Travel

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

With glee to the silvery sea

Was it more profitable for an early-20th-century seaside railway poster to promise the undeliverable or to be slightly less enticing but at least tell the truth? In his charming and unashamedly train-spotterish book about how the British travelled to the seaside in the great days of rail, Andrew Martin quotes slogans from posters. The Great North of Scotland Railway described the Moray Firth as ‘the Scottish Riviera’. The Furness Railway named Grange-over-Sands ‘the Naples of the North!’ (The exclamation mark injected a smidgeon of doubt, Martin feels). More realistic companies toned down their boasts. The LNER decided it should go no further than claim it took passengers to ‘The Drier

Wednesday

Jonathan Ray

Could a secretive Swiss clinic cure my bad habits?

Having just turned 65, I enjoyed a week of firsts. My first ever facial and my first ever yoga class progressed to my first ever impedancemetry session, my first ever photobiomodulation session, my first ever hyberbaric chamber session, my first ever cryotherapy session, my first ever sensory deprivation session, my first ever neurofeedback session and my first ever revitalising wave session. I was at the Nescens Clinic Centre for Aesthetic and Regenerative Medicine near Geneva, marking my milestone birthday by attempting to defy age. It was Mrs Ray’s idea. Concerned that I was beginning to look and act like the old soak that I am, she wanted them to break my

Thursday

Matthew Parris

Why you should never trust a travel writer

After one of Jeffrey Archer’s minor tangles with the absolute truth, his friend the late Barry Humphries remarked: ‘We all invent ourselves to some degree. It’s just that Jeffrey has taken it a little further than most.’ The remark came to mind last week as the media storm over the veracity (or otherwise) of the Winns’ account in The Salt Path reached its peak. As Dame Edna might have said, all travel writing is invented to some degree. It’s just that Raynor and Moth may have taken it a little further than most. ‘In Patagonia?’ Bruce Chatwin’s lodger is said to have remarked of the eponymous book. ‘I doubt Bruce

Dominic Sandbrook

Britain fought on the wrong side of the first world war

It’s more than two months since I returned from Dublin, and at last the hangover is beginning to fade. I flew out with our team at The Rest is History to record a series about the Irish War of Independence and Civil War. Our guests were Paul Rouse, a professor at University College Dublin and former manager of Offaly’s Gaelic football team, and Ronan McGreevy, an Irish Times journalist and author of a terrific book about the murder of Sir Henry Wilson. On the first night Ronan took us for an excellent curry; on the second, Paul organised a pub crawl. Well, I say a crawl, but in truth we

Thursday

Roger Lewis

The slow delights of an OAP coach tour

Early on Monday mornings, in service stations across the country, armies of the elderly are mustering. These are the OAPs about to embark on motor coach tours to the Norfolk Broads, Cornish fishing villages, the Yorkshire Moors and Welsh ghost towns, organised by men in blazers consulting clipboards, like Kenneth Williams in Carry On Abroad. There will be cream teas, along with river cruises, coastal excursions, scenic drives and jaunts on steam railways. I am a devotee of these charming holidays, as invented by Wallace Arnold, even though when one first catches sight of one’s fellow travellers it’s a frightening vision of what’s up ahead: the sticks, walking-frames, mobility scooters,

Thursday

Oliver Balch

The wolf as symbol of European anxieties

On 19 December 2011, at around 3.30 a.m., a young wolf in the mountains of southern Slovenia trots away from his pack and never looks back. For the next 90 days or so, Slavc (after Slavnik, the mountain of his home) lopes onwards, hardly stopping, fording fast rivers and traversing high passes, until at last, having cut a horseshoe loop through Austria, he crosses into Italy and stops in the picturesque Alpine plateau of Lessinia. More than a decade later, Adam Weymouth follows in the same wolf’s padded footsteps. For Slavc, this is a journey into a landscape of confusing novelties, full of motorways and noise and anti-wolf country folk.

Thursday

Ian Rankin

Beware taking up running in your fifties

Over a hotel breakfast in Brisbane, I showed Sir Alan Hollinghurst my injuries. We’d met the previous week at the Auckland Writers’ Festival and would meet again, post-Brisbane, at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. A book tour of Australia and New Zealand is a bit like being in a David Lodge novel – writers are more likely to travel halfway round the world if a few potentially sizeable crowds are waiting for them. A.C. Grayling, who I broke bread with in Auckland and saw again in Sydney, seemed to have scored the most palpable hit by being invited to be philosopher-in-residence at a festival in Margaret River, centre of Australia’s most

Thursday

Rupert Shortt

Church teaching on homosexuality can be revised

Studies of Christianity’s problems and prospects often entail a distinction between the singer and the song. At an institutional level, the world’s largest faith is in deep trouble throughout much of western Europe – and increasingly in North America, too. Widely rehearsed elsewhere, the reasons for this steep decline include the spread of individualism along with an allied flouting of deference, mistrust of agencies said to lie beyond the tangible, and self-inflicted wounds such as the abuse crisis. Yet many who mourn the spread of secularisation remind us that for all its flaws, the Church has a good story to tell overall. How so? Two answers stand out. First, Christian

Friday

Ameer Kotecha

Flying has lost its charm

As someone who flies a lot for work, many of my moments of high blood pressure or ‘Is this really what I want in life?’ introspection take place in airports or on aeroplanes. I cannot – to put it gently – relate to the moronic practitioners of the ‘airport theory’, which involves turning up deliberately late for flights to get an adrenaline rush, and/or to make a sorry living off social media views. No, I’m there in good time, so it shouldn’t be a particularly stressful experience. And yet I’ve come to rather despise flying. It wasn’t always this way. Admittedly my relationship with flying got off to a slightly

Thursday

Sean Thomas

The lost art of getting lost

One of the quietly profound pleasures of travel is renting cars in ‘unusual’ locations. I’ve done it in Azerbaijan, Colombia, Syria and Peru (of which more later). I’ve done it in Yerevan airport, Armenia, where the car-rental guy was so amazed that someone wanted to hire a car to ‘drive around Armenia’ that he apparently thought I was insane. Later, having endured the roads of Armenia, I saw his point – though the road trip itself was a blast. Recently I rented a motor in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where they were slightly less surprised than the Armenian had been, but nonetheless gave me lots of warnings and instructions, chief of which

Toby Young Toby Young

My sitcom-worthy walking holiday

I’ve just returned from a walking holiday in Northumberland with Caroline and my mother-in-law. I say ‘walking’ but that makes it sound more physically demanding than it was. Billed as ‘gentle guided walking’, it was more like an ambling holiday, and the distances weren’t very great. On the second day, I was anxious to make it to the pub to watch the League One play-off final, so raced ahead and completed the walk – the entire walk – in less than an hour. It was a packaged tour organised by HF Holidays, a co-operative set up as the Holiday Fellowship in 1913 by Thomas Arthur Leonard, a non-conformist social reformer.

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Butlin’s is cashing in on nostalgia

Butlin’s is no longer a holiday ‘camp’. The company has evolved from its postwar heyday and now describes its properties as ‘resorts’ which are crammed with restaurants, bars and venues for live gigs. It’s like a cruise but on dry land. I went to Bognor Regis for a nostalgic ‘Ultimate 80s’ weekend where the performers included half-forgotten acts such as Aswad and T’Pau, and the remnants of the boyband Bros. The site lies 200 yards from Bognor’s shallow, pebble-strewn beach. The town itself is doing all right, if not exactly thriving. The charity shops are cheap, the estate agencies are full of recently vacated bungalows and the funeral parlours offer

The Spectator

How popular is Airbnb?

Tall order Two naval cadets were killed and 19 injured when a Mexican sail training vessel, the Cuauhtemoc, crashed into Brooklyn Bridge. How many fully-rigged sailing vessels are there in the world? — Sail Training International lists 383 such ships which have taken part in races and regattas in recent years. — The oldest still in use, Constitution, was built in 1797. It is moored in Boston as a museum ship but still undertakes voyages. — The Australian navy trains sailors on the STS Young Endeavour, a gift from the UK government to mark the 200th anniversary of European settlement in 1988. Other countries which still train naval recruits on

Sunday

Jonathan Ray

Help! I’m trapped in a hi-tech hotel

Raffles Doha is one of the world’s weirdest, most improbable buildings. That’s it in the picture – a five-star hotel incorporated in one prong of the incomplete circle that is the 40-storey Katara Towers in Lusail City (the Fairmont Doha is in the other prong), on land reclaimed from both desert and sea. It’s an architect’s/despot’s fantasy turned reality. The bonkers design is meant to echo Qatar’s national emblem of crossed scimitars, and I’d love to see the back of the envelope upon which it was first sketched. It’s far, far beyond my miserable hack’s pay grade, but invited as a guest I’m ashamed to say that I couldn’t resist. The tone was set

Thursday

Toby Young

Are you a ‘tidsoptimist’?

Last week Caroline sent me an Instagram reel that featured a Norwegian word and its English translation. A ‘tidsoptimist’, I discovered, is ‘someone who is overly optimistic about how much time they have, often underestimating how long tasks will take and therefore frequently running late’. That perfectly describes me. Caroline is punctual to a fault, often arriving early to appointments, and she finds my tardiness intensely irritating. Whenever I have to meet her anywhere – at a friend’s house for dinner, for instance – she will pretend I’m expected 15 minutes beforehand, so when I’m quarter of an hour late I will actually be on time. At one point, she

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Texas is the perfect holiday destination

Business travel isn’t quite the perk it is cracked up to be. For one thing, you have no say about where you go or when (New Yorkers are rude about London weather, but their own city is uninhabitable for four months of the year). Even when the weather is perfect, you often have no opportunity to extend your stay, so most of your time is spent in airports and meetings. The taxi from the airport may be the cultural highlight of the whole trip. Nothing has a worse effort-to-reward ratio than staying in a hotel for a single night. And, worst of all, while you are awake at 3 a.m. watching

Thursday

Matthew Parris

The joy of Channel Island hopping

Seldom has a collective term been less appropriate: ‘the Channel Islands’ – as though these were in any sense (other than the geographical) a place. Entertained in my English mind had been a scatter of similar, pretty but perhaps over-manicured little islands stuck in the mid-Channel between Great Britain and France but sunnier, and where tax-avoiders are the indigenous population. Wrong, wrong, wrong. For family reasons I’ve just spent some time on Jersey, Guernsey and Alderney, sadly missing Sark and Herm. My island-hopping trip, though short, showed me how wide of the mark these assumptions are. Guernsey is by no means manicured and is in places pleasingly unkempt, while Alderney

Thursday

Louise Perry

Where the young rich flee to

If Elon Musk gets his way, and Mars becomes our newest New World, I had always assumed that the people who emigrated there would be rather like the Pilgrim Fathers – ascetic, homogenous, insular and highly religious. The sort of group that has historically had the psychosocial qualities necessary for withstanding a long voyage to a dangerous frontier. My money is still on the Pilgrim-types to lead the way, at least in the early waves. But I did wonder, while sitting in its airport last week, if interplanetary human civilisation might one day end up looking something like Dubai. Dubai operates rather like a space colony. It depends on desalinated

Thursday

Sara Wheeler

The adventures of the indomitable Dorothy Mills

When Dorothy Mills disappeared to Haiti to research a travel book, the British press led with the headline: EARL’S DAUGHTER GOES TO SEE BABIES EATEN IN BUSH. Mills was never out of the news in the interwar years. She wrote nine novels as well as six travel books, all of which sold briskly, and in 1928 she was the only woman in the starry line-up at London’s Explorer’s Week (Ernest Shackleton’s skipper, Frank Worsley, spoke alongside her). She was born Dorothy Walpole, in 1889.Her father, Robert, became the fifth Earl of Orford when she was five. Her ancestors included Britain’s first prime minister, another Robert. The young Dolly travelled widely

Thursday

Zoe Strimpel

The Gen-Z fliers obsessed with maximising their air miles

Oscar, 26, joins me on Google Meet from Buenos Aires, having arrived earlier that day from New York – by way of a few hours in Mexico City and Panama. Just five days ago, he was in London. ‘New York was just going to be a weekend trip for a conference, but then I thought while I’m in America, I might as well head south and here I am.’ It’s a far cry from Wales, where his family lives. Yet this itinerary is barely a ripple in Oscar’s relentless travel schedule. His nonstop approach to flying places him firmly within a new tribe of Gen-Z frequent fliers – mostly men