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Hit the road to explore Thailand’s holiday island of Phuket.... |
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Alice Springs, in Central Australia, combines cultural and adventure tourism in one exhilarating package. |
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Some fresh ideas for spending time out in Sydney |
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Within easy reach of America’s eastern cities, you can drift back to a gentler era, turning the clock back to the dawn of the industrial era, before the sparks and steam of the railways replaced the gentler motions of water pouring into locks and mules plodding along towpaths. |
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Cruising the Interstates, negotiating Tinseltown’s spaghetti junctions, raising the dust in the Mojave Desert....images made familiar by the silver screen. What is the reality? |
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So much has changed in Nepal since the heady days of the great Asian overland journey in the Seventies, let alone since Kipling evoked this description of the semi-mythical city he had never seen. |
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Call it the peace dividend: the ancient capital of the Khmer Empire now teems with tourists. Here are some tips for getting the best from one of Asia’s great monuments - and a different way to get there from Phnom Penh, the capital. |
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Discover the story behind the oldest landscape on the planet |
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The American West opens up ahead as you cross the Missouri, westbound to South Dakota |
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This Singapore-sized island kingdom offers the ideal stopover introduction to the Middle East - sunshine and sparkling turquoise waters, smart shopping and a few sights, six hours short of London. |
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In the Victorian gold rush city of Bendigo, Russell Jack, Chinese Australian community leader, has never let the lack of a few million stand between him and his vision. The museum that Jack built is home to the world's oldest and longest Chinese imperial dragons. |
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Rub shoulders with millionaire fish farmers and other larger-than-life denizens of the Outback around the rugged coast of South Australia’s little-known Eyre Peninsula |
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Some time after midnight. Three naked males, the others virtual strangers to me, are sweating profusely in the 80-degree heat of a Russian banya or bathhouse. One grabs a swatch of aromatic birch branches and starts systematically beating another. This is male bonding, Russian style. |
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Within another year this dusty ribbon of gravel will become another busy touring route for weekend warriors, when the last stretch across the high plains is tar-sealed. Now is the time to experience the magic... |
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Philip Game meanders along the Welsh border in search of... books |
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Explore the mystique, the adrenaline rush, the paranoia even, peculiar to border towns around the world |
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They’re native-born Spaniards but their first language is Catalan, not Spanish. For what it’s worth, the bullrings have fallen into disrepair. |
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Here are five (or more) fresh-air things to do in and around Brisbane |
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Melbourne’s Coastal Art Trail around Port Phillip Bay celebrates the generations of Australian artists who have painted our favourite coastal landscapes. |
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Forget the old Iron Curtain nasties; one of Europe's least-known countries is one of the most scenic and hospitable |
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Phnom Penh tour guide Bun Nguon knows every step of the bone-shaking road journey from the capital up Route 5 to Battambang: from the Khmer Rouge labour camps of the Cardamom Mountains he trudged 400 kilometres home and pick up the pieces of his life. |
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Whilst the British may disparage ‘Oxbridge’ as the home of an ivory tower elite, England’s two venerable university cities are quite different places.
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From Roman amphitheatre to Muslim Medina, ancient Carthage to Saharan salt lakes, Tunisia offers much more than sunshine and sand. |
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Nepal’s Chitwan National Park preserves a tract of lowland forest – tiger, rhinoceros and elephant country – far removed from the snow-capped Himalaya for which the landlocked nation is so well known. |
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This is the way to enjoy Galician barnacles: take hold, twist and withdraw the edible portion, not much bigger than your thumbnail. |
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The deserts of northern South Australia produce most of the world's precious opal, gouged out of the ground by ruggedly-independent miners. |
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Exquisitely manicured, the halcyon Cotswold villages of Painswick, Broadway, Bibury and Bourton-on-the-Water could easily be stage sets. |
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The villa accommodation boom is leading Bali's renaissance as a top-end destination. |
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The thylacine, the Tasmanian tiger, has been declared extinct: but many prefer to believe a few survive, and where else but deep in the forests of the Tarkine wilderness? |
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Never a dull moment on the long, dusty road which follows Australia’s largest river, even when the drought-stricken Darling is little more than a string of stagnant pools. |
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Darwin - Frontline Australia, as the license plate slogans put it? Australia's most unusual city, Darwin has always been first landfall for visitors from the north: Macassan trepang-hunters; the Imperial Japanese Air Force and the boat people. Today the only hostile invaders are the box jellyfish and the saltwater crocodile. |
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The sleepy tropical island of Diu clings like a flea to the underbelly of the Gujarati elephant, teasing its giant neighbour’s itch (or rather, its thirst). |
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Where better to start exploring London’s past than the banks of the Thames, for centuries the main artery of the greatest mercantile city the world had ever known? |
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From an obscure colony to a war zone patrolled by UN peacekeepers… it sounds like somewhere in Africa. But the Democratic Republic of Timor Leste lies almost at Asia's furthest extremity, one half of an island a short flight from Bali or from northern Australia. |
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Foodies and fashionistas delight at the Spitalfields market in London's East End |
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Where else to Eat, Pray, (and) Love? Elizabeth Gilbert’s personal journey in search of self-fulfilment reached its conclusion in Ubud, the spiritual heart of Bali. |
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At Echuca, where the Campaspe and the Goulburn run into the mighty Murray, floods –and drought – were always been a way of life for Australia's largest inland river port. |
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Edinburgh’s New Town remains arguably the world’s finest example of Georgian town planning and architecture, but two centuries on, the austere terraced townhouses and the luxuriant private parks wear a comfortable patina. |
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From the fiery brick-red of Marrakech to the lemon tints of Meknes, Morocco’s older cities seem to be colour-coded. |
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At dawn on December 3, 1854, thirty or more men died when British redcoats and colonial police attacked a makeshift stockade manned by rebel miners on the gold fields west of Melbourne.
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Amidst Java’s teeming millions, a comfortable express train is a capsule of calm, if not without hazards of its own... |
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Kamchatka is the show-stopper of Russia's Far East, a 'wild west' frontier region |
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Discover a do-it-yourself Fiji away from the big-name resorts... |
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India's oldest and largest tiger reserve is the legacy of the last of the Great White Hunters |
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What better summertime drive than to follow Virginia’s Appalachian parkways through some of the finest countryside in the eastern United States? |
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Rent a farm cottage somewhere in Normandy, Brittany or the Loire, then spend the next week exploring towns and villages harking back to William the Conqueror. |
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Fancy setting up a bucolic retreat in the French countryside? |
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The passengers have clattered downstairs to the ferry’s dimly-lit hold, squeezing back into dozens of cars, trucks and vans which have spent the journey packed into line, front to back. Now… not exactly the chequered flag, but the ramp has lowered into place, the crewman waves each vehicle forward in turn. We accelerate up onto the ramp, out into the daylight, clattering ashore onto virgin territory. |
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Will it still be there next year? |
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Many of the rough-hewn shelter huts scattered across the Australian Alps represent the legacy of earlier, more innocent visitors, including the now-banished mountain cattlemen. |
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An unlikely cultural capital, Glasgow's uncomprisingly Victorian streetscape provides the setting for an assemblage of fine galleries and museums. |
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Victoria's touring route for all seasons |
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Experience one of Australia's most dramatic landscapes: a cliff-hanging scenic drive around Victoria's southwestern coastline on the Great Ocean Road. |
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Forget the flamenco. What about some stirring reels from a Galician piper? Spain is a land of many parts, the more so since the blessed departure of the dour Franco years. |
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At first sight it’s an unlikely destination: Waikiki West perhaps, an Hispanic Hawaii, America transplanted to a dot in the ocean due north of New Guinea. |
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Yesterday we stalked one of India's last lions and her cubs; later that evening we joined in a garba, a neighbourhood carnival, joining in a Gujarati folk dance. |
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Here lie kings... inside the grassy hemispherical mound the temperature drops as the passage burrows into the heart of the tumulus. |
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Pull on your leathers to explore the Mornington Peninsula, ‘Melbourne’s backyard’, suggests Philip Game |
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Victoria’s heart of gold is a land of faded glories, of dreams which won’t quite die. |
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Since the time of the Shang the Yellow River basin has nurtured one Chinese dynasty after another, their capitals rising and falling in turn. |
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Bac Ho, Uncle Ho, presides over the square facing the gingerbread French town hall and the red flag flies above the dictator’s palace which the Viet Cong tanks gate-crashed in April 1975. |
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Hanoi, where the late leader lies in state, is the true Ho Chi Minh City |
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Coming to terms with the South Korean capital |
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The province "West of the Mountains" is a land of loess, the rugged dun-coloured country sandwiched between the Great Wall and the Yellow River. |
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Indonesian Papua is Australasia's last frontier: a little-known land where Muslim Asia coexists uneasily with Melanesia; a land which long concealed the world's richest deposits of copper and gold. |
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Halfway down to sub-polar Macquarie Island lies a cluster of five subantarctic island groups, scattered across the Southern Ocean to the south and east of New Zealand. |
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South East Asia’s favourite fruit provides an apt metaphor for a city which no longer deserves to be dismissed as squalid, dirty and charmless. However, a rich feast of sticky, custard-like flesh awaits those eager enough to withstand the noxious smell of this football-sized fruit and wrest open the formidable spiked carcass. |
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A venerable coffee plantation has been reborn as a boutique resort in the mountains of central Java |
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To travel aboard Malaysia's East Coast Railway is more important than to arrive. |
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A booming city which was once a tin miners’ camp; Kuala Lumpur mingles Malay, Chinese, Indian and other cultural strains in a 21st century metropolis sometimes futuristic. |
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Russia's remote Kuril Islands are not a people place |
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Come clean. You don't know where the Baltic countries fit on the map, or which capital is which. I didn't either. |
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Aloof from the world, Burma / Myanmar remains a land of mysteries, some dark, others whimsical.
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Within sixty kilometres of Seoul, a conurbation of twenty million, Stalinist troops stand ready to shoot on sight in defence of their hermit kingdom |
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Slumbering beside the Mekong amidst the mountains of northern Laos, Luang Prabang must be the only Asian city in which one hardly need look before crossing the street. |
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No customer is too picky for this boutique butcher in an unlikely corner of London's East End |
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A relative backwater today, Malacca formed the crucible for much of the recorded history of this multiracial nation |
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On a long, hot stretch of road I’d begun to nod off, when the bus stopped abruptly. A pair of phantasmagorical figures, masked and costumed in feathers, technicolour rags and war-paint were prancing at the roadside, strolling players in search of a gig. |
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Waiting for a bus is rarely fun, but on the Mediterranean island nation of Malta... |
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Mountains loom up from the canyon floor, dwarfing the 17th-century mission church. Cacti reach for a hot, china-blue sky; children scrabble in the dust outside the church whilst stetson-hatted figures come and go in battered utility trucks. The quintessential Mexico… |
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There's much to explore in the Russian capital, deservedly one of the world's great cities, declares Philip Game. |
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Back to the Future, in a remote corner of eastern Arabia |
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Anhar Setjadibrata, one-time medical student and lawyer, developed a consuming interest in preserving Indonesia's cultural heritage... |
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Enigmatic ruins of a floating city, built by a lost civilisation, survive on the remote Micronesian island of Pohnpei |
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Explore a mysterious landscape of deserted mountains, black lakes and red earth, an ancient terrain which conceals an exceptional ecological diversity. |
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Hush... the first notes of the flute waft through the balmy air. Two hundred pairs of hands wave gracefully - keeping time with the flies, rampant after recent rains. |
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Journey by train on the real ‘orient express’ down through Malaysia to Singapore at a tiny fraction of the price and five times the fun. Rice paddies, rubber trees and rainforests glide past your window... Colourful local trains traverse the heart of the Peninsula. |
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In the desert you can hear your heart thump... |
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The Outback is a state of mind, not simply a line on the map, and western Queensland proves the point. |
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Rural South Australia is somehow… different. |
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Not too big and not too small, the hill town of Pai offers a delightful retreat for travellers of all ages. |
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From the bean stews and mountain cheeses of Asturias to the cured ham and virgin olive oils of Extremadura, the Paradores offer an introduction to the best of Spain.
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Australia’s tropical Whitsunday Islands reveal their treasures |
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Galicia’s capital, Santiago de Compostella, is the goal of devout pilgrims who, since medieval times, have followed the Camino de Santiago across northern Spain to reach the legendary tomb of St James.
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Discover an island of rain-drenched forests and coastal mangroves, whose mysteries deepen through the bottom of a glass of stupefying sakau, a drink made from pepper bushes. |
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Each year a dusty throng of Rajasthanis, pious Hindu pilgrims, holy men and spectators from far and wide descends on this normally somnolent desert outpost. |
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Ride ‘The Ghan’ through the desert to Alice Springs… and on to Darwin. Named for the Afghan cameleers who worked the route, the first steam train in 1929 took two days to reach Alice Springs. |
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It’s eleven at night, but who wants to sleep, anyway? |
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1968: 'Fab Four' seek eastern wisdom at Rishikesh, joined by a young Canadian photographer |
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Is the Finke the world’s oldest (and driest) watercourse? |
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From the somnolent museum town of Suzdal to the Volga River port of Yaroslavl, the historic towns and cities northeast of Moscow exert their gentle charm |
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A two thousand-year-old touring route crosses the heart of Spain |
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Never let a beetle piss in your eye, warns Philip Game |
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In Santa Fe even the parking stations are built with adobe in the Spanish colonial style. |
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City-dwellers recharge their batteries – and graze on nature’s finest – within an hour or two of metropolitan Brisbane |
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The seaside towns of South Australia’s South-East cling to a sun-scorched coast, a shadeless landscape of low limestone crags, dunes and lagoons. |
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The Welsh do share that English passion for privacy… finding a sea-front inn on the Llyn Peninsula becomes quite a challenge. |
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By the eager people's bureaucrats of South West China's remote Diqing Region, that is... |
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There is something magic about flying across Africa, bound for the world’s largest wildlife reserve. |
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Don’t overlook one of the last frontiers in the South Pacific, writes Philip Game |
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Conceived from the first to be one of Europe's great cities, St Petersburg grew from the vision of just one man, a monarch who engaged the finest architects of the day. |
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A quick guide to Tha Pae Road, Chiang Mai, Thailand |
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The Outback sets its own priorities. If you get it wrong out here, you may not see home again. Is the easy availability of camper vans and guidebooks creating a false sense of security? |
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Often overlooked, Taiwan - the other China - can certainly overturn the preconceptions of a first-time visitor |
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Mix green from verdigris; blue from precious lapis lazuli, transported from the Orient; yellow from orpiment, a sulphide of lead; collect and crush cochineal beetles to make a rich red... |
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Time to pick my way back down to street level. But as I turned, I found the spiral staircase enveloped in darkness... |
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The ancient port of Tangier is described by its partisans as the White Dove on the Shoulder of Africa: white cuboid buildings tumble down the slopes around a horseshoe-shaped bay. |
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Kiribati hold its head high, in the face of rising sea levels |
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Cross the river at Mae Sai, and step back fifty years into Myanmar |
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European holidaymakers flock to Malta for the sunshine, but the rest of us savour fine food with an Italian touch, and other legacies of a long and tortuous history - including the post-War exodus of emigrants. |
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The day begins early for those saffron-robed legionaries... |
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Nauru, the world’s smallest island republic, searches for a sustainable future... but is money laundering or hosting Australia's unwanted boat people the answer? |
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...in Yunnan's Tiger Leaping Gorge |
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Riding the rails across Thailand and its near neighbours
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Trieste: the end of an empire, or two |
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Fiji’s exclusive Turtle Island hideaway came into being through one man’s journey of self-discovery. |
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Walking in Central Australia is rewarding when you rise with the sun! |
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On the outskirts of Newhaven, Phillip Island, stands an unlikely visitor attraction, housed within a starkly industrial aircraft hangar. |
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Shiny new cars from Russia, Belarus, Latvia, Estonia, Poland and a reunified Germany rumble across the cobblestones: glimpses of eastern Europe reborn.
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Tableland retreat of an Australian artist still bears his unmistakeable imprint |
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What is it about this remote Victorian community with its handful of residents? |
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Unlike their mother, Ba Vuong’s five daughters never need submit to the ordeal of teeth blackening. |
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In Kyneton’s Piper Street the vision, the drive and the creativity of a handful of people has created a dining and shopping strip as alluring as any in metropolitan Melbourne. |
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Everyone recognises a World Heritage site or two, and many pass one every day, like the thousands of Sydney commuters who steam past that thing with the sails every time they embark from Circular Quay... |
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Most southerners shun Australia's Top End during the hot, expectant time of year around October. Yet there is no better time to to visit, for now the Yellow Waters wetland becomes an Ark of browsing waterfowl, crocodiles half submerged like floating logs and the odd bird of prey, all jostling for space in a habitat which shrinks daily.
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