Saints and sinners - Sunday travel section digest
June 11, 2006The Observer stays at home this week with its Britain special. "Why go abroad?", the newspaper's literary editor, Robert McCrum, asks. "In the British Isles, all you need is an ordnance survey map, a credit card and a rail pass." And the sun to be shining? Apparently not. "Explore this archipelago and you will quickly relegate the quest for the sun to the category of juvenile obsession, childish things. Does Shakespeare celebrate sun-loungers? I think not." Fair enough.
Stuart Kirby, author of Tip-top Beaches: Great Britain's top 100 beaches, picks his top ten, which starts with Calgary Bay on the Isle Of Mull and ends with Compton Bay on the Isle Of Wight. Dinah Hatch discovers that a quiet revolution has been under way on her tasting tour of the vineyards of the South Downs. The "New New World" wines are hip right now and, Hatch writes, are "set to dominate our palates over the next 10 years". There is more South Downs in The Sunday Telegraph, but Sarah Shuckburgh and her daughter are more interested in the art and history of Lewes than local vineyards. Still enjoying the best the country has to offer, The Independent on Sunday's "Days Out" feature is a Tower Bridge walk.
The Sunday Times follows in Simon Calder's footsteps (yesterday's Independent) and sends three writers to Germany. Vincent Crump visits Rügen, the charming island that lies just off the Baltic coast. It occupies, Crump writes, "a similar place in the German popular imagination as the Isle of Wight does among Englanders". Anthony Peregrine goes to Bavaria and Sean Newsom holidays in the Chiemgau region. “You went out on penalties, now come back on holiday” - could this be the best marketing slogan ever?
If you couldn't find yourself in yesterday's travel tribes article, perhaps you belong in The Sunday Times' Midlife Crisis Club. If you were a keen traveller in your youth, but now just "go about the business of getting older", Matt Rudd selects eight adventure trips that will get the blood flowing again and Rhiannon Batten in The Independent on Sunday selects the 12 best active holidays in Africa.
Elsewhere in The Independent on Sunday, its Africa special takes in an interview with Bob Geldof, who after 20 years, is still entranced by the continent. Raymond Whitaker finds that Johannesburg, South Africa's richest city is making great efforts to become a leisure destination and the city also gets the 24-hour treatment. In Malawi, Jack Barker catches one of the last great tramp steamers, the Ilala, that transports "maize, bicycles and fridges" around Lake Malawi. The steamer also has five passenger cabins for some very laid-back cruising. African cruising is not for travellers on a tight schedule he notes.
In three short years, due to redevelopment of Istanbul's Asian shore, one of the last great train journeys into Asia (Istanbul to Ankara) will end. The trip is definitely one to write down on the "things to do immediately" list if only to see the magnificent Haydarpasha station. The station was built by German engineers to celebrate the Kaiser's alliance with the Ottoman Empire. In Barnaby Rogerson's (The Sunday Telegraph) words, it is "a vast Saxe-Coburg-Gotha schloss that should ... stand above the Rhine or above a firth in Sutherland". The journey itself is a throwback to the glory days of rail travel. The compartments and bunks are cosy, travellers are woken by the conductor's cries of "tchay-kahve" at dawn and sumptuous Turkish breakfasts are served on blue and red State Railway porcelain.
Saints and sinners round out today's coverage. In The Sunday Telegraph, Jonathan Gregson goes on a "pilgrimage" to the churches and monasteries of Catalonia on the Feast of St Joan, which takes in Montserrat with its famous image of the Virgin and Child, a hand poking out to receive kisses from the faithful. Ciara Ferguson in The Sunday Independent (free registration) spends a weekend in Siena and explores the monasteries of the area including the Abbazia di Monte Oliveto Maggiore, the home of the White Benedictines, a productive order who make, among other things, "a cure-all herb liqueur". And for the sinners... Frederic Raphael presents a fabulous romp through the history (and architecture) of Baiae in Campania (north of Naples). Raphael recounts that Cicero (before 43BC) denounced Baiae as “synonymous with lusts, passions, adulteries, beach-life, dinner parties, orgies, and yachts”. There was even an offshore oyster farm that supplied the aphrodisiacs for obvious reasons. In fact, there is so much to see in the area that Raphael quips: "all you need is stamina".
© Cheapflights Ltd Oonagh Shiel
