The Macau we discovered on our first night in the city is modern, glitzy and built for tourists. Known as the Cotai Strip, it’s a stark contrast to the historic, atmospheric old town. It has elegant and colourful Portugese influences from colonial times, while its streets are crowded with old apartment blocks, temples, shops and…
Category: City breaks
Macau and Hong Kong – day one of a special birthday trip
How should I celebrate a 50th birthday? Apart from hosting a drunken party for friends and family, I opted for a week-long trip to Macau and Hong Kong. Day one was never going to be one of the highlights of this special holiday. Eleven hours in a British Airways Boeing 777 is a bit of…
Christmas in Muscat, the capital of Oman
Where would we spend our first Christmas away from family and piles of roast turkey? A home from home in the UK? The snowy Alps? Or further afield? Our eventual choice was the capital of Oman, Muscat. An odd choice but a very good one as it turned out. Muscat is a city that by all…
A quick break amid the madness of Las Vegas, USA
I went to the gambling mecca of Las Vegas expecting to hate the place but ended up falling for it, despite the tackiness and materialism gone mad. We’d chosen it as the first stop of our American adventure because we love a gamble, but we’d also booked a trip to the Grand Canyon and Vegas is…
An Easter city break in Stockholm, Sweden
Easter isn’t the best time to visit Stockholm. The trees are bare and the weather can be drab and chilly, but the weather couldn’t dampen our enthusiasm for the capital of Sweden. I actually had very few preconceptions about it. I knew it as a city of water, islands and ludicrously priced alcohol. I knew it as…
A few days in Naples, Italy
Naples is the gateway to southern Italy but my first experience of it was overwhelmingly negative, for it had been like stepping into the third world. Years later, with Graham in tow, I still found it challenging but warmed slowly to its charms. That first visit to Naples back in the early noughties was nothing more…
Istanbul: A long weekend in Sultanahmet
Sultanahmet is the historic heart of Istanbul, the most famous of Turkey’s cities. It may not be the capital but it’s the only city that sits astride Europe and Asia. Just a few months after we visited Istanbul, it was gripped by the worst riots in years. But it seems that historic Sultanahmet escaped the…
A few days in Quimper, Brittany
Colourful Quimper is the oldest city in Brittany and many of its handsome medieval buildings remain intact, making it an attractive stop on the tourist trail. But it wasn’t exactly throbbing with life when we arrived at the start of our week-long holiday in the north-west of France. In fact, much of Quimper had shut…
San Francisco: A walk to the Ferry Building
On a sweltering September day we discovered the beautiful Filbert Steps and other San Francisco landmarks on a walk to the famous Ferry Building. Our stay coincided with a rare late summer heatwave, with temperatures on some days hitting the 90s, but we weren’t going to let the weather put us off exploring the city….
In winter: Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia
We’re a pair of old romantics. We visit cities in the middle of winter in the hope of finding snow that’s knee-deep on the ground, of discovering cosy bars with roaring fires. It’s why we went to Ljubljana, the modest capital of Slovenia. The old Communist bloc country was indeed dressed in snow. In parts…
The Vasa – Stockholm’s star attraction
I remember as a kid watching the Tudor warship Mary Rose being rescued from the depths of the Solent on TV, and several years later visiting Portsmouth to see her skeletal remains. Hers was a remarkable story of survival beneath the seabed, but she’s not a patch on the Vasa. On show in her own…