenactments and interactive demonstrations for children. Alongside this there are woodlands and bat caves to discover and explore.
The walk up to the castle summit is wonderful, but very steep in parts - however the buggy pushers did not seem to falter! At the top the views are incredible and on a clear day no less that eight counties can be seen, from the Pennines to the Welsh mountains. As a budding photographer, my husband was in his element and the children loved tearing around while the adults marvelled at the view. JohnnySegment
• Beeston Castle, Tarporley, Cheshire, CW6 9TX; english-heritage.org.uk
Adults £5.30, children £2.70
- Ask Tom
This week, Lonely Planet's Tom Hall offers expert advice on experiencing Bolivia's salt flat, New Zealand for New Year and malaria-free exotic breaks
I have been looking for a location I once saw on a travel programme. It's one of the most extraordinary places in the world. I'm not sure what country it's in but, in an attempt to describe what I saw, I would say it's a desert location maybe - the ground reflected the sky so although you are walking on a solid surface it appears as though you are in a state of limbo.
Adyam Markos
The near-unanimous verdict of colleagues who I consulted about this was that the place is Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni. This is the world's largest salt flat, covering an area of just over 4,000 square miles and sitting at an altitude of 12,000ft (3,657 metres), and when covered with water becomes one giant mirror. This is when many of the other-worldly photos you may have seen will have been taken.
Gap Adventures (08444 10 10 30; gapadventures.com) offer a 25-day Andes to the Atlantic Experience from 16 September-10 October 2010 for £1,589. Highlights include La Paz, Salar de Uyuni, Potosí, Sucre, Santa Cruz, the Pantanal wetlands, Iguazú Falls and Rio de Janeiro. The price includes a three-day 4WD excursion to the Salar de Uyuni and a two-day wildlife excursion to the Pantanal, transport, accommodation, some meals and local guides.
There are other places where you might get a similar visual effect – the Bonneville salt flats in Utah, where world land-speed records are usually attempted and the Etosha salt pan in Namibia.
I am flying with Continental Airlines from London to Cartagena (Colombia) via Newark and Bogota. The return flight departs from Cartagena and goes via Panama City and Newark. Since booking the flights, I have decided that I would like to sail from Cartagena to Panama and, therefore, approached the airline to cancel the first leg of the return journey and requested that I depart from Panama City instead.
The airline have confirmed that it will cost £75 plus the difference in ticket price (currently £100) to change the flight. Are they able to charge this even though I will be flying fewer air miles? What happens if I don't change anything but just try to check in in Panama?
Alexa Whitehead
Continental's terms and conditions say that they will "reroute a passenger at the passenger's request and upon presentation of the ticket or portion thereof then held by the passenger plus payment of any applicable fees, charges, and fare differentials." What this means is that there are charges for any changes to an issued ticket, provided the change was made after 24 hours from the time of your booking. These will usually reflect any change in fare and taxes, plus an administration charge from the airline. In this case, the latter fee is £75.
Since the cost of a fare is determined by more than how far the plane has to fly, and varies according to the date of travel and how busy it is when you book, it is possible that you are trying to fly on a shorter but more expensive flight. Therefore while this fee seems illogical the airline can charge more. As many readers will know, you could be in a worse position as many airlines would under these circumstances only be able to cancel your ticket and issue you with a new one.
Don't risk turning up at Panama City and trying to board the plane there. Chances are you'll be marked as a no-show in Cartagena and not be able to get on the plane, or have to buy a new ticket to do so.
My boyfriend and I are planning a three-week trip away, either at Christmas and New Year or the first three weeks of January 2011. We were planning to go to New Zealand but the flight prices look too steep. Do you have suggestions for somewhere equally as stunning, with good weather but flight prices at around £700 mark rather than the £1k prices we've been seeing for NZ?
Mollie Lewis
Early and mid January is not a cheap month to travel, as it coincides with the summer holidays in the southern hemisphere. If you can postpone your trip until the start of February, you will find airfares drop dramatically. A £1,000 return fare to Auckland in January isn't a bad price. I took a sample of fares across January on Expedia going from London to Auckland. While I was quoted upwards of £1,250 for early January departures, as soon as I searched for February dates the price was as low as £850 with Royal Brunei Airlines, going via Dubai and Bandar Seri Begawan.
Alternatives will have similarly inflated airfares in January, and nowhere has quite the same combination of attractions that New Zealand has. I found some £831 fares to Melbourne, Australia with well-regarded Qatar Airways, from where you could pick up a cheap flight with the likes of Jetstar (jetstar.com) to Hobart or Launceston in Tasmania. The island is green and very scenic and there are some superb hikes including the South Coast Track. Tasmania (discovertasmania.co.uk) is also home to some wonderful beaches and wineries and has a fascinating colonial history. I was lucky enough to visit a few years ago for the Guardian and there are some suggestions in my article. There's not three weeks' worth of things to do here so consider spending a little time exploring Victoria (visitvictoria.com), possibly following the Great Ocean Road. If the flight has to come in at under £700 you could get an open-jaw flight into one Central American city and out of another. One option is to fly into Guatemala City and out of Tegucigalpa in Honduras, visiting Mayan temples, Belize's beaches and Honduras' Bay Islands.
Note that parts of Christchurch's central business district are currently off limits following the earthquake, but that the rest of the city and the South Island is operating as normal, including Christchurch airport. See newzealand.com for daily updates.
Since it is generally advised that pregnant women shouldn't take anti-malaria pills, where can a pregnant woman go for one last exotic beach/snorkelling/exploration holiday? Central America would have been great, but for the mosquitos.
Joel
Assuming that you don't want to risk visiting areas with even a limited risk of malaria transmission, this rules out a huge swathe of the world, mostly between the tropics and neatly counting out most of the places that fit the bill, based on what you're after. Most, but not all. Much of Brazil, except for Amazonian areas, is malaria-free, and there are huge swathes of coast that would be suitable for you including the beautiful archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, areas of which made Gavin McOwan's top 10 beaches last year. Cuba also has no risk of malaria. Voyager Cuba offers tailor-made trips (voyagercuba.co.uk). Lastly, one of the most fashionable destinations of the past few years is Oman, whose mix of upmarket resorts, historic cities and some excellent snorkelling and diving fit the bill. Destination Oman (destinationoman.com) can give you some more ideas.
- Wasted youth?
Ever wondered what students really get up to on their gap years? A report from the Full Moon Party in Thailand
Up and down the beach, young western men are unzipping their shorts and peeing into the Gulf of Thailand. Behind them, under the light of the full moon, thousands more shirtless, shoeless Europeans are massed outside 14 beachside bars, their knees bending awkwardly to a soundtrack of the Black Eyed Peas, Justin Bieber and generic drum'n'bass. And squeezed between the bars and the crowds are 35 wooden stalls, each selling plastic buckets filled with a litre's worth of vodka and Red Bull. The stalls are daubed with deeply dubious slogans, ranging from the lurid to the the moronic. "No Bucket No Boom Boom", "Fuck My Buckets", "Everybody Fuck My Strong Buckets" – that kind of thing.
Welcome to the Full Moon Party, the largest beach rave in the world. Twenty-five years ago, this was a little-known hippy hang-out on the remote Thai island of Koh Phangan. Today, frequented every month by between 10,000 and 30,000 European youngsters, the all-night party is the ultimate destination on south-east Asia's "banana pancake" trail; a mecca for footloose gap-year tourists. This party scene, right here on this beach, is arguably the epitome, the pinnacle, of the modern gap-year experience.
Three weeks ago, the chief executive of the universities and colleges admissions service (UCAS) declared to a Sunday newspaper that "the golden age of the gap year is over". Mary Curnock Cook argued that while in the past "a gap year has been when young people take a nice break and go out and see the world", the period should now "be used in a focused way to support an application to the course or university you are targeting". In a year when the number of university applications – a record 660,000 – has dwarfed the number of university places available – 450,000 – Curnock Cook may have a point.
But this is a point that has yet to trickle down, in practical terms, to the nation's school-leavers. In fact, the vast majority of gappers do not use their year-out in anything approaching a fashion that might – in the eyes of universities – be viewed as "constructive". Every year around 160,000 British school-leavers take a gap year before entering university. More than 80% of them, says Richard Oliver, chairman of trustees at Year Out, "just go off and travel independently without any real purpose. Sun, sand and sangria, as I call it." Indeed, the trend might even be away from the year of constructive good deeds that Curnock Cook might be thinking of – a trend towards increasingly mindless hedonism. Hans Hoefer is the founder of Insight travel books, and the man who co-ordinated one of the first guides to Thailand back in the 70s, when fewer tourists visited the entire country (150,000) than now visit Burma annually. These days "gappers" touring Koh Phangan and its surrounding islands are, says Hoefer, "not experiencing anything apart from tourism. It's an absolute joke. They don't want to understand the culture – they just want to binge. I don't understand why they go."
Attempting to understand why they go, however, why this is the modern gap-year experience, is exactly what brings me to the Full Moon Party, surrounded by scores of topless teenagers urinating into the ocean to the words of the Black Eyed Peas' "I gotta feeling/That tonight's gonna be a good night/That tonight's gonna be a good, good night." What exactly is the lure of this beach to teenagers who are, after all, meant to be Britain's brightest? I'm here to find out.
When gappers touch down in Bangkok, their first port-of-call is almost always the backpackers' ghetto on the Khao San Road. In The Beach, Alex Garland's 1996 novel about a young man's search for adventure in Thailand, Khao San is described as a decompression chamber between east and west. But when I arrive, it soon becomes clear that even this is a generous description; the Khao San Road actually doesn't feel like it's in Thailand at all. The street is crammed with bars showing premiership football; Britney Spears and Bob Dylan blare out of every speaker; hawkers selling European T-shirts jostle with those selling fake British ID cards. This April, 20 Thais were massacred in clashes between soldiers and anti-government redshirt protesters barely 100 metres from the Khao San Road. But it might as well have been 100 miles away: the Khao San's tourist festivities were barely disrupted. And when Alex, a well-travelled graphic designer from west London who "took several gap years", muses to me that "the Khao San just feels like home", he's spot on, though perhaps not in quite the way he intends: apart from the fat, bald westerners parading their suspiciously beautiful Thai girlfriends, the road could be a carbon copy of Camden High Street.
In years gone by, backpackers travelling onwards to the Full Moon Party might have briefly escaped this westernised gauntlet by taking the overnight train or bus down the coast to the ferry terminal of Surat Thani. Today, however, it's almost as cheap to take the plane down – and so this is what photographer Sean Smith and I end up doing. A couple of cramped ferry journeys bring us finally to Koh Phangan, and it isn't long before I'm talking to the cream of British gappers.
"You know what the worst thing about travelling is?" asks Londoner Jez, 19 years old, dressed in a vest, and approaching the end of his year out. He enlightens me: "TOURISTS." It's a slightly strange answer: we're sitting on the side of a dirt track near the centre of Had Rin, the main tourist town on Koh Phangan, and venue for tomorrow's Full Moon Party. Tourists are whizzing past every 30 seconds on mopeds belching out acrid fumes. Every second shop is an internet cafe packed with tourists checking Facebook. Every third shop is a travel agent's filled with tourists plotting their next move. It's an odd place to visit if you don't like tourists. And particularly if you yourself are one.
But Jez – a warm, welcoming guy – doesn't think of himself as a tourist: he's a backpacker. "Most of the people here are backpackers," he insists. "Backpackers are infinitely different to tourists. Backpackers will accept anyone. Whereas tourists are the kind of people who back home would end up in fights. But backpackers have no interest in fighting anyone, do they?"
Jez directs this question at Pete, an even friendlier backpacker whom he met a few months ago in Vietnam. Pete, earringed and also wearing a vest, is 23, British and on a different kind of gap year; he's been given a year's leave of absence from the army. For most of his time off, he has been working as a promoter for a bar in Vang Vieng, Laos, but he's back in Had Rin for one last Full Moon Party.
Pete couldn't agree more with Jez. "Yup," he says. "Tourists are the people who spend their time fighting here. Tourists are people who go on holiday for two weeks." He pauses, then adds: "So if you can, put in the Guardian, somehow, that this is not a place where you can go for two weeks. This is a place for backpackers. Tourists may pay more money, but they're fucking idiots."
Pete's not sure I've got the message, so he leans in once more. "Where I work in Vang Vieng, I saw these two tourist girls with handbags, wearing skirts and dresses. But in Vang Vieng you should be wearing a bikini, and nothing else. So I said to them, 'You girls are a fucking disgrace, get the fuck out of here.' And my job is to get people into a bar! So I've ruined the chance of those people coming into my bar. But that's how much backpackers hate tourists."
In The Beach, Richard, the protagonist, is told that "Hat Rin's [sic] a long way past its sell-by date. They sell printed flyers for the full-moon parties now." And that was 14 years ago. But to Jez, even in 2010, the town is still sacred. "I just fucking love this place," he says, "because it just sums up everything about youth. Ten thousand people condensed into one area where they can do every single thing they want to, without any regrets. Back home, you get really shit-faced and there are repercussions. Out here you can do what you want. It's somewhere like Ibiza before it turned shit. It's way cheaper, too."
And, of course, there are the backpackers. "As most of the people here are backpackers," Jez re-explains, "you'll be walking along and you'll see someone you know. And then you'll see them again and again. All the people you've met while you're travelling will be here. It's just awesome."
The drugs are also a big draw. These guys know exactly which pharmacies sell speed – and what to ask for when they're at the counter. They know where to go to buy weed, and can name the three bars in town that list magic mushroom milkshakes on the menu.
Sounds fun, I say, but if everything here is all so western and familiar – and if they're spending most of the week off their heads – are they really experiencing Thailand? Pete is brutally frank. "This isn't a Thai experience," he admits, instantly. "This is a party experience. Chiang Mai and Bangkok, you get a Thai experience. Koh Phangan is a party place." Jez agrees, but is quick to emphasise that, for them, the "party experience" is a supplement to, and not a replacement of, the "Thai experience".
"We've gone through the Thai experience," Jez clarifies. "We've seen it, we've done it. So for us this is just a nice way to cap it off and celebrate what we've achieved, all that we've been through. A lot of people just see the Khao San Road and here – and they're tourists. They're not travellers. They're not going to learn anything here about Thai culture. Whereas going to places like Chiang Mai, you just learn so much about their culture of respect, and the emphasis they place on those . . . those aspects."
Jez and Pete are having a "shroom" session with some of their many backpacker friends that evening, and, true to their backpacker philosophy, they invite me along. And so, a few hours later, we rendezvous once more in a bar built high above Sunrise Beach (where, in 24 hours, the Full Moon Party will take place) – a bar nicknamed, for reasons which soon become apparent, Mushroom Mountain. Turnout is lower than expected; Jez and Pete are joined only by two second-year medical students from Nottingham – Hailey, who took a gap year, and Laura, who didn't.
When I raise Curnock Cook's comments, I get: "That is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard," from Jez, who will start at Newcastle this autumn, studying philosophy. "Taking a gap year was probably the best decision I've ever made. It's taught me more than 18 years in school ever did. I could write you an essay on Shakespeare or tell you the strengths and weaknesses of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, but at the end of the day that means fuck all in the real world, unless you go out and experience it. And fair enough, Koh Phangan isn't really the real world, but it's still an experience.
"I met a guy three days ago who'd done five tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he was telling me that during a Full Moon Party in 2008, he'd had to pull two Swedish girls who'd washed up, dead, out of the sea. To meet people like that, to see the lives that people go through, to escape the private-school bubble that a lot of kids end up in, it really opens your eyes to stuff. Shows you how life isn't just about getting good A-level results, getting a good degree and a good job."
Hailey's gap-year experiences were slightly different to Jez's. She didn't go travelling at all, she says, but spent the entire period working in a hospital in order to enhance her application to medical school; a perfect exemplar of the kind of gap year favoured by Curnock Cook. In many ways, though, she wishes she'd chosen a more relaxed path. "I don't know if I should say this," she starts, pauses, then continues: "I was in a verbally abusive relationship for three years, which meant I had no self-confidence. And I turned into a bit of a slut on my gap year because I was really messed up in the head. And then I went to uni, and I thought, 'I don't want to be either of those people I've been, I want to be someone else.' So then I sort of had three personalities. But coming out here on my own, having to go over and talk to people, having to be nice, not an asshole . . . It's been great. It teaches you how to socialise properly. It makes you so much more confident. Coming out here, travelling on your own . . ." She trails off, and then hurriedly starts again: "If I'd done the whole travelling on my own thing in my gap year, I would have been slightly less messed up at uni."
I'd been warned that as Full Moon night grew messier, the beach's toilets would be rammed full of lady-boys at work, their feet three-inches-deep in urine. Old hands predicted that when the sun rose the following morning, the sand would be carpeted with couples rolling around on a terrine of broken bottles, cups, buckets, straws, pills, lost flip-flops and unconscious drunks. This isn't quite how it happens on this full moon though. Certainly, the music is crap, and there are sordid aspects – the bucket stalls; the odd party-goer collapsing to the floor; one man vomiting into the sea beside that long line of urinators. But, despite being sober and solo, I find the atmosphere surprisingly euphoric, and my overall memories are of smiling dancers whose moves became more liberated as the night rolled into morning.
One such happy chappy is Francesco, a 19-year-old gapper from Bournemouth whom I encounter near a giant fiery skipping rope. "Mate," he says cheerily, "throw away that notebook, get a bucket, and just get TRASHED." Francesco would probably be described by official backpackers as a tourist – not that Francesco himself would mind. "There's different ways of travelling," he says. "This is about getting smashed. Getting in the buckets of Chang" – a local beer – "and just going for it. Back home, you walk in a pub, you get ID'd. Out here, you just lose the plot."
Working-class Francesco comes from the opposite end of the gap-year spectrum to most gappers I meet. "I had to work night and day to get here," he says. "I went round all the hotels back home trying to get work. I ended up working seven days a week, in a call-centre by day, and a pub by night." For him, then, the Full Moon is a once in a lifetime event, and it's hard to begrudge him his utter elation at being here.
There is though one group who seem less enamoured with this event: the locals. Though the Full Moon might be the festival highlight of the year for most of the gappers, tourists and backpackers on the beach, for the Thais that run it – and clean up after it – the party must seem like a monotonous, monthly chore. As Charlie Cassidy, a tall, bald expat who has lived in Hat Rin for the past decade, explains, "The locals don't actually go to the Full Moon. We go to the after-party up the hill the following morning. The Full Moon's just for the kiddies."
At four in the morning, I visit The Rock, a bar perched high above the sand at the opposite end of the beach to Mushroom Mountain. At the back, staring out over the partying crowds below, stands the long-haired Sutti Kuasurkul. Sutti's the man who opened Had Rin's first backpacker accommodation in the mid-80s – the Paradise Bungalows next door – and who, legend has it, organised the first Full Moon party shortly afterwards. But rather than smiling proudly at the institution he inspired, Sutti merely looks on forlornly, face motionless, eyes dulled. Would he mind answering a few questions about the origins of the party, I ask him? He shakes his head. Maybe tomorrow, or the next day, he says, before disappearing downstairs.
"Sutti doesn't really like talking about the party," explains Charlie. "For him, the Full Moon's just some farewell party he held for an Aussie mate back in the 80s, which just happened to catch on." Sutti, it seems, isn't too enamoured with what the party's become. "Sutti?" asks Charlie, rhetorically. "He'd rather be fishing."
Fifty metres away, in the DJ's booth at Paradise Bungalows, sits Burmese immigrant DJ Shine – or just plain Shane to his friends. Shane's 25 and he's lived in Had Rin since he was 16. This, then, is roughly his 50th Full Moon as a DJ, and his 100th overall. And Shane's bored – bored with playing the same electro-house on the same broken CDJ to the same crowds. He speaks perfect English, complete with a cockney accent, but he's never been to Britain, never visited the British friends he's made during his time on the island. And so, as he plays mix after mix after mix, month after month after month, Shane stares out at the thousands of Europeans who will soon be flying home, and wishes he could one day go with them. "But," he says, "I just can't afford it."
Up and down the beach, young western men are still unzipping their shorts and peeing into the Gulf of Thailand. Though I never took a gap year, never took the chance to either let my hair down like this, or do something more constructive, nothing that I've heard or seen here makes me want to join them.
Some names and details have been changed.
For more on travel gap years, go to
www.guardian.co.uk/travel/gap-year-travel
- Is this the coolest lodge in the Alps?
There is no reception, no bar, no restaurant and no room service, but Berge, at the foot of the Bavarian Alps, is the ultimate mountain retreat
It's been raining for days. The sky is a murky grey and the mountains, rising steeply just a few hundred metres away, are a blur. After a 90-minute train journey from Munich, I am standing outside the tiny station of Aschau, at the foot of the Bavarian Alps, waiting for Nils Holger Moormann, the celebrated and somewhat eccentric furniture designer, to pick me up.
I'm here to visit Berge, his unique Alpine lodge. Despite the fact that Berge (which means mountains) offers nothing in the way of a reception area, service, internet, telephone, television, breakfast or restaurant, Elle Decoration named it "the most beautiful lodge in the mountains".
Finally, an ancient 4x4 pulls up and the passenger door swings open to reveal Moormann's smiling face. We head first to his huge design studio, located across the road from the lodge, literally beneath Hohenaschau Schloss, a medieval castle that dominates the landscape.
"It's not a luxury hotel. It's not a design or art hotel," he replies. "It's a kind of a well-organised shelter."
About four years ago, Moormann was on the verge of bankruptcy. Displaying a characteristic disdain for long-term planning, he had invested his future in the decrepit building across from his studio, with the aim of using it for storage and as a "logistics" centre. His idea, however, met with opposition from a small number of Aschau residents (even though 98% of his workforce are locals and he uses almost exclusively local materials for his designs). Planning permission was refused and he slithered towards financial meltdown.
The building dates from 1671, and over the centuries has been used as a court bakery, guesthouse and youth hostel, before being abandoned and left to rot. Considering the surfeit of Alpine lodges across the region, Moormann's new proposal to turn it into a mountain retreat was deemed by some to be an even bigger mistake than buying it in the first place. As it turns out, it was a stroke of genius.
In contrast to the legions of lodges promising "dream holidays", an utter lack of hyperbole is key to understanding not only Berge but Moormann's design ethos. There is no invigorating spa or wellness programme, detox regime or fitness trainer. There is no prescription for a better, healthier lifestyle. What you see really is what you get: innovative design, an invitation to be self-sufficient and a genuine opportunity for relaxation surrounded by nature. "You can have a five-course meal. If you cook it yourself!" says the website.
Moormann's design plays with typical Bavarian clichés, as with the lodge's Janus-faced exterior. The roadside facade with neat, square windows is not dissimilar from the ubiquitous mountain lodges that scatter the Bavarian and Austrian Alps, while its mountain-facing façade is a harsher, darker grey interrupted by a series of rectangular windows with single shutters. "It's a wonderful game," is how he describes it, "with the Alps and the Bavarian baroque set against the minimalist design."
The entrance corridor is reminiscent of a minor medieval church: plain, uneven white walls traversed by numerous vault-like arches. Exposed red brickwork adds to the rustic appearance.
"There was no real plan," says Moormann. "It's trial and error. People have asked me whether I can build something similar for them in South Tyrol, or wherever. It doesn't work like that. We play with Berge. We go three steps forward and two steps back. It's not good for the nerves; everything is 'under construction', but it means you are closer to the [creative] process."
At first, Berge seems to have an air of being "not quite finished". But don't be fooled: quality, attention to detail and skilled craftsmanship pervade throughout. Moormann has invested €2.7m in the project, made possible only by what he calls "a perfect run for the company over the past four years": the steady expansion in sales of his furniture, examples of which are scattered throughout the lodge, from his angular Bookinist chair to his array of lamps and pared-down tables.
After the tour, we head back outside to the entrance, and I open a metal box to get my room key. There are 16 individually designed apartments, all with names related to the mountains or the locality. Kampenblick, for instance, is named after the nearby 1,668m Kampenwand mountain, which is accessible via a cable car. Moormann leads me to Bergfried ("keep", as in the castle variety), and hands me a bottle of organic red wine.
With no clutter, my room, which is bigger than many in five-star hotels, is more than adequate for two adults. On the right is the kitchen area containing Moormann-designed cutlery and crockery. Ahead are two windows, one narrow and stretching obliquely from just above the floor to the ceiling, leading the eye to the keep of the castle outside, hence the room's name. There are no wardrobes, just coat hangers dangling from an old ladder, and a small wooden table with benches. The bedroom area is on a "second floor", above the small bathroom, accessed by a metal ladder. Before he leaves, I ask him about the most important thing guests should bring for a stay here.
"Themselves!" he shoots back. Then adds: "My personal tip is to bring a small notebook. Here you have time. You have the opportunity to calm down, to reflect a little and write a few pages… And when the weather's fine, nature pulls you outside."
After he leaves, I give some half-hearted thought to the possibility of finding an internet connection, but once I realise I am wasting my time, I start to relax. Reading becomes a joy.
"Berge is not a luxury hotel," Moormann had stressed earlier. "It's a modern translation of how to stay in the mountains." He is right, but Berge is also a luxury. Just of a different kind.
How to get there and what you need to know
Deutsche Bahn trains run from Munich to Aschau (bahn.com) and Berge is a 10-minute walk from the station. Rail Europe (0844 848 4070; raileurope.co.uk) has fares from London to Munich from £161 return. Easyjet (easyjet.com) flies to Munich from London Stansted and Gatwick from £29.99 each way.
Berge, Kampenwand strasse 85, D-83229 Aschau im (moormann-berge.de). Based on two sharing, prices range from €120-€260 a night (€30 surcharge for one-night stay). The Große Stube can be booked for group events (chef Hans Blösl, can also be booked).
Five other remote lodges in superb settings
1. The Roozen Residence, Margaret River, West Australia
Visitors to the Margaret River wine region, three hours south of Perth, can bed down in a stunning three-bedroom architect-designed beach house, which is the iconic holiday home of local artist and surfer, Ron Roozen. Sleek and minimalist, the open-plan, concrete, copper and glass building sits low on a secluded hillside, above the crashing surf of Prevelly Beach, offering 180-degree vistas of the coastline from all its rooms, as well as its huge balcony.
• From $550 (£317) per night (+61 407 479 004; ronroozen.com.au). Qantas (qantas.com.au) flies from London Heathrow to Perth from £794 return.
2. The Winged House, Tasmania
Rising from the hillside like a silver bird with wings spread wide, this award-winning house is located above Table Cape, on Tasmania's rugged northwest coast. Designed by an artist and architect, it has two bedrooms, a Japanese-style bathroom and an open-plan lounge with floor-to-ceiling windows offering views across the Bass Strait – all filled with the designer's artwork.
• From $350 (£201) per night (+61 9906 3224; thewingedhouse.com.au). Virgin Atlantic (virgin.com) flies from London Heathrow to Sydney from £848 return. Virgin Blue (virginblue.com.au) flies from Sydney to Hobart from $176 (£101) return. Hire a car to drive five hours north to Table Cape (europcar.com.au).
3. Hotel Furillen, Gotland, Sweden
Located on the tiny islet of Furillen, off Gotland Island – 90km east of the Swedish mainland – this limestone-factory-turned-hotel is one of Sweden's furthest-flung hotels. It has 15 double bedrooms in the main house, but it's the four timber cabins hidden among the woods you want to go for, with sheepskin rugs, handcrafted furniture and roaring fires. The hotel has its own restaurant, too.
• From 1,950 SEK (£169) per room per night, including breakfast (+46 498 22 30 40; furillen.nu). Get there SAS (flysas.com) flies from London Heathrow to Stockholm from £141 return. Take a high-speed ferry to Visby on Gotland from Nynashamn, 57km south of Stockholm, with Destination Gotland (destinationgotland.se) from 152 SEK (£13) one-way.
4. Anttolanhovi Art & Design, Design Villas, Finland
Individually designed by not one but nine Finnish artists, these 19 eco villas are located on the shores of Lake Saimaa in southeast Finland. Built from birch, stone and glass, some are right on the shore front, others tucked in the hills, all with lake views. The villas sleep between four and six. A beautician and masseuse are on call for pampering whims.
• From €690 per night (+358 207 57 5200; anttolanhovi.fi). Easyjet (easyJet.com) flies from London Gatwick and Manchester to Helsinki from £46 return. From Helsinki, take the train to Mikkeli (2 hours 30 minutes), near Anttola. Go to see vr.fi for times and fares.
5. 360° Leti, Himalayas
Surrounded by mountain wilderness at 8,000ft in Uttaranchal in the Himalayas, about an hour's walk from the nearest road, this retreat is as remote as they get. It has four ensuite cabins, built from stone and decked out in woollen rugs and wooden furniture, fronted on two sides by glass – perfect for lapping up those mountain vistas. Dinners are served in the restaurant.
• Three nights from £1,231 per person, including all meals, a guide and return road transfers (seven hours) from Kathgodam train station (+44 (0)20 3151 5177; shaktihimalaya.com). Get there British Airways (ba.com) flies from London Heathrow to Delhi from £512 return. Shakti Himalay a can organise the overnight sleeper from Delhi to Kathgodam, prices on inquiry.
Nicola Iseard
- Ten top homestays in India
Homestays are becoming increasingly popular, allowing you to experience real India at affordable prices, says Lesley Gillilan
The Indian "homestay" experience has grown from strength to strength since the idea first emerged in Kerala, a decade or so ago. Now there are homestay tours and specialist agencies for the many hospitable families offering modestly priced accommodation in a variety of homes from city apartments to plantation houses. The majority are in the far north or the far south (Delhi, Rajasthan, Kerala), but the idea is spreading into other states. As a general rule, they are middle-class houses, largely run by the active retired professionals, though there are younger, or poorer, families among homestay hosts. Website galleries proudly feature pictures of "European-style toilets"; they often promise safe drinking water, station and airport pick-ups, drinks in the lounge among the family portraits. Some simply offer homely bed and breakfast while others veer towards the boutique hotel (which is reflected in the price), but the ones to look for are those that invite you to join the family, sample home-cooked regional food and explore the suburbs, hilltops and backwaters of those untouristy corners of India you might never otherwise see.
1. Sirohi House, Old Delhi
The former home of the Maharajah of Sirohi, this mansion of a townhouse is close to Civil Lines, in the thick of Old Delhi, but only two metro stops from Chandni Chowk (three from Connaught Circus). Beyond the gates, a private drive leads up to a grand entrance. It's big on ornate fireplaces, chandeliers, carved hardwood, bits of Hindu temple (the owner, the amiable Ashok Sahdev, collects antiques). For guests there's a choice of two standard doubles and two suites, all with bathrooms, air-con and cable TV, plus the run of the communal rooms - including a cocktail lounge with bar where you can chat over G&Ts. They serve up sit-down meals, buffets, barbecues, picnics, canapés and even room service. And a big plus is the lovely urban garden – a world away from the mayhem of the Indian capital.
• From £47 a night; homeandhospitality.co.uk.
2. Vikram and Paaro Ranawat's home, Jaipur
Vikram is a retired air force officer; Paaro is descended from the Rajput aristocracy and she has her own clothing company (kaftans and vegetable-dyed cottons). Their home is a suburban villa to the west of Jaipur; a series of airy, open-plan living spaces arranged around a flower-filled atrium; marble floors, a roof terrace, antique-modern furnishings, two guest bedrooms with a private lounge and a self-contained cottage in the garden. Paaro can organise cookery demonstrations, Hindi lessons, yoga classes, or a visit to her clothing factory. Or you can just hang out in the garden on lawns dotted with fruit trees (papaya, pomegranate, custard apple) and organise your next outing (the Ranawats have family all over Rajasthan).
• From £26 a night; homeandhospitality.co.uk.
3. Mr and Mrs Mehra's home, Dehradun
Set in a quiet residential area, the house has a bowling-green lawn, geraniums spilling out of window boxes and views of the Shivalik hills - this city in the Doon Valley is the capital of Uttarakhand and makes a handy stopover en route from Delhi to the Himalayan National Park. After settling into your homely room, Mr Mehra, a retired wool processing specialist, wheels out the drinks trolley (whisky, anyone?), while his wife hands around her apparently famous snacks (try the tandoori chicken or the lamb brain kebabs). From the balcony you can see the misty forests of Mussoorie - the so-called Queen of hill stations. You can walk there in three hours or, for a modest fee, borrow the Mehras' car and driver.
• From £27 a night; homeandhospitality.co.uk.
4. Colonel's Retreat, Delhi
This smart city bolthole in south Delhi's Defence Colony is home to well-travelled couple Arun and Suman Khanna (the Colonel takes its name from Arun's Indian army father). Three bright guest rooms offer clean-cut decor and all mod-cons (marble bathrooms, Wi-Fi, air-con, cable TV and hospitality trays). There are balconies to sit out on, views of the city, staff to look after you (all meals are provided on request), plus the help and hospitality of your charming hosts (Arun is particularly up on round-Delhi cycling routes). Shops, markets, restaurants and the Humayun tomb, a World Heritage site, are all within walking distance.
• From £57 a night; colonelsretreat.com (also mahindrahomestays.com).
5. Capella, Northern Goa
Jamshed and Ayesha Madon's lovely Goan house sits in lush tropical gardens in a quiet hamlet roughly halfway between the market town of Mapusa and Baga beach. Jamshed, an ex-merchant mariner, and Ayesha, a former journalist, built the traditional-style house after moving south from Mumbai to start a new life. They now run a successful Italian restaurant, J&A's in Baga; they have a young son, eight-year-old Zal, a family of dogs and cats and three cool, spacious guest rooms - two in the house and one in a self-contained cottage in the garden. All are furnished with snazzy modern bathrooms and antique beds. Relax on the verandah or the sala (the Madons' living room), enjoy simple, homemade lunches such as curries, rice and salads, help yourself to a drink from the honesty bar, or head for the beach (a 15-minute drive). A swimming pool is planned for later this year.
• From £60 a night; capellagoa.com.
5. Spiti Homestays, Himachal Pradesh
This isn't one homestay, but a whole community of them – a choice of 14 in all, spread across six high-altitude villages all in the isolated Pin Valley, set against the frosted peaks of the Himalayas (Kibber, one of the world's highest villages, stands 4,500m above sea level). As homestays go, these mud-and-brick dwellings are a bit rougher than most (instead of bathrooms you get buckets of hot water, and the toilets are composting squats) but the guest rooms – one a household - are clean, and colourful, furnished with rugs and folksy fabrics. Aside from home-cooked Spitian cuisine (momos perhaps, or noodle soup), you get rugged scenery, invigorating mountain air, smiling faces and the odd yak safari. Not only will you step into a way of life in this Bhuddist community that hasn't really changed for centuries, but you will also help to keep it going.
• Rooms from £35 a night, including meals and a guide; mahindrahomestays.com.
7. Nelpura, Alappuzha, Kerala
At Kuttanad, a tranquil corner of the Keralan backwaters, this "heritage homestay" is the 150-year-old home of a Syrian Christian family, Chackochan Edayady ("Mr Chacko") and his wife Salimma. Although both are academics (he is a professor of pharmacy; she teaches chemistry), they still run the family farm, a few watery acres of paddy and coconut palms just off the River Pampa. A traditional Keralan granary house (carved wood, a wraparound verandah, a pagoda-like tiled roof), provides three guest rooms (two are air-conditioned); and the food is fresh, homely and plentiful. Visit the magnificent St Mary's Forane church at Pulinconnoo, meet the locals, potter about in a country boat, or take a backwater trip to, say, Alappuzha (12 miles away).
From a £100 a double, full board; nelpura.com, +91 477 2702336 (also keralaconnections.co.uk, +44 (0)1892 724913).
8. Evergreen Estate Bungalow, Mundakayam, Kerala
In the heart of rubber country (between the hot coastal plains and the high tea gardens of the Western Ghats), George and Anju Abraham's 1950s house looks more Florida than Kerala - all Art Deco curves and decks of concrete – but what it offers is a taste of traditional Indian plantation life. Set in a tropical garden, peeking at the Mundakayam Valley through slender rubber trees, the bungalow has two large, simply furnished guest rooms, whirling ceiling fans, wicker chairs on shaded verandahs. George's family has farmed here for generations and he's keen to show you around: the Pullakaya River, the village rubber factory, Mundakayam's colonial-era planters' club. Dine en famille, while Anju bustles in and out with plate after plate of wonderful food: Appams with mild vegetable stew, fish moily, meat-ball curry, banana fry, fresh passion fruit juice (home grown). You can nip into the kitchen and see how it's done.
• From £59 a night; mahindrahomestays.com, +44 (0)203 140 8422 or stayhomz.com/evergreen.htm, +91 48 28 28431.
9. Glenora Homestay, Wayanad, Kerala
In the Wayanad District, a belt of rainforest in the northern Keralan highlands, Glenora is one of those homestays for whom success has meant a push upmarket - but that doesn't dim the quality of the experience. Home to the hospitable Rajagopal family, and registered as a "farm tourism provider", the house is set in 90 acres of coffee, pepper, betel nut, lime, ginger, guava and avocado among other fruit and spices. As well as three light, well-furnished rooms in the house, there are two new cottages on stilts (each of the latter has two balconies overlooking the plantation – birds, monkeys, foliage and not another house in sight). Activities include trekking, jeep safaris, badminton and trips to Sunrise Valley (less than a mile away), Meenmutty Falls or the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary.
• B&B from £45 a night; glenorahomestay.com, +91 4936 217550/217450 (also mahindrahomestays.com).
10. Nandan Farms, Sawantwadi, Maharashtra
In the Sindhudurg region of southern Maharashtra, this rustic, adobe-style home offers two guest rooms opening on to a wide verandah that overlooks Ammu and Ashish Padgaonkar's farm - 12 acres of cashews, pineapples and coconut palms. It's off the beaten track, a bit of real India, but they offer hot water, proper loos and a great location. To the east is Amboli, the little hill station in the Sahyadri hills, to the west, the beaches of Vengurla - both are less than 20 miles away. Hop on a train at nearby Sawantwadi station (on the mainline Konkan Railway), and you can be in northern Goa in half an hour (the state border is some 10 miles south). Or just stay put; try a local bullock-cart ride, kcik back in a Nandan Farms hammock or enjoy Ammu's excellent cooking (fried mackerel, say, or Malvani-style chicken curry).
• Doubles from around £36 a night, full board; responsibletravel.com.
- Algiers, north Africa's white lady
Few travellers visit Algeria these days but the country's capital – famous for its brilliant light – has a beauty that belies its recent violent history
Isn't is strange that a gigantic country with some of the most beautiful coastline on Earth, a luminous hinterland of mountains vast and deserts idle, crowned with the most alluring capital city I know, should be just three hours from London and almost unvisited by travellers?
We used to go: well-to-do Victorians loved wintering in Algeria. But modernity has been cruel to this great gorgeous land, and even by the standards of war-torn Africa, Algeria's is an awful story. We associate it with the violent end of French colonialism, civil war in the 90s that cost up to 200,000 lives, and sporadic terror attacks. But this is a gross underestimation of a magical place, and a delightful and beguiling people.
With its Phoenician, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Barbary pirate and French colonial heritage, Algeria has a hoard to dazzle any enthusiast of culture, architecture, literature, art, design, ornithology, botany or geography. I went, apprehensively, because I was following migrating swallows from Cape Town to Wales. At the airport, they impounded my binoculars – unwelcome because of "security". Policemen toted Kalashnikovs. "Security!" everyone said, cheerfully. "Bon courage!"
As it turned out, I felt as safe there as anywhere in Africa, and had the pleasure of discovering a world beyond guidebooks. I made lucky decisions: with my money and my visa running out, I resolved to throw all that remained of both at Algiers – "Alger la blanche" (Algiers the white). I loved it all: the foaming purple bougainvillea; the scents of mimosa, pine, spice and coffee; the roads floating through hillsides above the great sea; the Ottoman palaces; the scent of grilling lamb in the warren of the casbah; the harbour front with its snowy colonial buildings endlessly colonnaded (the old post office looks like a palace of ice-cream; no wonder Le Corbusier was in awe of Algiers) and the rich dark cafes… I wanted never to leave.
The casbah is a Unesco world heritage site, a burnt umber miracle, sweet with the song of goldfinches. The neo-Byzantine cathedral of Notre Dame D'Afrique is remarkable: the inscription within, "Our Lady of Africa, pray for us and the muslims", is a hopeful sentiment.
In the casbah, older cafe owners will tell you how they survived French paratroopers. ("We lived in the walls", one said. "In the walls, you understand?") The Great Mosque of Algiers is one of the few remaining examples of Almoravid architecture, with a 14th-century minaret. Just inland from the port, off the main street, is where most of the restaurants are. Follow your nose: mine led me to the most delicious lamb chops I have ever eaten – and as a Welshman I take chops seriously. And Algerian coffee is superb. The Martyrs' Monument is a strange and rather awful triple-pillared concrete structure. It looks like what it is – an outraged howl of mourning raised to the sky.
All Algiers goes down to the seafront to relax: here are lovely spaces in which to meet the locals (Algerians treasure their few visitors) and to wonder at the shattered piles of fishermen's houses below the sea wall, where people lived just above the waves.
My other good decision was to stay at the expensive but unforgettable El Djazair hotel, popularly known by its former title, the St George. The new wing is excellent. Crucially, the efficient management will fax you a confirmation of your reservation, which you will need for your visa if you go independently. (The Algerian embassy issues visas on the 21st of each month.) Once in Algeria, you are at liberty to travel where you will.
If God were to grant Algeria an overdue break, and lift her out of the grasping claws of President Bouteflika's clique and beyond the fists of its tiny extremist minority, Algiers would be the San Francisco of the region, gateway to deserts, mountains and coasts beyond reckoning. (Reputable companies offer tours to Tamanrasset, the Touareg capital of the Sahara.) In the spring the Kabylia region, in the north-east, is said to be like paradise. The coastal town of Tipaza, west of Algiers, is so beautiful that French writer Albert Camus said it taught him the meaning of glory – love without limit.
As it is, Algeria has the clearest light I have ever seen, and she needs you – to see her, to appreciate her and, in beginning to know her, to help her out of the shadows.
• El Djazaïr Hotel (hoteleldjazair.dz) has doubles from £195. British Airways (ba.com) flies from Heathrow to Algiers from £260 return. From 2011 Explore (0844 499 0901, explore.co.uk) has a three-night Algiers & Ancient Kingdoms break (plus optional excursions to Cherchell and Tipaza), from £937 including flights, B&B and tour guide.
- Walking in Palestine
Palestine is synonymous with violence, but politics takes a back seat on this extraordinary new walking route where the people are welcoming and the countryside stunning
There was a moment of silence. Then the Palestinian youngsters marched in front of us and I thought to myself, this is where they sing about being martyrs and dying glorious deaths. A gentle breeze swayed the mulberry tree. On the far ridges of the mountains around Nablus, the lights of the illegal Israeli settlements twinkled. This village, I knew, had seen 2,000 acres of olive groves taken by those settlers, plus several lives. An older girl called the group to order then, in English, they launched into their chant.
"I'm a red tomato, you're a green tomato. You're a little cucumber..."
Everyone started to laugh. A walking holiday in Palestine. You've got to laugh really. I laughed a lot on that walk. And this in a part of the world where something horrible is always happening, be it shootings in Hebron, attacks on aid flotillas, or separation walls and rocket attacks. In the middle of such madness, laughter is the most unexpected and valuable pleasure, one that people seize at every opportunity.
It was perhaps appropriate that I started my hike in the far north of the West Bank, within a few miles of a hill called Megiddo, where Pharoah Thutmose III overwhelmed the Canaanite king Durusha in about 1457BC, thus beginning the legend of Armageddon, the site of the Last Battle. With my guide Hejazi, I walked through peaceful fields of wheat past other ancient sites, exploring Roman tombs lost in undergrowth and watching storks circling overhead on their migration north. Our first major stopping point was Jenin, a town whose name is tied inextricably to violence and death. Despite its reputation, however, Jenin turned out to be a friendly market town of Palestinian farmers, a place to gorge on strawberries and almonds, washed down with carob juice sold from huge ornamental brass urns.
I walked around the souk in a bit of a daze. How could reality be so different from expectations? Certainly, the walls were pockmarked with bullet holes from the second intifada, but the martyrdom posters were all faded by the sunshine and people wanted to shake hands. The carob-juice seller adjusted his Ray-Bans and grinned: "Why not join me on Facebook?"
There are several long distance footpaths in Palestine, but the one I was following was the Masar Ibrahim al-Khalil – literally Path of Abraham the Friend of God, simply the Masar for short. This new route stretches across the Middle East, starting at Abraham's birthplace in Sanliurfa, south-east Turkey, and winds south through Syria, Jordan and Israel. Eventually, it could stretch all the way to Mecca, linking existing paths associated with Abraham, and new routes. Its purpose is to promote understanding between different faiths and cultures; it's also intended "as a catalyst for sustainable tourism and economic development". In places the path barely exists yet, in others it is well-worn, but everywhere it needs a guide. Hejazi was my man in Palestine, a person of unending cheerfulness and optimism.
For a Muslim, Hejazi tells me, the idea of a path named after Abraham is attractive since the great patriarch is revered as the "father of hospitality". To Jews and Christians, he is equally important – the starting point for monotheistic worship. The Masar, I discovered, is not some do-gooder peace initiative, but simply a great way to see the landscape and meet people.
The path makes no attempt to follow Abraham's original route, even if such a path could be discovered; rather it links sites that bear legends and folk tales about the man. Our first major site was south of Jenin at Jebel Gerazim, a mountain that stands above the ancient town of Nablus and affords astonishing views west to the Mediterranean and east to the hills of Jordan.
On the summit of the mountain is a tower built by Saladin and some fine, if neglected, Byzantine mosaics guarded by a group of Israeli teenage soldiers. Further down the hillside, we could see the houses of that renowned Jewish sect the Samaritans, a group that still has more than 700 followers.
"The reason the Samaritans revere this place," Hejazi explained, "is because they believe Abraham came here and built his first altar in Canaan."
It was a well-chosen spot to view what Abraham wanted: territory. "Unto thy seed," said his God, "will I give this land." And that was very generous of the Lord, all things considered. Except, of course, that all things had not been considered: previous inhabitants and the sheer fertility of Abraham's seed, which includes not only the 12 tribes of Israel but the prophet Muhammad via Ishmael, fruit of Abraham's union with the serving wench Hagar. And what about all those cousins from Noah's brothers? If Abe's God had spent a few moments considering, he might have foreseen problems.
That evening we stayed in Awata, a village near Nablus where the children sang about red tomatoes. There were tales of horror and violence too – there is no escaping the bloodied history in this land – but it never became overwhelming, as I'd expected. Hassan, our host, was keen to enthuse about the Masar: "It was like a light coming on here," he said. "We got connected to the outside world and that makes us feel hope. Everyone in the village is always asking about when the next walkers are coming."
Like most Palestinian villages, Awata has long since burst out of its ancient walled settlement and sprawled along the hill. But what is fascinating is that, amid the concrete and graffiti, there are sudden glimpses of an ancient world. When we chatted about water resources, Hassan jumped up and hauled open a trapdoor under our feet. Below us was a vast echoing cavern. "It's a Roman water tank," he explained. "We've got three of them."
After a huge feast of chicken, freshly made bread, pickles, salads and yoghurt, Hejazi and I bedded down on mattresses in the living room and slept.
Next morning we started out at 8am, meandering through olive groves and wheat fields. Scents of Persian thyme, wild sage and oregano drifted up from beneath our tramping feet. We stopped at a spring to drink delicious clear water, then pressed on, meeting other walkers as we climbed through meadows of scarlet poppies and butterflies to Jabal Aurma, a bronze age fortress. One of the shocks of doing this path is that the countryside is lovely. Travellers have been returning from the Holy Land with scornful appraisals of its beauty for many centuries. Herman Melville is typically bleak: "Bleached-leprosy-encrustations of curses-old cheese-bones of rocks," he wrote. The image of an ill-fated land has proven hard to budge.
On top of Jabal Aurma we discovered six vast underground storage rooms carved from solid rock, presumably to supply the fort during prolonged sieges. There is never any doubt in Palestine that this land has been a chaotic crossroads for civilisations, armies and tribes for a very long time – that is what makes it fascinating and worth exploring.
Later that day, we emerged on the edge of a grand escarpment looking down to the Jordan Valley, around 800ft below sea level. The wheat fields around us were tiny rocky terraces splashed with the yellow of wild dill. It's a difficult place to farm, and we came across Shakir Murshid with his wife and six children busily harvesting wheat by hand. On a sage bush nearby was the complete shed skin of a viper.
That night we stayed in Douma, a cluster of old stone dwellings long since overgrown by the straggling concrete of modernity. Rural life, however, was pretty much the same as ever: woodpeckers tapped at the trees, wheat fields surrounded the houses and men rode past on donkeys. We spent the evening by a campfire listening to locals sing and play homemade flutes. The patch of flat ground where we had built our fire turned out to be a Roman wine press, empty sadly. Once again we slept in someone's living room, under the eyes of family martyrs.
Our third day took us further south near the springs of Ain Samiya, now a water source for Jerusalem. We spotted chameleons in the bushes, whistling rock hyraxes and huge flightless crickets, then clambered up a delightful gorge, taking narrow shepherds' trails along the cliff face. By evening we approached the village of Kufer Malik, a place that was to hold perhaps the biggest surprises. The first came at a huge hacienda-style house, where the whole family came out to invite us in for coffee. "Do you speak Spanish?" asked the husband. "I learned it in Columbia."
Kufer Malik, bizarrely, is a little enclave of Latin America in Palestine. When we found our hosts for the night, the old man of the family, Hosni al-Qaq, explained: "In the 30s when times were hard here, my uncle decided to seek his fortune in America. He ended up selling shirts in Columbia, then got a shop and then a supermarket. He became very rich." Hosni smiled ruefully. "My father on the other hand stayed behind and was killed in the first intifada."
"And did other men go?"
"Oh yes, lots and lots, and then they spread out into other countries. There are now more than 800 descendants of this village in Brazil alone."
The effect of this exposure to the outside world on Kufer Malik has been electrifying. The men are hard-working and ambitious; the women assertive and independent-minded. Hiba, our hostess, had been to the Côte d'Azur to see what it was like. "We camped on the beach in Nice," she said proudly. "It was lovely."
So was her cooking: roast chicken, rice, vegetables and musahn, a flat bread cooked with sumac and onions.
"What would you do if a Jewish person came to stay?" I asked.
"No problem," they all said eagerly. "We've had one Jewish lady from America already and another from Brazil. Everyone is welcome here."
After dinner, the men sat out in the yard smoking shisha pipes. When they spoke Spanish, they looked like pure Columbians to me: all macho body language and grand gestures. When they spoke Arabic, they were Palestinian farmers again.
Our fourth day took us to Abu Taybah, home to the West Bank's only brewery – owned and run by a Palestinian Christian family (there are around 55,000 Palestinian Christians). After a glass of deliciously cold lager we moved on, walking down Wadi Qult to the marvellous fourth-century cliff-side monastery of St George, then on to Jericho.
The end of the Masar comes in Hebron, whose old city has been a dangerous flashpoint over the years. Zionist settlers have seized buildings in the market area – which has to be roofed with netting now to prevent rocks and rubbish raining down on shoppers. All of Abraham's progeny want a piece of the action here and the mosque has been forcibly divided to create a Muslim and a Jewish section. On one side, I found Indian Muslims praying and taking photos; on the other Jews from New York and Tel Aviv were doing the same. The Tomb of the Patriarchs, of course, looks pretty similar from either angle, though neither community, sadly, ever gets to see that fact.
Out in the street a shopkeeper invited me to have coffee. He was sitting with Micha, a former Israeli soldier turned peace activist, a young freckle-faced man with a friendly smile. What had convinced him to adopt what many Israelis see as a traitorous approach?
"Small things. It started when I was a soldier, talking at checkpoints to Palestinians, seeing what the settlers were doing, and what we were doing to protect them."
At that moment a Palestinian lady came over. They introduced themselves. "So now you work for peace?" she asked. "But I have to ask: did you kill any Palestinians?"
Around the shopfront where people were taking coffee and chatting, everyone froze. There was a long silence while Micha considered his reply. "I'd rather not say."
"I think you should," the woman said. "For any reconciliation, you have to."
A murmur of agreement passed through the small crowd. Micha thought again. "The truth is, I don't know. At Abu Sinaina we did shoot, but it was from far away."
"At Abu Sinaina? Then you killed at least five."
There was a pause and then Micha nodded. The Palestinian lady smiled. "You are welcome at my house. You must come for lunch."
They exchanged addresses and Micha promised that he would visit.
What is remarkable about the Masar walk is that religion and politics mostly take a back seat, allowing ordinary people to climb out of the foxholes of prejudice and suspicion. When that happens, Palestine becomes so much more than a brief and violent television news clip. I saw gazelles running on hillsides, tasted the local cuisine and enjoyed conversation on everyday topics. I climbed down inside bronze age burial chambers, tracked hyenas into their lairs inside Roman tombs and lay on the benches in Nablus's marvellous Turkish baths, discussing the best way to pickle olives. The problems of Israel's land-grabbing tactics remain: the wall is still standing and unsmiling teenage soldiers at checkpoints demand to see passports.
The Masar is not for those who want private rooms or special treatment. It is intense and sometimes emotionally draining. There were moments when I felt rage about the injuries and injustices. But, more than anything, this was a life-affirming and exhilarating experience that will stay with me like few others.
- Jordan's green crusade
With all the Roman ruins and Petra, it's tempting to focus on Jordan's historic sites, but its nature reserves and their chic eco-lodges shouldn't be missed
Yellow grit, the depressing mesh fences of army barracks, and long chains of oil tankers coming in from Saudi Arabia. This was the Middle East as imagined by people who don't know anything about the Middle East, and there had been nothing else in hours.
Road signs said "Iraq ahead". "Don't fall asleep!" laughed our driver, Ahmed. "Maybe I keep going, and you wake up in Baghdad!"
At last, something green. Palm trees. Then houses, a mosque, and a black basalt fortress. We had reached the point of the eastern desert of Jordan where the sands turns black with volcanic basalt rock. A trickle of travellers make it out here – 100km from Amman and well off the tourist trail between Petra, Wadi Rum and the Dead Sea – to see several desert castles, built in the seventh and eighth centuries by the Umayyads, one of those empires no one remembers, although they were once the biggest in the world, governing five million square miles that stretched from Spain to present-day Pakistan.
What brought us to the desert was the same thing that attracted the Umayyads (and before them the Romans, the Nabateans, and neolithic people): an oasis, the desert's only water source.
The Azraq wetland, an area of pools surrounded by tall grasses, bullrushes and reeds, is one of Jordan's six nature parks, established by the country's Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature. A million migratory birds used to stop here every year – filling the sky until they blocked out the sun. But no more. Since the 1980s the site has been in a state of environmental disaster as the Azraq water basin which feeds it has also been pumped to supply the population.
"One in every four glasses of water drunk in Amman comes from Azraq," say the boards in the visitor centre. Diagrams showed how the pools have shrunk to 0.4% of their original area.
Azraq may not be the paradise garden it once was (though the RSCN is fighting to get it back), but it's a fascinating stop-off after the castles. We explored the pools on wooden walkways, and spotted ducks, egrets and a cormorant from an adobe hide.
To encourage visitors to Azraq, the RSCN has turned a 1940s British field hospital into a lodge, decorated with period trunks, black and white photographs of Bedouin, plus a 1956 Land Rover. The barracks contain stylish tiled bedrooms with flagstone floors and cacti-studded desert views.
This forward-thinking way of combining eco-tourism with conservation has been put into practice in all of Jordan's six nature parks, which cover a range of landscapes – forests at Ajloun and Dibeen, the Rift Valley's canyons at Dana biosphere reserve, mountains and rivers at Mujib near the Dead Sea coast, and desert grassland at Shaumari, near Azraq.
Travellers dashing between the country's main attractions typically pay scant attention to these nature parks, but they are one of Jordan's best assets. I made them the focus of a 10-day tour of the country with my mum, but because Jordan's so small it was perfectly viable to include the major historic sites too.
Our first port of call in Amman – before its Roman amphitheatres, souks and modern art gallery – was the HQ of Wild Jordan, the RSCN offshoot responsible for eco-tourism, and for socio-economic projects that support the rural communities living around the reserves.
The architect-designed building on the edge of the capital's starting-to-be-hip district, Rainbow Street, is also a visitor centre, with a sun terrace affording views of the seven hills to which the city clings, a health food cafe and a boutique selling crafts made by people living near the reserves.
Oman has its frankincense, Egypt carpets, Morocco leather, Saudi gold, but Jordan didn't have much in the way of traditional crafts. So Wild Jordan has worked with villagers to develop some, using local, sustainable materials – painted ostrich eggs from Azraq, olive oil soap from Ajloun, Bedouin silverware from Dana.
Wild Jordan's director, British expat Chris Johnson, met us for a cup of herbal tea and had some exciting news. The government had just agreed to establish nine more protected areas, including three in the Rift Valley, plus two near Wadi Rum and one in Burqu, the black basalt desert we had seen near Azraq. There will be one in the limestone hills and deciduous forest on the border with Syria, another in a sub-tropical wetland south of the Rift Valley, and one at Jebel Masuda, an "amazing" mountain near Petra from which you can enter the famous site through a back route.
"We chose the most special and typically Jordanian eco-systems," he said, "but to get nine is exceptional."
It had taken a lot of work to persuade the government of the value of conservation, he explained. "They were always hoping to find a raw material that would change Jordan's fate. Feynan and Dana were almost lost to mining. But the minerals would have soon run out. Eco-tourism is more valuable."
Now the strategy is to keep tourists in Jordan longer, to explore more of the country. It's easy to do. By early afternoon the next day, we'd left Amman, seen Roman Jerash's dusty amphitheatres and chariot racetracks, walked the dark passageways of Ajloun's crusader castle, and were hiking in the fresh sunshine in the Ajloun forest reserve.
It was December, sunny but too cold for the reserve's safari tents, so we holed up in one of its gorgeous wooden cabins with a Calor Gas heater and read under thick blankets until we were called for a delicious dinner of lentil soup, salads and stew. Although sadly there was none of Jordan's lovely red wine, St George – all the eco-lodges are alcohol-free.
On our way to the next reserve, we stayed a night in Madaba to see its famous sixth century mosaic map of the Holy Land on the floor of St George's church, and stood the next day on nearby Mount Nebo, where Moses is said to have looked across the Dead Sea to Jericho.
"Just close your eyes for 15 seconds now," said Ahmed from the driver's seat as we headed south across flat, barren land on the King's Highway. "One, two..." he counted slowly. We hoped he was keeping his own eyes open. "15! OK!" Before us was the most incredible scene, an immense gaping canyon stretching into the distance. I was dumbstruck. The Mujib is Jordan's answer to the Grand Canyon, but I'd never even heard of it. Here Wild Jordan offers stays in eco-chalets, with swimming and canyoning trips along river trails, but in winter the water is too dangerous, so we had to give it a miss.
Instead we spent the next day at the impressive Karak crusader castle, then by the afternoon were at Petra. You don't need to read again about how incredible the rose-red city is, but what I'd underestimated was the staggering beauty of the landscape around it. We did a steep hike up to the Sacred High Place, where rock chasms run off in all directions. You'd need weeks of hard hiking to see all of it.
Afterwards we wanted to wash off the dust at a traditional hammam. "There is only a mixed one, if that is OK for you," said Ahmed. We thought it was. But then his mates turned up, and they all unexpectedly joined us in the marble steam rooms, larking about, and then kept "accidentally" bursting in on us while we got changed and had massages. They overstepped the mark, but I read later that Jordanian women would never go to a mixed hammam, so perhaps we were partly to blame.
As foreign females we were generally treated with respect, but in Jordan, strict boundaries are maintained between the sexes. Few women work, and they are not expected to make eye contact with male strangers.
But Jordan wants to modernise. Queen Rania is pushing for female social development through various charity projects, and Wild Jordan is doing its bit, employing women to make crafts and as lodge staff. But this has to be sensitively managed.
"At Ajloun, we developed a calligraphy workshop," Chris Johnson had told me back in Amman. "I visited and had a try, rather clumsily, so one of the female workers guided my hand with hers. The village found out and her family were angry – it was a scandal. She was made to quit her job."
But there are success stories, too. The Dana biosphere reserve – a canyon home to 800 plant varieties, 214 species of bird and 45 types of mammal – runs along the Rift Valley to the desert of Wadi Araba. The Bedouin who lived there were no longer allowed to hunt when it was made a nature park, but many were retrained as hotel staff at Dana Guesthouse at the top of the canyon and Feynan Ecolodge, at the bottom, or as nature guides leading insightful treks between them. Our guide, Mohammed showed us caves he'd lived in, wolf tracks, and plants for shampoo, but said he was happy to have left behind the hard Bedouin life.
Dana's lovely lodge had simple rooms with polished stone floors, iron beds with thick cream bedspreads, and Bedouin rugs, but the canyon views are its big attraction. In contrast, the dry desert setting of Feynan Ecolodge on the western edge of the reserve wasn't so beautiful, but the lodge itself was magical – lit by candles, and resembling a sandcastle. It is eco to the extreme – solar-powered and vegetarian, with clever water and cooling systems. And it is surrounded by archaeological sites dating back 10,000 years – Nabatean ruins, Roman copper mines, Byzantine churches, neolithic villages. Winter meant we couldn't try the canyoning, but we mountain-biked between the sites, and took tea in Bedouin tents.
We also took a tour of Dana village with Hamed, an RSCN guide. "Since the 1980s, tourism has changed life here," he said. "Before, there was no school, no TV, and women had to ask permission to leave the house. Now they go to university."
The village had been deserted when people moved to modern homes close to a new road, and its old stone and juniper wood buildings were crumbling. But the RSCN plans to restore them, and is offering free homes, plus jobs in the restaurants, museum and music venue it hopes to create there to entice villagers back.
We met Nabil, owner of a third of the village buildings, at his decades-old Dana Tower hotel, a low-cost backpackers' place, and a rival to the RSCN's Dana lodge. Though he was all for the restoration, he wasn't a big fan of the RSCN, wanting more decision-making to be in the villagers' hands: "They take money from tourists and spend it on many things. Not enough money goes to local people."
But what Wild Jordan is doing seems far better than other options. Our last stop was the Hammamet Ma'In hotsprings, where King Herod once bathed. Wild Jordan has a Dead Sea visitor centre nearby but no lodge, so we stayed at the posh Evason spa hotel, and swam in pools of 40C under steaming waterfalls.
I asked the manager if they employed local women. "No, women do not work in Jordan," he answered, assuring me that the towering hotel – with its $1,600 suites, Thai masseurs, western food, shuttle buses and luxury Sri Lankan fabrics – was eco-friendly. Sure, it had its own spring water, and an organic vegetable patch, but I am certain the lodges in the new Wild Jordan will offer a more authentic experience.
- Back to Bahrain
His search for the exotic paradise of his childhood proved elusive, but 25 years on our writer discovers a new side to Bahrain, the 'Kingdom of the Two Seas'
Time rolls neatly back as I step out of the airport into the steam-room atmosphere of the August night. It is 25 years since my family left Bahrain, but this sensation feels so familiar, I might have been here yesterday, stumbling about behind misted spectacles in the stunning heat.
I press my face against the windows of the chauffeur-driven car as it swoops across a swathe of newly reclaimed land around Manama, capital of the small island country. Here and there, lonely skyscrapers rise from the dust. The city is glamorous now – but not quite so glamorous as it seemed to me then, as an eight-year-old boy from Shropshire, dazzled by swimming pools and hotel brunches.
This island kingdom in the Arabian Gulf was my paradise. I spent two years here and fell in love with its heat and light, its stark, rocky interior and lush palm groves, its ancient monuments and rambling souks. So it is with trepidation that I have returned, fearing the change wrought by development.
In the hushed twilight of the Ritz Carlton, I wander through the grounds after dinner and lie on a damp sunlounger in the darkness of the hotel's beach. Behind me, the desert. Above me, the huge sky. Before me, the inky black sea. There, Persia; there, Arabia; and far, far over the curve of the earth, Africa and India. I'm on an island in the middle of the world. Since the third millennium BC, Bahrain has stood at a crossroads, attracting imperial powers – Babylon, Persia, Portugal, Britain – and welcoming immigrants.
The world is vast – I feel it – and the island and I are very small. That is how I felt Bahrain as a child; now, I feel it again. And next morning this instinct is reflected by history as I wander around the National Museum, a low building of pale stone on the waterfront in Manama.
Archaeologists once imagined that in ancient times the island was a vast necropolis for a neighbouring culture. How else to account for the tens of thousands of burial mounds across its desert? But in recent decades the ruins of towns and temples have been uncovered, yielding a hoard of little treasures – delicate carnelian jewellery, lustrous pottery, votive figurines and tiny seals – discs etched with religious and erotic scenes involving men and gods, animals and horned monsters.
The story of their discovery is laid out here and in the lofty galleries of the new Qal'at al-Bahrain Museum. It sits beside the country's richest ancient site, where the remains of six successive settlements are crowned by a gargantuan 16th-century Portuguese fort. Most spine-tingling is the suggestion that Bahrain was the land of Dilmun, so admired by the Sumerians for its merchant ships and lush vegetation that they conflated it with paradise. It's an idea that resonates in me, of course, and a gift for the local tourist board.
Now Bahrain's springs are brackish from overuse and I find the quiet old road through the fertile north is a dusty four-lane highway, the roadside palm groves replaced by concrete villas. The desert, too, proves elusive. By the time I find a map that shows wide, pristine stretches in the far south, my erratic pursuit of it has reached such a feverish pitch that I fear I have unnerved Yasser, my laconic driver, and I relent.
My mood is subdued, but Yasser takes a different route home, a little road through coastal villages and the Bahrain of memory. Tamarind and fig trees spill over walls and boats bob in placid bays. In the village of Karrana, where Yasser was born, the air is heavy with mint and the only sounds are birdsong and the call of the muezzin.
In Manama, I return to the fish market, where creatures of the deep – silver, blue and yellow, gauzy pink – transfixed me long ago, piled high on shiny platters in row upon row of tiny tiled stalls. In the souk behind, most of the traders are from India now, but the atmosphere of colourful chaos prevails.
My heart soon draws me across the causeway to the island town of Muharraq, where my family lived. I'm thrilled to find it in the throes of a vigorous cultural revival, centred on efforts to restore old mansions, mosques and warehouses – the legacy of the pearl trade, around which the town's life revolved for centuries.
Concert halls and art galleries, craft centres, cafes and libraries have sprung up in the whitewashed alleyways around the new Sheikh Ebrahim Centre for Culture and Research. Their interiors are lovely, setting sleek modern furniture against the fabric of their historic homes – heavy, elaborate doors and ceilings of mangrove and palm fronds. And I'm told there's more to come – including, to my delight, a House of Architecture, where my father John's elegant drawings of the town – already published in a book, Al Muharraq – will be displayed.
My nostalgia for old Bahrain is now mingled with excitement about its future. I want to go back in the months when it is cooler, when flamingoes come to the wild Hawar islands in the south. I want to see the new National Theatre in Manama, and the museum of pearl diving planned for Muharraq. And I want to investigate further the most intriguing of my new discoveries – fidjeri, the wild songs of sweet sorrow that the pearl divers of old learned from demons in the mosque at Diraz – and in which I fancy the soul of these islands is enshrined.
- London to Stavanger by road
Debbie Lawson takes the slow route north on a camping road trip along Norway's stunning south coast
When the last direct ferry between Britain and Norway set sail in 2008, severing a historic maritime link between the two countries, it also called time on Norway's popular Newcastle booze cruise, and forced holidaymakers into the air. But for those who still hanker after the romance of slow travel – and the convenience of arriving in one of the most expensive countries in Europe with a car full of beer and provisions from one of the cheapest – there is another way.
Lured by the image of pristine sandy beaches backed by forest and nature reserves, we set off from London to the south coast of Norway by car: a round trip of 1,390 miles by road, plus sea crossings. Having our own wheels meant we could take as much camping gear as we liked; Norway's accommodation costs are notoriously high, but its campsites and log cabins are cheap and plentiful – and in the best locations. The trip would start on an overnight ferry to the Hook of Holland, followed by a leisurely jaunt to the German border, a frantic dash up the autobahn to Denmark and finally, at the tip of continental Europe, a short ferry ride across the Skagerrak strait to the southernmost point of Norway. On the way back we'd treat ourselves to a luxurious overnight sea crossing from Esbjerg (half-way down Denmark) to Harwich, only two hours' drive from home. In the process we would take six ferries, stay in some of northern Europe's most dramatically situated campsites and make use of Scandinavia's highly recommended breakdown and recovery services.
The summer season in Norway is short and intense, and the southern coast, which enjoys the country's longest hours of sunshine, is a popular holiday destination among Norwegians, though little known to outsiders. Most foreign visitors head straight for the fjords to the north, passing over some spectacular coastal scenery, where clear sparkling water laps the shores of deserted boulder-strewn beaches dotted with crooked pine and spruce trees, shaped and worn by glaciation and the harsh winter winds.
"Expect to see a pair of BMW headlights up your arse all the way through Germany," I was warned. This turned out to be no exaggeration. But by comparison, the roads of southern Norway are a gentle cruise. Single-lane motorways with a top speed of 80kmph are flanked by gentle mountain slopes and small wooden lakeside houses. The comfortable Color Line ferry makes the three-hour crossing from Hirtshals in Denmark to Norway 11 times a day in summer, depositing travellers in the seaside resort of Kristiansand. In the onboard duty-free shop, along with bottles of vodka and gin, passengers can buy joints of ham and large chicken portions from big freezer compartments – a sign if ever there was one that your pound isn't going to go far when you reach dry land. From Kristiansand you can drive east towards Oslo or west to Stavanger. It's not an easy decision: you could spend a whole fortnight just campsite-hopping along the stunning coast between here and the capital.
We do just that and head north-east. At Hove Camping, one of the many sites along this coast – Norway's very own riviera – the dilapidated caravans and tents parked under the trees on the island of Tromoy, just off the mainland, are surrounded by sea, weird windswept copses and wild flowers. Knackered old mobile homes come alive in August, when city dwellers decamp here from Oslo, dusting off their barbecues and reacquainting themselves with old friends, some of whom have been coming here for 20 years despite long ago emigrating to Spain and Portugal. Most of the campsites hire out huts – cosy wooden chalets offering basic accommodation for up to six people, with cooking facilities and flowery curtains, an outside standpipe and a deck where you can sit and watch the nuthatches while enjoying the Danish beer you bought on the way.
Hove is known among music lovers for its festival, held each June, where 10,000 people gather to hear bands such as Florence and the Machine, Muse and Vampire Weekend belting out their songs in an old military encampment next to the nature reserve. Festivals seem to be a way of life here, especially in July and August. There are horse festivals, Viking festivals, even accordion festivals. At Arendal, a few miles up the coast, there's a slow food festival. Unni Ramsvatn, one of the originators of the slow food movement in Norway, runs Bjellandstrand Gard, a bakery and restaurant set in a rose garden and small orchard on the north-east side of Tromoy, just up from Hove Camping. Built on foundations laid by occupying German forces during the second world war, this former farm building turned watering hole is a labour of love for Unni and her husband, Jon, who serve up healthy salmon and couscous salads, bread from their wood-fired oven and vast slices of cake to weekend visitors. "It was almost impossible to buy a cup of coffee before on this island," says Jon.
In Arendal, there is no shortage of coffee shops. The old town, with its whitewashed wooden houses and harbourside boutiques, also has a fish market and restaurant and, according to Monica at the tourist office there, a very nice boat trip to the island of Merdo, where you can camp for up to two days. In fact that was exactly where we were headed before a mechanical fault brought us to an unscheduled stop. Still, there are worse places to break down than coastal Norway – especially if you have your own onboard stocks and a mobile phone. After a few running repairs we waved the empty tow truck off and headed back west along the coast to Mandal, the other side of Kristiansand, taking in the famous towns of Grimstad, home to the Ibsen museum, and Lillesand – a tidy little waterside settlement not unlike Henley on Thames, with cobbled streets, white picket fences and carefully trimmed lawns stretching right down to the sea.
Mandal is famous for Sjosanden beach: 800m of perfect sand at the edge of Furulunden Nature Park. There's a handful of campsites near Mandal, but the beachside Sjosanden Holiday Centre is hard to beat. Roe deer graze among the tents, and the accommodation ranges from wooden cabins to a small "motel" arranged around a flower-filled courtyard. It has a whiff of the holiday camp about it, but the low-key Scandinavian architecture ensures that the site remains in keeping with its natural setting. We explored some of the paths into the surrounding woods on foot and by bikes hired from the tourist office, then took the long, twisty road to Lindesnes Fyr, a red and white cast iron lighthouse built on the site of the first lighthouse beacon in Norway, at its remote and windswept southernmost point. In the rugged grounds, the small cafe prides itself on its rhubarb muffins, made using fruit from the lighthouse garden.
Local skipper Magnus Midling-Jenssen's boat-hire business offers visitors a great way to take in the local sights, including an old herring factory, the Spangereid Canal and rows of 17th-century houses in the historic coastal village of Svinor. Magnus is the archetypal salty old seadog. Full of stories and local lore, he operates his empire from a little yellow hut – "my crisis centre" – next to the house he built on the edge of the land. The water is heaving with salmon and cod, he says, and for about £20 a day you get world-class fishing.
Leaving the beach behind, we took the old winding coastal road – the famous Highway 44 – towards Stavanger, passing through countryside of dazzling green, by farms and lighthouses and cows grazing in boulder fields right next to the sea. A string of interesting villages along the coast include otherworldly Brusand, which has its own international art gallery, Nordisk Kunst Plattform. Just an hour to the north of Stavanger are mountains and the start of the fjords. Campers are spoilt for choice here, and a network of ferries whisks you and your car into the undulating countryside, and forests of giant fir trees where moose roam – though the only one you're likely to see is the one on the ubiquitous bumper sticker.
Stavanger itself feels like a city that has everything but is small enough to fit into the palm of your hand. Vast cruise ships fill the horizon and around every corner is something to explore: quirky shops and cafes, smart seafood restaurants, a stately old town and museums celebrating the city's glorious past as herring capital and centre of the oil industry. As we surveyed this prosperous scene from a harbourside bar, a group of Norwegian financiers pointed out that when the sea border was drawn between the UK and Norway, it clipped the oil fields. A smidgen the other way and all this could have been ours.
Getting there
FERRIES
Harwich to the Hook of Holland: Crossings from £61 single for a car and two adults. Cabins start from £11pp on day crossings or £18.50pp overnight (two-berth cabins, based on two sharing); stenaline.co.uk.
Esbjerg to Harwich: crossings from £232 for a car and two adults, including ensuite cabin; dfdsseaways.co.uk.
Hirtshals to Kristiansand: economy car packages from £45 one way; colorline.com.
CAMPING
Hove Camping, Tromoy; hovecamping.no, +47 37 08 54 79. Tents NOK 180 (£19) per night plus electricity, caravans Nok 210 per night plus electricity, four-bed cabins from NOK 400 per night.
Sjosanden Holiday Centre, 4504 Mandal; sjosanden-feriesenter.no, +47 38 26 10 94. Tents NOK 110 per night, caravan NOK 170; motel NOK 700 for doubles/twins in summer, cabins NOK 1,200 in summer (sleeping up to six).
FURTHER INFORMATION
Bjellandstrand Gard: Bjelland, 4818 Færevik (near Arendal); +47 37 09 44 49, visitnorway.com. Lunch buffet of local homemade food for £14 per person.
Lindesnes Fyr: 4521 Spangereid; +47 38 25 54 20, lindesnesfyr.no. Entry fee: £4.50 per adult, children under 12 go free.
Magnus Midling-Jenssen has holiday houses and apartments for rental in the Mandal and Lindesnes area as well as boat trips and sea fishing; norges-ferie.no, +47 38 25 60 88.
Nordisk Kunst Plattform is at Brusand Togstasjon (train station); nkplattform.no
- Sahara road trip
Following an ancient trade route across Libya, Sara Wheeler enounters Berber life, and finds that trade and smuggling are still alive and well
Abu Bakir, our driver and factotum, carried a large carpet shoulder bag that had belonged to his father and grandfather before him. It contained tea-making equipment: a beaten silver tray, two silver beakers, a teapot and a camel-hair buffing cloth. Wherever camp was established, Abu Bakir would settle on a square of carpet laid on the sand and commence the tea ritual. Foam held the key to a successful brew, hence a lot of high pouring from beaker to teapot and back. After turning in each night, I fell asleep to the clink of tea glasses and low murmur of voices.
It is a ritual that has been taking place across the Sahara for centuries.
A thousand years before camels came to north Africa, merchant caravans journeyed to the Niger bend in pursuit of ivory, essences and rare woods. The voyage back to the coastal ports, where Punic merchants jingled silver coins, was more than 2,200km. It was one of the most ancient trading routes, linking the heart of Africa with successive northern empires. Yet despite its remote and treacherous terrain, the Libyan Sahara still services commerce, as I found out on my own journey.
The road south from Tripoli is a study in desiccation. Following the trade route, my guide, 27-year-old Abbas, drove through the foothills of the Jebel Nafusa and the landscape dried out before our eyes. In the middle of our first day on the road, Abbas announced that we were to visit a smugglers' warehouse. We pulled up outside Qasr al-Haj, an almost perfectly intact 12th-century Berber granary. The sky was clear blue, and the slopes of Jebel Nafusa shimmered. The pottery colours of the Qasr seemed to grow out of the desert. Inside, a dusty corridor opened on to an arena lined with five-metre-deep cubby holes, each once used for a family's winter supply of barley and wheat, and now, apparently, a hiding place for contraband.
The oasis settlement at Nalut on the western edge of the Jebel Nafusa has been a resting place for traders since the fourth century BC. It remains a staging post but, following Muammar Gaddafi's new idea that each town in the Libyan interior must be painted in its own co-ordinated colours, the municipal buildings are now decked out in outlandish peach and green.
People melt away as one tracks the traders south: 85% of Libyans live on the Mediterranean coast. Libya may be the fourth-largest country in Africa, but only 10% of its land is cultivable. The interior was immune to the cultural flux that shaped the coast. It is Berber territory. Abbas never missed an opportunity to promote his own Berber ethnicity. Although he lived in Tripoli, he said he did not feel Libyan. "The only thing we share with Arabised Libyans," he said, "is religion."
Walking the covered lanes of Ghadames, an oasis town 550km from Tripoli, one sensed the ghostly presence of medieval traders, reclining in the shade of pomegranate trees in cool courtyard gardens. Ghadames was once the pre-eminent Saharan trading hub (today the walled old town is a Unesco world heritage site). Marseilles cloth and Venetian paper went south, precious stones and ostrich plumes headed north – and news came in from everywhere. On my journey the scent of crushed lemon leaves filled the empty lanes, and rods of light fell through vertical skylights on to white mud-brick houses. The temperature outside reached 36C.
The hotel on the outskirts of Ghadames new town was characteristic of tourism in the Libyan interior. (The Revolutionary government moved 6,000 residents from the medieval lanes in the early 1980s, a gesture towards the fabled modernisation Gaddafi craved.) Leaflets in the huge marble lobby advertised an impressive range of facilities. I made enquiries. The pool? "Is not built." Internet? "Is not working." Laundry? "Is no bags." But they did have an espresso machine.
According to the authorities, unemployment in Libya stands at 40%, but the figure is meaningless in a country with a burgeoning private sector without fiscal status. Abbas had a government job in addition to being a guide, though he appeared rarely to attend. When I asked him, after a week on the road, how he managed so much time away from the office, he said he got his cousin to sign in for him.
South of Ghadames, we entered the wilderness of Hamada al-Hamra and passed three cars in 150km. This expanse of desert scrub has been keeping smugglers safe since the time Europeans were emerging from their caves. Traffic thickened only as we approached Sebha, where we stopped at a shop for dates, stored, as everywhere, in boxes in the deep freeze, and ate some cashews and Ecuadorean bananas. Sebha is a horrible modern hole. Today's traders deal in people, spiriting Africans up to the coast and across to Sicily.
At the Ubari petrol station, young men filled rows of jerrycans strapped to the roofs of their Toyota Land Cruisers, the whole forecourt a seething souk of Tuareg and Berber faces. Petrol is 10p a litre in Libya, and 10 times that in neighbouring Tunisia, and around Ghadames and Ubari people fill cans and custom-built 100-litre tanks to siphon off in more lucrative markets.
I asked Abbas if fuel accounted for the majority of illegal trade, "No!" he laughed. "We smuggle anything. I made a lot of money last year importing canned dog and cat food from Tunisia. I bought cans there and sold them for 10 times as much here." At Ubari, we linked up with three further team members and a second jeep. The three – cook and headman as well as Abu Bakir – were Tuareg, proud men of the once nomadic tribe of the central Sahara who protected the trade caravans. The dapper Abbas, his black hair gelled, appeared in a different western outfit each day, at one point sporting a thigh-length teddy boy coat. But his three Tuareg assistants stuck to their hooded burnouses and the tagelmust, the 6ft length of fabric wound into a turban and face cover. They enjoyed teaching me to put one on, but I always ended up looking bandaged.
Off road, we entered the desert proper through Masak Mastafat, the northern gateway to the Acacus massif's basalt columns, sandstone buttresses and rolling sands; lots of rolling sands. There, the five of us camped for four days and four nights. Everyone enjoyed it. Darkness crashed down with African haste at 6.25pm, and after making our pop-up tents secure, we sat around a fire eating barley soup and camel couscous sharpened with dollops of harissa. There was talk about the sexually invigorating properties of the ubiquitous harissa. Eaten, I wondered, or applied?
At mealtimes, a desert sparrow might visit our camp. But it was at night that the Sahara came alive. Ensconced in my tent, I listened to gerbils (a foot long and meaty, not the hutch variety) scratching around the guy ropes. In the morning, I followed the delicate tracks of wolves and fennec foxes. Soon after striking camp one day, we surprised two heavily laden vehicles, with five men and two children loitering nearby. Spotting us, the adults knelt down and pretended to pray. I asked Abbas what was stashed under the tarpaulins. He shrugged, and suggested Sport cigarettes, the red-and-white packets that decorate every street in Tripoli. But I wondered.
On the last night we pitched camp in the lee of a volcanic outcrop. Desert rain had washed away the porous rock, creating a wild and fantastic outline. When lightning struck, phantasmagorical rock silhouettes leapt to life. The camp was hard by Mandara, one of a dozen lakes in the south-western Libyan Sahara. A water project had dried it to the bed, but the next day I swam in Umm al-Maa, a block of opaque green water nestled in a palmy basin. It was so salty my feet wouldn't stay under. All around, Niger Tuareg played noughts-and-crosses in the sand.
Driving out, a cry went up in our Land Cruiser. "Signal!" We stopped. Everyone got out. I remember the figure of Abu Bakir, burnouse flapping, holding his phone aloft in salute and squinting into the sun.
- Early renewal a traveller's passport to saving money
If your passport's going to expire in the next nine months, you can save a lot of time and money by renewing it now
If you've arrived back from holiday knowing your passport will expire before next summer's trip, consider renewing it now: leave it and you run the risk of forgetting until your only option is a more expensive, and possibly stressful, last-minute renewal.
You don't have to wait until your passport expires to renew it. If there's any time left on your old one, the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) will add it to your new one, up to a maximum of nine months. It is £77.50 to renew a 10-year, 32-page adult passport using the standard service, which usually takes three to four weeks, longer at busy times of year, to process and send out your new passport.
The cost – which has almost doubled over the past five years – is bad enough but leave it until the last minute and you'll pay £112.50 for the one-week service or £129.50 for a one-day renewal. You have to make an appointment to apply in person for these high-speed services by calling Passport Adviceline on 0300 222 0000.
The cost of renewing a child's passport is £49 for the standard service, £96.50 for the one-week service and £109.50 for the premium service.
There is no way around these costs if you want to go abroad unless you were born on or before 2 September 1929, in which case your passport is free. The IPS says it does not make a profit and that fees are all used to cover the costs of providing passport services in the UK. Part of the fee – the consular premium – is added by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office and covers the cost of providing consular help to British nationals who find themselves in difficulty overseas.
The IPS recommends you use the Check & Send service offered by main post office branches.
With this, you take your completed application form and supporting documents to the post office where they will check you have filled in the form correctly and that you have included all the supporting documents and fee. They will send off everything to the IPS by secure Royal Mail special delivery.
Applications via Check & Send are less likely to be returned or delayed because of queries, and are usually processed more quickly than standard postal applications. You can expect to receive your new passport in about two weeks, but you pay more — an £8 handling charge to the post office on top of the standard application fee.
IPS forms are available at post office branches, Passport Adviceline on 0300 222 000, or online at passports.ips.gov.uk. You can find a full table of passport fees at direct.gov.uk.
If you are an Irish national living in the UK, beware delays of 12 weeks for renewals, after an industrial dispute at the Passport Office in Dublin.
- Spotted online
Alfresco clubbing in Helsinki, a rare open-air drinking haunt in Dublin, and island hopping out of Oslo – all in this month's instalment of tips from blog network Spotted by Locals
Spotted by Paulo Cruz
Pakistani Cafe is a very small, eccentric restaurant that serves "good Punjabi cooking [with] no artificial rubbish".
The menu (handwritten) is not as extensive as elsewhere, but what is on offer (and there is comparatively quite a lot for vegetarians) is exceptionally tasty and good value.
Anyone wishing to enhance the subtle spiciness of most dishes should try "Ahmed's Pickle Mix", while those wishing to put out any fires, should have some Gulab Jamun with ice-cream.
The cafe is a "bring your own bottle" sort of place, although they have the usual selection of soft drinks, lassies and hot drinks (e.g. Lahori Chai with cream and almonds).
Colourfully decorated, it has bunting flags on the ceiling, poems painted on the walls, books on shelves, CDs hanging from hooks on the service counter walls and a random selection of music blaring from its stereo (e.g. opera and the Cardigans played back to back).
A meal at Pakistani Cafe is best enjoyed at a leisurely pace that matches the relaxed service. As it's a small place, popular with the locals, it's worth booking in advance (particularly on weekends). Oh, yes, bring cash.
• Pakistani Cafe, 607 Pollokshaws Road; +44 (0)141 423 5791. Main, desert and drink £11. Open 1-10pm daily. View on map
Spotted by Nea Barman
A translation of Kuningassoundi means king sound. There is no entry fee, but the acts are still the best on the Finnish music scene. The main outdoor area has a good-size dance floor and bar space. Or you can relax on the nearby green – where you can still hear the music. On some Fridays there are more than 500 people enjoying the beats.
The music is live Finnish hip-hop and reggae. But even if you don't understand the language, you can still enjoy the feeling, the people and the relaxed beats. You don't need fancy club clothing – just come as you are.
• Kuningassoundi, Viikintie 1. Main performer starts at 7pm. See on map.
Spotted by Damian Byrne
The Pav is a bar situated at the back of the sports grounds in Trinity College.
Now, if you are over a certain age, sitting outside a cricket pavillion surrounded by students knocking back cans of cheap, nasty lager may be your idea of hell. Bear with me on this one, however.
The fact is that there are remarkably few places in Dublin to sit outside and enjoy an alcoholic drink on a sunny day (and we do get the odd one). Foreign visitors to the city in the summer time must be bemused by this. Our government is addicted to banning, regulating and controlling public behaviour, so having a drink in the park or any other public space is a complete no-no. The few pubs that have outside seating areas fill up quickly, and are usually in the shade anyway.
This is what makes the Pav a real Dublin institution, even for people like me who never went to Trinity. There is simply nowhere else to stretch out on the grass on a sunny day and enjoy a cool beer without incurring the wrath of the Nanny State.
Even the Pav experience itself has been spoilt somewhat in recent years by a far heavier security presence. Given the lack of alternatives, however, it's still a great spot. As an added bonus, the cans of beer and cider are wonderfully cheap by Dublin standards, and you get to feel like you are 19 again. Almost.
• The Pavilion Bar, Trinity College, South city centre. Four cans of beer €8. Opening times vary. See on map.
Spotted by Kaja Marie Lereng Kvernbakken
If you want to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city, stick your toe in the water or just sleep in the sun, then Hovedøya is for you.
Hovedøya is one of the many islands in the inner Oslo Fjord, very close to the city centre. Walk or take bus number 60 to Vippetangen, and from there take a boat using a regular public transportation ticket. If you get on the fastest boat, you'll be out on the island within 10 minutes.
The island has a main beach if you walk across the island from the dock. This is a popular place for families, since the water is quite shallow – which also means the water can be a bit murky. But you can also find lots of secluded places where you can lay in peace and the water is clear. Be aware that there can be red jellyfish around. These sting, so don't get too close.
Apart from the Hovedøya, Langøyene and Gressholmen are also nice places to go, while Bleikøya, Lindøya and Nakholmen have private cabins and are only accessible if you want to go for walks.
• Hovedøya. 24-hour public transport ticket NOK 70. Open all year around, but boats run more frequently in the summer months. See on map.
Spotted by Cláudio Carneiro
First, a warning: this is not a restaurant for those who are on a diet. Second warning: expect to eat more than you ever thought you could, because I for one find it humanly impossible to hold back from trying every delicious recipe they serve here.
The dishes are mostly from a region of Brazil called Minas Gerais, mainly known for its exquisite flavouring, which uses a lot of onions, garlic, green pepper and parsley. You will also find black beans, meat, chicken, fish and vegetables. And when you have had the most delicious meal, then comes the dessert buffet with all sorts of gluttonous treats.
What I mean, by all this enthusiastic exaggeration, is that everything you eat there is not just good, but delicious.
Then, of course, you can taste the famous "caipirinhas", the tropical Brazilian juices and enjoy the good mood and service of the restaurant staff and owners.
• Tempero de Minas, Av. Luis Bivar, 83, Avenidas; +35 (0)121355 5038. Buffet €10. Open Mon-Sat 8am-11pm, Sun 8am-4pm. See on map.
- Your photos on local life
See the best images from August's photo competition
- TwiTrip to Manchester
Your Tweets led Benji Lanyado far beyond his old Manchester student stomping ground, from an indie tour of Salford to a dusty old library that witnessed a meeting of the masterminds of communism
Last Wednesday, I journeyed to Manchester with high hopes. I was determined to banish the dissatisfying memory of my misspent time at university in the city, when I loitered around the student district of Fallowfield for three years, save for the occasional drunken foray into town. This time I wanted to find truly Mancunian pursuits, aided by the good people of the Twittersphere. They did me – and their city – proud.
As per TwiTrip tradition, the day began with a request for train-time trivia. @Shabbychicb got the ball rolling, informing me that "Manchester City is the only football team to be founded by a woman: Anna Connell in 1880". Then @danpyt sent me a map depicting a Soviet plan from the cold war era to storm Manchester with tanks. Excellent stuff.
My second request was for a lunch tip in the city centre. A schism formed. @TechnicalFault, @ThermobaricTom, @Davemee and a number of others advocated Pancho's, a burrito stall in the covered market, while @katiemaymanc, @sarahlphillips and @LisaAshurst urged me towards some corned beef hash at Sam's Chop house. The corned beef lobby won through, and within 20 minutes of arriving I was feasting on the stuff, lubricated with gloopy poached egg yolk and homemade brown sauce. Lordy, it was good.
I was off my face on hash, and needed to wind down. @SammyJDaniels and @AmyGlendinning aimed me towards the beautifully serene interior of St Mary's church, nestled on a city centre backstreet and aptly nicknamed "The Hidden Gem". And from one hidden gem I was guided towards another, as @technicalfault and @popisthis tweeted me towards, erm, a multi-storey car park on Shudehill. On the top floor, they insisted, I would have the finest view of Manchester, at 0% of the price I'd pay on the Big Wheel. This was an eerie task indeed – when I got there, the top floor was deserted. But the view was marvellous.
A few minutes' walk from the car park, in the shadow of the magnificent Urbis building, my next tip was of mighty historical significance. @Nedpoulter, @Riprap007 and @Iancharters recommended Chetham's Library, where in 1845 Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx's eyes met fatefully across a crowd-less room, before they went about changing the course of history. Yet despite its epoch-changing associations, Chetham Library is distinctly off the tourist radar, and I was only the second name in the visitor's book that day. Inside, under magnificent rafters and low light, the thin, creaking corridors were lined with thousands of dusty volumes stacked on ancient shelves. Truly wonderful.
My next destination was in honour of another collective that changed the course of history forever. In a way. In 1986, one beautifully-coiffured gawky Mancunian, flanked by three slightly less beautifully-coiffured gawky Mancunians, posed for a picture outside the entrance to the Salford Lads Club. This picture of The Smiths ended up on the sleeve of their album, The Queen is Dead, and has become a classic rock photo. Like hundreds of devotees before me, I posed, as gawkily as possible. And then ... a real treat. Tipped off by @klloyddesign, @steph_boyle and @deats, I was led into a small shrine to The Smiths in the lads club's old weightlifting room by Leslie, the manager.
Up next was another Salford gem. @Escalinci and @eva_elliott pointed me towards Islington Mill, an indie arts centre in an old cotton-spinning factory just off the A6. The labyrinthine complex is home to a collection of studios, a cafe, a makeshift cinema on the top floor, and a B&B, ably manned by Paul, the owner's dad. I was then hurried onwards to another reclaimed, reinvented relic: The Temple, a bar in an old public toilet on the Oxford Road, where a handful of post-work drinkers were lurking under the street. According to @Deltorro01 @big_bad_doh and @jamiejburton, Guy Garvey, front man of Elbow, is often among their number.
After a quick visit to the Cornerhouse for some baffling instalation art (thanks to @Wordsnfixtures and @Gillmphoto), and techy-creative hub Mad Lab (where I met these lovely geeks) it was time for dinner. @Basketcasejo and @the_ladylark picked out Sweet Mandarin in the Northern Quarter, named as the Best Local Chinese restaurant in the UK by Gordon Ramsey. My meal - crispy beef washed down with a bottle of TsingTao - was superb, and the lovely ladies running the restaurant were even superberer. In fact, they'd even sent me a subliminal message across the ether earlier in the day, which I'd managed to miss among the floods of tweets that were being sent my way. It worked.
Before I signed off for the evening, I decided to embark on a short, geographically inexplicable bar hop. First, to the highly recommended (by @Davemee, @danpyt, @catdrawerjim and @garethhall) Marble Arch pub on the Rochdale Road, where the beer was Ronsealesque and the glazed brick interior was stunning, and then to the dim-lit student haunt the Deaf Institute (thanks to @heymanchester, @danpyt, @somuch2answer4 and @helenpower), recreated from the remains of, yup, an old deaf institute near the university.
And finally, it was time for bed at the Velvet Hotel, as suggested by @jonthebeef and @rainycitytales. In a single day, thanks to the good people of the Twittersphere, I'd found more hidden Manchester gems than I did in three years as a student. Once again, Twitterers, you excelled yourselves. A hearty thank you to you all.
- New York's 10 top boutique bolt holes
Uptown, Downtown, Brooklyn and Staten Island… here is our pick of New York's hippest hotels and B&Bs
When it comes to finding a boutique hotel or B&B in New York, many visitors look no further than central Manhattan. But if they venture out of the city centre they will discover little-known and up-and-coming neighbourhoods filled with character, and home to some of the city's most charming boutique hotels and guesthouses. Here, local experts give us their lowdown on the best bolt holes in the city's most colourful neighbourhoods.
1. At Home in Brooklyn, Park Slope, Brooklyn
Recently named the best neighbourhood in New York City (out of 60) by New York magazine, Park Slope boasts streets of handsome brownstones, trendy shops and great restaurants. This B&B on Prospect Park West is in the middle of it all. Occupying a landmark row house, the inn has four bedrooms, an extensive library and a living room filled with DVDs, board games and puzzles. Host Don Matteson serves a bountiful breakfast, and the rooftop deck offers sweeping views of the neighbourhood, Grand Army Plaza and its 500-acre park.
Book it Doubles from $155 per night, including breakfast (00 1 718 622 5292; athomeinbrooklyn.com).
Don't miss The Clay Pot (clay-pot.com), which features ceramics and jewellery made by regional artisans. The Community Bookstore (communitybookstore.net), one of Brooklyn's oldest, has a comfortable area in which to read, and a garden. For tea and pastries head to the Tea Lounge (tealoungeny.com).
Recommended by Rena Grossfield, Big Apple Greeter (bigapplegreeter.org)
2. Akwaaba Mansion, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn
Once an abandoned ruin, this 1860s Italianate villa has been converted into a B&B. Inside you'll find four guest rooms and elegant decor featuring ornate fireplaces, Victorian furnishings, antiques and African-American artifacts. Kick back in the guest library or shaded courtyard. The hotel is located in the historic part of Bedford-Stuyvesant, one of New York's most iconic black neighbourhoods. It was, until recently, considered a no-go zone for visitors, but has undergone a renaissance with the opening of hotels and restaurants.
Book it Doubles from $175 per night, including breakfast (00 1 718 455 5958; akwaaba.com).
Don't miss Saraghina (saraghina brooklyn.com), a top-notch pizzeria by night and rustic-chic café by day; the back garden is one of the finest outdoor spaces in Brooklyn. The Market at Bedford Village (bedfordvillagemarket.com) is a new venture held at weekends, showcasing local art and artisanry.
David Landel, travel editor, New York Post
3. Fort Place B&B, St George, Staten Island
Historic St George at the tip of Staten Island provides a rare mix of small-town charm and big-city accessibility. On the low-key side, settle into Fort Place, a gracious Victorian home with water views. Owned by an industrial designer, it has four bedrooms, each decorated in vintage furnishings.
Book it Doubles from $120 per night, including breakfast (00 1 718 772 2112; fortplace.com).
Don't miss Live music at the ornate St George Theatre (stgeorgetheatre.com), and some of the best tapas in town at Beso Restaurant (besonyc.com). When you're ready to go up in scale, the free Staten Island Ferry is just a five-minute walk away.
Ethan Wolff, author of Frommer's NYC Free & Dirt Cheap (frommers.com).
4. The Ravel Hotel, Long Island City, Queens
Long Island City is fast becoming a hip neighbourhood. And this hotel makes for a great base: lavishly decorated rooms with knock-out bathrooms, stylish public spaces and a rooftop restaurant with some of the best cityscape views in town.
Book it Doubles from $129 per night, room only (00 1 718 289 6101; ravelhotel.com).
Don't miss PS 1 (ps1.org), the sister to the Museum of Modern Art, and be sure to attend a Saturday Warm Up – a critically acclaimed music series that has become one of NYC's most popular events. For dining try Water's Edge (watersedgenyc.com); request a table outdoors – you'll sit just inches from the East River with a dramatic view of the Manhattan skyline.
Chris Heywood, NYC & Company, official tourist board guide
5. Jumel Terrace Books B&B, Hamilton Heights, Manhattan
Literature lovers will adore this quirky B&B linked to Uptown New York's only antiquarian bookshop. There's a garden apartment which sleeps three and has a full-size kitchen, plus a separate double ensuite bedroom upstairs. Run by academic and font of all local knowledge Kurt Thometz, it's the launch pad to the area's cobbled streets and majestic brownstones.
Book it Apartment from $250 per night; double room from $200 per night, both including breakfast (00 1 212 928 9525; jtbandb.wordpress.com).
Don't miss The Morris-Jumel Mansion (morrisjumel.org), Manhattan's oldest surviving house, which was George Washington's headquarters during 1776's Battle of Harlem Heights. Take a stroll through Riverbank State Park (nysparks.state.ny.us), and head to St Nick's Pub (stnicksjazzpub.net) for some of the best live jazz in the city.
Ondine Cohane, New York expert for Simonseeks.com (simonseeks.com/newyork)
6. Victorian B&B, New Brighton, Staten Island
This Italianate guesthouse is a good reason to step off the free Staten Island ferry and explore the city's "forgotten borough". It is a tranquil sanctuary of spacious rooms, decked out with 1860s decor (the house dates from 1846). The breakfasts are stupendous, as are Danuta's homemade cakes.
Book it Doubles from $115 per night, including breakfast (00 1 718 273 9861; victorianbedandbreakfast.net).
Don't miss Snug Harbor Cultural Center (snug-harbor.org), one of New York's lesser-visited gems, with museums, gardens, artists' studios and galleries spread over 83 acres. For midday refreshments, the Everything Goes Book Café (etgstores.com) is a great alternative café and bookstore.
Stephen Keeling is co-author of The Rough Guide to New York City (roughguides.com)
7. Mi Casa Tu Casa Guesthouse, South Bronx
The words "bed and breakfast" might seem out of place in the South Bronx, an area known for being rough around the edges. Yet Liz Figueroa and Julio Pabón, friendly and knowledgeable long-time Bronx residents, have been running their cosy guesthouse here since 2006. Housed in a weathered 19th-century clapboard house, it has four comfy rooms; one room is dedicated to the Yankees baseball team, while the other three have Latino themes . There are three shared bathrooms, a shared kitchen and a tranquil backyard garden.
Book it Twins from $85 per night, including breakfast (00 1 718 402 9310; micasatucasa150.com).
Don't miss The 149th Street-Grand Concourse subway station. The South Bronx gave birth to hip-hop in the 1970s – and much of the graffiti art that went with it – and this was one of the favourite meeting places of aerosol artists. The Bronx Arts Space (bronxartspace.com) hosts various art, experimental film, dance, music and theatre events. Berzet's Soul Food offers some of the best and cheapest Southern home-cooking in the city – you can get two-piece fried chicken sets with candied yams, collard greens and corn bread for around $8.50.
Stephen Keeling is co-author of The Rough Guide to New York City (roughguides.com)
8. Nu Hotel, Boerum Hill, Brooklyn
This boutique hotel manages to be minimalist (cork floors, sleek wood furnishings, white walls), quirky (bike rack in the lobby, hemp hammocks to laze in on hot afternoons) and welcoming (free breakfast) all at once. The best rooms overlook busy Smith Street, full of chic coffee shops and mom-and-pop restaurants, and have views of nearby Brooklyn Bridge.
Book it Doubles from $199 per night, including breakfast (00 1 718 852 8585; nuhotelbrooklyn.com).
Don't miss Henry Street – a more relaxed alternative to Smith Street. Grab some Italian aperitivos at Bocca Luppo. For a real foodie adventure, check out Brooklyn Fare (brooklyn fare.com), a bodega turned high-end restaurant where the chef turns out nightly tasting menus inside his glass-enclosed kitchen. Boerum Hill is mostly residential, but nearby is the Waterfront Museum Barge (waterfrontmuseum.org).
Ginger Otis, author of Lonely Planet's New York City Guide (lonelyplanet.com)
9. The Blue Moon Hotel, Lower East Side, Manhattan
This 22-room hotel is housed in a restored 19th-century tenement, but you'd never know it – the rooms are huge for New York City and some have balconies with city views. A sense of the neighbourhood's history is everywhere – a lot of salvaged material has been used in the hotel.
Book it Doubles from $199 per night, including breakfast (00 1 212 533 9080; bluemoon-nyc.com).
Don't miss The Tenement Museum (tenement.org) and the Museum at Eldridge Street (eldridgestreet.org) for a look at how immigrants lived in the 19th century. Walk down East Broadway to experience the culture of the Lower East Side's newest immigrants, the Fujianese Chinese, and stroll through the Essex Street Market (essexstreetmarket.com).
Kate Stober, Lower East Side Tenement Museum (tenement.org)
10. Bubba & Bean, East Harlem, Manhattan
Two townhouses have been combined into one friendly B&B in up-and-coming East Harlem. Owners Jonathan and Clement have turned each suite into a mini-apartment with French doors between sleeping and living spaces. There's a small garden out back – usually the territory of their two terrier pups, Bubba and Bean.
Book it From $250 per night, sleeping two (00 1 917 345 7914; bblodges.com).
Don't miss El Museo del Barrio (elmuseo.org), dedicated to local artists. At 103rd and Lexington is a vibrant community garden, open from noon to 4pm. Around the corner grab some great Mexican eats at El Paso Taqueria (elpasotaqueria.com).
Ginger Otis, author of Lonely Planet's New York City guide (lonelyplanet.com)
- Rooms at the top
Treehouse holidays are going up in the world, but the new Treehotel in Sweden's Lapland, with its futuristic pods, aims to soar above the rest, says Rhiannon Batten
Towards the end of his 2008 documentary, The Tree Lover, which explored the link between trees and people in Sweden, Jonas Selberg Augustsén says: "Imagine being here on the veranda on a summer evening, or listening to the rain on the roof with the stove purring quietly." As he says this he's sitting in a treehouse he's spent the summer building, looking out over a wide tract of pine forest with a river flowing in the distance, reflecting a sinking sun. You don't have to imagine it any more. Since last month, when the Treehotel opened in Swedish Lapland, anyone can check into a treehouse and survey the landscape from Jonas' viewpoint.
Set just outside the small village of Harads, an hour's drive northwest of Luleå and very close to where The Tree Lover was filmed, the Treehotel is the creation of Britta and Kent Lindvall. Britta, a guesthouse owner, and Kent, a fishing guide, were inspired to action by the film when an area of forest behind Britta's guesthouse was sold for logging. Instead of waiting for the inevitable to happen in a country where forestry is such an important industry, they contacted the forest's owner and offered to buy the land from him. Calling in favours from various architect friends Kent had been on fishing trips with, they started building the Treehotel, determined to demonstrate that the natural environment around them had value beyond supplying timber. Along with daughter Sofia, who also moonlights as a stuntwoman, what they have created is a high design, back to nature retreat where guests can slow down, switch off and breathe more deeply.
Arriving at the guesthouse late on a light-soaked summer's evening, I was met by Britta. Ushering me in with motherly warmth she sat me down in the 1950s-style surroundings and served up a delicious homemade fish pie on vintage china, explaining that the guesthouse operates as a kind of base camp for the treehouse rooms. "Guests leave their luggage here and just take a small overnight bag to the treehouses," she said. "We want you to get the feeling that you're leaving one world behind and entering another."
It certainly felt that way when, after dinner, Sofia led me along a narrow gravel path through a glade of birch trees and then higher up, through sturdy pines, to the Mirrorcube. The most striking of the treehouses, it's a glass box perched high in the forest. Like an architectural magic trick, it almost disappears into the foliage, so sharply are the surrounding trees reflected in it. The only giveaway that things are not quite what they seem is a wood and rope bridge leading up to a near-invisible door.
Inside, the Mirrorcube's chic plywood interior smells of warm wood. The dimensions are neat (four metres wide, four metres long and four metres high) and it is light and airy inside. Like the hotel's other treehouses, the facilities here are fairly basic, not stretching much beyond an environmentally-friendly toilet (some treehouses have ones that freeze the waste and others have ones that burn it into ash) and a sink – meals and showers are taken at the guesthouse, 10 minutes' walk away.
Still, this is a treehouse for grown-ups. Underfloor heating will keep it cosy through winter, posh tea and coffee are provided, along with a designer kettle, and a huge bed is dressed in thick white cotton and stylish woollen rugs. There is a sense of playfulness here, too. A ladder is provided for those who are game for clambering up, through a tiny, Alice In Wonderland-style door to a roof terrace, and the reflective cladding means no one can see in, so the windows have been left curtainless, giving almost 360-degree views of the surrounding trees. There's even a window in the ceiling; look up and feathery branches trail off into the sky.
Waking the next morning it was a shock to roll over and find a bird peering back at me through the glass. Underneath the duvet it was tempting to burrow away for the day in my own little nest but I would have felt guilty snoozing the day away, and wanted to explore the rest of the grounds.
Stepping out into giddying fresh air (Harads is only 60km south of the Arctic circle), the forest was so still that the tiniest underfoot snap crackled like gunshot.
I went to take a peek at the Cabin, a sleek, organically shaped space pod touched down in the trees about 50m from the Mirrorcube. Also sleeping two, this one has a huge viewing deck and a floor-to-ceiling window looking out, beyond the forest, on to the Lule river, the northern lights in winter and the midnight sun in summer. Just behind it is the four-person Bird's Nest, inspired by a giant sea eagle's nest spotted on one of Kent's fishing trips to Russia's Kamchatka peninsula. Looking just as you might imagine, its twiggy heights are accessed via an electronic stepladder that descends and retracts via a keypad strapped on to one of the neighbouring trees. Inside, the sense of snugness is exaggerated by small porthole windows.
Between the Bird's Nest and the Mirrorcube is a sauna and relaxation room and another treehouse, the four-person Blue Cone, which is scheduled for completion next month. Its name belies its Lego-like structure, which is covered with bright orange tiles. A fifth treehouse, the UFO, will open at the end of October and, after a gap to source the finance, Britta and Kent hope to eventually have 24 on the site. "Building a treehouse is every boy's dream," said Kent, showing me around. "Now other architects want to get involved as they see it as a great showcase for their skills".
At well over £300 per treehouse per night, this is likely to remain a dream for many would-be guests, too.
It is only three and a half hours' drive, or a train ride, from the Icehotel in Jukkasjärvi so it is probable that these two quirky destination hotels will be sold together as a winter package, with a night spent in each. Access to some of northern Sweden's most spectacular wild landscapes aside, without a run of other real must-sees nearby, it's easy to imagine that the Treehotel will become the preserve of birthday weekenders, holidaying architecture buffs or the first stop on a Nordic honeymoon.
Yet there's plenty to do here for those who have more time. Britta and Kent are enthusiastic about village walking tours where guests can stop for coffee, cake and conversation with a local family. "Guests want to meet real people," he shrugs.
More energetic activities are on offer too. After my tour of the treehouses I was collected by Cicci Nilsson, the owner of the local stables, for a short ride. Cajoling Rominy, a petulant Irish cob, into trotting along a lane, we passed storybook red summer houses and fields, up to a plateau where there are spectacular views along the Lule river – and of the 1,500 hectares of former forest that were destroyed in Sweden's biggest forest fire four years ago. "A lot of local people owned a piece of forest here so it had a big impact on the community," Cicci told me. "Until this happened people saw having a piece of forest as a kind of pension pot."
Looking out at the scorched landscape past the few lonely pines left standing, it was a reminder that logging isn't the only threat to Sweden's forest. (Treehotel guests will be reassured to know that Kent also works part-time as a fireman.)
Over a lunch of reindeer meatballs back at the guesthouse, Britta and Kent explained how deeply rooted their commitment to the forest is. Though the hotel has been designed with fun in mind, it has a serious side too. "The forest for us is a relaxing place, a source of mental peace," said Kent, adding that the couple want to share this passion for the environment with guests. The Treehotel has duly been built as sustainably as possible – the Mirrorcube has even been fitted with an infrared film, visible to birds only, that stops them flying into it – and environmentally unsound activities such as snowmobile safaris are out.
After lunch, I went to explore the forest from another angle – the seat of a kayak. "The weather has turned this week. The leaves are changing, there's a chill in the air, autumn is here," said local guide Love Rynbäck as we pushed our kayaks into the Lule river.
Love is subcontracted through his company, CreActive Adventure, to run outdoors activities for hotel guests; winter, he told me, is busier than summer, with husky safaris, skiing, skijoring (a bit like waterskiing on snow but being pulled by a horse), ice fishing, Sami cultural trips and sleigh rides on offer.
But gliding out on calm water in the afternoon sun there was still just enough warmth in the air to pretend that summer wasn't over yet. Paddling languidly along the edge of a huge island, we watched the trees reflected on the still water and the water casting ripples of sunlight on the trees in return. "When you're in a kayak the wildlife doesn't really notice you. It's like you're just a huge bird," said Love.
And what better place for a human bird to hole up afterwards than a bedroom up in the trees?
- The Irish island that drums to its own beat
Every year bodhrán drummers descend on the tiny island of Inis Oírr for a unique insight into Ireland's traditional music
- Caffeine hit in Auckland
The flat white, café du jour in London coffee shops, was invented in Auckland (at least that's what they say in New Zealand). Here's how to make one, and where find the best cup in the city
Stretch, whirlpool, surf. I repeat the mantra while preparing my first flat white, at a top-notch La Marzocco espresso machine that an hour ago was as alien to me as the cockpit of a Formula One racing car.
I am on the barista training course at Allpress Espresso, one of Auckland's premier roasters, to learn how to make the antipodean take on white coffee, the flat white. Perfected in New Zealand – which bickers with Australia over who actually invented it back in the 80s – the flat white is a single shot of espresso blended with steamed velvety milk; strong, creamy, not too frothy.
In the last couple of years, the flat white coffee has become the in drink in London's hipster neighbourhoods; spreading from Soho cafes such as Flat White, and Dose Espresso in Smithfield, which first catered to homesick Kiwis, to the new spate of cool coffee shops that have opened recently in East London – Tina We Salute You, Mouse & De Lotz, Wilton's, Taste of Bitter Love, and Prufrock where 2009 World Barista Champion Gwilym Davies works.
And the brew is gearing up to become as widely known in the UK as the country's last great export, Flight Of The Conchords, as at the beginning of the year, the nationwide chains joined in. Peter Andre launched Costa Coffee's maiden flat white in January, around the same time that Starbucks got in on the act. Next month, Allpress is due to open a roastery/cafe in Shoreditch,
I went back to the Auckland original, to see if the city really does make the best coffee in the world, and to learn how to make a flat white myself.
After stretching (gradually warming the milk) and the whirlpool (steaming the liquid to make a latte froth), I surf – swirling the metal jug to mix the bubbles back into the milk. Under the careful eye of my tutor, Monica, I have already made a half-decent espresso. Now I gently pour the velvety liquid over a spoon to blend it with the shot. As the cup fills, I move the spoon away so a nice slug of cream falls on top. Perfect. New Zealand's biggest city boasts one of the strongest claims to have devised the flat white as we know it, thanks to an explosion of espresso-drinking in the mid-80s. No one is quite sure where it all began, but the boho DKD was generally considered the first Auckland venue, though Sydneysiders reckon they beat the Kiwis to it. In one hangout, I speak to Jackson, who roasts beans in his own garage, and speaks fondly of those times. "I was a student and I remember drinking flat whites back then," he says. "We used to watch subtitled films at the Civic Theatre and have coffee and cake after."
DKD is long gone, but its legacy and that of other pioneers remains in a thriving cafe society. Aucklanders use coffee shops as social venues, as we might pubs, for business meetings, to catch up with mates or simply read the paper. And they take coffee seriously, with 140 roasters in New Zealand, many based in this city. Even if most Kiwis do not roast beans themselves, many buy them freshly ground to supply their own gleaming Italian machines.
Back in the 80s, cafe owners aped continental mores, a practice continued by Auckland's finest city centre institution, Reslau (39 Elliott Street). Its narrow space barely provides room for a handful of tiny tables and just one banquette. The coffee is perfect (I am an expert now) and the individual salmon quiches from the tea trolley exquisite – the owners' mum does the baking. Reslau offers a rare slice of chic in Auckland's drab central business district, an area that many locals avoid.
The city's industrial waterfront lacks charisma – there's a motorway running through it – and many of the suburbs are livelier, with quirky, original cafes. I found the best flat white at Espresso Workshop (2 Owens Road, espressoworkshop.co.nz), a perfect name for this bustling Epsom joint that acts as a caffeine laboratory. Despite coming only as a single shot, its version offers bags of punchy flavour without bitterness. Suddenly I realise I have halted a lifelong habit, adding sugar to my coffee.
Other cafes provide more leisurely vibes. Not far from the city centre in Freeman's Bay, down a side street of warehouses converted into architects' studios, lies Queenie's Lunchroom (24a Spring Street, queenieslunchroom.co.nz), last year's top dog from a shortlist of 50 in local magazine Metro's annual survey of Auckland cafes. Queenie's has only been open a year or so, and reflects a move away from minimalism to kitscher decor, with its painting-by-numbers mural of a Maori rural scene and a chandelier made from antlers. Its food was as good as the place looked: I went for huevos rancheros, a classic Mexican breakfast of eggs with tangy salsa. My partner went for scrambled eggs with fresh spinach on toast.
Further out, plenty of environs are worth exploring – Grey Lynn's Richmond Road is one of the quieter thoroughfares, yet still dotted with interesting shops and cafes, while Kingsland has a more youthful buzz and great food. We fell for Frolic Café (653 Manukau Road, frolic.co.nz) in Royal Oak, opposite the entrance to One Tree Hill, an extinct volcano that provides views over the isthmus to Auckland's harbours. With room to spread around and a back garden, Frolic is designed for Sunday lounging. Its coffee has a soothing mocha-like sweetness.
Good One (42 Douglas Street), off the uber-trendy Ponsonby Road, lacks a kitchen, but makes up for it with lamb sausage rolls and sardines on toast. This no-nonsense, post-industrial shed is a proper beanhead's mecca that leads the way in the lastest trend – filter coffee. Forget those clumsy, 80s, plastic monstrosities; this is how to imbibe single-origin beans.
I am presented with a wooden tray that holds a mug with a dainty ceramic filter, milk and a jug of hot water. Big in Japan, I am told, and the process hints at the elegance of that nation's tea ceremony. Ethiopian Yirgacheffe coffee has a burnt toast taste that is oddly warming. Not everyone's cup of tea, so to speak, but I am reminded once more of every local's reply when I ask for a cafe tip: "You can't really get a bad cup of coffee in Auckland."
• Allpress Espresso holds Coffee Knowledge (around £37) and Perfect Cup (£31) classes at its store (266 Ponsonby Road, +64 9 307 5555, allpress.co.nz) on Tuesday evenings. Classes will also take place at the new London branch. Doubles at the boutique Hotel de Brett (+64 9 925 9000, hoteldebrett.com), from £137, including breakfast and pre-dinner drink. The Quest Ponsonby (+64 9 360 4240, questponsonby.co.nz) has studio apartments from £63 per night and one-bedroom apartments from £73
- Top 10 UK walks
Download our guides to the best bank holiday hikes, as picked by the National Trust's experts
- Trip of a lifetime
Whether you're thinking of a year out, need a career break or just an adventurous holiday, find inspiration with these extraordinary gap-year tales
Cycling to India
When I was 11, during a junior school leavers' assembly in front of all the mums and dads, my headmistress asked my class what they wanted to do when they left school. Footballer, doctor, film star, politician, came the replies. My answer? "I want to cycle round the world and raise money for charity." A big "ahhhhh" resounded around the school hall. "So sweet."
Little did they know that 20 years later I would be setting off on a 9,000-mile journey to India. On my own. Carrying everything I needed on my steel-framed bicycle, affectionately known as "Shirley".
I would like to say it was planned to the nth degree and that everything ran like clockwork. In reality, I was arrested twice, chased by wild dogs, beaten (and wined and dined) by the mafia, attacked by bandits …
On my last day I was cycling through the Bandipur wildlife park in southern India. My flowery bike wasn't great camouflage and startled a number of elephants as I passed. They decided to charge.
The advice is "if an elephant charges you, stand your ground, and bow your head to show respect". What tosh! With 30 tonnes of muscle and bone crashing towards me, destroying small trees and making the ground vibrate under my feet, there was no way I was standing firm. I dropped my bike into third gear and floored it.
Another time I ran out of food and water in the desert and was woken one morning to find maggots in my hair and beard.
Yet the greatest memories are of so many wonderful people I met in every country, who invited me into their homes to celebrate local festivals, play music, dance, sing, eat, and share each other's cultures, beliefs, history and way of life.
After six months' cycling, I rolled into Chembakolli, a tiny village, my final destination. It was my 31st birthday – 20 years since I had first dreamed up the idea. I was greeted by a carnival of people playing drums, singing, cheering, and waving banners saying "Happy birthday". All I could do was crouch down and cry tears of joy. I'd cycled 9,000 miles from England to India. I'd lived my dream.
Daniel Bent, 31, teacher, Essex. See his blog at mrbent.blogspot.com
Conservation protest camp in Tasmania
I was on a year out in Australia, and after a few months in the red centre I decided to go to Tasmania to escape the heat, and to see big trees. The island is home to a vast forest of Eucalyptus regnans, the largest flowering plants in the world.
Within a few days of arriving I heard word of protest activity in the Upper Florentine Valley, a pristine corner of virgin forest under threat from various logging projects.
I decided to hitch there, and for the last part of the journey I rode with TK, a Canadian biologist who had been living at the Florentine camp for two years. He gave me a brief history of the area as we entered the forest. These Eucalyptus regnans, at 60m tall, may not be the biggest trees in the world – one California redwood is 98m, for example – but never, TK assured me, would I feel as dwarfed by nature as when among the giants of the Florentine Valley.
The protest has been going on since 2006, when Forestry Tasmania began extending the road into the forest. Protesters live in the trees so that they won't be cut down, though there has been much confrontation and some arrests. "Don't ever go in there," TK said as we passed a lonely, redbrick pub. "If they think you look like one of us – a week or so at the camp should do it – they'll kick the shit out of you."
The local climate is incredibly wet, adding a ghostly white cover to the giant trees. Rain-soaked banners high up in the branches – "Toot for Tassy's Forests", "Still Wild, Still Threatened" – were visible from the roadside. But no amount of neck-craning can quantify the trees' size.
For an eco-friendly backpacker, the Florentine camp provided a cheap and exciting alternative to a volunteer project. Bring food donations, good conversation and a useful pair of hands and the vast Tasmanian wilderness is yours to explore. Camp life was centred on communal meals, firewood runs, clean-ups and lookout reports. Each night, wet hair and cloth steamed by a campfire under a blue tarpaulin. Plates of food were passed around – curried baked beans topped with fresh parsley.
A camp veteran of six months told me how she was humbled by a spectacular light display from the aurora australis. Another veteran had a doctorate in zoology, and used the camp as a base for a statistical project on the Tasmanian devil population. I spent a couple of days on the west coast's Bay of Fires – a wild, windswept clash of white-sand beaches, turquoise water, brooding skies and red-stained granite rocks.
As well as being a good place to become actively involved in forest conservation, the camp was where people shared travellers' tips – a valuable resource that is often ignored in favour of a guidebook.
Clyde Macfarlane, 23, anthropology graduate/freelance writer, Chichester. See Still Wild Still Threatened (stillwildstillthreatened.org) for details of the campaign
A year in Saudi Arabia
Yearnings for the bamboo forests of China, the ski slopes of Switzerland and the karaoke booths of Japan – highlights of my previous gap years – don't surprise me, but I never imagined the minarets of Saudi Arabia would call me back.
It is two years since I returned from Jeddah, but when I close my eyes on a grey English day I'm walking the city's ancient streets again, seeking out Bukhari chicken or Egyptian flat bread.
Money was my motivation for going to a country famous for exporting oil and terrorism; it has some of the best paid English teaching jobs in the world, and I managed to save £8,500 in just six months working at a boys' school there. I chose my new home city carefully. As the gateway to Mecca, through which the Muslim world passes on the hajj, the port of Jeddah is Saudi Arabia's most cosmopolitan and liberal city.
My new Saudi friends warned me against even visiting the capital Riyadh, home of Wahhabism. In Jeddah I knew Saudis, as well as western women, who walked the streets unaccompanied by a man and with their heads uncovered, something they could never do in Riyadh.
Jeddah also boasts some of the world's best coral reefs. Diving on the Saudi side of the Red Sea offers the same underwater riches as the Egyptian Sinai, but without the crowds.
On the downside, I didn't speak to a woman for my first two months there, but I eventually found a private beach where the sexes could mix.
My first lesson on a jetski was fleeing the coastguard. A Palestinian girl had taken me for a ride when we saw their ship approaching. For fear of being caught together we hid in a cove. Women are barred from driving any kind of motorised vehicles so I had to take the controls and when they passed we sped out of the cove and back to the beach James-Bond style.
Bizarre experiences inform my anecdotes about Saudi Arabia – gate-crashing a wedding and ending up on stage in front of 2,000 guests, my Saudi girlfriend's mother catching us at my apartment together … But what I long for is visiting the crumbling, centuries-old buildings of Old Jeddah, smoking shisha in coffeshops and sipping sweet Adeni tea with a friend.
The kingdom is a harsh place, but the people who live there are the most hospitable I've ever met. I went for the riyals but came back richer in so many other ways.
David Trayner, 29, news reporter, Leicester
Finding my own volunteer work and inspiration in Asia
In October 2008 two friends and I started our gap year in Thailand. We began in Bangkok, where we shopped non-stop on Khao San Road, then moved to Koh Samui to learn Muay Thai kickboxing, and up to Pai for yoga and massage courses. We went across to Laos for cooking lessons, and it was here that I went into a school and helped with English lessons. I'd always been put off volunteering by the idea of having to pay a company to work for nothing, but this was free.
We moved onto Vietnam, and back to marathon shopping, but I just wasn't feeling it. I'd got a taste for doing something "better" and I wanted to do more of it. So I left my mates and went ahead to Cambodia.
The day I arrived I found an HIV orphanage called House of Family, where I volunteered. I asked the doctor what happened to all the other orphans – there were only 30 kids at the orphanage but the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Cambodia is among the highest in Asia. She explained that they were living at the rubbish dumps, so that is where I went.
I discovered children eating dirt, sleeping on dirt and walking barefoot on burning toxic waste. It was inhumane and unacceptable. So I came back to England, borrowed a video camera, raised £1,000 on Facebook and returned two weeks later to do the first Small Steps project. I gave wellington boots, clothes aid, food and water to the children. Then I came home, edited the film, screened it and got an amazing reaction from the public. I registered Small Steps as a charity and intend to repeat the project – called Around The World in 80 Dumps – on inhabited dumps around the world, to create awareness and help people. I am now the director of Small Steps, the next project is in Nicaragua.
Amy Hanson, 30, London. If you are interested in volunteering for a Small Steps project (smallsteps.org), especially if you are a medic, contact info@smallstepsproject.org
Hitchhiking to Israel
After spending 32 tedious hours on a coach last summer, I was considering giving up overlanding. But as I sat in front of the easyJet website this summer I couldn't quite bring myself to double the size of my carbon footprint for the year with just one click. Instead, I decided I'd rely on my thumb and the kindness of strangers and take a risk on that most controversial form of transport, particularly for women: the hitchhike.
A friend would accompany me as far as Zagreb, then I'd go on alone to Israel, through Turkey, Syria and Jordan. Three hours after posting a request on the website Gumtree (gumtree.com) we had a lift from Hounslow East in London to Mannheim in southern Germany. A week and three lifts later, we were couchsurfing (couchsurfing.org) in Berlin.
We became pros at working service stations, asking every car that pulled in whether they had space for two travellers: "You go?" … point at map, smile, get in. There were BMWs, a limousine and a Slovenian rocking out to Pink Floyd.
In some cars, especially after a night spent camping just off the hard-shoulder, my head would droop and 12 hours later I'd wake to realise I'd missed an entire country (sorry Slovakia, Bulgaria and northern Israel), but the further east I went, the more unfamiliar the scenery became and the more often my eyes would stay open.
Even the worst experience could turn into a high point. We were dropped just north of Munich in the rain as it was getting dark, and were stuck for two hours, soaking wet, our spirits low.
A couple in a people-wagon finally saved the day. They planned to drop us at a service station where we could hitch a lift into Austria. We talked and joked about small things – the scenery, the baptism that they'd been to. I told them about my year as a parish administrator and the reverence that the baptism register commanded. By the end of that conversation they had decided I was a girl with an unambiguous calling who had put faith on hold to struggle against climate change. It turned out the man was a Protestant priest, and rather than drop us at a service station to pitch our tent in the rain, they offered us a night in their spare flat in the Bavarian mountains – hot water, fresh towels, beds all to ourselves, and for free – bliss.
I spent over a month in the Middle East and saw sights that the guidebooks are yet to discover. Relying on the famed Syrian kindness, I was taken in, fed and cared for by a family for four days. They then drove me most of the three hours to Mar Musa monastery, enjoyed by few travellers.
In Israel I lost myself in the carefree parties of Tel Aviv, making friends with kids who'd just finished military service ("Who cares about peace? We just want peace of mind"). The next day I went to Jerusalem to yell in protest with the activists in the West Bank. I was given access to both worlds, the only condition that I would listen to the stories that they told about the other side.
And it was this necessity to listen that made my decision to hitchhike so much more than just a cheap way to travel. Each was an invitation to get close to someone.
Hitchhiking is the start of a story where anything might happen. You escape the check-in queue and have faith in the moment, in people and yourself. You begin a story with each person you meet. Living another person's life, if only for one journey, will teach you more about their culture than any guidebook.
Tamsin Omond, 25, environmental campaigner, London. Follow her @tamsinomond on twitter
Working on a farm in Scotland
For many of my generation, the gap year between school and university was spent volunteering in orphanages or sunning on an Aussie beach. Being pretentious but poor I decided instead that my fate lay on a Scottish island. I had been to Mull on holiday and figured I would spend my days wandering the beach, reading epic novels and having flings with strapping farmers.
I was a troubled teenager, desperate to escape the woes of life in a remote Kentish village, terrifyingly clueless about my career path.
When I told her my plans, my mother, somewhat spitefully, said, "How on earth are you going to do that?", which galvanized me into asking the tourist office if there were any friendly farmers. Fortune had it that I managed to speak to a girl called Claire, a conversation that changed my life. Claire knew of just the man, a farmer in the south of Mull who periodically "took in" young folk like me to help out on his 22,000 acres. Our brief phone call (he had an impossibly posh accent) went something like this:
"Have you ever worked on a farm?"
"Erm, nope."
"Know anything about farming?"
"Nope"
"Are you fit?"
"Not particularly"
"I like your chutzpah. I'll pay your coach fare. If we like you, you can stay."
I stepped off the ferry in cropped, dyed red hair, round glasses, ripped jeans and Dr. Marten boots, prompting the farmer to squint at me in disbelief and ask if I was a punk.
Lochbuie – where I lived – is a 17-house village, beautiful and appealing to holidaying wildlife lovers, archaeologists and photographers. Sites include the uninhabited 15th-century Moy Castle and the impressive (inhabited) 18th-century Lochbuie House, overlooking the loch. Mull remains one of the most beautiful, unspoilt places in the UK. I returned recently and nothing had changed.
I hated it for the first few weeks. But the farmer and his wife persevered through my astonishing ignorance about the world and I went from self-obsessed teenager who'd never done a day's work in her life (bar the sort that you could give up if you didn't like it) to a useful (ish) member of the community.
I emerged at the end of the experience fitter, fatter, better-read and able to sleep.
Hazel Davis, 33, journalist, Huddersfield
Family gap year
We lived in Cornwall in a beautiful barn conversion with stunning valley views and only a short drive to the glorious Atlantic coast: my wife Nicki, with a beauticians business in Wadebridge, 15-year-old Michael, addicted to Xbox games, Emmaline, 13 going on 19, and me, John, full-time artist.
Wanting to see the world had been nagging at me for years. In the end we decided to just do it. The kids could be schooled as we travelled and the experiences they'd get would be possibly life-changing – hell, we might even find somewhere better to live than Cornwall.
Having sold everything to fund the trip we had just three weeks to prepare, decide where to go and buy our round-the-world tickets: we opted for Japan, south-east Asia, Australia, New Zealand, a stop in the Cook islands and finally the United States. The furthest we'd ever been prior to this was Bulgaria.
We flew to Tokyo the day after Boxing Day, and stayed with a family in rural Japan, eating sushi with them each day and trying to communicate with gesticulations and props – sake seemed to help the conversations somewhat. Dressed in traditional kimono and samurai we visited Buddhist and Shinto temples on New Year's Day.
We went on to learn to dive in Thailand, helped out at a charitable school in Cambodia, camped in the Australian outback and skied in August in New Zealand. But constantly moving on every few days can be exhausting, especially for kids, so sometimes we'd just slob and watch DVDs in a rented apartment. The experiences have been so many and varied, and has been highly rewarding for the whole family. We'll have plenty of stories to "entertain" our friends and relatives at Christmas when we return in December.
John Tregembo, 52, Cornwall. See his travel blog at johntregembo.co.uk. Watch the Tregembo family in My Crazy Family Gap Year on Channel 4 from 6 September, 9pm
- Top 10 autumn sunshine holidays
Hold on to that summer feeling - and beat the August heat and crowds - with an autumn break to one of these sunny short-haul destinations
Autumn in the Med
Autumn is a great time to get away for a final blast of sunshine not too far from home. Not only have the crowds thinned, allowing you to find space on the beaches and enjoy the sights without the queues, but midday temperatures have receded - perfect for donningwalking shoes and exploring rural areas that are wonderful at this time of year. Best of all, many hotels slash their rates as soon as the summer crowds head home. We pick our top 10 spots for that perfect autumn getaway …
1. Sardinia, Italy
Average maximum temperature: 27C
Visit Sardinia in autumn and you can discover one of the island's best-kept secrets: Autunno in Barbagia (Autumn in Barbagia). Running from September to December, a series of festivals take place across 27 villages in Barbagia, a mountainous area of inland Sardinia (sardegnaturismo.it). Streets are transformed into markets, local craftsmen hold workshops, locals throw open their doors - and dining rooms - to visitors and walks are held through the hills. Or you can just kick back on one of the island's near-empty beaches and soak up some rays.
Stay: Agriturismo Testone (+39 0784 230 539, agriturismotestone.com), tucked in a forest of cork trees in the heart of Barbagia, near the village of Nuoro, is an old stone farmhouse with eight bedrooms, hearty home cooking and log fires in the sitting and dining rooms. Doubles from €38 per person per night, including breakfast.
Get there: British Airways flies from London Gatwick to Cagliari from £138 return.
2. Andalucia, Spain
Average maximum temperature: 32C
Autumn days in Andalucia are still exotically warm, often hitting the low 30s. While the beaches are great this time of year - far quieter than in July and August - this is the time to head to the cooler climes of the hills for some rambling. Sierra de Aracena national park, just north of Seville, is one of the least-known of Andalucia's parks. Lace up your boots and explore its wooded valleys, whitewashed villages and groves of chestnuts - their leaves turning red and golden. Don't miss the lively market town of Aracena, with its limestone caves and 13th-century church built by the Knights Templar. Stop for tapas at Café-Bar Manzano, opposite the square - this is the season to try the region's famous setas (wild mushrooms).
Stay: Finca el Moro (+34 959 501079, fincaelmoro.com), in the heart of the Sierra de Aracena national park, is a 75-acre hill farm with three cottages, sleeping between two and six, each with its own pool. There's no Wi-Fi, no TV, just excellent walking from the farm - take the donkey, Violetta, to carry your picnic, or set off on one of the farm's horses (experienced riders only). From €500 per week for a one-bedroom cottage.
Get there: Ryanair (ryanair.com) flies from London Stansted, London Gatwick and Bristol to Seville from £40 return.
3. Cyprus
Average maximum temperature: 33C
Cyprus's southerly position means it enjoys a long, hot autumn, with temperatures well into the 30s. While Cypriot resorts are not among the most beautiful in the Med, an increasing numbers of village houses are being converted into cottages and inns, many in remote rural areas that - on cooler autumn days - are perfect for exploring on foot. After a day's romp, cool off with a dip in the sea, still blissfully warm at this time of year; Coral Bay, a large horseshoe-shaped cove backed by steep limestone cliffs and with blue flag status should do just the trick.
Stay: Amarakos (+357 22 313374, amarakos.com), situated in the sleepy village of Kato Akourdalia - close to Coral Bay and Paphos - is a family-run guest-house with seven rooms around a flower-filled courtyard. Guided walks, cooking lessons and visits to archaeological sites can all be arranged. Doubles from €77 per night, including breakfast.
Get there: Easyjet flies from London Gatwick, London Luton, Bristol and Manchester to Paphos from £105 return.
4. Dubrovnik, Croatia
Average maximum temperature: 25C
Dubrovnik is extremely busy in the summer months; accommodation is hard to find and endless cruise ships dock in its port, adding to the already overcrowded streets and beaches. Autumn however brings out the best of Dubrovnik; it takes on a tranquil, laidback atmosphere, the weather is less humid, the sea is still warm enough for swimming and accommodation and ferries prices drop considerably. Hop on a 50-minute ferry to the tiny, car-free island of Lopud; it's renowned for having one of the best beaches in the Dubrovnik region, Sunj (pronounced "shoon"); in summer everyone in the region with a motorised vessel heads there for a swim. Come autumn it's the Adriatic at its best.
Stay: The Amoret Apartments (+385 20 324005, dubrovnik-amoret.com), in the old town, is made up of 10 apartments (sleeping two-three) housed in three former palaces, each mixing antiques with modern paintings inspired by the city. Doubles from €70 per night, accommodation only.
Get there: Flybe flies from Birmingham and Exeter to Dubrovnik from £250 return.
5. Dahab, Egypt
Average maximum temperature: 31C
Visit this small Bedouin coastal resort in summer and you'll face unbearably high temperatures of up to 38C; by late September, they've dropped - to the low 30s - and unlike in winter, nights are not too cool. Located 100km north of its more commercial neighbour, Sharm el-Sheikh, it has a chilled backpacker vibe and is renowned for its diving, thanks to its diversity of reefs, and also its windsurfing (the resort has about 270 days a year of wind a year). Now's also the time to visit stunning locations nearby – doable as day trips – such as the Coloured Canyon, with its dramatic rock formations, and St Catherine's Monastery, situated at the foot of Mount Sinai.
Stay: Dahab Paradise (i-escape.com/dahabparadise.php), on the Red Sea, is right among the action. It has 35 bedrooms with high ceilings, terracotta tiles and handcrafted reclaimed furniture. The hotel also works in conjunction with one of the diving schools. Doubles from €58 per night, including breakfast.
Get there: Easyjet flies from London Gatwick, Luton and Manchester to Sharm El Sheikh from £190 return.
6. Lanzarote, Canary Islands
Average maximum temperature: 29C
Just 70km from the Western Sahara, Lanzarote has a more desert-like climate than the Mediterranean, and is at its best come autumn: the north-easterly trade winds – which blow across the island from March to August – drop considerably; the sea, heated by the summer sun, is at its warmest; air temperatures still average around the mid-20s and the tourist crowds have subsided. This is the perfect time to don your walking shoes and trek the island's volcanic peaks, for example Timanfaya national park (Fire Mountain), with its striking red and ocre lunar landscape and seismic activity.
Stay: Casa El Morro (+34 928 830392, casaelmorrolanzarote.com) is an 18th-century mansion, located above the village of Uga on the outskirts of the Timanfaya national park, that has been transformed into seven self-contained suites sleeping two to five, furnished with collections from Arabia, the Orient and Indonesia. From €107 per night, room only, sleeping up to three.
Get there: Easyjet flies from London Gatwick and Liverpool to Arrecife from £62 return.
7. Kas, Turkey
Average maximum temperature: 29C
Still sunny but not scorching, autumn is the perfect time to visit this relaxed old fishing village, situated on the Lycian coast in south Turkey. Especially if you're planning on exploring the Lycian Way, a long-distance footpath that stretches for 500km from Fethiye to Antalya through the ancient land of Lycia (Kas is a good base for exploring the southernmost sections). If it's watersports you're after, the locals say the best time to dive is after the first autumn rain (usually between late September and early October), as this is when you can see the most fish activity.
Stay: Villa Hotel Tamara (+90 242 836 32 73, hoteltamara.com.tr) in Kas has 26 rooms and suites - all with sea views - two swimming pools and terraces that lead down to the private beach. Doubles from €100 per night, including breakfast.
Get there: Monarch flies from Birmingham, Gatwick, Luton and Manchester to Dalaman from £91 return.
8. Saint-Tropez, France
Average maximum temperature: 25C
Summer playground of the glitterati, the flashiest seaside resort in the Côte d'Azur takes on a whole new identity come autumn. While temperatures can still reach the mid-20s, most of the crowds are long gone, leaving behind a more laid-back town. Beaches which are usually packed - such as Plage de Pampelonne and Plage des Salins - are blissfully quiet, as are its posh boutiques and restaurants. If it's the Saint-Tropez buzz you're after, visit between 25 September and 3 October, when the annual Regatta Les Voiles de St Tropez (societe-nautique-saint-tropez.fr) sees 300 sailing yachts, from all over the globe, compete in a week of racing and festivities - and the jet-set return in throngs to watch.
Stay: Pastis Hotel (+33 4 98 12 56 50, pastis-st-tropez.com) has nine beautiful bedrooms, complete with objêts d'art, leather armchairs, contemporary four-posters and their own private balcony or breakfast terrace. Doubles from €175 per night - down from €450 in peak season.
Get there: Ryanair flies from London Stansted to Toulon from £30 return.
9. Rhodes, Greece
Average maximum temperature: 28C
Whichever Greek island you pick in autumn you're likely to find warm sunshine and few crowds. But if there's one island that is particulary lovely at this time of year it's Rhodes. Its medieval Old Town is teeming with tourists in July and August. Visit in the autumn, however, and you can have its narrow alleys, lined with Ottoman mansions, and tranquil squares virtually all to yourself. September is also the best time to visit Petaloudes (Butterfly Valley), the island's most popular tourist attraction; out of season, this lovely green dell in the middle of the island is tourist-free, so it's the best time to spot the thousands of brightly coloured insects (don't leave it too late, they only inhabit the valley between May and September). The thermometer will hover around the mid to high 20s, perfect for catching some rays on the nearby beaches; head to Kalithea, just 8km south, famous for its hot medicinal springs.
Stay: Spirit of the Knights (i-escape.com/spiritoftheknights.psp), in the centre of Rhodes' Old Town, is a family-run hotel with six elegant rooms, all stone arches, marble floors, iron candelabras and stained glass windows. Doubles from €145 per night, including breakfast.
Get there: Easyjet flies from London Gatwick to Crete from £66 return.
10. Île de Ré, France
Average maximum temperature: 23C
A longtime favourite with French holidaymakers, this tiny island, just off the west coast of France and connected to the mainland by a bridge, can be rammed during the summer. By September however, most have returned to the mainland. Île de Ré is one of France's sunniest regions; though with temperatures a few degrees lower than in summer it's one of the best times to saddle up and explore the island's 100km of cycle tracks, all wonderfully flat. Cruise past endless sandy beaches - many empty this time of year - vineyards, pine forests and oyster farms (Île de Ré is one of the country's major producers), ending up at Saint Martin, the island's capital, overflowing with gourmet restaurants. Re-fuel on ocean-fresh lobster at La Baleine Bleue (baleinebleue.com), the island's most renowned restaurant, which out-of-season you conveniently don't have to book weeks in advance.
Stay: Hôtel de Toiras in Saint Martin (+33 5 46 35 40 32, hotel-de-toiras.com) is a handsome 16th-century merchant's house which has just been awarded five-star classification (the only one on the island) and has 20 lavish rooms and suites, some with open fires, for those cooler autumn nights. Doubles from €205 per night, room only - down from €305 in peak season.
Get there: Rail Europe has fares from London to La Rochelle from £111 return. Buses run between La Rochelle and Île de Ré regularly.
• Prices valid for September/October 2010. All temperatures for September
- History around Britain opens its doors
Heritage Open Days and Doors Open London will see thousands of historically fascinating buildings open their doors to the public
Today Sarah Hamilton will throw open her front door in Kent and wait for a stream of total strangers to march in and sneer at her carpets. Hers is among thousands of normally tantalisingly closed doors joining Heritage Open Days, the annual event which, with next weekend's Doors Open London, constitutes the high point of the snooper's year.
Hamilton's Edwardian redbrick house in Paddock Wood is a time capsule of one family's history, the house where her mother and grandmother died, with some rooms unchanged since her grandfather bought it in 1920. She opened for the first time last year. "I'm passionate about history, and I love talking to people," she says. "And everyone that came was so nice."
The event is now coordinated nationally by English Heritage, with the help of thousands of volunteers: over the two weekends almost 5,000 sites will open. All are free, but many must be booked in advance. Here are seven doors that are opening this weekend:
▶ Birmingham, Edgbaston Lawn Tennis Club: the world's oldest lawn tennis club.
▶ Hoylandswaine, near Barnsley: 18th century nail-maker's forge, still in use in the 40s.
▶ Tyne & Wear, the Banqueting House: a Gothic folly built in 1746 on the Gibside Estate.
▶ Cambridge, the Cambridge Union: Victorian premises of the famous debating society, whose guests since 1815 have included Winston Churchill, Clint Eastwood and the Dalai Lama.
▶ Manchester: the Rufflette factory, where the curtain tape is still woven in a 1930s building originally designed to make machine-gun belts.
▶ Hastings, net shop: one of the oldest of the bizarre spindly black sheds on the beach, unique to Hastings and built in 1835 to store fishing gear.
▶ Bristol, Aardman Animation: state-of-the-art sustainability in new headquarters for the creators of Wallace and Gromit.
And three next weekend in London:
▶ Trellick Tower, Erno Goldfinger's loved and loathed London landmark since 1972.
▶ Beefeater Gin Distillery, Kennington, the last still in a city famous for the drink since Hogarth's vicious Gin Lane cartoon.
▶ Bromley, the Berresford House, 1957 design by Ivor Berresford, still strikingly modern, much used for photo-shoots and recently listed, dubbed "the perfect house" by Grand Designs.
- Are co-pilots on short-haul flights necessary?
Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary wants to use just one pilot per flight as part of his drive to save costs at the budget airline
- Ryanair boss aims to axe 'unnecessary' co-pilots
Ryanair chief Michael O'Leary will seek permission from aviation authorities to have just one pilot on shorter flights
Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary wants to use just one pilot per flight as part of his ongoing drive to save costs at the budget airline.
O'Leary said he intends to write to aviation authorities for permission to use only one pilot per flight because he believes co-pilots are unnecessary in modern jets, the Financial Times reported today.
The airline boss, who has previously considered standing tickets on flights, as well as charging for the use of toilets, conceded that two pilots would be needed on long-haul flights, but said on shorter trips that flight attendants could do the job.
In an interview he said the second pilot was only there to "make sure the first fella doesn't fall asleep and knock over one of the computer controls".
He backed up his comments by adding that trains were allowed to have one driver even though this could conceivably cause a crash in the event of a heart attack. He said: "It could save the entire industry a fortune. In 25 years with over about 10 million flights we've had one pilot who suffered a heart attack in flight and he landed the plane."
But industry experts have labelled the proposal "unwise". A spokesman for the British Airline Pilots Association said: "This is just a bid for publicity. His suggestion is unsafe and his passengers would be horrified."
O'Leary frequently courts controversy with his attempts to cut costs at Ryanair. This year he raised the baggage charge for the summer holiday season and, following the volcano ash cloud crisis, initially capped the level of compensation to passengers. He later bowed to EU pressure and agreed to pay out costs to customers affected by the eruption.
- Eyewitness: Flexing their pecs
Photographs from the Guardian Eyewitness series
- Country diary: St Ives, Cornwall
The procession of bards wends its way through narrow streets in St Ives. From the Guildhall they pass St Ia's church, whose pillars are garlanded in hops, the lifeboat station, harbour, cafes, ice-cream and pasty shops, art galleries, gift shops, holiday lets and crowds of bemused visitors, en route to the Island, the site of this year's Gorsedd. There, yntra deu vor (with sea on each hand) the gathering of blue-robed bards attracts spectators perched on rocks and grass below the chapel of St Nicholas. This chapel was used as a watch house and landmark by fishermen before the War Office set about demolishing it in 1904; protests led to its restoration in 1911.
Inland and out to sea is hazy and dull but this shore is brightened by fleeting sunlight, which glistens on the adjacent Porthmeor beach while also enhancing the blueness of the circle of bards and reflecting on their copper regalia. Today's ceremony includes the introduction of a recently forged sword, carried in two halves by a Breton and a Cornish bard, and presented whole to the delegate from Wales to symbolise links between the three Celtic countries. Before the sound of harp and pipes heralds the bards' arrival, people gather around stalls selling books about Cornwall's history and language. The Guild of Cornish Hedgers displays photos of old walls, hedge banks and stitches (remnants of medieval strip fields) which contribute to distinctive landscapes; there are references to dialect words still associated with traditional hedge-building like batter, ram, rab hard and tob off. Tros an Treys, a group of dancers dressed in red and black perform a serpent dance, and the local concert band's music mingles with the sound of waves and gulls.
- Feel the heat: Paris Métro to warm flats
A zero-carbon heating initiative in Paris plans to harness hot air generated by underground travel to warm up nearby homes
Warmth generated by sweaty passengers as they commute on the Paris Métro may be used to heat a block of low-income flats located near the Pompidou Centre in the city centre. This could slash the building's energy bill and carbon footprint by a third, according to the property's owner.
The temperature in nearby Rambuteau Métro station stays at a toasty 14-20C degrees all year round thanks to the heat generated by passengers, trains and other machinery. Paris Habitat-OPH, the owners of the building, plan to use the underground heat to warm up water as it courses through pipes. It will then be pumped to the surface into an underfloor heating system in the block of flats.
"It's a huge source of free, zero-carbon heat so it couldn't make more sense," said Dr Patrick James, a researcher at the University of Southampton's School of Civil Engineering and the Environment. "I guess the only problem will be if there's a train strike in the winter, in which case they'll need a back-up source of heat."
The UK is currently considering similar projects. "By 2016, all new residential buildings will need to be zero carbon, so people are definitely starting to think about innovative ways to heat buildings," he said. Heating accounts for roughly two-thirds of the average UK home's carbon emissions.
Normally, it would be prohibitively expensive to hook up a building's heating system to a subway. "You'd have to dig up roads and it just wouldn't be cost effective," said Dan Phillips, head of sustainability at environmental engineering firm Buro-Happold. It only works here because the flats are connected to the subway by an old stairwell which can house the new pipes bringing the heated water to the surface.
Engineering companies will be invited to bid for the contract by the end of the year and Paris Habitat-OPH hopes to start construction in 2011.
Paris is not the first city to attempt such a feat. Heat generated by Central Station in Stockholm is used to heat an office building. And in Oslo, heat is captured from sewerage and used to heat the city.
- Deadly flood threat hangs over French Alpine village
Scientists are racing to prevent a build-up of water under a glacier on Mont Blanc from flooding the village of Saint-Gervais
Viewed from up here, the world of man appears very small and vulnerable. The Tête-Rousse glacier, hovering between sky and earth at an altitude of 3,200 metres, dominates the scene splendidly. It is a magnificent panorama of infinite horizons, the perfect silence interrupted only by sound of the climbers' crampons as they start the ascent to Aiguille du Goûter, the normal route up Mont Blanc. Facing us, the Aravis range and the Chablais Alps break up the horizon, while in the valley below, tiny chalets appear to be clinging to the mountainside.
But the serenity is deceptive. In the core of the glacier lies a silent threat that could, without warning, destroy the village of Saint-Gervais below. Trapped under the glacier lies an enormous 65,000 cubic metre pocket of water – the equivalent of 20 Olympic swimming pools – that could burst and surge down on to the village below. "It's impossible to predict when that might happen," said Christian Vincent from the Grenoble Laboratory of Glaciology and Geophysical Environment. He is here to carry out a regular temperature check at Tête-Rousse.
The 75 metre-deep glacier covers 8 hectares of a rocky basin. Early this summer, several boreholes were pierced with a high-pressure hot water drill and special sensors introduced on to the bedrock. Using a snow shovel, the scientist clear the markers that show where these were placed and note down the temperatures. "Precise knowledge of a glacier's temperatures is vital to understanding how these water pockets are formed," Vincent explains.
The danger may be invisible but it is real enough. One such disaster remains in Saint-Gervais's collective memory. In 1892, 80,000 cubic metres of water that had collected in a sub-glacial cavity burst through the ice "cork" that was holding it in. A torrential flow of water tore down rocks and trees in its path and buried Saint-Gervais in mud and debris, leaving 175 dead.
According to the current mayor, Jean-Marc Peillex, far greater damage would be caused now, "due to urbanisation and the large number of tourists visiting the glacier". As many as 900 houses could be swept away.
The alarm was first sounded in 2007, when the thickness of the ice was measured by radar. "Nobody thought there might be water under the glacier," Vincent said. "But the images showed something abnormal about 10 metres above the bedrock."
In 2009 this was confirmed by proton nuclear magnetic resonance, a technique similar to a medical MRI scan. It proved that an enormous pocket of water – or possibly several pockets – was locked deep inside Tête-Rousse. The reason for the water collecting lies in climate warming. But paradoxically – grassroots science being more complex than theoretical models – this has led to a cooling of the lower part of the glacier. The probable process, as described by Vincent, is that the water from thawing in the upper part of the glacier trickles down on to the bedrock though micro-fissures until it finds an outlet.
In the case of Tête-Rousse, the warming observed over the past decades has reduced the thickness of the snow cover (the firn, which provides thermal protection), and to a greater extent in the lower part of the glacier than in the upper part.
As a result, during a recent cold snap, the thinner spur of ice below cooled more rapidly than the ice at the glacier's summit (there being a difference of more than 2C between the two), resulting in the formation of a dam that blocked the water trickling down from above. However, being unable to find an outlet, the water has accumulated and now the pressure is rising – and threatening to burst like a pressure cooker.
A scientific report issued in July by three Grenoble laboratories concluded that it was necessary to pump the water out the sub-glacial cavity as soon as possible. A warning system, costing $640,000, was immediately set up. Two metal cables were placed across the glacier, which, if broken, would trigger a siren in the valley below. The nearest inhabitants have been informed about the 17 rallying points on high ground, and would have 10 minutes to reach the nearest one if the alarm sounds.
The pumping of Tête-Rousse began last month. Powerful boring machines and pumps were transported by helicopter to the glacier. The water will be pumped out within a month and gradually released. The whole operation will cost $2.5m, 80% of which will be paid for by the French government and the European Union.
Is that the end of the story? "In a year or two we will have to check if the pocket is filling up again," says Vincent. "If that is the case, we will have to consider boring a permanent channel to drain the water." Models show that the water collected in just two years.
Reservoir formation under glaciers is a rare phenomenon. But with global warming these risks are increasing, such as the collapse of surface ice and, with the receding permanent snowline, the formation of proglacial lakes whose natural barriers will give way, up there between earth and sky.
Keeping the lights on
In Chamonix, climate change is also a reality for EDF, the French electricity giant. The Mer de Glace glacier has been retreating fast in recent years and is threatening the sub-glacial water intake in the Les Bois hydroelectric power plant.
When this plant came on stream in 1973, the intake took place 200 metres under the ice. In spring 2009, it was out in the open, and, to make matters worse, covered by a mass of glacial rock and sediment following a number of storms.
EDF now has to maintain electricity production while carrying out the work needed to adapt to the new circumstances – and keeping the Les Bois plant "at the highest level of environmental integration".
Not without reason: the 12km Mer de Glace is the longest French glacier and something of a national treasure.
The stakes for the Haute-Savoie region are considerable. The Bois hydroelectric plant produces 113m kWh per year, mostly during the thaw, which is the domestic consumption of 50,000 inhabitants, or a town the size of Annecy.
However, the glacier has been retreating at a rate of about 30 metres a year since 2003. "And the pace has increased in the past few years," said an EDF official. At the Rochers de Mottets level, for instance, ice thickness has been falling by between eight and 10 metres a year since 2004.
"We anticipated this situation, and after some research, we decided to move the intake upstream in the glacier under 100 metres of ice, which won't change anything to the scenery or the tourism business," said EDF, before launching the $19m project. Work started in 2008 on an underground channel to divert the water permanently to the new intake area – no easy matter under such difficult geographic and climatic conditions. The installation is due to come on stream in the spring.
Meanwhile, a temporary solution was found by digging a channel a few dozen metres long to emerge below the glacier. That will provide sufficient water to feed the plant until 2011.
This article originally appeared in Le Monde
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