Category — Travel

First visual impressions of Masterchef winner Mat Follas’s Beaminster dining room are of a tearoom that’s been subjected to a lick of paint and some design consultancy. Exposed brick, chunky wooden tables and a daily menu on the chalkboard give The Wild Garlic a studied “refined rustic” look. It’s not unpleasant, just a bit mannered. However, that’s the last so-so impression this place makes.

Follas’s love of foraging is evident right from the starter: both are delivered in hearty portions on wooden butcher’s blocks garnished with wild leaves and edible flowers. The brill ceviche is fresh and delicate with a whisper of zest, lacking only a grain or two of salt for my taste. A flash-fried and optimally cooked pigeon breast comes with a chunky compote of dark berries and beetroot. It’s delicious.

[Read more →]

A handful of bits and pieces relating to Italy have appeared while I’ve been on my recent Italian research trip…

8 Italian masterpieces that barely survived

War after war, occupation followed by revolution, bad luck combined with bad judgment — all have contributed to the destruction of Italy’s art treasures. A fire in the Sala del Scrutinio and the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in Venice’s Doge’s Palace destroyed several Titians as well as work by Bellini, Gentile da Fabriano, and Pisanello. A half-crazed Botticelli tossed several of his own “decadent” works onto the Bonfire of the Vanities in 1497.

Italian art has, unfortunately, not been immune from the turbulent influence of the peninsula. But the history of Italian art and architecture isn’t short of happy endings, either. Many works we admire today have dodged a bullet or two during the journey to the 21st century.

Getting up at 5.30 in the morning, and on a Saturday morning at that, isn’t usually my idea of a good time. My drive through the empty streets of the East End is eerie and somber. A hoary drunk props up a bus stop. The last of the morning mist clings to the Limehouse canal known, with Ripperesque undercurrent, as The Cut. A gull squawks and hovers overhead; the city, at the cusp of day and night, is taking a breather.

As I step out of the car, a bitter spring wind howls straight from Norway, over the flyover on the A1261 and up my sweater. Small sacrifices. I’m hunting the freshest fish in London, at Billingsgate Market, which has already closed by the time any advanced civilization is eating breakfast.

Read the rest at Perceptive Travel

How is technology changing the way we travel?

Smarter search

Searching the web means typing in words and expecting Google, Bing or Yahoo! to deliver the answer. It’s the way we’ve got used to working, but it’s not how real human beings sift information. We want to know what’s nearby, what our friends like. Improvements in local search, social search and visual search will do just that.

An Android-iPhone Shootout

Apple won’t have it all its own way this year. We’ll hear a lot more from Google’s Android mobile operating system, which is available free for phone hardware manufacturers to install. Several new handsets from Sony Ericsson, Motorola, HTC, Samsung and Google itself (the Nexus One) are Android-powered.

Read it all at Telegraph.co.uk


Then read my guide to the best iPhone and Android apps, eReaders, Augmented Reality, travel inspiration websites, and freebies for travellers (also at Telegraph.co.uk).

One of the (many) things I find genuinely useful about Twitter is the ability to get an instant answer or opinion on just about anything. Like this:

Wondering: in the medium term, which is worth more to a tourism business: 1. Nice mention in a guidebook. 2. Nice mention in a paper. Ideas? [@hackneye]

I  didn’t really have a motive for asking this, other than genuine, theoretical curiosity. It strikes me that many PR companies put a lot of effort into courting periodical, weekly and daily media, and a whole lot less time on guidebook writers. Maybe PRs know something that isn’t immediately apparent to me. [Read more →]

A short series of pieces in the Sunday Telegraph this winter on saving money on your travels: cheaper mobile phone calls abroad, prepaid currency cards, booking travel with cashback websites.

New ways to save money with your phone appear almost weekly. If you’re not confident on the web, invest in a Multi IMSI travel SIM card. This new generation of SIM slots into any unlocked mobile and can come with two numbers (one UK, one US). Callers can dial either number to reach you, wherever you are in the world.

Read about Multi IMSI and VoIP technologies for your travels at Telegraph.co.uk

Do you want a 10 per cent discount on your next weekend away, no strings attached? With planning and basic web-savvy, that’s how much you could save if you currently buy your spending money in high street or airport bureaux de change. Even habitual credit and debit-card travellers could secure savings of about five per cent.

Read about prepaid currency cards and the best places to buy travel money online at Telegraph.co.uk

For travellers who are comfortable booking on the internet, cashback websites can unlock a new tier of savings. With very little effort, you could pocket six per cent off an Istanbul city tour with Isango!, or hundreds of other deals – on top of any discounts or offers available booking direct with these operators.

Read about cashback websites, and the savings you can bag booking travel with them, at Telegraph.co.uk

Every ski season around 490 scheduled flights from the UK land at Caselle, 10 miles north of Turin’s city centre. Charter airlines also use the airport as a jumping-off point for Valdostan resorts like Courmayeur and Cervinia or the Milky Way ski area, and few passengers ever need make the short journey into the city centre.

Which is a shame. Under-rated Turin is northern Italy’s culinary capital, a Wonka-esque paradise for chocolate lovers, home of Europe’s longest-lasting royal house, Catholic Christianity’s holiest relic, and the best collection of Egyptian artefacts outside Cairo.

So, my advice for this winter’s skiers is to book the last flight home (Ryanair’s late Stansted departure is 8.30pm), deposit your bags at the airport early and make the 19-minute train ride into town your first departure of the day.

Read the rest at Timesonline

Statistics can tell us all sorts of things. They can be very complicated. Or they can be simple. But they are best when presented in the raw. So, here, uneditorialised, unedited, in a no-holds-barred list kinda format, are one six-year-old’s marks out of ten for everything-she-could-fit-into-one-weekend-at-Disneyland-Paris. I’ll warn you now, her scoring can be erratic, over-emotional, and downright dubious, but I can assure you it’s honest and it’s authentic.

In the spirit of open data, crunch her numbers however you wish. They are after the fold / below the photo.

[Read more →]

Dalston, De Beauvoir, Shoreditch. Not the standard chapter headings from your London guidebook, to be sure. But if you haven’t visited my city for a few years, here’s the bit you missed: London is moving east.

The tarmac thread that links those three is the Kingsland Road, the Broadway of the East End. A trip along its arrow-straight two miles serves up a United Nations of food influences. Restaurants are generally chaotic, informal, and great value. In other words, a perfect cipher for the waves of immigration that have made this London’s most varied (and, suddenly, most fashionable) cultural quarter.

Read the rest at Frommers.com

Following soon after the release of my Instant Florence app last month, Instant Turin for the iPhone was released into the App Store on the first of this month. It’s my second contribution to the Instant Cities series of travel apps produced by smart start-up Never Odd Or Even (of Ask the Hoff fame).

Once again, we’re hoping that a combination of photo-driven menus, original content, and a keen price (£1.79/$2.99) will be a winner. We certainly think the app is pitched just right for anyone spending a weekend in the capital of Piedmont. Turin is a great (and much under-rated) city, and I hope my love for the place comes across in the app.

If you want to buy Instant Turin, this link opens iTunes and takes you straight to it. If you would like to review the app for your website or publication, then drop me a line and I’ll arrange a review copy for you.

If you’ve used the app and have any comments, then please leave them below. We’re always trying to make better stuff, and feedback really helps.