Inside the Travel Lab

Dust rose from the ground as the horse thundered past and the sun began its ablutions. It painted pinks and pomegranates, amber, pistachio, charcoal and soft apricot rust across the walls of Petra before calling it a day and turning in for an early night…

Usually, I manage to find something beautiful, something that moves me wherever I go. But last night, in Petra, that didn’t happen.

The latest in the series of fun quizzes about travel takes you into the jungle in Asia where a tree wraps its branches around a very special something…

Rummaging through the archives this week, I stumbled on my photos of the Taj Mahal, taken on an old point and shoot digital camera. While I have plenty attempts at…

In the scorching cauldron of Andalucia, the Sierra Nevada mountains rise up to tickle the skies and gather enough snow to cover the peaks for most of the year. Beneath them…

When it came to first impressions, the inside of Seville’s sprawling cathedral left me cold. I saw gloom and scaffolding, dust and darkness, and the dreams and shadows of the Spanish Inquisition lurking behind the many locked gates and doors…

Everything’s still, save for a breeze so slight it’s invisible until it reaches the window and makes the curtains sigh. I hear railway sounds from another century, a whistle and muted metal clanging, before the landscape of northern Spain picks itself up and learns to glide by.

I’m not used to seeing hedgerows at right angles and beaches with vertical shorelines…

Life sometimes reinforces our inadequacies in a brutal, confrontational way. Soon, I’ll be introducing you to Norbert Niederkofler, an imaginative, creative chef who began life in the Dolomites, travelled the world, then returned to his homeland to bring his vision of art to the table. He’s…

There are some secrets in this world that don’t make any sense. The Wieliczka Salt Mines near Krakow sparkle so mysteriously that I can’t help but wonder whether they’re part of an international conspiracy.

People

The world’s largest inland delta, the Okavango Delta in Botswana, from the sky