Getting to La Reserve is super easy from London, as long as you use the Swiss service from City Airport to Geneva. Thank Heavens for London City Airport on a Bank Holiday weekend - no Heathrow, no desperate lines at security, no long queue to get on the plane. Once you land and get through passport control (with typical Swiss efficiency), it’s only a ten minute taxi ride before you are pulling into the gates of La Reserve. As you can see from the picture above, the building isn’t going to win any architectural awards, but once you get inside, this is one luxurious resort.   more »

Miraflores is one of the wealthiest parts of Lima, and home to most of its best hotels. It sits on the cliffs high above the coast, and has very pretty gardens which run along the front.   more »

The defining feature of Machu Picchu is mystery. Even though the buildings are bare and decaying, there is still the sense that the place has just been abandoned with great haste. You half-expect to come across a dinner plate with half-eaten Alpaca bones in one of the tiny houses below. But who was here and why did they leave?   more »

After serving as a monastery for hundreds of years, the palace is now Monasterio, without question the finest hotel in Cusco. And the ‘Best Hotel in South America’, as voted by Conde Naste Traveller in 2007. Monasterio, part of the Orient Express group, is certainly a fine place to stay, in a unique setting. The staff are first class, and there are two excellent restaurants which serve Peruvian cuisine (think Alpaca, think Guinea Pig) with a contemporary twist.   more »

Trekking through the Atacama desert is the closest that I will ever come to being on another world. The resemblance to satellite pictures of the the surface of Mars is not so far-fetched. In 2003, a team of scientists from NASA found ‘Mars-like soils’ in the Atacama. In other words, the samples they analysed produced very similar results to those of NASA’s Viking mission to Mars in the 1970s: no sign of life and virtually undetectable organic material. This strange result gave the researchers hope that life on Mars may be found one day.    more »

There are five of us here for a special occasion - KB’s birthday - and I can’t imagine a better place to stay than Hotel Tremoille. It has been undergoing an extensive renovation itself, 16 months of upgrading which has turned Tremoille into a very fine mid-sized hotel in the heart of Paris’ ‘Golden Triangle’, just a few minutes’ walk from George V Avenue and the Champs-Elysees.   more »

Sumahan was created from the shell of a 19th century Ottoman distillery. It has been renovated with a great deal of care, and sits in perfect harmony with the quiet little village next door.   more »

With its bulbous yellow lamps and multi-coloured pillars, Tantris is more like a Tate Modern installation than a restaurant.    more »

Looking for the Hollman Beletage Hotel? Do we have the right address? you may ask yourself as you head down Köllnerhofgasse, a short street about five minutes walk from St Stephen’s Cathedral. You stop at the entrance to a grand old apartment building and enter a secret code which opens the heavy door. Once inside, your eyes wander around the cavernous hallway, which looks little changed from the late Imperial era.   more »

There are a small number of world class hotels in St Petersburg, and this is one of them. The Astoria has been around since 1912, when the unfortunate Nicholas II was still living in style down the road at the Winter Palace. Just about every world leader who has visited the city since has stayed at the Astoria.   more »

Elaborate doesn’t begin to describe the interior of the Pestana Palace. Although this is a recreation of ‘haute’ 19th century European living, I’d describe it as more Rococo than Empire - the kind of place where Louis XV would have felt right at home (or Sir Elton John, in today’s terms).   more »

We are staying in one of half a dozen tents in a mobile camp which moves round the Serengeti with the wildebeest. There is nothing to separate you from the life of the great plains stretching for hundreds of miles in front of us. Hyenas howl outside the tent most nights. The odd giraffe stumbles by. Leopards are chased away now and again by the staff. We are given a small whistle to use in case of ‘real emergencies’. I wonder what that might be like.   more »

I don’t know whether we can say that the Ngorongoro Crater Lodge is the best hotel in the world, the second best, or trailing in at number five. What I can say is that this is an outstanding travel experience which more than justified the bank-account emptying price tag.   more »

Lake Manyara National Park is a lush green strip of land between the water and the Rift Valley escarpment which provides the most dramatic backdrop. The reason why this land is so green is that most of the rainfall in the area occurs on the highlands just above the lake.   more »

From the moment we step onto the neat One & Only yacht in Male harbour, we are inside the Reethi Rah universe. Four stewards in smart white costumes greet us offering drinks. It is raining as we motor towards the island. We scramble onto the top deck and enjoy getting wet as the Indian Ocean opens up in front us of. An hour passes before we approach the harbour of Reethi Rah itself.   more »

I’m always fascinated by ugly towns: Chongqing, Nairobi, Detroit, Dundee. They’re ugly because they are (or have been) centres of industrial-economic activity: working towns. They may not have a Hyde Park or a Champs Elysee, but if you scratch just a little beneath the surface of an ugly town, you’ll find hidden treasures, quirky stuff which doesn’t exist anywhere else. For example, next time you’re in Detroit, check out the Cadieux Cafe, one of the last places in the United States where you can play authentic Belgian feather bowling and enjoy a bowl of steamed mussels at the same time.    more »

One of our brilliant guides is standing by the sink-hole to hold on to each visitor while we look down. I am about half way down the queue. Everyone else has made it more or less intact and is now climbing the other side. I keep my penguin walk going steady right to the last step, and then start to feel my balance going. Instinctively, I push one leg out to balance myself, then realise I am going the other way. So I push back - right into the arms of our guide who grabs me with all the strength he can muster and utters a small cry of genuine concern. Without him there, I would probably have disappeared down that sink-hole forever.    more »

In a city which is know for its magical realism, the Faena Hotel & Universe is, in many ways the ultimate location. Just a few miles from where Borges wrote about fantastical other worlds - some fiction, some fiction within fiction - the Faena is almost certainly on another planet, although which one I’m not entirely sure.   more »

KB is driven mad by those documentaries on satellite TV about Rome, which constantly refer to 'the greatest Empire the world has ever known'. The worst offender recently was the bombastic Boris Johnson in his BBC series on the glories and grandeur of the Romans. As an educated, worldy, Asian-born scientist, KB finds this kind of casual, narrow-minded claptrap infuriating; and who can blame him? By the time Julius Caesar was rolling around the Dordogne, the great Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi had been underground with his Terracotta Army for over 200 years, having created what was (and is) really the 'greatest empire the world has ever known' - with a culture, arts and sciences far ahead of anything which existed in 'the west'.   more »

Before dinner, we head down to the ground floor for a stroll around Pudong. It’s all brand new, bright and shiny, big and bold - just across the river from the old town. This is where Shanghai is building its world financial centre. At the end of this century, if our species is still here, that’s almost certainly exactly what it will be. Old Europeans may not like what is being built in Pudong, these massive temples serving international trade and business. But I find it oddly comforting, this confident vision of the future. It’s certainly a lot better than the alternative.   more »