Recent Entries

• Brad and Ange in the Lakes: bigging up the UK's national parks

  by What's trending in travel? September 5, 2012
  Good on Brad and Ange for choosing the Lake District for a holiday with their sizeable brood this summer. The Hollywood power couple are to brave the English weather for a few days in the Lakes, if the Daily Mirror is to be believed. It might be a slightly less glamorous proposition than the usual c...

• Judge and jury: why I'd jail all Brits abroad

  by What's trending in travel? August 17, 2012
  I was going to start this column by saying I don’t like being judgemental. But that would be like Hugh Hefner professing an indifference to big-chested blondes. I judge people – constantly – on their travel habits. The way a person holidays says more about them than their clothes, ...

• Head to the Olympics shed: world's worst hotels and hostels

  by What's trending in travel? July 27, 2012
  Good on Tricia Jones, a savvy East Ender who is renting out her garden shed in Leytonstone for £40 a night during the Olympics. Before you baulk at the price, consider that Tricia has pulled out all the stops to make her shed cosy, decking it out in Union Jacks and throwing in a free breakfas...

• Let's get wet: holidaying in the UK's washout summer

  by What's trending in travel? July 19, 2012
    Visit Cornwall boss Malcolm Bell has been moaning that the region is going to lose £60m thanks to the soggy summer, but this makes me think the tourists are even wetter than the bloody weather. Just because it’s raining, it doesn’t mean you can’t get out and have a g...

• Holiday fashion: just look like shit

  by What's trending in travel? July 12, 2012
  The news that the average woman changes her clothes four times a day on holiday (as reported by various newspapers this week) couldn’t be more at odds with my own travel habits. For me, hitting the road is the perfect excuse for being as slovenly as public decency permits. Make-up melts in the...
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• In Burma: my tourist shame

  by What's trending in travel? July 5, 2012
  There was an incident that made me wince with shame while recently travelling in Burma. The policy of the tour company was to stay at locally run hotels and guesthouses, maximising the positive impact of our time in the country. Supporting businesses at a local level is the most use we could be in ...

• How to save your summer from the Olympics

  by What's trending in travel? June 14, 2012
  Ah, the Olympics. A Marmite topic if ever there was one. But if new research by British Airways is to be believed, unprecedented numbers of Brits are willing to shake off their customary slapped-arse-featured, slack-shouldered pessimism. One in 10 have cancelled their summer break to stay home and ...

• Silly town names: from Dull and Boring to Sugar Tit and Dildo

  by What's trending in travel? June 14, 2012
  The news that the Scottish village of Dull is to be twinned with the US community of Boring has raised a smile among most, but the move deserves admiration, too. Plenty of towns have not been so savvy when it comes to bearing the burden of an unfortunate name. That these Dull villagers have been go...

• Celebrity airs: why can't the rich and famous behave on holiday

  by What's trending in travel? June 14, 2012
  “Fucking idiot” Kim Kardashian (Jon Hamm’s words, not ours) applied her customary tact to a travel mishap recently after a flight from Terminal 5. “Very disappointed in British Airways for opening my luggage 
& taking some special items of mine!” she tweeted, no doubt ...

• Faulty towers: big gimmicks, little imagination

  by What's trending in travel? May 31, 2012
  Trying to attract tourism is a little like playground boasting between countries, if you think about it. The point is to show off. A nation will trill that it has the prettiest beaches, while another insists the cut of its contours are unsurpassed. Dubai is arguably the flashiest git in the school ...

• The love of a line: the stupidest ever queue at an airport

  by What's trending in travel? May 17, 2012
  Tutting and shaking my head has become a startlingly regular habit of late. I can only think that it’s the spectre of my thirties on the horizon, initiating me gradually into the blanket disapproval of the aged. Regardless, whenever I see 
a pedestrian bound in front of a bus rather than wait...

• In defence of American beer

  by What's trending in travel? May 14, 2012
  Talk of American beer is peppered with snorts of derision and a pervading air of superiority on this side of the Atlantic. But the assumption that the Yanks are all blindly slugging back Budweiser is about as accurate as the idea that Aussies love nothing better than chugging a chilled Foster’...

• Airports that lie about where they are

  by What's trending in travel? May 4, 2012
  One of my most painful travel memories is landing in Sabiha Gökçen Airport at about three in the morning and hopping straight in a cab to get to my hostel in Istanbul. This is an agonising recollection because, when I reached my final destination, the fare had clicked up to a pretty eff...

• Wild and indecent: a new adventure sport in Scotland

  by What's trending in travel? May 3, 2012
  Last weekend, I was having a bit of 
an Action Man moment. Crashing through a pine forest on my mountain bike, I was stopped short by a glittering lake. Hauling the pack off my back, within minutes I had used its contents to assemble a raft and paddles. Next, I dismantled the bike and tied it secur...

• Leave Heathrow alone!

  by What's trending in travel? April 26, 2012
  Yet again, Heathrow Airport is at the eye of a national shit storm. Those of the glass-half-full variety are so goddamn gloomy, I can only surmise they must be nursing a warm piss in said glass, as the hysterical calls of “Olympics chaos at Heathrow!” continue to ring around the country...

• The rude French: quit bitching!

  by What's trending in travel? April 12, 2012
  Travel divides people as much as it brings them together. For every holidaymaker who comes home raving about their time abroad, there’s another without a kind word to say of the city/ country/ people they’ve encountered. Take some American friends of mine who recently came to stay. Afte...

• Inland Iceland

  by What's trending in travel? April 5, 2012
  I always figured Iceland was a pretty well-worn stop on the tourist trail (the country, not the shop), but a whistlestop visit this week proved me wrong. It was while I was eating pancakes with the president ‘round his gaff that I realised, far from being the sort of chap only too happy to cl...
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• The secret to getting an upgrade

  by What's trending in travel? March 29, 2012
  There is one travel experience that continues to elude me in this cruel life of mine. It is the upgrade. I have had my bikini bottoms stolen by the endangered Arabian Oryx as they dried beside my private pool on a sheikh’s personal desert reserve; watched dolphins frolic in the sea from a roy...

• Make your mark

  by What's trending in travel? March 23, 2012
  English Heritage has revealed that 70,000 listed buildings – churches, monuments, anything considered important to the country’s heritage and history – were damaged by graffiti and vandalism in the last year. According to heritage minister John Penrose: “When historic buildi...

• Travel makes you smarter: fact

  by What's trending in travel? March 15, 2012
  It’s not unusual to be confronted with a damning example of humanity’s rapid decline from ‘intelligent life’ 
to several leagues below pond scum, 
but a recent survey showing that more than half of Britons think Everest is 
the tallest mountain in the UK pretty much takes the...

• Bigging up Britain

  by What's trending in travel? March 9, 2012
  “Why go all the way to Bondi when you can come to Bridlington?” asks Harry Potter star Rupert Grint, barely containing the shivers behind his grin as he bravely sports a wetsuit on the Yorkshire coast. It’s all part of the government’s new ad campaign to 
try to keep Brits in...

• Budget: the new black

  by What's trending in travel? February 24, 2012
  Has the word ‘budget’ ever been so in vogue? Being on a budget used to be a shameful detail of one’s life that obligated secrecy; a trip to Lidl for the weekly shopping called for MI5-standard stealth, lest you be caught carrying the supermarket’s mercilessly tactless primary...

• Death of the guidebook

  by What's trending in travel? February 24, 2012
  I’ve heard a lot of talk lately about 
how ‘the guidebook is dead’. This is 
a sentiment being shared among travel industry insiders, bloggers, and – the absolute worst – a snooty brand of backpackers who think themselves 
too intrepid to so much as consider another per...
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• Couch surfing 2.0

  by What's trending in travel? February 19, 2012
  I must admit that when social travel company 9flats.com  pitched 'couch surfing 2.0' to me, I thought it sounded a bit naff. The idea is that, like with traditional couch surfing (couch surfing v.1?), you stay at a local's flat when travelling abroad, as opposed to a hotel or hostel. The d...

• What is there to do in Kosovo?

  by What's trending in travel? February 19, 2012
  On my way to Berlin this weekend, I read an article entitled '12 things to do in Kosovo'.   It looks like they ran out of ideas right around number 5: