Rubbish island - What the Saturday papers say
June 24, 2006This island is rubbish. Literally. Richard Newton (The Daily Telegraph) pays a visit to Spectacle Island in Boston Harbour. The former landfill site, which opened in 1912 and closed in 1959, accumulated so much rubbish in its time that a bulldozer once disappeared in it. Newton writes: “On sunny days, its surface sparkled with shards of metal and glass. After dark, it glowed with spontaneous methane fires.” Sounds lovely. When work began on a $14 billion traffic project in the 1990s, city authorities decided to cap the landfill, dump the dirt there and landscape it. The green and pleasant island is now open to visitors for the first time in a century.
Where Spectacle Island once contained everything the average Bostonian did not want, Siobhan Mulholland (The Indepenent) finds everything she could wish for in Mandal on the southern coast of Norway. This list includes: “Long, light summer evenings, elk safaris, shellfish suppers - and no Brits.”
Mulholland might want to avoid the Brits, but Adrian Bridge (The Daily Telegraph) actively seeks them out. In Cologne Cathedral last week, he discovered football fans praying fervently for a good result against Sweden. They were making the sign of the cross, while wearing shirts emblazoned with the cross of St George, and hoping for a goal-producing Beckham cross or two. "We're praying for divine inspiration," said one. "God knows, with England you always need it." To escape the stress of a major sporting tournament, Rhiannon Batten (The Independent) takes herself off to Vamizi island off the coast of Mozambique, where a luxury eco-lodge (without television) proves to be the perfect getaway. While there, Batten spies in the guest book the following note: Thank you for eight fantastic days. See you soon! Sven and Nancy."
With footie fans carousing in Germany, younger generations are learning about darker times in our history. It might be called lest-we-forget tourism. Cassandra Jardine and her son (The Daily Telegraph) take a trip to Ypres, almost 90 years after the Battle of the Somme was fought, while Sophie Campbell, visiting Southwell Union Workhouse in Nottinghamshire - “the prototype for the institution that incarcerated Oliver Twist” - writes that today’s rambunctious children are spooked by the silence there and barely manage 30 seconds of sitting quietly.
The Times has a food and travel special today. Resident cook Jill Dupliex selects her top 50 treats: oysters in Ireland, crayfish in Helsinki, camel’s milk in Dubai and, in Germany, a foodball, a round organic “Spanish/ Japanese stuffed rice ball”. Amy Lame, a third-generation Italian-American foodie, takes some cookery lessons in Tuscany, and for the boys, Zoran Brajcic runs a no-nonsense, no-frippery cooking school on the Adriatic island of Vis to which Ian Belcher signs up.
Bargain-hunter Jill Crawshaw rounds up some holidays for food lovers that include making tacos in Mexico and sending the children to learn how to cook at the Raymond Blanc Cookery School near Oxford.
You can forget about eating foie gras in Chicago however. The city banned it recently, writes Feargus O'Sullivan in The Guardian. The city was once the world’s largest abattoir, but today, O'Sullivan writes, the “capital of meat” believes that “the food industry should tread a little lighter and think a little greener”. Also, Kevin Gould, the newspaper's Hungry Traveller, presents his awards for the worst and best airline food.
To see North America properly, you really need your own vehicle, be it a car, motorbike or motorhome. In The Independent, David Orkin has a fantastic article about fly-drive holidays in the US and Canada. Orkin has the lowdown on the open road, the cheaper gas, the rules of the road, and, if you are partial to moose and icebergs for example, where to find the drive of your life.
The Daily Mail's Mark Palmer has a useful holiday checklist. It's the type of article that tells you what you should be thinking about with one month to go (is my passport in date?), two weeks and two days (Help! I've lost my passport).
Simon Calder (The Independent) spends 48 hours in Left Bank Paris soaking up the culture and snacking on croissants, but Kathy Lette, the egalitarian Australian novelist, in The Daily Telegraph has the last word on Paris as she and four glamorous friends spend a couple of days there - "think Enid Blyton's Famous Five, in Manolo Blahniks". Lette says that her French vocabulary runs to four words: "rendezvous, liaison, lingerie and croissant", but doesn't need much more on her weekend of champagne-sipping, tennis-watching, dining, dancing and discovering that Frenchmen are "ready, villain and able". Beaut.
© Cheapflights Ltd Oonagh Shiel
