William Dalrymple
Borobudur, Java
My travel discovery of the year was unquestionably Borobudur in Java, the largest and most spectacular Buddhist temple in the world. Begun around AD800, it is one of the great cultural achievements of humanity, but not nearly as well-known as it should be.
From the ground, it looks like it is a stepped pyramid — but seen from the air, its plan is in the shape of a sacred Buddhist mandala. It is an absolutely massive structure, constructed from more than 1.5mn huge blocks of stone and decorated with 500 statues of the Buddha and the Bodhisattvas, all locked deep in meditation, focused within as they hover on the threshold of enlightenment.
Its history is mysterious. It is usually said to have been put up by the Buddhist kings of the 9th-century Sailendra dynasty, “the Lords of the Mountains”, but there is precious little evidence for that. One single surviving inscription links a Sailendra princess to an unnamed sanctuary, but it is not certain that it is Borobudur which is being referred to. Nor is it clear what the monument is for. Most scholars believe it seeks to represent some Indic cosmological theory, perhaps representing in stone a Mahayana Buddhist view of the universe. This is possibly the Three Realms of Mahayana Buddhism; or the Six (or Ten) Perfections. In the absence of an inscription, no one is sure.
Perhaps the monument’s greatest pleasures are the four tiers of sculptures that line its corridors. These range from court dramas in royal palaces to animal fables and morality tales set in ancient jungles. They are of the highest quality, and full of humour and witty observation of everyday 9th-century Javanese life. Some are familiar tales from the life of the Buddha; others less familiar Jataka tales; many are from a much less known Buddhist text telling the story of Prince Sudhana, a traveller prince who was inspired to take to the road by the Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī and whose life became a long succession of adventures that read like a Buddhist Odyssey.
At the top, the sculpted stories suddenly stop: at the apex, there is a huge stupa, and inside it is a void — the ultimate goal of the pilgrimage to enlightenment that Borobudur’s builders have been taking us on. Wandering alone in these galleries, it’s easy to lose track of centuries and to imagine yourself back in the 9th-century golden age of Java when this remarkable ancient picture gallery was first sculpted, and paid for by the massive profits of the spice trade. Some of the finest images here are of the rigged and masted sailing ships the traders used in their voyages.
William Dalrymple was a guest of the Amanjiwo hotel (aman.com; doubles from $880), which is within sight of the temple complex, and Singapore Airlines (singaporeair.com)
Disappointment Undoubtedly British Airways, which cancelled several of my flights, twice lost my bags and on one occasion caused me to miss most of my son’s 21st birthday party with a five-hour flight delay followed by a three-hour wait for luggage at Heathrow Terminal 5 — all for a one-hour domestic flight. What is going on with what used to be my favourite airline?
Cal Flyn
Trevarefabrikken, Henningsvær, Lofoten
My partner and I stumbled upon this unnervingly cool hotel, bar and restaurant while travelling in the Lofoten archipelago, off Norway’s north-west coast. Once an abandoned factory, the stark waterfront building was taken over by a group of friends and given new life as a vibrant cultural hub. In a region better known for dried fish heads and hiking, Trevarefabrikken offers chic rooms, simple but stylish dining options, plus a sauna with a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the bay — from where we watched a pod of dolphins sweeping by.
It’s an ideal focal point for a small community like Henningsvær — so much so, I found myself documenting every nook and cranny in the wishful notion that one day I could recreate such a thing in my own hometown of Stromness, Orkney. Trevarefabrikken hosts yoga classes, retreats, ski tours, craft workshops and gigs; it’s also just a cool place to hang out of an evening, to sip a cocktail and watch the rain as it hammers on the water outside. Happily, it’s also within a minute or so’s walk from the Kaviar Factory, a tiny but internationally renowned contemporary art gallery (which was hosting a solo show by Ai Weiwei when we were there) and the famous local football pitch, which has been carved into a rocky peninsula — and is spectacular enough to be of interest to someone who does not care about football (me). A gem.
trevarefabrikken.no; doubles from Kr1,495 (£125)
Disappointment I keep trying the #vanlife experience, but it just doesn’t do it for me. By necessity, one has to camp somewhere that a van can drive to; by definition, that is not somewhere I want to camp. Campervans appear to offer a quirky, cost-efficient way of travelling through beautiful rural locations; in practice, you end up sleeping in a series of car parks and lay-bys. Next time, it will be wild camping or staying in a cabin. So much more romantic.
Sophy Roberts
Ushawishi Kilifi, Kilifi, Kenya
This summer, we lent out our house in Dorset and relocated to Kenya for a month. I still needed to work, so wanted somewhere peaceful to write. My husband loves food; he liked the idea of a coastal market town for seafood. My youngest son is a passionate sailor; since we’d be taking him out of the club where he works every summer in Lyme Regis, I needed to assuage his fear of missing out. Risky though it was, I followed up an Instagram acquaintance, and rented a two-bedroom, three-storey Swahili-style villa in a sleepy creek-side settlement called Kilifi about a one-hour drive north of Mombasa.
There’s not much going on here — a beach bar here, a vaguely trendy organic restaurant there — but what there is is perfect, so long as your idea of perfect is to strip noise back to the swell of evening insect life, and your morning alarm call to the hubble-bubble song of a rainbird. The house is set back from the track to the beach, sitting on a green lawn under spreading mango trees. The decor is simple and bohemian: whitewashed walls, hammocks, an antique carved four-poster daybed, and bowls of shells, feathers and African amulets.
I wrote each day in a cloud of cushions in a kitchen-sitting room with sides open to the flitting butterflies. My 15-year-old son ambled down the beach every morning — a 15-minute walk weaving past a coral cliff-line to a first-class sailing club where he could polish his spinnaker skills, and I’d go swimming (the house pool is only big enough to dip in). My husband hustled fishermen for fresh crabs with the villa’s Kenyan host Michael Yona, and learnt to cook Swahili dishes. I didn’t come expecting much more than good value and some reliable sun. Instead, I made a precious discovery I’m only sharing because I’ve already reserved my slot for 2023.
Sleeps up to four, from $200 a night; a cook costs $30 per day (airbnb.com/h/ushawishikilifi)
Disappointment A line-item in my annual accounts I’ve just signed off. From May 2021 to April 2022, a depressing £795.99 spent on Covid tests for travel.
Stanley Stewart
Pata Lodge, Patagonia, Chile
You arrive through enchanted woods. A steep road twists downwards, like an upside-down beanstalk, through coihue trees bearded with lichen and knee-deep in bamboo and giant ferns. At the bottom is Pata Lodge, in a small verdant valley enclosed by an amphitheatre of Andean peaks. Across swaths of grass are a handful of stylish wooden cabins, a greenhouse at the centre of fenced gardens, a rustic two-room school house, and a wide curve of the Rio Futaleufú, where rainbow trout lurk in glassy shallows. Deep in Chilean Patagonia, Pata feels like a lost world.
It is home to a small group of enterprising young families from São Paulo in Brazil who have come here in search of a more environmentally sensitive future. They want to protect these forests, find a healthy work/life balance, and create a sustainable holiday retreat for visitors to the Futaleufú River. This is slow trave: fly-fishing, hiking and kayaking between meals sourced from the gardens and evenings spent watching the sun fade across the faces of those wonderful mountains.
But don’t get too comfortable. The Futaleufú is one of the world’s great white-water rafting rivers. A few miles downstream, where powerful currents are compressed between canyon walls, it becomes a cauldron of white water. In an adrenaline-rush that leaves you buzzing, spectacular rapids pile up in quick succession as canyon-sized holes open in the river’s belly and foaming walls of water rear above the raft. For 90 minutes you are at the mercy of the river. There is no better ride on Earth. I couldn’t get enough of it.
Stanley Stewart travelled as a guest of Plan South America (plansouthamerica.com). There are six private cabins for guests at Pata Lodge (pata.cl); accommodation and half-board for two people costs $600 per night
Disappointment More than 70 years ago, John Steinbeck declared Positano on the Amalfi Coast would never be overrun by tourists: too steep, too intimate, not enough room for hotels. As a prediction, this is up there with the first world war being the war to end all wars. The coast is still one of Italy’s great beauties, with unrivalled panoramas linked by an acrobatic road. But tiny Positano has become a maelstrom of heaving crowds and endless shops of floppy hats and beachwear. If you must, go in the evening when the numbers of day-trippers may have abated.
Oliver Smith
Antwerpen-Centraal Station, Belgium
I had wanted to visit Antwerpen-Centraal ever since I read WG Sebald’s novel Austerlitz — which opens with the narrator meeting the title character in the foyer.
Sebald’s prose has a dreamlike quality — so too the station he describes is eerie and fantastical, and hard to conceive of beyond the pages of a book. And yet stepping off a grubby, graffiti-swathed service from Brussels Midi-Zuid, Antwerpen-Centraal indeed appears a kind of magical threshold. It is a commuter hub for Belgium’s second city, but I could imagine it also as a gateway to the capital of the world.
Opened in 1905, this immense structure is a strange encyclopedia of Renaissance, Baroque and Byzantine influences. In Sebald’s novel it works as an architectural expression of 20th-century Europe — he points to carved symbols of capitalism and international communication over the entrance. There is the ghost of colonialism too — the station was a pet project of King Leopold II.
But the overriding sense is of a structure ecclesiastical in its splendour and scale. The architect was allegedly inspired by Rome’s Pantheon. More than anywhere else, its airy spaces reminded me of the Aya Sofya in Istanbul. But — as Sebald writes — where you’d expect an altar, Antwerpen-Centraal has a clock: ticking high over a marble staircase, presiding with godlike authority over arrivals and departures.
It had ticked through two decades since Austerlitz was published, two years of lockdowns since I had seen my friend who was travelling from Germany to meet me here. And it counted two days before I returned under its inching hands to start my journey back to London St Pancras. Perhaps it was a hangover from all the Trappist beers — but I felt oddly humbled passing through this majestic temple of timetables.
Disappointment For the first time I visited the westernmost point of mainland Britain: Land’s End. It was deeply disappointing: charging £6 for parking, with theme-park like attractions incongruously set on a blustery headland. Far better was the National Trust’s Lizard Point: the southernmost point of mainland Britain, where I spotted seals playing as a storm blew in off the Atlantic.
Ruaridh Nicoll
Whale River Camp, Ungava Bay, Canada
As I jumped from the float of a seaplane to a vast river’s narrow beach, a departing angler asked if it was my first visit. Then he said: “Please don’t tell anyone about this place.” Sadly, I’m terrible with a secret.
Seventy miles from where it spills into Ungava Bay in the far north of Quebec, the Whale river must be 300 yards across. Tundra extends in all directions, penetrable only where caribou have created paths. A tributary, as big as the Thames, thunders down a half-mile of waterfalls.
Every summer Mike Karboski, a retired lineman (think Glen Campbell) travels to this far-flung spot with his family to run a fly-fishing camp. For two months, they will be the only permanent human inhabitants on the river’s vast watershed.
It’s a precarious spot. One year they arrived to find a bear had wintered in their cabin. Other visitors include thousands of caribou and a run of Atlantic salmon with the bulbous profiles of Airbus A380s, which is what drew me and my brother.
Over a week at the beginning of August, we and our friends stayed in a line of huts on an island in the river, fed by Karboski’s wife Luciette and ferried about by his children Joe, Brianna and Brittany in Canadian canoes. We were run up terrifying rapids by the man himself, and walked trails that had me singing the bears away.
Karboski’s father set up the camp. He was a member of Darby’s Rangers, the US commandos. He came back from the second world war with wounds and an urge to get away from other people. “He never said much,” said Joe.
Fishing allows me to access places where no one else gets to go. But the Whale river felt like a journey to a time when humanity didn’t exist at all.
A week at the Whale River Salmon Club (whaleriversalmonclub.com) costs $7,000 per person including seaplane flights.
Disappointment I live in Havana, where there are food shortages, so I’m always excited when my pal suggests a boat run to Key West. Yet while we may travel (to quote another friend) “90 miles and 60 years”, the scran that awaits us is always disappointing. The US used to do junk food so well — but now it invariably seems to be pail-sized portions of over-sauced swill.
Tim Moore
Bologna, Italy
By recent calculation, I’ve been to more cities in Italy than in any other country outside my own. But the more obviously magnetic allure of rivals in neighbouring Tuscany and Veneto meant that the capital of Emilia-Romagna slipped through the net until this Easter, when by logistical circumstance I overnighted there on a train journey from Paris to Puglia.
I knew I’d been missing out almost as soon as I left the station, when I peered over a wall and saw steepling old townhouses gazing at each other across an ancient canal. An hour later, standing alone on the yawning roof terrace of my sub-€100 downtown hotel, I struggled to process an extraordinary urban panorama clustered with soaring medieval towers, some more tilted than Pisa’s.
I dined on superlative pasta served by venerable waiters in a restaurant devoid of tourists — you know, other tourists — then strolled under vaulted colonnades into what must rank as one of Europe’s most splendid public spaces: the Piazza Maggiore, an astonishing tribute to Renaissance brickwork and garrulous civic exuberance, dominated by a monumental statue of Neptune with squirting-breast sea nymphs at his feet, and a trident in his right hand that was the model for the Maserati logo. I’d died and gone to Top Gear heaven.
For more on visiting the city, including accommodation, see bolognawelcome.com
Disappointment Maybe late October wasn’t the best time for a first visit to Carcassonne, but in any case it will be my last. Those turreted battlements had beckoned winsomely every time I’d sped past them down the A61 motorway, but up close the place exuded the bogus, scruffy cynicism of a struggling theme park.
Jamie Lafferty
Punta San Juan
In Peru, I discovered a brilliant conservation project working in the most pungent of circumstances. South from Nazca, on a desert coast near the mining town of Marcona, Punta San Juan has been protecting seabirds since the 1940s, building a seawall to create conditions not unlike an island, albeit one made almost entirely of guano.
A few thousand Humboldt penguins live on the peninsula and with their bumbling and their tumbling, are chief fundraisers for the project. “I guess you could say they are our mascots,” said project co-ordinator Susana Cárdenas-Alayza, a little reluctantly. Despite their undeniable appeal, the penguins are not the project’s focus — or at least not its only focus. Visiting in September, I found it difficult to even spot the penguins, even though there may be as many as 3,000 nesting nearby.
The reason for this was the hundreds of thousands of other birds: black storms of Guanay cormorants, shimmering congresses of Peruvian boobies, noble squadrons of Peruvian pelicans. The poor penguins could hardly get a look in.
The reason the walls were built to protect this extraordinary peninsula was not because people were likely to come to hunt or steal the birds, but to steal their guano. One of the world’s most abundant natural fertilisers, it was overexploited in the late 1800s before the Peruvian government introduced controls. Extraordinarily, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to an increase in guano banditry for the first time in decades as desperate farmers struggle to acquire fertiliser through international embargoes and shortages. “It’s been completely different this year,” said Alayza. “We’ve been OK, but the government keeps making requests to come for a legal guano harvest. Our job is to keep telling them: no.”
For more on the project, see puntasanjuan.org
Disappointment After a couple of years in the Covid wilderness, 2022 was supposed to be the Edinburgh Festival’s big comeback. I live in Glasgow and so jealously resent the event in any year, but even I was genuinely excited about its return. Imagine my disappointment, then, when travelling east to find a city festering with uncollected rubbish and an event riddled with controversy, unhappy performers — not just sad clowns but genuinely upset comedians — and, worst of all, London pricing on all the drinks. I didn’t expect it all to be funny, but I didn’t think it would be quite so miserable, either.
Simon Usborne
Khinkali in Georgia
Ever since my daily visits to the Fujianese canteen under my flat in the Chinese city of Ningbo, where I once worked as a teacher, I have been addicted to filled dumplings. I can still taste those pork-and-chive zhengjiao almost 20 years later. I’ve since gorged on har gow in Hong Kong, devoured Tibetan momo and polished off pierogi by the dozen. So all-consuming is my love of dumplings, you could stick a sausage in a padded envelope and I’d probably give it a go.
Earlier this year, in the cold and remote mountain town of Mestia, in the Svaneti region of northern Georgia, I ticked off another variation on a faultless combination: khinkali. They arrive on steaming plates to share, looking like little carved alabaster cushions with pleated doughy topknots. Inside, a morsel of moistened, spiced meat (I became partial to lamb) releases a light broth while the dumplings are boiled.
Amateurs reaching for cutlery are quickly educated by tut-tutting waiters. As well as sealing the dumplings, the twisted knobs serve as handles. You lift the dumpling to your mouth, making an incision with the teeth to release and slurp the fragrant, warming broth. The rest goes down swiftly after that, and the doughy knobs are returned to the plate in a growing pile that serves as a visual indicator of an appetite amply satisfied.
I dare not estimate how many khinkali I ate in my week in Georgia, but every one hit the spot in the way that only a good dumpling can.
For more on visiting the country, see georgia.travel
Disappointment I quite like beach resorts, but rarely has my mission to resist my inner grumpy old man faced a sterner test than at a hotel on the grey, fag end-strewn sands of Playa La Pinta in Tenerife. As I put in earplugs on the seventh night to block out the surrounding karaoke bars (“Sweeeet Caroline . . . DUH, DUH, DUH”) I resolved never to sacrifice my own needs so entirely for those of my small children, who of course had a wonderful time.
Claire Wrathall
Co’Vino, Venice, Italy
Late on a Monday evening, CoVino was, when we located it in the labyrinthine alleys of Castello, identifiable by a handful of diners from the earlier sitting finishing their wine outside in the calle. Once inside, we were shown to one of seven scrubbed wooden tables for two, all with a view of its open kitchen, and the deal was explained. There are eight savoury dishes on offer, all of which can be served as a first or second course, plus two desserts or cheese. You can have three for €44; or they can choose for you, in which case it’s four for €49. It’s a system that minimises waste and, as our vastly knowledgeable and engaging server assured us, “There are no bad choices.”
The cooking is accomplished and essentially Venetian. I started with smoked spaghetti in a sauce of anchovies, cinnamon and onions sweated to a golden purée, a twist on the classic bigoli in salsa. It was glorious. Next up was Adriatic sole in saor, a subtly acidic dressing that complemented the sweetness of the fish. My husband’s pappa al pomodoro, made with two varieties of tomato and topped with pecorino and a poached egg, followed by wild boar ribs, Castelluccio lentils and bitter chicories, were similarly transporting. Pudding was a pine nut-rich cassata of buffalo ricotta.
The wine list is an education too: 14 Italian small-production natural or at least artisanal wines, five from the Veneto, and all available by the glass. I was specially taken with the Monteforche cabernet franc and am glad to have discovered the spicy catarratto grape.
The bill, when it came, was €136, including two glasses of delicious prosecco from nearby Valdobbiadene, poured from a magnum as you arrive, which sets the convivial tone. For Venice it seemed like a steal.
covinovenezia.com
Disappointment An invitation to lunch at Girafe, the sought-after seafood restaurant in Paris’s Cité de l’Architecture, promised a treat. Its elegant decor is by Joseph Dirand, whose work I revere. And the view from our table on its verdant terrace had the Eiffel Tower dead centre. But the food. Mon Dieu! The yellowtail sashimi (€26) was dry, saved only by its ponzu dressing, and my octopus main course (€38) was a dollop of mashed potato in a pool of sharp grapefruit foam, topped by a curl of tough tentacle.
Kate Maxwell
Thorington Theatre, Suffolk
I felt as if I’d been dropped in a leafy part of Ancient Rome when I first glimpsed this open-air theatre through the ferns and forest. Nestled in a second world war bomb crater, five miles from Suffolk’s Heritage Coast, the new Thorington Theatre seats 350. It was the brainchild of Mark and Lindy O’Hare, who own Thorington Estate, and was built during lockdown from sweet chestnut wood coppiced and milled on the estate.
My family and I found the whole set up so enchanting — the sunlight twinkling through the trees, the wind in the leaves, the occasional dog bark (dogs are welcome and don’t need tickets) — that we visited three times this summer. It’s a thoroughly low-impact enterprise: invigorated by their trim, the sweet chestnut trees have since grown 20 feet; refreshments are organic and Suffolk-made, it’s powered by renewable electricity, and everything is recycled.
The eclectic programme of 56 productions per year, by local, national and youth groups, includes Shakespeare, opera and stand-up comedy, as well as family classics; the highlight for us was a pleasingly retro production of The Railway Children. We’ll be back for Dr Doolittle, among others, next summer.
For details see Thoringtontheatre.co.uk; the 2023 season is due to start in May
Disappointment The high hopes I had for my train journey to Amsterdam on Eurostar were dashed when my family of four was seated separately — one in the next carriage. After much terrified clinging and a few tears (my children are seven and six), we were found seats close, if not next, to each other, in the same carriage, but that wasn’t the end of the drama: we soon discovered that every single toilet on board was out of order . . .
Maria Shollenbarger
Brisbane, Australia
Last April I had to truncate a long visit to Sydney (Covid surge; relentless rain; ruinously expensive taxis). To avoid the cardiac-event-inducing cost of a direct connection home, I flew via Brisbane, staying for two nights. The Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (together known as QAGOMA) were hosting their Asia Pacific Triennial; I’d heard talk of intriguing “lifestyle” developments along the river and in town. Worth seeing it for work, I told myself, preparing to be underwhelmed.
How great to be wrong. Brisbane seemed to have outgrown its duelling sobriquets of “big country town” and “Brisvegas”, with a quietly cool, eminently liveable city evolving in their place (and one that will host the Olympics in 2032).
The James Street precinct, a developer-funded regeneration initiative, bills itself as a “high-energy urban retail pocket” — boilerplate rhetoric that undersells the thoughtfulness and appeal of its repurposed light-industrial buildings. Apart from The Calile Hotel, opened in 2019 (a mid-century-inspired stunner to rival, if not best, anything in Sydney or Melbourne), very few architectural interventions are evident. And though the precinct is definitively manufactured, with a roster of shops from leading designers — Zimmermann, Lee Mathews, Bassike, Dion Lee, Sir The Label — somehow there’s the energy of a more natural evolution. In the shade of twin avenues of enormous old timber trees, I had moments of feeling I was strolling a version of Venice Beach’s Abbott Kinney Boulevard, transposed to the subtropical Antipodes.
QAGOMA was a revelation, its 20,000-strong Asiatic and First Artists collection spanning 14 millennia, the Triennial curation impressive and thought-provoking. An elevated walking path lines the river — a perfect morning run, with cafés and wine bars at the Howard Smith Wharves, and views up to a bluff where locals wandered, flanked by tall palms. I flew out wishing for a third day.
Maria Shollenbarger was a guest of the Calile Hotel (thecalilehotel.com), which has doubles from A$390 per night. For more on QAGOMA see qagoma.qld.gov.au
Disappointment Can an otherwise alluring place be utterly undone by its traffic? Canggu, on Bali — already notorious for its gridlock-as-regional-pastime issues — offers compelling food for thought on the topic. God knows you’ll need something to keep your mind occupied as you lose hours of your life travelling distances of two miles or less, enveloped in fumes and the insectile buzzings and dartings of untold numbers of Vespas. There are more good restaurants, artisans, hotels and beach clubs in this town than ever before; and, post-pandemic, a thriving full-time creative community. Just pack your runners; on foot you’ll get there in half the time.
Pico Iyer
Dining room of the Park Hyatt, Zanzibar
For half a century, I’d been dreaming of the cool white mosques in Zanzibar’s Stone Town, the “Sufi trees” and “fermented intimacies” hymned by its exile novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah. I’d heard of a house where Speke, Stanley, Livingstone and Sir Richard Burton all stayed; I’d been transfixed by tales of latticed balconies and Ali Baba jars in the African heart of the Omani Empire.
Expectation can be the death of any trip, but the heavy “Gujarati doors” along Stone Town’s twisting alleys, the rooftop cafés overlooking the warm blue-green waters of the Indian Ocean, were indeed beyond anything I’d seen in Mauritius or east Africa. One morning I followed the sea, past stained-glass windows and tiled courtyards, to the Park Hyatt Hotel, housed in part in a historic mansion. Only feet away, boys were bathing in the sea — no beaches are private here — while schoolchildren in saffron headscarves trooped behind their teacher across the sand. Sailors guided their boats, at fearless speeds, over choppy waters, the winds blowing the sails of dhows almost horizontal.
To our table on the sunlit terrace a small, weathered waiter brought mocktails made of ginger and passion fruit and the island’s celebrated coconut syrup, followed by wafer-thin circles of pita bread, accompanied by unpronounceable spices. Then four clay bowls containing what looked to be Indian vegetable korma, Arabic hummus, Zanzibari kidney beans and African porridge. Every few minutes the waters below shifted to a different shade of turquoise or milky green and I didn’t know whether to relish more the smells, the tastes, the sights or the sounds, as men called greetings across the palmy waterfront.
For half a century, I’ve been a determined anti-foodie, my taste buds having been demolished by years of English school food. But on a warm spring morning following months of lockdown, I knew I’d never taste anything so rich, so unique — or so truly cosmopolitan — as the Park Hyatt’s Very Veggie Mama Ntilie.
The Dining Room restaurant at the Park Hyatt Zanzibar (hyattrestaurants.com) is open daily
Disappointment I didn’t stay long in the Seychelles, and the sleepy island of La Digue did look charming. But the capital, Victoria, is the first place, ever, where my small and law-abiding Japanese wife had her hair violently pulled by a stranger in the street, her phone snatched out of her hand and her innocent self assaulted by curses. The Seychelles may share Zanzibar’s Indian Ocean waters, but we found little there of the textured history, or the intriguing recessiveness, of Stone Town.
Tom Robbins
Berghaus Zallinger, Alpe di Siusi, Italy
Alpe di Siusi is Europe’s largest high mountain pasture (known as an alp, alm or alpage depending on where you are) — a grass-covered plateau of about 500 hectares, at an altitude of between 1,700 and 2,200 metres. In winter, when the cows have been brought down to the surrounding valleys and the fields are smothered in snow, its gentle undulations become a laid-back ski area.
Back in January, I took a cable car up from the village of Ortisei, rising over a steep, shadowy mountainside to crest the ridge and find the plateau beyond bathed in afternoon sun. Already it felt removed from the world below but I saw fewer and fewer people as I skied across the pastures to the furthest corner of the Alpe, the shadows lengthening as I went. By the time I reached the Berghaus Zallinger, all was silent and the stars were coming out above the silvery peaks.
I expected a cosy mountain refuge but Zallinger turned out to be far more surprising, transformed by Bolzano architectural practice Noa into a high-altitude alberghi diffusi both traditional and cutting-edge. At its centre is a 19th-century farmhouse, containing a restaurant, bar and 12 bedrooms; scattered around it, the various barns have been rebuilt to house another 24 rooms and a sauna with jaw-dropping views. A clever system of wooden shutters means that from outside these low buildings seem unassuming, like they might still house tractors. Inside they are airy, modern and open plan, with basins hewn from stone and curtains in South Tyrolean loden fabric.
The catering is more refined than the usual refuge too. In the bar, families and couples chatted over homemade cocktails; in the restaurant I ate trout fillet with a Riesling grown 25 miles away. Those not staying can borrow a toboggan for the descent; they’d be missing one of Europe’s most peaceful retreats.
Tom Robbins was a guest of the Berghaus Zallinger (zallinger.com). A week, half-board, costs from €1,022 per person
Disappointment For 30 years I’ve been ending walks with family and friends at The Volunteer, a pub in the hamlet of Sutton Abinger in the Surrey Hills, just south-west of London. Last month we arrived anticipating a warm fire and a pint of real ale only to find the pub closed up, recently sold by the brewery to a property developer. Its future is unclear — it may yet emerge again in a different form — but the real disappointment is that this is now so common, with pubs closing around the UK every week in the face of rising costs, staff shortages and a clientele who can only afford to drink at home. One of our great cultural and social assets is diminishing before our eyes.
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