A wonderful thing will happen this spring at dead of night down on the shore in front of the Park Hyatt in Abu Dhabi. An ancient natural cycle – something repeated over many, many thousands of years – will be completed when a hawksbill turtle hauls herself onto the beach and labouriously crawls to… Continue reading
Browsing Category Travel Blog
Tourists taking photos of whale sharks could be helping conservation
The citizen photographer is starting to be very useful. I would be surprised if one of the images of the year is not the Russian meteorite flashing across a Urals motorway, filmed by one of the dashboard cameras that drivers there habitually carry to record fake accidents. Other dramatic images of 2013, captured by the… Continue reading →
Saatchi modern artists finds a place to stay, in the Churchill Hotel
Museums of modern art can be intimidating places. The wider public, I suspect, would feel more comfortable in the National Gallery in London, where the works on display are familiar and long-ago accepted as great, than, for example, the Tate Modern, where challenging images greet the visitor on every wall. Art isn’t like music. It’s… Continue reading →
What sort of traveller am I?
I had breakfast with two travel PR ladies in London yesterday, and in the course of that chat they asked me the routine but important question – what was I really interested in? It’s a useful question to be asked from time to time, because it gives you the chance, after many years of travel… Continue reading →
Swanage – South Coast resort soon to be reconnected to national rail network
South Coast resort Swanage has been reconnected to Britain’s rail system, 45 years after the link was severed. Most holiday resorts around the coast of Britain are well served by the railways. The closures of the mid 20th century removed some loss-making lines. Yet seaside places such as Blackpool and Bournemouth and Brighton, as well… Continue reading →
Edinburgh’s Caledonian joins elite list of restored hotels from railways’ glory days
Are we entering a new age of the great railway hotel? The Renaissance St Pancras, in London, which opened in 2011, set a very high standard. And another restored hotel in the capital, the new Andaz Liverpool Street, is another impressive reminder of the days when all the major train companies kept a hotel of… Continue reading →