Travel

Thursday

Matt Quinton

The great holiday Covid test rip-off

I holidayed in Malta last month with my partner, having chosen it because it was on the ‘green list’. Foolishly, I assumed this would mean we could waltz back to the UK without any hassle. I was wrong. We needed a test before departing Malta. Within a few minutes of looking on the Malta airport website, I found a provider, headed to their test centre, and €30 later, was given the all clear. But that wasn’t all. To complete my pre-flight passenger form, I needed a ‘Day 2’ test for when I was home. For this, the UK government has a website pointing holidaymakers towards a slew of private firms

Wednesday

Tanya Gold

High on the hog: The Pig at Bridge Place reviewed

The Pig at Bridge Place is not a pig in possession of a country house, but I would be for it. You cannot have enough pigs, or any edible fauna. It is, rather, a hotel inside a Jacobean mansion — or, rather, part of a Jacobean mansion, the rest burnt down, and is all the better for it — in a pleasingly unkempt part of Kent, just beyond Canterbury. There are ten Pigs, dotted across the south coast as if in homage to Armada beacons. They are the successor to the Soho House brand, which is looking increasingly dusty, and in velvet. My main objection to Babington House is that

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Is the airline ‘booking surge’ a load of hot air?

Be glad you’re not in Dr Mike Lynch’s shoes. A London judge has ruled that the founder of the Cambridge-based software venture Autonomy can be extradited to the US to face multiple fraud charges in relation to the takeover of Autonomy in 2011 by Hewlett-Packard of California. This was, undoubtedly, a disastrous purchase: HP paid a huge premium over Autonomy’s market value, swiftly found all was not as expected, wrote off most of the $11 billion price and accused Lynch of having artificially inflated the company’s numbers. His fate now hangs in the legal balance. The Serious Fraud Office looked at the file but dropped it on grounds of insufficient

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The case for travelling abroad

I’m off. In the week when you may read this, my partner and I will be winging our way to the European mainland, exploring, visiting friends, and immersing ourselves in new places, among new people who speak languages other than our own. Even as I write this, I can anticipate a sour response from some who read it. Over the past year I’ve learned that any mention of travelling abroad draws from certain quarters three types of disgruntlement. Three, in fact, of the Seven Deadly Sins. The first is Envy. ‘Oh, bully for you!’, ‘It’s all right for some’, etc. This I disregard. Between youth and old age I’ve made

Toby Young Toby Young

The true cost of my week in Wales

Rather miraculously, my daughter managed to leave the country last week to go on holiday with a group of friends. To celebrate finishing their A-levels, they had bought tickets to a music festival in Croatia, but it was cancelled at the last minute due to a surge in Covid cases. Having been denied every other rite of passage in the past year, they decided to press ahead with the trip anyway, which left me having to sort out the PCR testing logistics. In order to be allowed into Croatia, she had to produce evidence of a negative test, then, once there, she had to test negative again in order to

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Could hydrogen power turn air travel green?

Have you been scanning airline websites for exotic destinations to which your double-jabbed status might allow you to slip away in August? I certainly have, but I’ve ruled out the parts of Canada and the United States that are stricken by record-breaking heatwaves and forest fires — and I’m wondering what impact such extreme climate events will have on the aviation industry as it struggles back to life after the pandemic. Having survived a year of near-total shutdown, I suspect it will now face an onslaught of green rhetoric to which governments — positioning for November’s COP26 climate conference in Glasgow — will be forced to respond. A recent Financial

Thursday

Gus Carter

Travel quarantine scrapped for double-jabbed

International travel rules will be relaxed on 19 June as part of the wider scrapping of social distancing rules and masks. Transport secretary Grant Shapps told the House of Commons that those entering England from green and amber nations will not be expected to self-isolate — provided they are fully vaccinated. In practice, what this means is that British summer holidays have been given the go ahead. France, Spain, Portugal and Italy are all on the amber travel list. Currently, the rules state that returning travellers must isolate for ten days, as well as complete a day two and day eight test. That second test has also been scrapped.  The crucial point is

Thursday

Aidan Hartley

How WhatsApp mums saved Kenya’s castaway children

Kenya In March, Global Britain signed a new, post-Brexit trade deal with Kenya. This was a welcome agreement for my homeland, where the pandemic has caused tremendous economic suffering, but where comparatively few deaths have occurred among the fit, young population. Weeks later, on 9 April, the UK condemned its former colony to the red list of countries. Non-citizens were banned from travelling to the UK from Kenya, while arriving UK passport holders faced a £1,750, ten-day incarceration in a quarantine hotel. Such extreme measures were imposed on the excuse that a ‘significant’ number of passengers arriving from Nairobi tested positive for a variant of concern. It appears that, in

Sara Wheeler

The strangest landscapes are close to home

This pleasant volume, the author announces in the introduction, is ‘not a nature book, or even a travel book, so much as a book of fantasy: four small pilgrimages into imagination’. In its pages Nick Hunt unfurls his sleeping bag under a pink moon, breakfasts on a raw white onion and meditates both on what remains and on what we have lost. Outlandish is divided into four parts, each covering a short walk through a uniquely unusual landscape: Arctic tundra in the Cairngorms; a remnant of primeval forest straddling Poland and Belarus (‘the closest thing that Europe has to a true jungle’); the continent’s ‘only true desert’, in Spain’s south-eastern

Thursday

Kate Andrews

The Covid divide: there’s one rule for the elite, another for us

This week was meant to be the moment when we could celebrate the return of freedom. Instead, we’re left still navigating a maze of rules. Couples are working out what a ‘Covid-secure wedding’ means (spoiler: no dancing or hugging). Family reunions — once planned for Christmas, then delayed to Easter — are being pushed back into the autumn. Birthday parties have been axed again. No one wants to break the law, or risk asking others to do so. Ministers make a great show of obeying the rules. The weekend before Boris Johnson announced the delay to ‘freedom day’, he was bumping elbows with Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau at the

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

Air travel is in terminal danger

During the political car crash of 2019, I couldn’t imagine ever agreeing with Theresa May. Yet last week she exhibited both principle and pragmatism — qualities sorely lacking in her capitulation to the conniving EU paradigm whereby Northern Ireland made Brexit supposedly insoluble. The legacy of that surrender, Ulster’s disastrously unworkable trade protocol, will wait for another day. I come to praise May, not to bury her. The previous prime minister stressed to the Commons that ‘chaotic’ and ‘incomprehensible’ international travel restrictions, more oppressive this summer than last, send the message that Britain is ‘shut for business’. She upbraided the government for failing to register three truths: ‘we will not

The Spectator

Has Covid turned us into a nation of cyclists?

On this day Would 19 July make a suitable ‘freedom day’ (assuming Covid restrictions are lifted even then)? There is an ominous warning from history. In 1919, 19 July was designated ‘Peace Day’, on which victory in the Great War would be celebrated with parades and banquets, three weeks after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. In London 20,000 service men and women marched on a seven-mile route past the temporary Cenotaph. Many demobbed servicemen felt aggrieved, however, that so much money was being spent on celebrations when many of them were out of work and still without the housing they had been promised. Trouble erupted in several towns,

Thursday

Andrew Watts

A second home in Cornwall is nothing to be proud of

Last week there was a public toilet for sale on the coast of Cornwall. The Kent-based auctioneer called it ‘an exciting and rare opportunity’, although its video tour of the property did not even undo the padlock on the security door. It was on the market for £20,000, which was a bargain — the last exciting and rare toilet block to be auctioned in Cornwall went for five times its asking price, even though it didn’t have as nice a view. It did, however, have windows. It’s undeniable that the property market in Cornwall is overheating. The backlash to the toilet auction was such that it was withdrawn from sale,

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

The forgotten joy of spontaneity

If you ask people what they’ve missed out on since the pandemic, they’ll probably lament their cancelled plans. Weddings postponed, birthday parties axed and family reunions moved to Zoom. Me, I’ve missed the unplanned. The spontaneity that knocks your routine, muddles your diary and lands you tipsy in the pub on a Monday night when you were supposed to be at the gym. For more than a year, our lives have been ruled by the principle of ‘safety first’. Accidents — even the fun ones — have been avoided at all costs. It has been illegal to act on a whim or at least, in the better times, very strictly

Thursday

The Spectator

Why Britain must unlock on 21 June

The scare over the Indian variant of coronavirus this week is a taste of what to expect over the next few weeks, months or even years. Like all RNA viruses, Covid-19 mutates and has done so thousands of times already. New strains supplant old ones and, for a while, questions will be raised when one mutation comes to dominate. Is it more lethal? Is there a chance it could evade vaccines? Every time so far, there has been no significant reason to doubt the efficacy of the vaccines. So the government’s timetable for lifting Covid restrictions holds firm. How far should Britain go to try to fend off new variants?

Tuesday

Robert Jackman

Travel podcasts to fuel your wanderlust

After a miserable year for would-be globetrotters, international travel is finally returning – albeit slowly – with the unveiling of the (rather short) green list. What better time, then, to stoke up your wanderlust by listening to one of these excellent travel podcasts: The Trip Former TIME foreign editor Nathan Thornburgh has a pretty cushy gig: flying across the world to imbibe the local toast with what he succinctly describes as ‘exceptional people’. Whether it’s sipping mezcal with former cartel fixers in Tijuana or dishing the dirt with corruption-busters in Kensington (over knock-off Russian vodka), The Trip is the perfect podcast for the raffish and adventurous. If it all sounds rather

Sunday

Jacob Little

Into the wild: hidden campsites to explore this summer

We all know it’s going to be another bumper year for the UK’s tourism sector. With confidence in international travel still not yet fully in-place, and staycation options booked out, camping is a fantastic alternative, giving you the flexibility to follow the weather and families the ability to meet again in a socially distant way with the backdrop of some of the UK’s most stunning landscapes. We’ve put together this list of some of the best campsites in the UK to book this summer, with a focus on wild spaces and access to coast paths and hill walks. Here are eight recommendations for the best campsites to book this summer. Upper Booth,

Wednesday

William Cook

Secret sea air: where to beat the crowds this summer

With foreign travel still a tricky prospect, it looks like being a bumper summer for the British seaside. And yet that means the most popular places are bound to get very busy indeed. To avoid the queues and traffic jams, I’ll be revisiting some of Britain’s less familiar seaside towns. Of course, these places are very familiar to folk who are lucky enough to live nearby, but they don’t attract the bumper crowds you get in big resorts like Blackpool or Skegness. Nor are they terribly fashionable, like Padstow or St Ives. Some of them are a bit offbeat, but they’re all places where I’ve had great days out. You’re

Thursday

Toby Young

Am I really paying £3,000 for six days in Wales?

Has it ever been more difficult to plan a family holiday? At the time of writing, it is illegal to travel abroad from the UK for non-work purposes. That restriction is expected to be lifted in due course, although not before 17 May, and replaced by a traffic light system, with countries ranked green, amber or red depending on how they’re coping with the virus. Only eight places are expected to be on the green list — Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Israel, Gibraltar, Iceland, Malta and the USA — and holidaymakers will be required to take a PCR test before boarding a plane home and another within 48 hours of

Friday

Alice Hancock

Why vaccinated Israel is worth a visit

Have you been watching Shtisel during lockdown? Or maybe you are just one of the hundreds (thousands?) of us eyeing vaccination rates and realising the obvious candidate for this year’s summer holiday green list: Israel. Land of mountains, sea, multiple religions, ancient and knotty history, and copious amounts of houmous. Whether the 8,550 square mile country, just a fifth of the width of England and its widest point, can fit us all is another matter but if you are searching for more or less any type of holiday, it’s likely that Israel can provide. Historic city break No prizes for guessing Israel’s most storied city. Legends, tales and parables seem