Category — Travel

Two minutes and twenty-seven seconds. I’m sitting by the pool, legs dangling in the water, timing how long it takes the current to carry a drowned fly’s corpse around one lap and return it to a spot in front of me. Every time I kick my feet, the late-afternoon sun refracts patterns that slither like electric eels across the bottom of the pool. The only sound is water caressing stone, as the hotel’s fountain babbles away in the background. There’s hardly a whisper of wind to disturb the protea.

It doesn’t seem feasible that I’m sitting less than two miles away from the stretch of rock with such a fearsome reputation among sailors: the Cape of Good Hope. [Read more →]

For me, Brittany will always be the place where, aged nine and a half, I had my first taste of foreign food. Just hearing the name conjures up a crowded campsite, queues for the showers, the staccato drone of rain battering canvas and my dad reversing our new Citroen into a bollard at Portsmouth harbour.

But for the French, Brittany is renowned for salt – specifically, for Breton fleur du sel. It is somehow appropriate that a place where authentic local dishes (and pizzas) come with crab and cockles, or lobster and langoustines, should have made its name from the sea. [Read more →]

Cava. The fizz that does the biz without breaking the bank. You might crack open a bottle on a friend’s – but not a really good friend’s – birthday. Or at Christmas – especially at Christmas. Seven bottles of Cava equals one of Champagne. You do the maths. But to a Catalan, Cava means something altogether different. Catalans treat it with the sort of reverence Brazilians reserve for Candomble or the French for the Tour de France.

Were it not for just one building, Sant Sadurni d’Anoia, the home of Cava, might be just about the wine world’s most forgettable town. Driving through the Penedes in February, I’m too late for autumn’s ochres, too early for the first emerald shoots of spring. Slate-grey town blends colourlessly into muted green countryside, the only punctuation those regimented rows of gnarled vines.

Cava was first made here in 1872. Josep Raventos, back from working in France’s Champagne region, brought the techniques home to the family business. Within a decade, his xampany was a sensation – and Codorniu has become the world’s biggest producer of sparkling wine. [Read more →]

On a clear morning, the last two hours of the flight into Cape Town are unforgettable. From seven miles up, I can see the lunar landscape of Namibia’s skeleton coast and the gaping mouth of the Orange River emptying into the Atlantic. Nearing our destination, Table Mountain, its peak obscured by a wispy tablecloth of cloud, is set in sharp relief by the pale-pink light of dawn.

The road east from the airport takes me past the shameful townships of the Cape Flats. Nyanga, Crossroads and Mitchell’s Plain finally give way to the sharp climb into the Overberg. Stopping at the top of Sir Lowry’s Pass to admire the view across False Bay, it’s almost possible to convince yourself that the degradation of what you have just seen isn’t real. Almost.

But, despite the wild beauty of the Garden Route, it’s not by clinging limpet-like to the shore that I am going to find what is truly unique about the Cape. For that, I head just a little inland. [Read more →]