Travel

As Sini harnessed up the huskies they were all yelping with excitement, but once we set off and the forest closed in around us they fell silent. Now the only sound was the soft patter of their paws as they raced ahead, dragging our wooden sledge through the snow. It felt good to be back in Lapland, the last wilderness in Europe, where temperatures can drop to –40C, where the population density is barely one person per square kilometre and where the natural world still reigns supreme. I’d been to Lapland once before, husky sledging, but that was across the border in Sweden, 300 miles away. This time I’d come

With the Retail Price Index figures released yesterday, commuters are up in arms at the news that rail prices are set to rise by up to 3.6% as of January. It’s not all fares that will be affected; only those that are regulated by the government – and the price increase won’t happen until the government agrees to it being implemented. But around 45% of fares in England, Scotland and Wales are regulated, including certain off-peak and standard return tickets, and most season tickets in the South East and London regions. A 3.6% increase might not sound huge if you only get the train once or twice a month. But

Valencia was a furnace. During the short ride from the airport, the taxi driver supplemented his chat about the weather with a photo on his phone sent by his father-in-law. His father-in-law lives about an hour away. The photo showed a bus stop on a deserted street. Attached to the bus shelter was a temperature gauge with large green digital numbers showing 50.5°C. Little wonder, observed the taxi driver, that the street was deserted. He dropped me outside the Sercotel Sorolla Palace hotel where Eva was waiting on the steps. Eva was the Spanish PR lady, or shepherdess, in charge of 13 travel journalists from all over Europe on a

British families are forecast to spend £1,284.54 per person on this year’s summer holiday. That’s up more than £200 on what they forked out last year, says charitable shopping website Give as you Live. And with inflation gathering momentum and the pound still weak, many of us will feel we’re not getting a lot of bang for our buck when we finally get to our destinations. So it would be sensible to consider the simple steps you can take now to protect any money you’ve already spent on your trip – as well as what you’ll spend when you get there – to ensure you don’t end up paying out

After landing at Gatwick, the plane taxied for five minutes or so and then came to a halt in the middle of an outlying patch of tarmac. I heard the engines wind down. ‘Oh shit!’ I thought to myself. ‘It’s going to be a bus.’ Until then, I had always felt short-changed and mildly resentful when forced to take a bus to the terminal rather than being offered a proper air bridge. Then the pilot made an announcement so psychologically astute that I wanted to offer him a job. ‘I’ve got some bad news and some good news,’ he said. ‘The bad news is that another aircraft is blocking our

It’s one month until Easter and if you’re planning to make the most of the long weekend or the school holidays with a trip abroad be sure to also make the most of your travel money purchase. The fall in the value of sterling since the Brexit vote last June has made foreign holidays more expensive. The price of February half-term ski breaks was up nearly 12 per cent on average, according to M&S Bank. And while £1 would have got you €1.27 a year ago through the currency exchange and money transfer website xe.com, yesterday that had fallen to just €1.14 – a reduction of more than 10 per

A fortnight ago I got a taste of what being far too famous might feel like. A leak that I’m a contender for the Mary Berry slot on The Great British Bake Off morphed into the fake news that I’d got the job. For 24 hours it was a lead story — then it was yesterday’s non-news. My daughter, Li-Da Kruger, has made me her plus-one on the maiden voyage of Viking Sky, the swankiest cruise ship imaginable, all spacious showers, leather handrails and the surreal experience of sitting in the hairdresser’s with a roiling sea of black water and white-topped waves rushing past. Li-Da was booked to show her

‘If life is a race, I feel that I’m not even at the starting line,’ I said to the doctor in French. (I’d composed, polished and rehearsed the sentence in the waiting room beforehand.) She was a sexy piece in her early fifties with a husky voice. She listened to my halting effort to describe my depression with a smile playing lightly over her scarlet lips as though I were relating an amusing anecdote with a witty punchline lurking just around the corner. I further explained in French that I had been properly but briefly depressed once before, about 15 years ago. Here my tenses let me down badly, and