In print and online

Check out some of our latest work In print and online, including a review of Pierre Gagnaire's extravagant restaurant Reflet at the InterContinental Dubai Festival City in the latest issue of Gulf Air's in-flight magazine Gulf Life. You can read the online version of the review here and you can also take a look at our first review of Reflet on Fodor's Hot List if you missed it last year. In the same issue of Gulf Life you'll also find some photos that Terry took of Chef Mohammed Hellal at Damascus' Four Seasons hotel. We also interviewed the Chef two years ago while we were there updating the Syria section of Lonely Planet's Syria and Lebanon guide (we had written the Lebanon section and front matter for the 2004 edition). If you're heading down under to Perth (pictured) in the near future, rip out Walk This Way: Perth and test out my walking tour around Western Australia's capital which features in this month's issue of Connect, the Business Traveler magazine of Carlson-Wagonlit; you can print up the online version here. If you ever get a chance to do it, let me know what you think.

The appeal of Perth: endless sunshine, blue skies and a bearable "lightness of being"

I've just returned to our temporary home and office (my uncle and aunt's house at Bendigo, north of Melbourne) after almost a week visiting family in Perth, Western Australia, the country's most isolated capital. And as much as I love it here, returning has been a shock to the system. While we had clear blue skies, daily sunshine and temperatures in the mid-high 20s (Celcius) in Perth for a week, here it's grey and cloudy, it feel like it hit 0 degrees last night (and probably did) and we're well and truly rugged up in the winter woolies, and stoking the fireplaces every night. While I was busy seeing my family and still worked every day, I somehow felt rejuventated and reinvigorated from being there. It's not only the weather, but it's the water everywhere - from the Swan River that meanders through the city, lake-like in parts, to the beautiful beaches of Cottesloe and Scarborough where we stayed a few days. There's a "lightness of being" (thanks, Milan Kundera) to Perth that you don't find in grey old Melbourne or even gorgeous Sydney, no matter how beautiful that city is - and I think it's because they're big, fast, polluted, high-density, traffic-heavy cities. There's a lot to be said for small, slow-paced, clean, low-rise, low-key, and laidback cities like Perth. I've spent a fair bit of time in them on this trip and I'm increasingly finding them more appealling. I think it's a shame that the vast majority of travellers to Australia have a few sights and a couple of cities on their lists to tick off - Uluru (Ayers Rock), the Great Barrier Reef (Qld) and Kakadu National Park (NT) tend to comprise the top three sights, and the big cities of Sydney and Melbourne mark the main entry and exit points. Far fewer foreign travellers make it to Australia's other cities, the highly underrated cities of Darwin, Adelaide and Perth. Yet I'm finding them far more alluring.

P.S. I've just written a story on Perth for Carlson Wagonlit's business travel magazine Connect; I'll let you know when it's out.

Best time to visit Australia? It may be summer, but don't head Down Under

How well do you research the best times of year to travel to places before you buy your tickets? I'm asking because I was astonished to see Queensland's Great Barrier Reef listed as a place to visit now on a popular travel magazine's site. This is in fact the worst time of year to visit northern Queensland. Indeed, anywhere in northern Australia, known as 'the tropics' - which gives a hint why! It's currently the Wet season, which means it's sweltering, it's raining constantly, there are regular thunderstorms, high winds, strong chances of cyclones, and frequent flooding. And it's going to stay this way until April. Although the tourism bodies and tour operators still try to encourage travellers to visit now. In tropical Queensland for instance they market the season as 'The Green' rather than The Wet as they do in the Northern Territory and Western Australia. The Green (like The Wet) begins in early November with a period called The Build-Up when things start get steamy, there are spectacular lightening displays and the first monsoonal showers fall. The heaviest rains hit in January and February, when the humidity is at its highest, before easing off and stopping in April or May when The Dry begins. As a result of the rain, rivers are full, waterfalls flowing, and everything is lush and green. Some argue this is the best time to visit the NT's Kakadu National Park* for instance - they're probably right, but you must have flexible travel plans. Dirt roads turn to mud (if not raging rivers!) and are closed, and if you get trapped somewhere you could be stuck for days if not weeks. Keep in mind the official tourist season (which begins in April/May) ends in October: many resorts shut for the season, operators stop offering tours, and businesses let their staff take leave, staying open for shorter hours with a skeleton team. On the plus side, hotels staying open offer reduced rates. As for the rest of Oz ... while we're finding it lovely and warm here in the south right now, everybody is talking about the "heatwave", bushfires are blazing in SA and NSW, and because school kids are on summer holiday families take their annual breaks, so accommodation is fully booked and anything near the beach is expensive. As far as I'm concerned, the best times to visit anywhere in Australia are spring and autumn (fall). But before you buy your tickets, rather than following false advice, check Australia's reliable Bureau of Meteorology website.

* Take a look at the fascinating six seasons that the indigenous people of Kakadu follow here.

Pictured? Our vehicle on the Mereenie Loop, an outback track west of Alice Springs, just before we were caught in a flash flood in early November. Read about our adventure on Terry's blog Wide angles, wine and wanderlust in his post Staying calm in the eye of the storm, part 1 and part 2.

Train noise... the ideal soundtrack to tracking shots of epic landscapes

Don't you love a train that still goes clackety clack clackety clack? The Indian Pacific may not make that precise sound but it does make noise and that's one of the things I loved about it. Japan's Kawasaki company may be developing a new fast train to criss-cross the tiny country at a super-speedy 350 km per hour, but in this colossal place that is Australia travellers' seem to like that the Indian Pacific averages just 85 km an hour and takes three days to traverse this vast space. Indeed the slow pace is an intrinsic part of the appeal of the Indian Pacific's 4,352 km journey. As well as reflecting a growing global trend toward slow travel and a more general desire to slow down and enjoy the simple things in life more (one of the most popular activities among guests socializing in the Platinum lounge on the Indian Pacific was board games and cards), I think it also reflects a need by travellers (both Australian and foreign) to fully grasp the immensity of Australia and understand just how wide its wide open spaces are. Something you wouldn't properly appreciate if you whizzed through it all at 300km per hour in a day or so and the majestic scenery outside was merely a blur. While Kawasaki's press statement boasts that their new train will be super-quiet, I think I'd miss those familiar train sounds of metal against metal, the grinding on the tracks, the occasional screeches, the increase in volume as you step from one carriage into another, and all of it punctuated by an eery silence (spookiest in the velvety black of the night) when the train stops to wait for a freight train to pass by. To me, train noise is the ideal soundtrack to the endless tracking shots of epic landscapes that roll by the window on a train trip in Australia.

Another thing I loved about Platinum service was the ability to see out the windows on both sides of the train from within our cabin. Our window out to the corridor was aligned with the window on the other side of the train so as to enable some serious scenery absorption. That, combined with the slow pace and clackety-clack soundtrack was very conducive to some wonderful train-dreaming.

Pictured? A view of the Western Australian wheatbelt a few hours out of Perth through the wooden blinds from our window. The blinds did go up, by the way. I just loved looking at the landscapes through the horizontal lines.

Western Australia in Wanderlust

Western Australia is this wonderful vast place in Australia that boasts the country's best beaches, best weather, most breathtaking landscapes, and the most enviable laidback lifestyle of all of Australia's states. It takes up around a third of the country yet has only a tenth of the nation's population so there are lots of wide open spaces. But what I love about it is that even when you're in the middle of nowhere you'll come across the most extraordinary things, like this fridge stencilled with a camel which we came across on a dusty backroad in the outback near the rabbit proof fence. Western Oz was the first state I ever travelled to - aged four years old - in Australia, from my home town of Sydney. It's also the state we return to the most often when we go back to Australia these days, whether it's for writing assignments or to visit family. And it's the state I'm most fond of now. For a whole variety of reasons, but mainly because of its natural beauty, its spectacular outback, its quirky spirit, its fascinating characters, and its fabulous food and wine! You can read more about Western Australia in my piece for UK travel magazine Wanderlust, which is this month's cover story. If you live outside of the UK, you can download a copy of the story from my Media Bistro page.

The world's most jawdropping drives, pt 1

We do a lot of driving as part of our guidebook research - rather, my partner and co-author Terry drives and I do the trip planning and navigating. So it's inevitable that some of the most memorable aspects of our trips are the roads we drive. I stumbled across Matador's The World's Most Spectacular Roads, which inspired this post. As I only write about places I've been, here's my pick of some of the globe's most jawdropping drives from the roads we've travelled over the last few years. I've categorized them by country or region, as some destinations are gifted with so many dramatically beautiful routes:
1. WESTERN AUSTRALIA: this colossal island's most stunning drives are in the West. Our favorites are in the Kimberley and Pilbara regions of the Northwest, especially those through the area's national parks, including Karjini, Purnululu (Bungle Bungles), Millstream-Chichester and the Kennedy Range National Parks. Empty roads run through flat arid outback landscapes sprinkled with strange wildflowers, incredible rock formations, and mountains sliced with deep river gorges. These are also the country's most isolated roads (pictured) where you can drive 900 kilometres between towns and not see a soul, so a 4WD with extra fuel, water and supplies is recommended.
2. MAINLAND GREECE: the country's mainland boasts some of the planet's most breathtaking drives. Those we've loved best are the road from Edessa via Florina and Pisoderi to the splendid Prespa Lakes and fishing village of Psarades, near the border with Macedonia and Yugoslavia, which boasts some of the most pristine country we've come across; the narrow roads through the high country of the Pindos range with their monstrous rugged snow-capped mountains, hills thick with shrubs in every shade of green, and grey granite rock formations around Vikos Gorge; and the wild ruggedly beautiful Mani region of the Peloponnese (read more about our Greek travels on our Lonely Planet Greece Trip Journal).
3. CRETE: yes, we know Crete is an island of Greece, but Crete has so many amazing drives with spectacular scenery it deserves a listing of its own. The high roads of the isolated southeast coast skirt the mountains offering virtually birds-eye-view sea vistas, scenic routes snake through the elevated rural plateaus of central Crete offering picturesque views of villages and farmland, while the views from the windy roads of the west coast are so awe-inspring you'll find yourself stopping at every turn to take photos.
4. CALABRIA: Aspromonte, Sila and Pollino National Parks in Calabria, Italy, offer breathtaking scenery. In all three national parks, high roads snake through thick forests that form canopies over the roads - the drives are spooky in parts (very dark and moody) and the air fresh and fragrant. But once out of the woods, the views are almost always stunning, whether it's a vista of a hilltop village cascading down a mountain or a field blanketed with wildflowers.
5. CYPRUS: good narrow roads criss-cross the central Troodos mountains through thick aromatic pine forests dotted with Byzantine fresco-filled churches and splendid monasteries, the most impressive being the serpentine road through Cedar Valley; in the northwest, from Pomos to Kato Pyrgos, pretty fishing harbours bob with boats while around Kato Pyrgos the road rises to majestic heights, where it's just the mountain goats enjoying magnificent coastal vistas; and in Northern Cyprus, the road through the Karpaz Peninsula takes you through pristine country where wild donkeys graze on green meadows, by pretty turquoise coves watched over by crumbling Byzantine churches, and to one of the island's best beaches, a wide stretch of sand backed by high dunes.
Read part 2 here.

Top 5 indigenous cultural tours in Western Australia

Some of the best guided walks I've ever done have been with Australian guides. The Aussie guides tend to be obsessive when it comes to developing specialist knowledge, which they intersperse with fascinating facts and trivia and sprinkle it with humor. They're often self-effacing and nearly always gregarious and easy-going. And the Australian guides I've done walks with have had a special connection to the place they're introducing visitors to. No more so than Australia's Aboriginal guides. Here's my pick of Western Australia's best indigenous Australian cultural tours:
1) On Wula Guda Nyinda tours, at Monkey Mia in the Shark Bay World Heritage area, Darren 'Capes' Capewell (pictured) teaches you 'how to let the bush talk to you', tracking, bush tucker, bush medicine, and bush survival skills, along with some basics in the local Mulgana language.
2) Kujurta Buru tours, in the far north-west at Broome, take groups wading through the mangroves of azure-coloured Roebuck Bay to learn the art of fishing the traditional way, hunting in the local area with traditional implements, and essential bush survival techniques.
3) Yamatji Cultural Trails, on the central coast at Geraldton, take groups on overnight walks to important indigenous sites. There you get to camp out under the stars and gather around the campfire to learn about the history of the traditional owners of the land and discuss issues of contemporary significance to indigenous people.
4) At Kodja Place Interpretive Centre, at Kojonup in WA’s south, an elder from the Nyoongar tribe teaches visitors some of his people's traditional practices then sits them down around a fire and tells magical stories from the Dreaming over cups of good old-fashioned Aussie billy tea.
5) At Yanchep National Park, not far from Perth, the local Nyoongar people performance traditional dances and give didgeridoo lessons to travellers.
For more information on indigenous cultural tourism take a look at the website of WAITOC, the Western Australian Indigenous Tour Operators Committee.

Guides: a model guide from the Mulgana mob at Monkey Mia

For all my criticism of guides, there have been a few that have impressed us, and there has been one that changed our lives. Darren ‘Capes’ Capewell, an indigenous Australian from the Mulgana tribe, runs cultural walks through the bushland and along the shores of Monkey Mia in the Shark Bay World Heritage area on the north-west coast of Western Australia. Capes' father is from the Mulgana mob (tribe) and his mother from the Nardi mob, so he’s an expert on aboriginal country. We did a couple of walks with Capes while researching our Lonely Planet Perth and Western Australia guidebook. His walks are called ‘Wula Guda Nyinda’, which means ‘you come this way’, and after telling us that we were Mulgana mob for the day, he said: “Take soft steps. Today you’re going to learn how to respect country.” And he had us from that moment. After a few hours of stepping softly through the sandy scrub-land we learnt that what appeared to be arid country was in fact a "bush supermarket" and that the vegetation was a smorgasbord. Capes broke twigs from branches and picked berries from trees and we learnt to identify and taste bush tucker. We learnt how to find water and how to create it if we couldn't. We learnt that the supermarket was also a pharmacy. A plant Capes called ‘pigface’ could be applied to skin to soothe sunburn, and coastal myrtle, like Vic’s Vapour Rub, could be rubbed under the nose if you had a cold. So while we were 'shopping' and food-tasting, we were also learning valuable survival skills. Capes taught us "how to let the bush talk to you” by listening to the birdsong and rustles in the grass. We learnt how to identify animals by their tracks in the sand and how to tell the size of a kangaroo by the size of his poo! And along the way Capes taught us some of the Mulgana language. Keen for more, we joined Capes for a second walk to an aboriginal campsite where he told us dreamtime stories under the stars. As Terry said the next day "We walked a few kilometres in just a few hours yet we dipped our toes into thousands of years of Aboriginal knowledge of the land." We learnt about bush tucker, medicine and survival, but most of all we experienced firsthand that special connection indigenous Australians have to the land, to country. To me, it's the ability to share that special connection that makes a guide great and a walk or tour a memorable, if not life-changing, experience.

10 Places You Must Go in 2008: places I have been

These are the 10 places I think you should experience in 2008, based on places I have been myself, and here are some quick reasons why. I'll give you my own wish list of 'it' destinations for 2008, places I have never been but hope to visit, in the new year.
1. SYRIA: colossal history confronts you at every corner, the world's best archaeological sites, crusader castles, sublime Umayyad Mosque, bustling medieval souqs, the Mid East's tastiest food, beautiful Damascene houses, artisans at work, Euphrates River, Dead Cities, Palmyra, Bosra, and the friendliest people in the world.
2. BUENOS AIRES: because it is as buzzy as they say it is, atmospheric barrios, architectural mishmash of architecture, lively markets and parks, fabulous bars and restaurants, great meat and wine, all-night nightlife, traditional peñas, Feria de Mataderos, gritty backstreets.
3. MOROCCO: do a road trip for moonlike landscapes, sublime desert scenery, abandoned mountain palaces, Berber desert citadels set amid date palm oases, then stay with Maryam in Marrakesh.
4. WESTERN AUSTRALIA: Broome for Australia's best beach and sunsets, Monkey Mia for WA's most tranquil beach and best indigenous walk, spectacular Kimberley & Pilbara regions, Margaret River's wild coast and wonderful wineries.
5. ANTWERP & BRUSSELS: because Antwerp is Europe's most underrated, easygoing city and Brussels isn't boring at all, superb dining scenes, laidback bars, pubs and atmospheric brown cafes, multicultural neighborhoods, lively jazz scenes, excellent museums, cutting-edge fashion, and those fantastic mussels!
6. THAILAND: road trip it off the beaten track, through lush green landscapes of limestone mountains and impenetrable jungle, eat tasty food in small town markets, meet the world's sweetest people, and well, okay, squeeze in a spa treatment at beach resort if you must.
7. ISTANBUL: after the umissable historical sights, the Blue Mosque, Aya Sofia, Grand Bazaar, Topkaki Palace, and whirling dervishes, explore modern Istanbul, its lively backstreets, vibrant restaurants, bars and cafes, and get on the water for a cruise up the Bosphorus.
8. BALTIC CITIES: TALLINN: beautiful walled old city with perfectly preserved pastel-colored medieval architecture, kitsch experience of trying medieval food, sublime contemporary cuisine; RIGA: elegant art nouveau architecture, great walks, pretty parks and squares, lively pubs; and VILNIUS: laidback vibe, beautiful baroque churches, hearty food, and wild nightlife.
9. DUBAI: for reasons most travel writers won't tell you: Emirati and Bedouin culture and heritage, the courtyard wind-tower architecture in the Persian Bastakiya neighbourhood, gritty backstreets, Deira 'Creek' views from Bur Dubai, hospitable people, superb restaurants, and a lively contemporary art scene.
10. OMAN: majestic forts that make you feel like a kid again set in lush date palm oases, the Musandam peninsula, the Arabian Norway, the pretty waterfront at Muscat with its stunning harbour, and laidback Muttrah souq.

Morocco: the people you meet, part 4

I've shared with you my love of the road trip and the people you meet along the way. Nowhere is a road trip more satisfying than in Morocco. Syria comes a close second and Western Australia follows not far behind. But our road trips in Morocco have brought us the most pleasure. Like the time we drove from Marrakesh to Essaouira. We must have stopped a dozen times. The first was to snap some pics of goats standing in an Argan tree eating its leaves. (Have you ever tasted the nutty Argan oil? Dip some bread in it - it's delicious.) Our second stop is still the most vivid of the trip for me. We pulled over to admire the artful loading of blue and yellow sacks of golden hay on the back of a couple of unhappy beasts of burden, a rather handsome long-lashed camel and his less attractive donkey friend. Their young master seemed to take much amusement from their groans. And even more amusement from our interest. That's what I love about travel, that the pleasure of people meeting on the road is often two way.