Paula Hardy

I lean back against the bare rock and look up at the Milky Way, hanging like a blast of gunshot in the Saharan sky. Brahim, my guide, points out Cassiopeia, named for the vain Ethiopian queen, which dazzles with luminescent nebulae and the shock waves of a starburst galaxy; then, Amanar, or Orion, the warrior of the desert, with its sapphire-coloured supergiant, 1,200 light-years away; and, finally, Polaris, the steadfast North Star, which the Tuareg have used for navigation for centuries. Shooting stars flash across our retinas; and the International Space Station traces a fine white arc across Ursa Major, 400 kilometres above our heads.

We are standing in the lee of a sandstone pinnacle – its wind-weathered strata appearing like melting wax in the flickering light of our campfire. This is the so-called Cirques, a surreal land of sculpted buttes and plateaus at the heart of Tadrart Rouge, the Red Mountains of Algeria’s Tassili n’Ajjer National Park. It has taken our diminutive caravan of six travellers and six Targi, the nomads native to these lands, nearly a week to get here from the desert town of Djanet – and, like the astronauts in that space station, I find myself untethered by the experience.

How did I get here? It started over a year ago when I became mesmerised by a series of sepia-tinted Instagram reels featuring serirs, sand sheets, dunes and ergs, posted against a hypnotic soundtrack of desert blues by Chahira Ouanella on her Duneya Tours account. Overwhelmed by deadlines, I dreamed of retreating to the simplicity of sand, weather and rock, where every day heralds a different late-Turner landscape of endless peachy browns beneath a clean blue sky. For months, I found myself tuning in for a microdose of daily awe. I sent a message; and eventually we spoke on the phone. I learnt that Chahira and her husband Adasay were diaspora babies from Canada and Switzerland who had returned to Algeria to start a travel company. “No one in Djanet can believe we’re here, but it feels natural for us,” she said. Adasay’s great uncle opened Djanet’s first tour agency, and the family has been guiding trips for three generations. Even his Swiss mother is an intrepid desert traveller, having met Adasay’s father on a camel trek in the 1970s. Chahira and Adasay’s desire to dispel misconceptions about Algeria – and the Tuareg – was palpable even over the patchy phone line. I booked a flight.

As I come into land, Djanet appears from the darkness like a golden tear strung along the Oued Idjeriou river. In the morning, the waterway turns a vibrant green, a shock against the rust red mountains that surround the town, which sits 1,050 metres high on a shelf of the Tassili n’Ajjer, or Plateau of Rivers. The plateau is twice the size of Switzerland and shelters 14 Kel Ajjer clans. Djanet was an important stop on ancient trade routes, later finding itself a flashpoint between competing Ottoman and French imperialism. The Kel Ajjer held sway until 1920 when the French finally subdued the area, concluding a process of Algerian colonisation that began in 1830. While Djanet has a population of just 23,000, there are an estimated 1.2 to 3 million Tuareg in seven confederations scattered across Libya, Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso – a nomadic people now penned in by modern borders.

Adasay knows everyone in Djanet’s market, so we browse slowly, admiring a takatkat, or overshirt, made from bazin, a waxed damask from Mali’s capital Bamako (“it’s the fashion these days as it shines in the sun,” Adasay tells us), alongside ornamented leather bags, belts, sandals and other accessories. Shops are piled high with spices, dried herbs and pretty floral print fabrics used as melhfas (a wrap worn by local women), as well as elegant woven bowls, baskets and handbags. Adasay points out round palm mats woven in a colourful spiral, traditionally used to wrap salt cakes for transportation on camels – a practice still common on the caravans headed to salt mines in Bilma, Niger. We collect his repaired tea bag from the leathersmith, buy some spices to enliven our desert meals and invest in a sheer sheesh, the signature head veil worn by Tuareg men.

Heading out of Djanet, we trace the edge of the Tassili n’Ajjer plateau, which glints like an iron curtain beneath a layer of ferromanganese (an alloy known as desert varnish), and pass a herd of white mehari camels, the Tuareg’s pride and joy. When we stop for lunch, Adasay’s uncle Brahim leads us halfway up the black escarpment to a rock shelter, to show us a bright ochre-coloured painting of leaping, long-haired hunters encircling a lion. He picks up a ferrous rock and scratches away at it, showing how the pigment for the painting might have been made, then fixed with blood or urine to the rock face. We are amazed by the little tableau, because we have no sense yet of what lies ahead.

Over the next few days, our personalities begin to reveal themselves. There’s Pelle, the adventurous engineer with his orange neck gaiter and yellow cap who is always the first up the cliffs and dunes, followed by gentle and curious Charlene, a special needs teacher. Stalwart Tassa, from San Diego, is an earnest student of Islam and Arabic, newly married to Fadwa, an Algerian who grew up camping all over California with her sisters, but tells us: “I’m the first person in my entire extended Algerian family to set foot in this place.” She becomes our translator and cultural interpreter, even though she, too, finds herself a stranger in this place.

Between 5,500 and 11,700 years ago, In Djaren was the centre of a thriving culture, its cliffs covered in paintings and petroglyphs. While Europe shivered under an Ice Age, the Sahara was basking in the Neolithic Subpluvial period, which conjured comfortable climes where abundant grasslands were watered by monsoon rains and great paleo lakes supported an array of wildlife. One morning, Brahim leads us to a large, flat slab chiselled, extraordinarily, with the image of an elephant. Above it, an inscription in the Tuareg language, tifinagh, hints at the deep connection between the Tuareg and their Amazigh cousins further north. We move on to a weathered rhino and a perfectly painted picture of a giraffe giving birth that is so finely rendered, I find it impossible to believe it is 10,000 years old.

While the morning is spent roaming the vast valley beneath chiffon clouds and climbing up stratified cliffs to blink in disbelief at every new prehistoric artwork, the afternoon is spent snoozing in the sun like lizards, or fossicking for fossils and pieces of prehistoric pottery. Then we climb back into our Land Cruisers and fishtail down In Djaren’s tributaries amid huge puffs of sand that leave Brahim exclaiming “poudre!” and whooping in delight to the sounds of Tinariwen. They are the original ‘Desert Boys’ who formed their band in Ghaddafi’s military training camps in the 1970s and traversed Tassili to the battlefront of northern Mali and Niger during the Tuareg rebellion in 1990.

Their music, assouf, is rooted in the traditional beat of the tendé drum and the inflections of the teherdent (a three-stringed lute) played by the West African poets and storytellers, or griots, of the Niger Bend. These are substituted around our campfire by a plastic water drum and Boutafil’s acoustic guitar which he wears around his black ‘Planet Djanet’ t-shirt and red puffa jacket while he sings lyrical poems about the desert, dispossession and ishumar, the marginalised young men forced to confront the alien realities of modern nation-states dislocated from the old customs and ethnic allegiances that previously gave life dignity. The music seems to seep into the sand, the rising moon and stars, like a tuning fork emitting a fundamental frequency that holds us together in the profound darkness.

A study of Tassili’s rock art didn’t take place until 1956, when amateur French anthropologist Henri Lhote arrived. He documented 800 paintings, writing that he had never seen anything “so extraordinary, so original, so beautiful”. But Lhote and other early explorers weren’t responsible custodians or careful reporters, indulging in damaging practices such as wetting the paintings to secure more vivid photographs, or spreading outlandish theories that extraterrestrials had created them. Since then, 15,000 paintings and engravings have been found and, in the 1980s, Tassili n’Ajjer was recognised as a Unesco Heritage site of outstanding universal value.

There is no doubt that the artworks are exceptional, but they are also a unique record of the Earth’s changing climate – and a stark warning of how once extravagantly fertile landscapes can be ravaged in the blink of a cosmic eye. We witness the change take place as we skip from Wild Fauna Period engravings (10,000-6000 BCE) of stampeding elephants, rhinos and even hippos; to the Round Head Period (8000-6000 BCE) of mystical dancers and toolmakers; to the Pastoral Period (5500-2000 BCE), where the images are full of spear-wielding warriors and longhorned aurochs, the predecessors of the zebu cattle that still graze the Sahel. So beloved are these creatures that they are chiselled across monumental stone slabs, or carefully painted in their dozens in secret corners of caves. At times, the Tuareg seem like prophets from another age, come to warn us of the ravages of impending climate change.

The rock art isn’t the only surprise – Tadrart, too, is an epiphany. The Precambrian plateau dates from earth’s earliest era, when continents were formed, life evolved and volcanoes and mass extinction events shaped our world. In places it is scorched and desolate as if recently blasted by a solar flare. Elsewhere we stand amid immense amphitheatres of striated rocks wind weathered into surreal shapes or gaze up at petrified volcanic vents created by pyroclastic blasts that once shot magma and frothy scoria skyward. We pick up pieces of the petrified basalt frozen like bath bubbles for all eternity. Sometimes it’s hard to fight the feeling that we’re pioneers who’ve journeyed back to the beginning of time, but then we crest a hill or round a corner and find ourselves in a fertile river bed full of alfalfa grass, acacia trees and great bushes bursting with yellow and purple flowers over which flit butterlies and birds. And, we’re reminded that we’ve just circled back to a well-trodden path as the rock art and pottery proves.

After three days of travelling together we find ourselves tight knit, following in Brahim’s footsteps. It’s like we’ve been travelling together for years united by our reliance on each other for everything – food, laughter, music, patience, strength and compassion. While each day starts immaculately with an arc of airglow at the horizon before the sun spills its light across the stunning panorama, it ends in the comforting sight of human faces illuminated by firelight. Drinking endless cups of tea in Tadrart our lives seem inexpressibly trivial and momentous all at once. We each matter greatly, but not at all. The desert gifts us this clarity and community because everything else is stripped away.

Finally, on the penultimate afternoon, we break out of Tadrart’s rocky embrace and launch into an ocean of silky sand that washes across the border into Libya. The Kel Ajjer have kin there, in Ghat, 100km due east on the caravan route that once traced a path from the Gulf of Guinea all the way to the Red Sea. ‘The last caravan I can remember was my father’s when he travelled to Ghat for a family wedding 60 years ago,’ Brahim tells us. Our camp that night is the most beautiful yet, set in the lee of an immense barchan dune called Tin Merzouga that rises to 304m and is one of the highest in the Sahara. Small puffs of wind lift the sand off its razor-sharp ridge filling the air with grains of quartz glitter. We start to climb in the hope of making the summit before sun fall.

Up in the space station the astronauts experience 16 sunsets a day, but here in Tadrart we live each moment slowly and fully. While they float in zero gravity, we are firmly grounded in our bodies, the avalanche of thoughts quieted, our muscles straining to ascend the moving mountain. Along the way, we notice every detail, the tracks of the smallest scarab beetle, the faintest cool breeze and the deepening colour of the sky from blue to bruised azure, then mauve and indigo. It takes me 45 minutes to reach the summit, where Pelle, Charlene, Tassa, Fadwa, Adasay and Brahim greet me with a cheer. We look around us, staggered by the beauty of it all. You don’t need to travel to space to experience the wonder of the world, Tadrart Rouge is far enough.  

This piece was first published by Conde Nast Traveller Middle East in March 2026 (online in April 2026).

From the roof terrace of Riad Fes, I can see one of the world’s greatest and last living medieval cities laid out before me. It was dreamt of by the eight-century moulay (holy man) Idris I, a grandson of the prophet Mohammed, who fled to Morocco to escape Harun al-Rashid, the caliph of the Arabian Nights. Idris ruled nearby Walila, the old Roman city of Volubilis, but dreamt of a new capital until Harun’s assassins caught up with him. So, his son Idris II finished Fes in 789, creating Morocco’s first Imperial city.

Whatever you know of Marrakech won’t prepare you for the immense maze of Fes el-Bali, the old town, where 9,700 serpentine alleys trace the edges of the three-storey blank walls, behind which hide riads and palaces, steaming hammams and funduqs (inns once used by caravans), verdant gardens and lively universities, tranquil mosques and madrasas, all dressed in intricately carved plaster, shimmering zellij (handcut tiles) and painted and carved cedarwood from the Middle Atlas forests.

Drama and intrigue is knit into the fabric of this great labyrinthine medina and if you want in on the intrigue you’ll need a good guide. A guide here doesn’t just show you the sights, but provides you with a companion to an otherwise hidden world.

Mine is smart Meryem Ameziane from Culture Insiders, who suggests we start at the newly opened Musee Al Batha. Once a glorious summer palace with sunken Andalucian gardens, its halls now tell the tale of over a thousand years of history, showing the ebb and flow of dynasties, migrations, scholarship and craft that places Fes not just at the centre of Moroccan history,but connects it to the broader pre-Islamic, Islamic and Mediterranean worlds.

The piece was first published by the Telegraph in June 2025. To read more, click here.

Algiers' iconic Casbah is the most ancient quarter of the city, an Escher-like labyrinth of staircases, blind alleys and dead ends daubed with football insignia and the murals of fallen FLN independence heroes; men like Ali La Pointe who fought the Battle of Algiers (1956-57) in its streets. When UNESCO added it to the World Heritage list in 1992, it described the Casbah as an outstanding example of a historic Maghrebi city. While earthquakes, colonialism, civil strife, floods and neglect have all taken their toll, the Casbah is still one of the most historically significant spaces in north Africa, a symbol of indigenous resilience and cultural identity, which is why renewed conservation efforts are restoring not only important structures, but civic pride in this historic neighbourhood.

The Casbah is a confounding place and you’ll need a good guide to navigate it. Mine is Soumia Kebaïli, who I meet in Place des Martyrs beside an elaborate wrought-iron bandstand where office workers sit feeding the pigeons. She explains the plaza – beneath which Roman, Byzantine and Carthaginian ruins have been discovered – was once the lower half of the neighbourhood, but the French razed it to the ground in the 1830s to create a parade ground. The only remaining buildings are the 11th-century Great Mosque – the oldest in the city – the 1660 “New” Mosque, and the Palais de Raïs (Palace of the Admiral).

“We lost so much of our authentic architectural touch during the French occupation,” Soumia says, listing the Al Sa'ida Mosque, parts of the Jenina palace complex, extensive souks of dyers, gold and gunsmiths and 420 houses. The extent of the lost heritage is clear when we wander through the Palais de Raïs – now an arts and culture centre called Bastion 23 – admiring multicoloured ceilings and intricate carved thuja wood before heading up to the ramparts through cleverly engineered cool passageways to gaze at the sparkling sea over iron canons. “That’s why the restoration of the Casbah is so important, because it is the core of Algiers' history.”

This piece was first published in Conde Nast Traveller Middle East in June 2025. To read more, click here.

This pastel-hued seaside palazzo was born of the friendship of three maverick personalities: owner Samih Sawiris, Africa’s most successful destination developer, acclaimed Franco-Egyptian architect Olivier Sednaoui, and inimitable interiors and antiques aficionado Amr Khalil. Between them they conjured its extraordinary Orientalist style, taking inspiration from Minoan murals, Ottoman and Byzantine palaces and Art Nouveau villas. Initial guests were Sawiris’ family and friends, who relished the chance to swap Cairo’s manic pace for regular forays to easygoing El Gouna for some sun, sea and light-hearted fun.

The aura of these happy holidays lingers in the hotel, which still feels like an intimate escape despite the vast volumes of its salons, galleries and loggias. That’s thanks to Khalil’s extravagant décor, which fills every nook and cranny with eclectic furniture and antiques, tasselled and devore fabrics, silk carpets, glittering glass chandeliers, inlaid marble floors and fireplaces, painted ceilings, bronze sculptures and gilt-framed period paintings. It’s certainly not what one might expect at the seaside, but it works like a dream to transport guests to a fantastical refuge.

The other notable aspect of La Maison Bleue is its team, headed up by stylish GM Jane Drotter. She previously ran Yard in Paris and worked with Michelin-starred Bruno Verjus at Table before arriving in El Gouna in 2024. She brings with her an indefinable savoir faire that has elevated every element of the service and naturally filters down to the charming, youthful team. Drotter works hand-in-hand with ebullient French chef Vincent Guillou, whose joie de vivre telegraphs the sunny flavours of his classic cooking. Circulating tables and catching up with guests at the poolside bar or as they head out for morning yoga or afternoon boat trips, the duo creates a relaxed and at-home atmosphere.

This review first appeared in Conde Nast Traveller in May 2025. To read more, click here.

We sit in the dazzling glass-and-onyx lined dining room on the 23rd floor of the 1951 Royal Mansour Hotel gazing out acrossCubist Casablanca to the Atlantic. A final streak of golden sunlight illuminates the horizon and frames the elegant silhouette of the Hassan II mosque, which sits beneath a sky full of sweeping violet clouds. But for the mosque, it could be Marseille or Miami, or Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia. It’s hard to say, but it certainly doesn’t look like the typical image of Morocco, all red earth and sentinel kasbahs.

Whenever I ask Moroccan friends about visiting Casablanca, they tell me not to: “It’s too busy”, “too noisy”, “there’s nothing to see”, they all insist. That is, all except Bilal El Hammoumy, the co-founder of Inclusive Morocco a young Moroccan travel company on a mission to showcase the breadth of country’s cultural experiences. Bilal takes my Casablanca downer as a personal challenge, promising to introduce me to people and projects that will change my perspective.

The next morning I meet zesty middle-aged guide Naima Boussaid and mural artist Karima Mansouri and we head to Karima’s alma mater, the Casablanca Art School. It caused a cultural earthquake in the 1960s under the direction of Farid Belkahia, who overthrew colonial conventions in favour of indigenous craftwork like carpets, pottery, tile work and jewellery. By collapsing the boundary between fine and applied arts, the school prompted an extraordinary explosion of creativity, now receiving international attention at this year’s aptly themed “Foreigners Everywhere” Venice Biennale.

The piece was first published by Conde Nast Traveller Middle East in August 2024. To read more, click here.

It’s not often you learn of one of the year’s most exciting hotel openings while visiting a foundation focused on migration. But that’s how I hear about La Fiermontina Ocean, a discreet luxury retreat on Morocco’s wild and unspoilt North Atlantic coast. I am in Rabat with Bilal El Hammoumy, founder of Inclusive Morocco, a travel company focused on showing tourists the country’s cultural diversity. While eating orange blossom-soaked doughnuts in the kasbah, our conversation turns to Morocco’s unique position as a bridge between Africa and Europe, and a nexus of travel, trade and migration over the course of centuries. Which brings us to Fondation Orient-Occident, which for the past 30 years has worked on supporting local communities and building bridges across the Mediterranean. As we tour its facilities and visit the skilled embroiderers in its atelier, Bilal tells me that the foundation’s inspired president, Yasmina Antonia Filali, is also the co-founder of La Fiermontina Ocean.

A few days later, I’m on my way there. After whizzing down the glittering coastline, we turn onto a dirt track that disappears into an oak forest. When the trees clear, they reveal golden wheat fields fringed with yellow helichrysum and cow parsley. We stop by a herd of grazing goats at the crest of a hill and get our first view of the quilted countryside that leads to the hotel’s stone reception house. With its patchwork of shamrock green, sage and yellow fields, ploughed corn rows, wind-whipped lines of olive trees and a slash of silver-blue sea on the horizon, it looks like a surreal Gerda Wegener painting.

This piece was first published by Conde Nast Traveller Middle East in December 2024. Continue reading here.

Take a look at French-Moroccan designer Charaf Tajer’s luxury fashion label Casablanca and you’ll catch the vibe of the namesake city. This is Morocco’s most modern city, an unabashed money-making metropolis that was the one-time French Colonial capital from 1912 to 1956. Modelled on Marseille, it was built as a modernist masterpiece by the great architects of the day, yet Casablanca is a distinctly post-Colonial place with buzzing pan-African street life and an ever-evolving urban landscape that fairly quivers with jack-hammers and ideas. Like Tajer’s silk-printed shirts and bold intarsia knits, the city effortlessly fuses classicism and Rationalism with mashed-up street culture, suggesting tantalising dreams of new metropolitan possibilities. Here are some of the best things to do in Casablanca.

Tajer speaks often about how growing up in the mixed setting of Casablanca and Paris inspired his irreverent fusion of design movements, craft techniques and trends. Casa, too, is a city that appears in a constant process of re-inventing itself. Most recently with ambitious urban development programmes including the Corniche and Marina, as well as Pritzker Prize-winning Christian de Portzamparc and Rachid Andaloussi’s Grand Theatre de Casablanca, which looks like a set of billowing sails tied down on Place Mohammed V. Meanwhile, in the southern suburbs, the old 1910 Casa-Anfa airport is morphing into a new neighbourhood with state-of-the-art sustainable Finance City with Thom Mayne’s futuristic CFC tower as its centrepiece. Make no mistake, this is a city on the move.

One thing is clear, Casablanca is not a nostalgic place despite the general reverence for the eponymous Hollywood classic which for years has played downtown at the Art Deco Cinema Rialto. Take a tour with an architect-guide from non-profit Casamémoire that has been working for 28 years to protect the city’s modernist core; it believes Casa's landmarks warrant inclusion on UNESCO’s list. There’s no doubt, it’s a unique showcase of all the avant-garde trends of the 20th century – Art Nouveau, neoclassicism, functionalism and brutalism – as well as unique hybrid neo-Mauresque structures like the L’Eglise du Sacré Coeur (1930), the Post Office (1920) and the monumental Palace of Justice (1918). Post independence, in 1956, even bolder forms emerge from the likes of Jean-Francois Zevaco’s, the Niemeyer of Morocco. They include the Rue d’Agadir market, which looks like a retro-futurist market from Star Wars, the undulating waves of the Assouna Mosque, and the Atelier Vincent Timsit workshops, which looks like an inter-galactic post-box that fell out of the sky.

This piece was first published by Conde Nast Traveller Middle East in September 2024. Continue reading here.

A blue tug draws our vintage dahabiya out into the prevailing wind and our captain unfurls its distinctive 12-metre-high sails. As the fabric billows, the tug sets the double-masted houseboat adrift. The water slaps against the hull and frogs croak in chorus. As the sun sets, the Nile turns to liquid gold, reflecting pink plaques of drifting cloud; originally, the boat, too, would have been covered in gilding – dahab means gold in Arabic. We glide by papyrus islands sheltering yellow-footed cattle egrets and black moorhens, where water buffalo wallow and farmers tend groves of mangoes and fields of sugarcane. The sky turns vermilion then lilac then deepest indigo behind palm trees whose gently swaying fronds look like the raised arms of temple supplicants.

Like a carriage on the Orient Express, the 100-year-old Set Nefru is exquisitely crafted. There are fewer than five of these beauties left on the Nile and all the others are privately owned, one by Parisian shoe designer Christian Louboutin. Set Nefru is the recent acquisition of Al Moudira, a hotel-home filled with Middle Eastern antiques tucked away from the mayhem of the major monuments on Luxor’s rural west bank. It is a worthy caravanserai for the “great Nile road”, where a cosmopolitan crowd of travellers can find respite on their journey south.

This piece was first published by Conde Nast Traveller Middle East in July 2024. Continue reading here.

Marrakech started the year in an upbeat mood as international collectors flocked to the 1-54 contemporary African art expo beneath the Mamounia’s painted cedarwood ceilings. Sponsored by Christies and attended by VIPs from the Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou and Smithsonian, the fair hosted a record number of galleries, welcomed serious collectors who bought works at record prices, and inaugurated the opening of two new art spaces. In short, it was a spectacular success.

It also felt like a fresh start following the terrifying earthquake that shook southern Morocco, and Marrakech, on 8 September 2023. That once-in-a-century event and the devasting images that emerged shocked the world and halted what until then had been a phenomenal year following Morocco’s history-making semi-final in 2022 World Cup. The aftermath was brutal (and reconstruction continues), but the whole country rallied in a phenomenal aid effort that got things back on track just in time to host the IMF conference and La Mamounia’s 100th birthday in October. Because of that unique community spirit the Ministry of Tourism declared 2023 a record year for tourism with 14.5 million visitors, the highest ever in Morocco’s history. 

This article appeared in the Telegraph in March 2024. Continue reading here.

Venice is an act of pure imagination. Just think about it: a city of marble palaces built in a marshy lagoon. It makes no sense at all as a place of human habitation. And, yet, in this liminal landscape, in the absence of cars, I feel more connected to other people than anywhere else. That's because Venice only works by an act of extraordinary collaboration. Nowhere else is our contribution so urgently needed. Because make no mistake Venice is the future’s frontline. And, with its heart-breaking beauty - constructed entirely by human hands - it reminds us that we are not passive observers, but artists, doers and changemakers, too.

This text is the introduction to the new edition of Lonely Planet's Pocket Venice guide. It is due to publish in Spring 2025.

Zil Elwannyen Sesel, as the Outer Islands are known in Creole, are scattered across a vast expanse of ocean 230km to 1150km southwest of Mahe. Barely peeping above sea level, they are mostly coral atolls - rings of reefs and islets that mark the ghostly rim of ancient volcanoes now submerged. It’s a place so pristine it provided the location for one of Blue Planet II’s most memorable sequences, when giant trevallies leapt from the sea to snatch baby terns in flight, to present David Attenborough’s astonishment.

In a world where biodiversity is being lost at an astonishing rate, Seychelles Outer Islands are rare, precious and important.

This is an excerpt from the Lonely Planet guide to Mauritius, Reunion and Seychelles, for which I was lead writer and contributed all the Seychelles text. The guide was published in November 2023, and you can find a copy here.

A half-moon hangs in the morning sky beside the Koutoubia minaret, fading fast. Like Florence’s Duomo or Paris’ Notre Dame, no matter how many times you see this perfectly proportioned 12th-century tower, it always makes you pause. It is particularly lovely in the morning above a sea of leafy orange trees that municipal workers carefully trim.

That it is still standing at all after the 6.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Morocco’s High Atlas mountains at 10.11pm on September 8, 2023, is a miracle. Home videos from the night show the 252-foot-high minaret swaying dramatically while flocks of roosting birds evacuate en masse and holidaymakers run clear in confusion.

Over coffee at his co-working space, L’Blassa, in the Marrakech neighbourhood of Gueliz, entrepreneur Oussama Laftimi, tries to describe the experience. “The ground was moving like a wave and the noise, the noise was so loud,” he says. “Like the roar of wind but deep inside the earth. I can’t describe it.”

This piece was published in the Telegraph in November 2023. To read the full piece, click here.

As magical experiences go, sitting in the Chellah – a medieval, Unesco-listed Merenid necropolis in Morocco’s capital Rabat – watching contemporary dance master Shahrock Moshkin Ghalam playfully pirouette takes some beating. The last rays of sunlight bathe him in a golden glow and beautifully back light virtuoso tar player Aïda Nosrat, kanoun player Christine Zayed and percussionist Saghar Khadem, who play while he dances.

The performance was one of nearly a hundred at the 2019 edition of Mawazine, the world’s largest and most diverse music festival attracting 2.75 million people. Since 2001, it has been organized by the Association Maroc Cultures under the high patronage of King Mohamed VI himself. Vast laser-lit international concerts, intimate dance recitals, street performances and creative workshops take place across seven stages, in local neighbourhoods and at heritage sites like the Chellah.

Marwane Fachane, CEO of the city’s top cultural agency the Hiba Foundation, says, “there is an institutional vision for Rabat to be Morocco’s window to the world, which is why culture is now central to the city’s development.”It’s also why Rabat was nominated Africa’s Capital of Culture in 2022. Mawazine is just the biggest in a long list of cultural events that fill the city’s calendar including the Roots Film Festival, the Rabat Book Fair, an internationally acclaimed art Biennale and the Jidar Street Art Festival.

The Hiba Foundation supports many of these initiatives with a mandate to foster Moroccan talent across all the arts. Their three-storey heritage home on Avenue Mohammed V includes a one-of-a-kind theatre-cinema auditorium, dance studios, workshop spaces and a café which hosts a packed weekly programme of jam, stand-up, improv, slam, book readings and concerts. Yet still Rabat flies beneath the world’s cultural radar.

This piece was first published in the Financial Times in August 2023 as part of a promotional campaign by the Morocco Tourism Board. Read more here.

Morocco’s 3500km North African coast is where the Atlantic trade winds originate. Hot air over the equator rises towards the cold North Pole and as the earth rotates beneath the air mass sinks into a heat-induced low over the Sahara. These winds are perpetual and constant and represent the biggest wind energy movement in the world.

Merchants, adventurers and sardine fishermen have been navigating the swells off this wind-whipped coastline for centuries. Now it is surfers who flock to the waves of Taghazout, Tamraght and Imsouane between Essaouira and Agadir. Since the 1960s, the country’s surf scene has grown steadily. Now there are over 100 camps and schools and 95 named breaks, as well as top riders such as Olympic competitor Ramzi Boukhiam and five-times National Champion, Maryam el Gardoum, who runs the country’s first female-led surf school, Dihya.

Lily O’Hara is a co-founder of Surf Maroc, the country’s leading surf and yoga centre. “When we first opened in 2003, Taghazout was a little fishing village with rough roads and few facilities,” she says. “Now there are cycle lanes all the way to Tamraght, skateboarding parks, fibre-optic cable, the beaches are spotless and we’re introducing e-bikes to our properties.”

This piece was published in the Fnancial Times in August 2023 as part of a promotional campaign with the Moroccan Tourist Board. Read the full piece here.

Tangier, Tingis, Tanja, Tanger – this storified city is Morocco’s most edgy in more ways than one. Walk up to the Kasbah district and you’ll find yourself at the northwestern tip of Africa, staring out at the Atlantic and Mediterranean, with Europe just nine miles away across the Straits of Gibraltar. It is a perfectly poised metropolis set on ancient maritime routes between North and South, East and West.

Stand awhile at the sun-struck ramparts and you’ll experience a sense of total suspension. This feeling of in-betweenness is a core characteristic of the city. Only here could the Rolling Stone’s conjure their otherworldly 1989 track Continental Drift with a trance troupe called the Master Musicians of Jajouka. Likewise, Beat Generation giants Paul Bowles, Brion Gysin and William Burroughs produced their most edgy work in the International Zone of the 1950s. And, today, contemporary artists such as Yto Barrada still probe the multiple identities of this shape-shifting city.

Hicham Bouzid, co-founder of the cultural non-profit Think Tanger, reflects on this outlaw originality. “Tangier is a very vibrant place,” he says. “It is a true crossroads, not just internationally, but between the surrounding rural region with its deeply rooted traditions and the energy of the city’s multiculturalism. This creates a unique space.”

This article was published in the Financial Times in August 2023 as part of a promotion by the Moroccan Tourist Board. Read the full piece here.

Nowhere is the Nile more beautiful than at Aswan – ancient trading outpost and guardian of Egypt’s southern gateway. While the river runs unimpeded to Cairo, Aswan sits on the granite shelf of the First Cataract, the river eddying picturesquely around riverine islands and great granite boulders. Impassable to boats, the Cataract (literally ‘waterfall’) was for centuries the natural border between Egypt and Nubia, the powerful kingdom to the south that controlled trade from sub-Saharan Africa from whence came gold, ivory, slaves, carnelian, incense, dates and camels.

Such remote and romantic borderlands generate myth-making. Aswan and Elephantine Island are key elements of Egypt’s origin story when Abu was capital of the first Upper Egyptian province in 3000BCE; here, too, resided Hapi, the hermaphrodite river god responsible for the inundation alongside Anukis, Setis and Khnum, the great ram-headed creation god of the cataract region.

Travel here catapults you through the ages. At Al Kab you’ll find the first hieroglyph and the last at Graeco-Roman Philae; Kordofan camel-herders still travel the Forty Day Road to Daraw’s market; and, the immense 1970 High Dam rivals the engineering feat of the Great Pyramid to hold back the Nile’s flood waters, drowning Lower Nubia beneath its placid waters. Travel by boat where you can and, at the end of the journey, you’ll be rewarded by the epic temple of Ozymandias – Rameses II – at Abu Simbel.

This is an excerpt from the Southern Nile Valley chapter of the Lonely Planet guide to Egypt. Published in November 2023.

Another Italy altogether, Calabria and Basilicata offer a candid travel experience full of ancient history, sparkling seas, unusual food and intriguing small-town culture. Deeply rural Calabria and Basilicata are two of Italy’s least visited regions. They’re the right place to be if you want to immerse yourself in authentic local realities - not the folkloric version of Italy, but the real deal made up of many contradictions.

The area’s inaccessible and sometimes inhospitable nature is a blessing and a curse. It has preserved innate characteristics but also stymied development. The regions are still among Italy’s poorest and there’s a long history of brigandage in these hills. The ‘Ndrangheta, Calabria’s home-grown Mafia, is considered the richest crime syndicate in the world.

Long-held stereotypes paint a picture of a backward and unchanging southern scene. But in an era of climate change and overtourism, the slow pace of life, a strong sense of community, locavore cuisine and largely unspoiled wilderness make this an increasingly attractive destination.

This text is the introduction to the Calabria and Basilicata chapter of the 2023 Lonely Planet guide to Italy. To buy a copy, click here.

There is a scene unfolding in Souk Semmarine. A drum reverberates. The air fills with the shimmering sound of qraqeb (castanets) accompanied by the syncopated calls of Gnawa musicians in flame-red robes. They process like Pied Pipers down the main artery of the market, drawing a wave of people in their wake.

Marrakech has been all but silent this winter — borders were shut to tourists in November as Omicron spread — so the sound of music and human voices is exhilarating. Shopkeepers appear on their thresholds beneath gleaming brass lanterns and brightly coloured slippers, smiling, snapping pictures, curious about the crowd. Who are these extravagantly dressed people? Where did they come from?

In fact, they are storytellers, here for the inaugural Marrakech International Storytelling Festival, a week-long event that has emerged as a silver lining from the difficult past two years.

This article appeared in the Financial Times in March 2022. Continue reading here.

A hundred years ago, Trieste was one of the great seaports of the world – an animated Riviera town, and a Mitteleuropean trading hub as easily accessible by rail from the Baltic as it was from Egypt by boat. The city’s home-grown shipping company, Lloyd Austriaco, pioneered the first leisure cruises, and helped bankroll the Suez Canal in order to ensure Trieste’s pivotal role between Europe and the rest of the world.

So, how is it these days that so few people are familiar with Trieste? While Venice hogs the headlines with the never-ending controversy of megatonne cruise ships entering its fragile lagoon, Trieste, barely two hours away, was designed for ocean-going traffic. It has a natural, 18-metre-deep port, a miles-long sandy beach and a handsome promenade with a string of jetties overlooked by luxurious Liberty-style hotels, including the Savoia Excelsior Palace, aka the “Ocean Liner Hotel”.

It’s as if a great forgetting has taken place. History, politics, geography, literature and, yes, even travel writing, have conspired to obscure Trieste’s obvious charms. In part, this is due to the immense success of Jan Morris’ acclaimed book, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. Penned 20 years ago when she was 75, Morris was at the height of her writing powers and this beguiling book wove an elegiac web about the city. Every writer (and maybe every traveller) ever since has experienced Trieste through this regretful filter.

This article appeared in the Telegraph in April 2021. Continue reading here.

When General Gordon of the ill-fated Khartoum siege visited Seychelles in 1881 he returned to London claiming he had found the original site of the Garden of Eden. It’s a claim that stuck and now forms part of the island nation’s promotion of itself as a paradise for idyllic holidays on the world’s most beautiful palm-fringed beaches.

But Seychelles is so much more than a fly-and-flop destination. It is a modern-day Jurassic Park – an evolutionary isolate with no indigenous mammals where reptiles reign supreme on 115 islands, which are themselves the remnants of an ancient landmass that broke off from the supercontinent Gondwana 125 million years ago.

It’s weird and wonderful biota includes a Sooglossus frog smaller than a fingernail, a crab so big it can climb a palm tree and cut a coconut free with its pincers, a quarter-ton giant tortoise, and a mythologised aphrodisiacal, 20kg nut – the coco de mer – once worth its weight in gold and still so coveted rangers guard the prehistoric palm forest where it grows.

This pantheon of relict species survives thanks in part to Seychelles remote location in the midst of the Indian Ocean. Mahé, the main island, is 946 nautical miles from Mombasa and 1753nm from Mumbai. But it is also thanks to the pioneering work of the Seychellois, who in the 45 years since independence have gone to extraordinary lengths to protect half the island nation’s landmass and 30 per cent of its 1.35 million sq km ocean territory, meeting the United Nations 2030 sustainability goals a full ten years ahead of schedule.

This article appeared in the Telegraph in March 2021. Continue reading here.

I’m 73 years' old and I’ve worked in the Marrakech Medina for more than 50 years. I make cloisonné, an ancient style of filigree and enamel jewellery, which comes from Tiznit, a famous centre of silversmiths in southern Morocco.

It is difficult work as the pieces are small and require a mastery of the tools. First I must weld the fine metal wires into a pattern of circles and scrolls. Then I fill the tiny spaces with powdered pigments, which I solder to form the brightly coloured enamel pattern.

I left school at 10, and worked as a welder until a family friend who was a jeweller started to teach me this craft when I was 16. He worked in the Mellah, the Jewish quarter of the Marrakech medina. At the time, it was full of Muslim and Jewish gold- and silver-smiths. Finally, when I was nearly 30, I rented my own space in a foundouk (traders warehouse) in Souk Biyadeen. It is a special place for me since it is where my workshop was born and where I found my passion for this craft.

Over the years, I have seen the medina change completely – now there are fewer artisans, new shops, manufactured souvenirs. Before Covid-19 I was one of only two artisans left in my foundouk. Now with the virus we don’t know what other changes we will see.

This piece was published by The Telegraph in December 2020. Continue reading here.

The cover image is © Elias Nazih

‘The living world is a unique and spectacular marvel.” So says Sir David Attenborough in his new documentary A Life on Our Planet, a cautionary tale about the tragedy of our time: the rapid loss of the world’s wild places and the devastating diminishment of the biodiversity that makes up the web of life on the planet. It’s a heart-wrenching but urgent watch. The scale of damage is huge but there are surprisingly simple solutions. And, travel, if properly managed, has a vital role to play in helping to preserve, protect and sustain those wild places.

That is certainly something that renowned fly-fisherman and Blue Safari Seychelles co-founder Keith Rose-Innes believes. He has spent 24 years exploring one of the most beautiful places left on earth, the Outer Islands of Seychelles – a place so pristine it provided the location for one of Blue Planet II’s most memorable sequences: a shoal of monstrous giant trevallies leaping from a shimmering sea to snatch baby terns mid-air.

“I was the first person to see that,” says Keith, whose fishing partner Devan van der Merwe helped the crew capture the shots. “A lot of things you see on Blue Planet can be seen here. This is as wild as you can get from a marine point of view.”

This article appeared in the Telegraph in November 2020. Continue reading here.

The cover image is © Blue Safari Seychelles.

There’s excitement in the conference hall as I take my socially distanced seat. Sixty journalists are gathered here from the UK, USA, France, Spain and Japan (only the Brazilians couldn’t make it). Local TV crews flank the stage. Lights dim, and we don our translation headsets like UN delegates. The big news? La Mamounia has reopened.

General manager Pierre Jochem, who has been at the helm of Morocco’s most famous heritage hotel since 2013, fields the first question, “Can La Mamounia and Marrakech survive Covid-19?” It is an urgent local concern, as tourism contributes seven per cent to Morocco’s GDP and Marrakech is the country’s most popular destination.

It might also explain the heartfelt welcome I received the previous night. Silk-jacketed Fayle Medoune – who started at La Mamounia just 15 days before lockdown – greeted me in the Salon of Honour like a long-lost friend. As we walked to my suite down the Caravaggesque corridors, he told me how he moved here from the Burj Al Arab, because La Mamounia is “the best, most authentic palace hotel in Africa”.

Back in the conference room, Jochem responds, “It was important for us to reopen, not just because it was time for our 600 staff to get back to work, but because we wanted to show that Morocco is back in business.”

This piece was published by The Telegraph in November 2020. Continue reading here.

As a few faint rain drops began to fall in the courtyard of Riad Mena, a seven-room guesthouse in the Marrakech medina. Hotelier Philomena Schurer Merckoll looked skyward at the ominous grey clouds assessing the likelihood of a downpour. This was in February, when a seasonal shower was the biggest threat to a social gathering.

At risk beneath the citrus trees were white linen sofas and red silk-embroidered floor cushions, laid out for cocktail hour, before a dinner in honor of Marrakech’s design talent. But with artworks arriving and international guests expected, she shrugged, determined the evening should go on. The furniture was rapidly whisked inside and then reassembled an hour later when the shower passed. Looking back now, in a radically altered world of shelter-in-place orders and social distancing, guests fondly recall the evening as one of the last occasions they were able to mingle freely with old and new friends. “It’s wonderful to remember that dinner now,” said Schurer Merckoll late last month. “It feels so special, because it really gives me hope of more positive times to come.”

Schurer Merckoll, 36, was raised in London by German-Norwegian parents and later spent years living in Paris, Berlin, New York and Mexico. She first traveled to Marrakech with her mother in 2005 to visit a family friend, and bought Riad Mena, an Arabo-Andalusian mansion built in the early 19th-century for a family of courtiers, on the same trip. She spent the next seven years painstakingly renovating it with the Franco-Swiss interior designer Romain Michel-Ménière, before opening it as a hotel in 2014. Initially, she had plans for a maximalist Moroccan scheme, but after finding a 1980s-era glass-and-steel Paolo Piva table in the nearby souk early in the project, she chose a starker midcentury modern aesthetic instead. As a result, the airy whitewashed rooms, which have glossy tadelakt (polished plaster) floors, are filled with Italian and Scandinavian vintage furniture offset by local textiles including kilim-covered poofs and cushions made from handiras (Moroccan wedding blankets).

This piece was published in T Magazine, the New York Times Style Magazine, in May 2020. Continue reading here.

Covid-19 has changed everything. In particular, it has changed everything about travel. As a Lonely Planet writer you learn fast that change is the only constant on the road. Still, no one was expecting the changes announced last week: that Lonely Planet is to close its Melbourne production facility and London offices “almost entirely”, as well as its magazine and Trade and Reference division. The famous guidebooks will continue to be published through the company’s Dublin and Tennessee offices, but they will also face some job cuts.

As travel has outpaced the growth of the global economy for the last eight years, Lonely Planet has grown to become the world’s largest travel publisher, accounting for 31.5% of the global guidebook market. But with planes grounded, borders closed and people quarantined, where travel is headed next is anyone’s guess. “[It’s] a sad and difficult day for all of us in the Lonely Planet family,” wrote managing director of publishing, Piers Pickard.

This piece was published by the Guardian in April 2020. Continue reading here.

Venice’s booming tourism industry is threatening the city’s very survival. But grassroots initiatives are making a difference – and may even help other cities.

Friday 15 March was a rare day in Venice: on the concourse in front of the Santa Lucia train station, Venetians outnumbered tourists. Young Venetians had skipped school to join the global youth climate strike, holding placards with statements such as “If climate was a bank, you’d save it.” The movement is especially relevant in Venice, since a 50cm rise in sea levels could see the city vanish beneath the waves.

This piece was published by the Guardian in April 2019. Continue reading here.

For years Trieste has laboured beneath its reputation for melancholy. Twenty years ago, travel writer Jan Morris called it the ultimate “nowhere-place”: an Italian city suspended in a vanished Austro-Hungarian past surrounded on all sides by Slovenia, Croatia and the Adriatic Sea. But borders aren’t where things end, they are where they begin, and Trieste is finally on the radar.

This piece was published by Lonely Planet in October 2019. Continue reading here.

The t’bourida – Gunpowder Festival – is one of the oldest folklore traditions in Morocco. Thousands of men ride in this roving rodeo – and now a handful of Moroccan women have saddled up to take them on.

“I didn’t even know that women could ride in the t’bourida (also known as fantasia, a French term),” says Moroccan photographer Zara Samiry in a voice that conveys her astonishment. “Then one day I saw a report on TV about some women riding in the festival – alongside the men, with their own guns. I was amazed so I decided to try and find them.”

This piece was published by Culture Trip in March 2020. Continue reading here.

The cover image is © Zara Samiry

It might not look like it in the dusty streets, but the Marrakech medina with its earthen ramparts is an enormous walled garden intricately divided by a jigsaw of dwellings. This model of a garden city reflects deeply held Islamic beliefs about privacy, pleasure and the restorative power of nature.

Marrakech summers regularly top 40C (104F). By 10am it is already hot. By midday the sun strikes the paving stones of the Jemaa el-Fnaa with the ferocity of a hammer on an anvil and people flee the plaza, disappearing down shadowy alleys and vanishing behind heavy cedar doors to escape the relentless heat in secret riad gardens.

In such an unforgiving environment, the greenery of a garden is an incomparable luxury. In the desert, an oasis means life itself, and as Islam emerged in the desert, an Islamic garden represented an earthly analogue for paradise itself. Even the word paradise comes from the Persian pairidaeza, which means an enclosed garden.

This piece was published by Culture Trip in February 2020. Continue reading here.

Urban legends have been made in Marrakech for a millennium, spun by Berber warlords, sugar-baron Sultans, Sufi saints and Rolling-Stones reprobates. As a result, the city has attracted more than its fair share of conquerors, travellers, entrepreneurs and creatives, but what do the locals make of their much-loved city?

This piece was published by Culture Trip in January 2020. Continue reading here.

Morocco may be a short hop across the Mediterranean from Europe, but other than the tourist magnet of Marrakech, this dazzlingly diverse country remains relatively unknown abroad. That’s a shame, because Africa’s westernmost kingdom has sublime tucked-away spots, stunningly varied geography, and a cultural richness that few places can match.

This piece was published by the Telegraph in January 2020. Continue reading here.

Youssef Safine has lived on a narrow street called Talmud Torah his whole life, a few doors down from the historic Slat Al Azama Synagogue. That is where he, as a Muslim child, learned the stories of the Mellah from an elder of Marrakech’s Jewish community.

This piece was published by Culture Trip in December 2019. Continue reading here.

Dundee isn't an obvious destination in a country with so much to offer, but Scotland's fourth largest city has big plans to transform its gritty, post-industrial landscape into a thriving hub of culture and design excellence, and one project is spearheading those changes: the new V&A. Opening in September 2018, Kengo Kuma’s awesome, space-age museum is the crown jewel in an urban redevelopment that’s turning heads both at home and abroad.

This piece was published by Lonely Planet in March 2018. Continue reading here.

Situated in the middle of the Indian Ocean, 400km northwest of Madagascar and over 1000km from the East African coast, the Seychelles is an ancient archipelago of 115 islands. While most travellers arrive trailing confetti and are content to just fly and flop on some of the world’s finest beaches, the islands possess natural wonders that hold far greater value.

This piece was published by Lonely Planet in February 2018. Continue reading here.

Click, click, tamp, swoosh! Click, click, tamp, swoosh! Clouds of steam plume above the shining, eight-spout Gaggia and a thick stream of unctuous, dark coffee trickles into tiny espresso cups, some topped with a velvety cloak of frothed milk, before clattering down on the marble-topped bar.

The breakfast crowd presses forward uttering rapid fire calls for “un caffè!,” “un cappuccino!,” “un macchiato!” When the coffee arrives, a space at the bar opens and a rare moment of calm descends. There is nothing besides the hot, bittersweet taste of the coffee and a word or two of conversation with your fellow barflies. One sip, two sips, possibly three and it’s gone, and the day surges on.

Given their love of the bean, you might think that Italians invented coffee. They didn’t. Coffee is native to East Africa and the first records of it being roasted and drunk come from Sufi shrines in Yemen in the 15th century. But ever since the so-called “wine of the Arabs” reached Europe, landing on the quay in front of the Basilica di San Marco in Venice in the 17th century, the Italian passion for coffee has created a culture unrivaled anywhere else in the world and which now underpins an industry second only to crude oil, valued at over US$100 billion.

This piece was published by L’Italo Americano in December 2017. Continue reading here.

Marrakesh is a city on the edge. Here, Europe, Africa and the Middle East mingle, and past and present are hard to tell apart. This ancient trading hub is a creative sweet spot where ideas thrive and flourish, making it a muse for artists and designers from around the world.

This piece was published by Lonely Planet in November 2017. Continue reading here.

Wander the back streets of Murano and you can hear the roar of furnaces behind blind factory walls. The air trembles and there’s a perpetual orange glow in the high clerestory windows that remain just out of reach. It is the hot air from the glass ovens burning at 1500˚C that rushes like dragon’s breath through the industrial pipework to plume atop tall chimneys like the blow of a sleeping Leviathan in the shallow Venetian lagoon.

Seldom do visitors get the chance to peer inside, for since the 13th century when the glass foundries moved to Murano as a fire safety precaution, trade secrets were so closely guarded that any artisan who left the city was considered guilty of treason. But these days it is Murano’s cloistered masters who are in danger of extinction due to competition from cheaper imports, a decline in young apprentices and a lack of innovation befitting the 21st century.

This piece was published by L’Italo Americano in October 2017. Continue reading here.

I can’t think of the right way to ask, but I’m perturbed by the button labelled “enema”. We’re standing in the lovely grey-green quartzite bathroom of a vast villa at Zil Pasyon, Six Senses’ new sybaritic retreat on the island of Félicité in the Seychelles.

Despite the insanely beautiful view through the wraparound picture windows of chrysoprase-coloured waters, we stand huddled in the corner. That is, my husband and I and Andrew, our GEM (Guest Experience Manager), who is enthusiastically showing us the functions of the hi-tech loo.

Andrew takes the control panel off the wall, wielding it like a games console as the lavatory gently gurgles, spritzes, blow dries and deodorises with alarming animation. While I know integrated wellness is at the heart of the Six Senses concept – and is one of the reasons that readers of Telegraph Travel voted it the best hotel group in the world in 2016 – this is not what I was expecting.

This piece was published by the Telegraph in October 2016. Continue reading here.

Warm, lemon-yellow sunshine on a cornflower blue lake; the sound of leaves falling in the forest like soft rain; carpets of crimson berries crunching underfoot – nowhere does autumn come in such a burst of sensory glory as in Finland. Locals even have a special name for the fleeting season, ruska, and for a few short weeks in September and early October ruska pilgrims head out to catch summer’s final flourish before the winter darkness descends.

This piece was first published by Lonely Planet in October 2015. Continue reading here.