Travel

A trip to…Ledbury. A West Midlands summer, part 1.

Had 2020 been a normal year, I would have gone on a summer holiday to Germany for the third time. The trip would have been following the route of the Romantic Road, through places like Würzburg, Rothenburg ob der Tauber and Dinkelsbühl, places which sound wholesome and cute. As we all know, 2020 has been a little bit tricky, so instead the decision was made at Holiday HQ to travel through the West Midlands. You read that right, the West Midlands. I am from that part of the world but have never thought to spend time there for leisure.

Lonely Planet describes the region as having “green valleys, chocolate-box villages of wonky black-and-white timbered houses” and the promise was delivered and then some. The countryside we saw was soothing, verdant, with hints of a wilder edge in the Malvern Hills. We visited Ledbury, Leominster, Ludlow and Ironbridge and every destination had timber-framed buildings a plenty, inviting pubs, a local approach to food and usually a castle within spitting distance. “Please stop spitting at the castles” is the region’s catchphrase.

It was quite novel having a holiday 90 minutes from where my family live, so I took the opportunity to invite Mum to spend the day in Ledbury with us. We hadn’t seen each other since the very day the lockdown was announced back in March. In Ledbury, we stay at The Feathers. The building dates back to 1565 and is a perfect example of the architecture of the time. It creaks and crackles with most stairs lurching pleasingly to a slope that makes you feel drunk while sober and sober when drunk. In our room, the floor went down into a corner and I sort of found myself falling towards it no matter what I did. The bathroom looks fresh out of the 1980s and the framed pictures in the bedroom have seen better decades but for £45 a night, the hotel is far nicer than the price would suggest. The restaurant and coffee house all retain a lot of the features that make the building memorable, but the coffee house’s blue light around the ceiling is less than fitting.

It’s a pity to report that the Sunday roast at The Feathers is average because to me, a roast is a high stakes meal and should leave you in no fit state to do anything but rub your belly and groan in a happy way. Instead, I was merely quite full and while nothing was wrong with the food, it lacked character. For £18.50, I would have expected more. My Mum did say her crumble was excellent, and the iced coffees are good, so it’s not a disaster. In a welcome twist, breakfast the next morning was genuinely good.

Ledbury is all centred around the market house and up the set-piece medieval Church Lane which is marvellously photogenic from any angle. On the street you have Butcher’s Row House museum and at the top of the lane stands St Michael and All Angels church, which has existed there in some form since the 11^th century. After our stroll around the town and it being August, a Sunday and in the covid-era, we wandered what we could do, so we went to the riverside park. After all the beautiful buildings of Ledbury, it was a pleasure to get to the park via an industrial estate which featured some stunning tin roofs. It’s quite the historical tour of industrial buildings of the last 50 years and is not to be missed, unless you’ve anything else at all to do. The park is a thin sliver of land between the river Leadon and a main road but there are some reasonably diverting sights such as a tree that clings onto the river bank, showing you the roots spreading out alarmingly. Beyond the riverside park you can head out into open country that looks gorgeous with cows roaming about. We spotted Sixteen Ridges vineyard in the distance, but it was closed.

In the evening, we went for a second walk and headed out to Ledbury Park, but it turned out that this was private so we kept finding gates telling us to go elsewhere. It’s bit of a downer because there’s so much nice land in Ledbury but finding a path you can walk on takes longer than it should. So we trudge back to town, find another private path and eventually find a space we can wander around, which is an almost vertical climb so we abandon that as well. Finally, past the Police station we find a path that takes us through some fields abuzz with bees and we end up in Dog Hill Wood where we spot someone looking out over the town all alone. It always seems to me that anyone sitting alone on a viewpoint must be a murderer, but we didn’t see any legs sticking out of the undergrowth.

After this somewhat distorted walk we go to the highly atmospheric Prince of Wales pub on Church Street. They’d gone covid-mad and every single table had plastic screens that separated people apart from each other but not separating us from strangers. I had seen these sort of screens splitting people up in Italy but Italians quickly figured out that this was ridiculous and scrapped it. We, like everyone else in the pub, discreetly slipped the screen out of the way as talking through a plastic screen is rubbish and we supped our very nice German beer in a semi-anxious state. They didn’t bother with track and trace and had a system where you ordered your drink and signed your signature with a pen other people had used. I guess we’d spritzed our hands with hand gel but still, great pub, shame about the inconsistencies. And if a breakout happens there, I’ll never know.

Day two in Ledbury marked day one of Eat out To Help Out so we went for a taxpayer-subsidised breakfast at Cameron and Swan, which sounds like the setup to a political joke, but in Cameron’s case it was a pig. And the first thing to note is that this is a place that does track and trace very well. Perspex separates different groups of customers, with hand sanitiser on entry and someone to take your details. If you wanted to go to the loo, you had to put your hand up so you’re not confronted with the horror of bumping into another human. I had the full English, which is most of anyone’s daily calorific needs, but it was kept very healthy by the half tomato and beans. Why do cafes feel the need to only put half a tomato on a place? Would an entire tomato ruin appetites? When I was in a hotel in Warsaw, I noticed that room service breakfast charged the equivalent of 50p for half a tomato. The mind boggles. My partner had some sort of salmon concoction and was very pleased. Gold star!

After the meal we had a stroll in the walled garden by Church Street and it was blissfully calm and quiet. I could have sat there for days. I was excited to visit Hus and Hem, a Scandinavian design shop which for reasons unknown thought that Ledbury was the place to sell their delightful goods. I bought a friend some chocolate covered liquorice (Salmiaki) before we headed to the only museum open in the town. The painted room is a small, er, painted room and when renovating the building in the 1990s, a decorator stripped away some wallpaper to find some unexpected marks on the walls. It turns out that they had come across a 500 year old painting that was hidden under hundreds of years of renovations. The design was that of a knot garden and it is simply remarkable that the painting is still so bright today, with easily readable extracts from the bible. The guide was super, miming along to a covid-friendly audio recording of her talk, and she was dressed in suitable attire, hiding her face mask under a lacy veil. There was something very 2020 about this visit; usually, I wouldn’t find much of a thrill in somewhere like the painted room but being able to go back into a museum was still something to be savoured. And really, it is remarkable that people in the Tudor times were painting on a wall I was standing in 500 years later, taking photos on my digital devices.

After a good lunch at the Seven Stars, we set off on a walk to Eastnor, despite Eastnor Castle being closed. We head to Coneygree wood, on the edge of Ledbury and we experience that great moment of the traffic sounds being entirely muffled by the trees. Soon all we hear is our feet crunching on the ground and the birds gossiping about us in the trees. The woods felt ancient, with vines creeping up everything they could and before long we were walking through open fields ringed by the enchanting trees and great views of the Malvern hills. After about 45 minutes, we come across a settlement of pheasants rummaging about, making alarmed noises and having fun with their friends. When we arrive in Eastnor, we see the Church covered in scaffold and not much else. A look for another route back via the fields was essential as the fine folk at Google only suggest routes that would have us as flat as roadkill if we misjudge the traffic on the roads. Luckily, there’s another route that takes us in a loop back to Ledbury, via fields of sleeping sheep that brings us out near Dog Hill wood.

In the evening we have dinner at the Olive Tree restaurant. Our original plan of eating at a Thai/Chinese restaurant is scuppered by them only doing takeaway. The only person inside was a very stressed out looking woman wondering where everyone was. Luckily, the Olive Tree had one table left inside, where people usually wait for takeaway. On this table we were able to hear the presumed owner bemoan his full restaurant, saying Eat out to Help out was a disaster. I couldn’t sympathise. He was making money and we got to eat two mains with drinks for £20. While I thought my hake risotto was great, the menu was so absurdly long, it made me wonder why restaurants don’t just do a simpler range of things excellently. But I don’t run a restaurant, so what do I know.

My adventures in Ledbury end here. It’s a fine town, with much to commend it. I had moments of real pleasure and relaxation but the closures from coronavirus definitely made this a less compelling visit than it could have been. Had we hired a car, the Malvern hills would have been ours for the taking. Next time maybe, but my trip continues to beautiful Ludlow.

Island hopping in Greece

After a few days in Athens, we drove to Naflipo, in the Peloponnese region of Greece. After driving through some reasonably nice landscapes, though ones devoid of ooh’s and ahhh’s, we start to see the Greece that travellers coo about. One minute it’s olive groves as far as the eye can see, then a hill starts to resemble a mountain and views become more like a greatest hits package. Everyone in the car starts staring out the windows left and right so as not to miss anything. Familiar names crop up like Corinth (ancient history town), Kineta (the first film by Yorgos Lanthimos), Olympia (all the sports) Argos (famed for its catalogues) and in heading to Nafplio I find out that it was the capital of the First Hellenic Republic and Kingdom of Greece until 1834. It has a population of just 34,000 today but still has an air of elegance and status about it.

We stayed at Pension Marianna, which is outstanding. As soon as we arrived, we felt welcome and were given some orange juice and are told our rooms were ready. A bugbear I have is arriving at hotels and finding that some unforeseen disaster has befallen my room such as moth attack, exploding lamp or an unforeseen and aggressive haunting, so it’s such a delight when all is smooth. The room was cosy and as we were perched at the top of the town, we had windows that opened out onto a magnificent view below, stretching out into the bay. The Marianna somehow under-promises and overdelivers from its excellent location to the quality of the breakfast.

Just above the hotel, you can walk to the Akronauplía castle ruins, where some parts of the wall date back 5000 years. History feels like a part of the fabric of Greece but until I found out that the walls were this old, I just looked at them and thought “these are nice walls” as I gazed out into the sea. From the viewpoint, I was able to see the curve of the bay and the Argolic Gulf, a view so peaceful I went there every morning to watch the few people in the sea as well as some fishermen and I urged myself to visit the sea more in England, something I have magnificently failed at doing.

When I first ventured into the town, it was a treat of marble pavements, wall-to-wall bougainvillea (the only plant I seem to be able to identify) and cats lounging stylishly. Entirely delightful streets full of things I didn’t need to buy stretched out everywhere but I spotted Mediterraneo wine and deli that had everything I wanted; a place to sit, read my book and have a glass of wine. A holiday read in a relaxing spot is the best kind of read, one where you don’t have to quickly feel you need to do anything but turn pages once in a while. Michel Faber’s Under the Skin might not appear to be a great holiday read but it’s worth a shot. It’s not too long, it’s deeply immersive and has a pace that makes you want to read more. Plus, the book features British weather and I had escaped all that.

Later, when my friends came down from the hotel, we took a long walk along the seafront, stopping every now to sniff the sewage and then to take photos and marvel at the quality of the light that may well have been organised by a cinematographer. It all felt a little unreal. Over the water, a castle perched on a rock and beyond that, hills caught the last gasp of the sun, with an army of wind turbines doing their thing. We headed back to Mediterraneo for a bottle of wine before dinner and after this, pleasantly fuzzy in the head, we walk to a couple of restaurants, who all politely laugh at our entreaties to be fed.

Hunger growing, we walk around the town some more and have a drink at the Aiolos Tavern’s Wine Bar before we are seated. What follows is an absolutely enormous meal of anything and everything at Aiolos Tavern. We were hungry, but the sheer quantity of food was ludicrous. That said, it was excellent and when you find a restaurant with a great atmosphere, it feels totally fine to just eat endlessly and laugh a bit too loudly. The orange cake was good enough that we visited the following day to get some more. Even typing orange cake gets me thinking about how much I want more of this. Somehow, after all the food expanded our stomachs and ripped our clothes like we’d become the Hulk, everyone wanted ice cream, so just like children, the ice cream part of the stomach was activated.

As we were in Greece, an island day was required so we drove from Nafplio to Ermioni, via a route that in some will produce terror and in others awe. A turning on a gentle corner quickly became a scene from a Bond film where he’s chasing someone and they end up in a ravine, on fire. Luckily, we arrive in Ermioni without anyone catching us. From there, we take a floating lawnmower disguised as a boat to Spetses, an island that can’t help but charm with its houses built very recently for Instagram. On some of the new estates, you could see influencers knocking chunks of the new homes with a sledgehammer, all for the vintage vibe. The vistas were engineered for hashtags. It is like arriving on an island designed for lifestyles lived online, with yet more glorious sunlight adding even more to the beauty.

As easy as it is to forget it’s a real place, people do live here and their bright white houses are perfectly set against the deep, luscious blue of the sea. We stop for an iced coffee at Balkoni, with views out to the water where I write a few smug “hahaha, you’re not here and I am” postcards to friends back home. Inevitably, I never found a stamp and these postcards ended up being sent when I was back in the UK. I may be one of the last people sending postcards, and even I’m doing it badly.

Caffeinated, we head from the centre towards a church on a peninsula and we walk past small beaches, clear water and fishing boats that lie dormant. On the island you can sense the season is drawing to a close; bars are closed or open for brief parts of the day. The warmth is very deceptive; it’s nearly 30c so you expect that sitting on a terrace for a beer will be a remarkably easy feat but it’s not. It’s nearly November and instead of enjoying the weather, we should be panicking a little. To put the weather into context, if this were the UK, shops would be filled with Christmas trinkets yet here I was applying sunscreen.

We only had three hours on Spetses so could just about scratch the surface of the island. There are woods that beckon in the hills, coves to explore but we simply don’t have time so we loop back towards the centre of town via a parliament of cats, getting down to the serious business of hanging around on benches. Just before we board the ferry for the next island, we pass a fairly grand old building in some state of disrepair with a notice board out front advertising their events. One was a 30^th anniversary workshop for Aston University. In three years of university, I never had a lecture or meeting off campus, let alone on a beautiful Greek island.

One thing I’ll always remember about Spetses that is both fascinating and terrifying is the endless streams of grannies whizzing by on scooters. They were always at a pace and nothing had a chance to get in their way. In the moment, I felt very much that I wanted to be a pensioner on a scooter later in life. They looked so mind-bendingly happy.

Hydra was our second island and it’s perhaps more beautiful than Spetses, but the differences are slight. For one, it’s less wooded but the upside of this is that there are more unobstructed views to be had. The island is entirely free of cars, which gives it a different pace and we didn’t have to duck and cover every few minutes. Donkeys, with BMW and Peugeot badges are the only form of transport on the island other than your own legs. We have five hours in Hydra but even so, we don’t get far from the main town but we do pass Leonard Cohen’s house which he bought when he was 26. Impressively, none of us realise at the time but Google timeline reliably informs me that I took a photo outside it. Naturally, I was taking photos of yet more cats.

According to Google, these cats are outside Leonard Cohen’s house. I think otherwise.

We need feeding, and it’s late afternoon on a Greek island in October. Google maps tells us that a few places are open, when they clearly are not. We go to a restaurant that has glowing reviews, knock on the door just in case and a startled topless man comes to tell us they’re definitely closed. After a while we do the activity that exists only when on holiday and lacking choices; we get picky. Anywhere will do, but not the place with the tables that look horrible, and certainly not the place with the ugly door. Eventually, miraculously, we find a place that only has one flaw. Flies. Herds of flies that are everywhere. We peer at the food, which looks delicious, and we try to look beyond the flies nesting on every piece of it. When lunch is bought over, new flies divebomb us and our arms flail enough to create a cooling draught for the customers next to us.

Post-lunch and fly larvae, we stroll along the cliffs and take in the views, accompanied by big contented sighs. Some of the trees on the path were bent at angles that suggest fierce storms and above us we spotted a few stone windmills. Some of these are barely recognisable as windmills while others are now used as accommodation and look gorgeous. As we amble towards a bar, we pass Leonard Cohen’s bench which this time is noticed by us. It’s not so much a bench as a three sided stone wall with a plaque, but with a view that would lighten the mood of any Cohen fan.

We spend the rest of our time in Hydra near the harbour, where I try and paddle in the water but find myself unable to trust the slippery look of the stones leading to the ladder. So instead I continue to look out on the water before we have a drink at Spilia café and bar and here, my mind wanders. Why is the sea so calm so often? How come water flows quite evenly and doesn’t jut out of the sea at random angles or arrange itself in a vertical tower of water? How come gravity doesn’t stop? Why didn’t I do well in my GCSE Science? This goes on for what seems an eternity and is a sign that I’m relaxed enough for my mind to start rearranging the world. We face the sea, looking at the sun slowly dipping down for another night and I’m glad water wasn’t doing anything untoward because, for one, it’d ruin the view.

A food tour…of Athens

If I had been counting calories in my time in Athens, I would have swiftly realised I was pregnant with triplets. The food was endless and almost all of it was gooey, yummy, delicious and with enough vegetables to trick the mind into thinking it was healthy. But healthy food has never tasted as good as the food in Athens. My friend, Rokos, had planned a day of doing little but eating and doing some walking between food stops to give us the illusion of exercise.

Part 1: We started at one of his favourite places, Stani. It’s one of a dying breed of dairy bars in the city and is in a neighbourhood that has seen better days. This isn’t an austerity comment, as most of Athens looks and feels like a normal functioning city but Omonia just looks tired. Watch your step as you could trip over some jagged pavement, avoid the overflowing bins and eventually you’ll arrive at Stani. It’s tiny and looks like it hasn’t changed in decades, which is exactly how it should be. The offering is simple and excellent; we had sheep yogurt with honey, a cake containing custard that oozes out when you break the pastry as well as coffee. The first mouthful was so good that suddenly the surroundings became palatial and glorious.

Part 2: Our second stop was Loukoumades Ktistakis, which sells very little but the eponymous fried honey balls. There are a few tables inside but this is the sort of place where you order, eat in one mouthful, make a face that is close to the face of someone that’s just seen God (and when he does return, he’ll go there and do the face of god when he tastes these). This is food that cracks open into a gooey mess, but it gets a thumbs up from everyone.

Part 3: The central food markets. This has the potential to go either way, once you enter the meat and fish section. As someone who has mostly given up meat, walking through a giant hall filled with flesh of every kind being cut up wasn’t very pleasant. Even the beaks and hooves on display didn’t fill me with joy. So I learned that I’m further along the vegetarian marker than I’d realised but not quite there. But the markets don’t just do meat, they do anything you could imagine and I always find a large array of brightly coloured vegetables really soothing. The real pleasure I get from them is seeing ingredients I don’t usually come across, which gets me thinking about what I’m going to cook next. It’s the same when you see spices piled high; reminding me of a middle eastern souk. The markets bring to mind a time before everything came pre-measured, in a glass jar or plastic pouch and I foresaw my past-self going round the stalls, haggling over prices before stopping off for a quick coffee. In this past life, I almost certainly had a wheely trolley full of the day’s shopping.

Part 4: The Mediterranean Grocery store is a superb deli that instantly made me want to live in Athens so I could pop by here all the time. Holiday mode does this to me; we have these sort of deli’s in London and even in Walthamstow, but still. I was in love. Aisles stacked high with every sort of olive oil imaginable, biscuits, different types of pasta, pickled things, wine. It all just looked so enticing and I cursed my lack of hold luggage on the flight back. Consequently, my phone is full of photos of Greek produce I’ll always be on the lookout for.

Part 5: Nikita’s. After various bites across the city, it was time for a big meal and Nikita’s has a great atmosphere of ‘home-cooked food by mum’ plus an outstanding cat having a snooze on one of the outdoor chairs. In my world, this is as good as getting a positive Jay Rayner review. At Nikita’s, we ate as much as the table would hold, from moussaka, to dolmades to vegetable stew and saganaki, all washed down with beer.

It got me thinking about the food of my childhood which was in no way as rich and varied as this. It was more of a traditional British meat-n-two-veg household, the kind of place where boiling a cauliflower until it’s a limp and soggy tragedy was deemed blanching. We didn’t eat cheese, ever, and adventures in seafood went as far as cod in a parsley sauce. It wasn’t battered! Watch out Heston. When I lived with my Nan, she somehow decided I was a maniac for lamb chops and chicken chasseur and even twenty years after her death, I still fondly think of her getting on the bus – the number 18 in Birmingham if you like buses – to go to the butcher’s so she could get the meat. But still, no cheese.

After all the food and reminiscing, we needed some perking up to stop us all falling into a food coma so when we found Dope Coffee we were all delighted. Not only do they serve great coffee in a very (I hate myself for saying it) Insta-friendly backdrop but more importantly, some superb cinnamon buns that were so good we found additional space in our already-distended stomachs for them. Hands down, one of the best cinnamon buns I’ve eaten in my life. It poses a threat to everything Scandinavia holds dear, it’s that good.

God seems to figure today with the holy dough balls and the holy bun, so it was obvious that we needed to follow this up by going to church. And so we walked to the Metropolitan Church of Athens which is pretty enough, but in its shadow is the very cute Church of Virgin Mary Gorgoepekoos and Saint Eleutherius, bringing some 12^th century swagger into the heart of modern day Athens. Inside, it is a showcase of what churches do so well; it feels intimate and calm while also as chintzy as you like. Cracks in the walls indicate the damage earthquakes can have on the city.

Next up was Syntagma Square, which I am familiar with from the austerity riots and also that time that Jason Bourne ran through the square mid mayhem to do something in a film. It is a becalmed place now, featuring the mighty Evzones guarding the President. Let’s take a moment to admire their uniform. A cap with a tassel, a shirt with flared sleeves for that Studio 54 look, stockings made of wool, clogs with a pom pom on and a gun. The clogs, presumably, are for kicking as they weigh 1.5kgs each and the pom pom is for fun. The gun is to shoot people dead. It is endearing for nations to keep these ridiculous traditions, and the world would look far less interesting without them. Take off the bearskin cap of the British Foot Guards and not only would they be able to see, but they’d just look boring. Anyway, my main point is that the military really embraces a camp aesthetic and should be applauded for how progressive that is.

On this whistle stop tour of the foods and sights of Athens, we still had more to see and so we walked through the national gardens which featured palm trees that rivalled those seen in LA, or perhaps it should be the other way round. The National Garden is a pleasant park though fairly tiny place at just 38 acres but it’s a green haven in the city with its own set of ancient ruins (to be honest, it’s hard not to find an ancient remain in Athens) and leads to many more sights such as Zappion Gardens and the Panathenaic Stadium which held the first modern Olympics. As stadiums go, it’s so simplistic in form and a beauty to look at. However, I can’t imagine it’d be too pleasant to sit there for many hours in the sun, roasting slowly.

As we headed closer to sunset, we took a cab to Mount Lycabettus, taking the cable car up 227 metres, meaning we were the highest people in the city. It got me thinking about exactly how high it was up there, and the Shard reaches 300m so there’s a little fun fact for you. When you reach the top, there’s little in the way of space as you’re on a small peak and there is a restaurant, bar, church with neon lights and a spectacular viewing point. Everyone is crowding for the best spots but with some patience, you’ll get the shot in the end. Most people tend to choose the cable car to go up and to walk down, savouring the sublime views of a deep red sky filtering over the top of the city and seeing all the lights spread out for miles. Having never been to LA, I reckon that LA looks like this from up the highest points in the city.

In theory, walking down the hill is an excellent idea but my friends and I took a wrong turn at some point and ended up walking down the hill with phone torches as our only light and coyotes hungry for our blood. Maybe it was a cat. It wouldn’t have been great fun to trip and break a leg here and dear reader, I didn’t. We eventually fell off the hill and into sight of this gorgeous modern building that was like a little slice of Zaha Hahid with its gorgeous curves and immaculate finishing. Back in civilisation, we found a bar, we found wine and we found more food to eat. It was glorious.

A trip to…Dresden

Such was my desire to visit Dresden that a seven-hour journey across Germany wasn’t enough to dissuade me. I can report that the journey is sorely lacking in grandeur and beauty without a mountain in sight. The journey on an InterCity train cost £20 each and we upgraded to first-class for under £10 each, which gets you a couple of free biscuits and table service where you have to pay for everything. That said, it’s a steal compared to the UK where first class comes with freebies galore at a price.

We were lucky to have a necrotic man sitting opposite us, who proceeded to eat breadsticks from a briefcase in a style I could only describe as “annoying” and when he wasn’t chewing on breadsticks he was hacking up some phlegm that had been brewing in his chest since the 1980s. He was such an awful person he even left the pinging sounds of emails on his laptop going. He thought he was so important, but he was the one covered in phlegmy breadcrumbs. We trundled and occasionally sprinted through Dortmund, Bielefeld and Hanover without incident or interest until Dessau, when I realised I was passing the home of Bauhaus and cursed myself for not stopping off here for a day or two. Thanks to my obsession with putting markers on Google maps, it’s stored for my next German adventure.

Eventually, after 15 mini naps, listening to almost all the recorded music ever made and numerous games of book versus phone, I caught my first sight of the many spires of Dresden and I knew I was going to like it. We checked into the very lovely Hotel Indigo where I congratulated myself on finding two excellent hotels in a row. The Indigo was not in a building as thrilling as the 25hours Hotel in Cologne, but it was stylish, comfortable and had a logo of a lion in a tuxedo playing a saxophone.

Hotel Indigo is located near the Zwinger Palace and the reconstructed centre so we headed out to the palace to explore the different levels where we were treated to the sun striking a demonic looking cherub or a dome in a gorgeous light. It is a photographer’s paradise, especially in the late afternoon. It was built in the 18^th century during the reign of Augustus the Strong and held a wedding that apparently went on for 40 days. I read further to find the theme of the wedding was Baroque and Roll. Actually, that’s a lie but it sounds cool. Clearly, anyone who would countenance a 40 day wedding would have been absolutely unbearable but the complex that stands today is a real treat to walk through and more so as it was free. We walk to The Crown Gate which looks much like the most overwrought crown upon an entrance, delightfully decadent with four Polish eagles stuck on the top for added chintz. Tucked away is The Nymphs’ Bath, an elaborate water feature that reeks of absurd wealth.

The old city is a marvel of reconstruction that rivals old Warsaw for the effort that went into bringing the city back to life. Dresden, like Warsaw, saw over 90% of the city centre reduced to rubble in the war. Today, you know what happened in the 1940s but can’t really feel it as buildings look designed so as to look ancient but are smart and neat with straight rooves, giving away their real age. There is a mixture of buildings that were recreated to reflect their baroque history and more generic designs, yet there is a sense of scale and harmony to the centre. We walked through the city on the way to Yenidze, an old cigarette factory that looks like a mosque to reflect the factories use of Turkish tobacco. A strangely inappropriate building but one that stands out from a mile away. Service there was, at best, frosty. Perhaps Yenidze is secretly an east German icon that refuses to accept things have changed. It took two emails to get a reservation (first one they told me the kitchen was closed and didn’t make any attempt to suggest I come at another time) and when we arrived the place was deathly quiet; even a group of friends sounded scared to talk in case the waiting staff were listening in. As soon as we sat down, a dramatic storm raged over the centre of Dresden which we had a fantastic view of. The rain lashed down and the wind whipped the sides of their version of a minaret. It was quite something to behold and was more memorable than the food. The slightly strange Yenidze experience is worth it, though. Perhaps better as a place for evening drinks on their rooftop bar than for dinner.

We went to go for a post-prandial cocktail in the Neustadt. Around Louisenstraße, people were spilling onto the street from bars, graffiti adorned the walls and stickers covered everything that isn’t moving. The trendy district of Dresden announces itself without any subtlety. We were going to head to Pinta Cocktail bar but it was roasting hot and filled with cigarette smoke so we abandoned it for a nearby beer garden where a pint was €3.60 which just makes London seem like it’s having a laugh.

Getting back to the hotel on the tram was far more confusing than it ought to have been, with the tram pivoting away from the centre towards some barely lit residential streets. We alighted to wait for another tram back, hoping for the best. The next tram takes us on an intensely circuitous route around Dresden, going north before suddenly realising it actually wanted to go back to the south. It was more of a drama than I required, but before collapsing into bed, I had to tune into the latest instalment of Germany’s anti-hero loaf of bread, Bernd das Brot on KI.KA. Bernd is a depressed loaf that gets into all sorts of scrapes. That night’s edition saw him hanging out with his band on a tour bus, before he fell over and broke a set of bagpipes. Luckily that night his gig was a huge success. It really is the most wonderfully crap show.

The next morning we visited the Albertinium by Bruhl’s terrace for cake and coffee. The Albertinium is the city’s modern art gallery and has an imposing main hall with an outstanding gift shop full of books about Dresden’s history but this is as far as we got as we had a busy day planned. Bruhl’s terrace is a wonderful section of the city, nicknamed “the balcony of Europe” when it was part of the ramparts of a palace. In 1814 a grand staircase connected Schlossplatz to the terrace, finally enabling the locals to enjoy the sweeping views of the Elbe that the elite had enjoyed for years.

The walk through the old town, snaking past the painstakingly reconstructed Frauenkirche through the terrace and to Brühlschen Garten put me in a state of deep relaxation. The city was quiet, the heat of the day hadn’t turned oppressive, the sky was a deep blue and I was on holiday. It was at this moment that I fell in love with Dresden. We read in the garden, occasionally sighing contentedly before a walk to the DDR museum, which is fittingly above a shopping centre. Even in death, East Germany is mocked. I am obsessed with the DDR, though I know I wouldn’t have thrived in the political hellscape as I don’t want to be restricted in every aspect of my life and couldn’t be on board with spying on everyone and being spied upon. I would be first against the wall. Or am I scared that I’d be a superb spy, destroying lives to save my own comfort? The design of the era is simply as good as it gets and manages the trick of having you think that a new society was being constructed from the ground up. People were at the front and centre – a less muscular version of the socialist worker, one who might have been able to extract some joy from life. The reality of course, sounded pretty damn bleak but I have always been hypnotised by the images. After looking at the drawings of happy kids at school, using beautifully-designed textbooks and drooling at reconstructed living rooms with dreamy furnishings, I went to buy some postcards at the shop. My Mastercard wouldn’t work and the man behind the till said that their machines didn’t like foreign cards. I joked that this was like being back in the DDR. He looked blankly at me. Ah, now, that was like being in the DDR.

Dresden has an outstanding DDR-era mural on the side of the Kulturpalast and what is so surprising is that in 2019, a full-throated piece of socialist realist art remains fully intact. There are communist symbols everywhere and the people look as strong and delighted, not to mention determined, as you’d expect. In Berlin, there’s a feeling of all the history being renovated out of the city but here is a distinct piece of soviet propaganda that puts you in a different world entirely. It’s gorgeous and I took every opportunity to photograph and admire it. The Kulturpalast as a building is a standard 1960s squat block that is perfectly nice, and manages to fit into the cityscape more successfully than you might expect it to.

For lunch, we walked up to Soul Food Sisters back on Louisenstraße. All the hipsters were probably tapping away on a laptop in a coffee shop somewhere and the area felt very different. But the food was brilliant; I had a Weiner schnitzel which was a really generous portion at a surprisingly reasonable price. The atmosphere was unexpectedly friendly, to the point that Ryan offered to put our plates in the kitchen at the back and the owner didn’t stop him wandering off.

Less friendly were the people of Molkerei Gebrüder Pfund, a famous milk bar that has a glorious interior of Villeroy & Boch tiles and remains true to its roots of serving fresh milk and dairy products to the people of Saxony. The only problem was that nobody was buying the milk and the staff operate on high alert for anyone daring to flash a camera near the tiles. At one point I was being trailed round the shop by two members of staff who seemed to take real joy in being utter jobsworths. I kept going for my camera, just to keep them on the edge of despair and ecstasy. While the shop is undeniably beautiful, this obsession about cameras is counter-productive and I’d have happily given them a few euros to have been able to snap away. Leaving the shop empty-handed – it was over 30c so the idea of fresh milk was frankly disgusting – we headed to Großer Garten on a tram which took us the right way to the city’s enormous park. Dresden is a very green city and despite spending some hours in the park, we saw but a sliver of it. For day trips, the area around Dresden is rich in places to explore. There’s nearby Leipzig for starters, with Saxon Switzerland, Prague and Berlin a bit further afield. All are ripe for exploration in this wonderful patch of Europe.

A trip to…Cologne

This summer, inspired by Greta Thunberg and the dread of a busy airport full of over-tired people, also known as torture, my beloved and I took a train from London through to Prague. We stopped off in Cologne, Dresden and Saxon Switzerland before ending in Czech Republic, Czechia or whatever they’re calling it today. With this holiday’s relaxed travel ethos and saving-the-world vibe, I feel like I’ve finally nailed how to do it right.

Eurostar is just a wonder, isn’t it? Despite their byzantine queueing system where a ticket purchased on Bahn.de requires you to the “just go there, just wait there” line for an eternity while everyone seeing said Bahn.de ticket looks scared, it’s still streets ahead of flying. That is, until we’re settled in, the train is pulling out of London and a tour guide starts talking to her group in a very piercing voice for what seems like forever. They are going to Antwerp I gather, and she is guiding them through escalators of Europe, and telling them about the chances of being robbed whilst in Brussels for twenty minutes. Once she’s word-bombed one lot of people, off she goes to another group. The peace and quiet of Eurostar is shattered so I put in my headphones and listen to Slipknot to calm me down. At Brussels, we are robbed twice and can’t work the escalators.

On the ICE train to Cologne, I realise with some horror that I’d not reserved tickets from Brussels and every compartment is rammed with people apart from first class which is, as ever, almost entirely empty. It’s quiet save for the sounds of champagne corks popping, aimed at the eyes of the poor. I cleverly use my un-corked eyes to spot one compartment fully booked, but from Cologne so we grab seats and realise everyone in there is British, American or Australian. We’re drawn to the compartment, I reckon, for the romance of it and the memory of when trains were like Harry Potter. The American impresses us all with his grasp of English when asked a question in German, he barks “English”.

I recall my first trip to Cologne, when I hated the city. I had been in Brussels with a friend, which we loved and Cologne seemed dreary in comparison. At the time that Germany were holding the World Cup, there was more energy in Belgium. Imagine! This time, Cologne presented itself as a thoroughly cool place, even if it isn’t much to look at. There are shops which resemble those in London, with the same succulents in tiny holders, postcards along the lines of Happy birthday, you old motherfucker and images of Cologne cathedral in neon pink. I also feel that Cologne was far better this time thanks to the brilliant 25hours hotel which I had been interested in staying in for a while. I already knew I loved the look of the building; it’s an old insurance company headquarters and 25hours have kept a number of the original features which gives it, in their own words, a retro-futuristic vibe. Attention to detail is everywhere, from the lobby which features a stunning ceiling, beneath which is the original reception desk where old typewriters are placed. The lobby is full of deep chairs, all within reach of a giant Taschen book on topics such as architecture, art, graphic design, the Bauhaus movement and cities. The lobby also has a store where you can buy Cologne gin, excellent garish socks with parrots on, books, notepads and so on. There’s a vinyl store with turntables for playing music and even a couple of Daleks hanging out.

Design doesn’t stop at the reception, the lifts are covered in mirrors, which is ideal for selfies and the ‘gram (ugh). The rooms have plenty of little touches that mark this out as a great hotel; every room has a UE Boom bluetooth speaker which is a simple idea that I haven’t seen replicated elsewhere and made me very pleased – clearly better than trying to belt out tunes on a mobile phone. There are books, comics and magazines on the bedside table for light reading and an old phone if you need to call anyone from the past. On the roof is a popular cocktail bar which does lots of fruity drinks at a reasonable price, offering far reaching views of Cologne. The downside is that I now only want to stay at their hotels.

We stroll out to Brusseller Platz where many ping pong tables are used by the youth to play badly. One man plays with a broken arm, and he’s one of the better ones. Mature trees offer some welcome relief from the blazing sun and the Belgian quarter has a series of genuinely old buildings to admire as it wasn’t badly damaged in the war. Later in the walk, it was chilling to note some information inlaid into the street of former inhabitants, saying where they were deported to in the war.

We ate lunch at Noa, and the salad I ordered came as a giant plate bursting with fresh leaves and herbs, quinoa, balsamic dressing and I added prawns in a chili sauce on the side. To say I was happy would be to downplay the concept of happiness. We head on to Aachener Weiher for a sit down overlooking a park and we sample one of the delights of the city, a Kolsch. It’s a 200ml beer that’s deeply refreshing and a reminder of how good the Germans are at this stuff. For dinner, we went to Café Feynsinn, which didn’t live up to Noa’s taste attack, but it’s a good restaurant playing many 80’s hits which is always a tick from me. My dinner was a pasta dish that was far nicer than Ryan’s veggie burger. As ever, our simple rule of no burgers or pizzas outside London was not applied and we paid the price. To round the evening off, we had cocktails at an outside bar, watching the world go by and being shocked at just how many songs Rihanna has done and how similar they are. Even the videos could be swapped over for one another.

Our second day was another beautiful one and we headed to Café Hommage for breakfast. It’s a typical hipster place, and instead of getting a number for your table, you choose a toy animal of your liking. We chose Bambi. While the breakfast was good, Nutella pancakes being an appropriate start to the day, the coffee was the real star of the show. Fortified with caffeine, we headed through the city and across the enormous bridge to Rheinpark to read and watch the world go by. There’s honestly little better than to sit in the shade reading a book. It’s relaxation of the purest kind.

Dragging ourselves off the grass, we got a train to Brühl, named after nobody’s favourite German actor, Daniel Brühl and to Augustsburg Castle which is a beautiful example of rococo architecture and is set within meticulously manicured grounds open to the public. Built in 1725, it has a staircase so grand that you’ll leave wondering if you can pull it off in your semi. Once a seat of power when Bonn was the capital of West Germany, dignitaries would gather on the staircase for a photo op. It has the ostentatious look that a certain president would admire greatly. Ready to take endless photos, we were told this was strictly forbidden and you could only go through the building in a guided tour, in German.

Headset on, and catching the odd bit of German, I learned some nuggets of information about the castle. In a state room is a beautiful stove in the corner of the room, which has no opening to feed it fuel. Behind the stove is a corridor where workers would shovel coal in lest the poshos have to witness how heat works. Other stories we were told marked the inhabitants to be real pieces of work. Sometimes the leader had a banquet all to himself, with the locals watching from a gallery upstairs, observing and smelling the feast below. He was on record as saying they loved this.

While we didn’t have the funds to antagonise people in the manner of the obnoxiously wealthy, we did manage to feast later in the evening at WALLCZKA, where we somehow bagged a table with a reserved sign on. I guess my German is that good. WALLCZKA is in the Neuehrenfeld district, a 15 minute journey from the centre of Cologne but it was worth it as the food was a total triumph. The burrata with chimichurri was bright and zesty, the duck salad was equally fresh but for me, the courgette kofta in a tomato and coconut sauce was a knock-out. To finish the night off, we head to Little Link cocktail bar and expect good things as the website proclaims “we are excellent” and I can’t disagree. The staff are friendly, they know their stuff and they understand their demographic when a cocktail with a film theme comes in a bag stuffed with popcorn.

After a great two days, it’s time to leave Cologne, but not before a quick reminder of what happened in WW2. The city was devastated with 37,000 tonnes of explosives dropped by the RAF, in 262 air raids. One particular raid struck me; over 1000 bombers attacked the city so that Bomber Command could get a propaganda win. They bombed the city for 90 minutes with the aim to cause so much damage that the fire brigade would be overwhelmed. Sometimes war just feels like statistics that are so overwhelming it’s pointless to really think about what these numbers mean. I thought it easier to think about this; in total the Luftwaffe dropped 40,000 tonnes of bombs on the UK in the war. Cologne was essentially dismantled from the air.

A holiday to Ukraine…the Chernobyl experience

It could have been apocalyptic, a bang to set off a chain reaction of bangs that would shroud the world in a pall of radiation, poison the waters of Europe before leeching into the seas and oceans of the world. And yet, 32 years later it’s a tourist spot. Chernobyl is burned into the minds of people as a byword for disaster and as a child I was fascinated by what happened there. Even today it’s seen as a deadly place of silence and mutated creatures roaming the landscape. Having read a chunky history of the Chernobyl catastrophe, by Serhii Plokhii, there were so many missteps and calamities that it’s a minor miracle I’m able to type this and perhaps a bigger miracle that I was able to have lunch in the power plant’s canteen, just a few hundred metres away from where the explosion happened. Recently, a gleaming containment unit was slid into place, soaring above the old reactor and hastily assembled concrete sarcophagus that stopped the radiation completely escaping.

People know about the event itself in the broadest of terms, but often it is the people that lived around the plant who are forgotten, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of liquidators who worked tirelessly to lessen the effects of the disaster, potentially saving the world but subjecting themselves to personal catastrophes such as a lifetime of ill-health, or a swift but brutal death.

Reading Plokhii’s book, I saw a horrific image of the aftermath of the explosion. Chaos everywhere, chunks of radioactive graphite burning all around and people rapidly becoming sick. In a chain reaction, as one person got sick from the radiation, they’d struggle to tell someone coming in what had happened – perhaps also too terrified to even admit what they knew if they did know anything – and that new person would quickly get to work before they fell ill. Imagine that; it’d be like trying to evacuate a sinking ship while suffering from overwhelming sea sickness.

Booking a tour to the exclusion zone is easy; but to maintain the idea of danger, the tour company Go2Chernobyl plaster their website with radiation symbols and a strange promise to take you somewhere extreme, that’s also safe and comfortable. Which is true, I suppose, otherwise nearly 50,000 people wouldn’t have visited Pripyat in 2018. Hints that this isn’t a usual excursion come when you are required to book your trip in advance to obtain permits and the many email reminders that without passport details you won’t be allowed to enter the 30km exclusion and 10km exclusion zones.

We meet other intrepid adventurers on a gloomy day by Kiev central train station. Nobody makes much of an effort to talk to one another, though that makes sense. We’re not exactly going bungee jumping. While we wait to go, we’re asked if we want to hire dosimeters but we choose not to. Some tours offer this and make the machines look rather scary, but I stick to the belief that this is just a money-making ploy; it’s safe enough to visit, so when the machine beeps a bit, it’s not going to reach a figure that’s meaningful. I absorbed more radiation in my flight to Kiev from London than spending a day near the power plant and you don’t find the air stewards shoving dosimeters in your face the whole time. An idea for Ryanair, there.

On the journey to the exclusion zone, a video is put on with terrible CGI of the explosion and lots of people sounding earnest or sad, which is reasonable enough. Eventually, when we arrive, I step out and go to the toilet, which is just past the barrier that separates the normal world and the world of the exclusion zone. I witness a strange frisson of excitement as I pass through a little divide between everything being OK and things being not OK for hundreds of years and everything still looks exactly the same. A road leads forever deeper into the forest and nothing seems to be moving, so it certainly scored highly on the eerie atmosphere I thought would exist. We wait for an age at the checkpoint, seeing gorgeous dogs that I wanted to pet but thought better of.

We visit Chernobyl town and it looks like you might expect a run-down ex-soviet town to look but with some subtle differences. Utility pipes run above ground because the soil is contaminated so nothing can be buried underground. People still work here, but can only work 15 days in the zone and 15 off due to the build-up of radiation. Inside the town is a museum, filled with dolls and baby gas masks as well as information about what happened. In a side room there’s a large painting depicting the scene where the firefighters were attempting to put out the blazes at the plant. It’s strangely poignant to see it stored away from other items and there was also something very tragic about the painting knowing what we know now, seeing the effort and exertion in their faces. Despite the museum’s artefacts and modern installation, this painting was by far the most immediately shocking and arresting thing in there. Outside in the rain, the Wormwood Star memorial is a long line of names of abandoned towns and a large statue of an angel. Nearby is a statue of Lenin; it’s one of two that remain standing in Ukraine. The other is also in the exclusion zone, making this place feel even more like a timewarp.

Our second stop is the Duga radar station, which is a fascinating place I hadn’t heard about until I booked the tour. Our guides explained that the radar was designed to know if the Americans had launched a missile, so the radar would bounce signals into the ionosphere, where it would have a look for anything to worry about, and messages would ping back. The scientists built the enormous station, over 100m high, 700m long, launched the system but never managed to get the signals to come back to Duga. It was doomed to fail, but was a colossal project that was so powerful, using up to 10 million watts, that it interfered with radio and TV signals around the world. So, it might not have stopped the Americans launching war, but it could made Coronation Street a bit fuzzy.

It’s a beautiful sight though and I would have happily spent an afternoon photographing it from every angle. It’s such a cold war remnant; a huge installation that the Russians thought could be hidden. Even as the reactor burned, officials didn’t want anyone to see Duga, fretting over whether to let Hans Blix from the Atomic Energy Agency drive to Chernobyl and be confronted by clouds of radioactive dust which would let him know that the explosion at the plant was worse than they said or fly there, but see the secret installation. In the end he flew there, and I doubt that Duga, as massive as it is, was ever really a secret. Naturally, being a tourist site, people have put up some radiation signs near Duga, which are fake but during the day we see plenty of real ones.

After Duga, we heard towards the power station itself and get an idea of just how enormous the site is with power lines and pylons stretching out across a great swathe of land. Impressively, a solar panel array has recently been installed and a plan for the future is for more solar farms to be put across the exclusion zone. We also stop by the red forest, so called because it soaked up huge levels of radiation after the explosion, altering the colours of the trees. Almost instantly, this became one of the most irradiated places on the planet and even today, the soil is so contaminated that radiation levels are thousands of times above the norm, so we didn’t stop there for lunch.

We stopped in the Chernobyl power plant canteen for a sloppy lunch of red and brown coloured food that is bought in from Kiev and on entering, we needed to go through a radiation scanner, which is nerve-shredding. It’s never revealed what would happen if you were the cause of a terrifying alarm, so I assumed you’d just have to live in the exclusion zone forever, serving up sloppy food to tourists that haven’t set the alarms off. I don’t know how the machines work but mine didn’t beep and for that, I am thankful.

Next up was Pripyat, the highlight of the trip, because for all the drama that happened at the nuclear plant, the town that has been left to nature is more interesting than the nuclear plant, where people still work. It was over 24 hours after the explosion at the plant that people started to be evacuated, some had spent the day after the explosion relaxing in the unusually pleasant weather. One man was sunbathing on the roof of his building and was delighted at how easy it was to tan that day, and not at all disturbed that his skin gave off the smell of burning. He wasn’t aware that his tan was the beginning of radiation burns, which would slowly cause intense blistering across his body. Many people suffered the same fate and for the squeamish, looking up radiation burns is not for you.

Pripyat is not quite what it seems and I don’t think the experience could ever be genuine after such a long time and as it’s so famous. But as the minivan meets the guard in his checkpoint shack and enters the town, we immediately see the blocks of flats almost hidden behind thick stands of trees. Everything feels different, that this is not a town that bears relation to any you’ve seen before; it’s like an English garden city if the developers decided to build inside a wood and leave all the trees standing. Every so often the trees give way and a block rises up, it’s both intriguing and eerie, but not scary. If you were there at night, it’d be a terrifying place. Our first stop is the old swimming pool and our guide tells us that we can’t or aren’t supposed to go in, so advises us not to post anything on social media for a few days and takes us inside. It was hard to say if this was a trick to make us think we’re seeing something we shouldn’t be or they’re being a bit cheeky. We were told that the pool was still operating up until 1996, used by the liquidators but now you would easily think it was abandoned along with everything else. All the windows are gone, the pool long emptied and the structure is slowly decaying. Some of the group clamber up the diving board but I find myself interested in the large swimming pool sign on the floor that reminds me of the atomic logo with people swimming around it. There’s a clock still hanging on the wall but like everything here, it doesn’t work.

Later we visit and cross another group of tourists, armed with their dosimeters which aren’t making any noise. The school feels like it has been dressed for us, almost like a film set. Rows of windows frames are left open at the same angle for that pleasingly consistent look. Maybe for Instagram, a classroom floor is littered with children’s gas masks for the emotional sequence and school books are left open on pages with the benevolent face of Lenin staring out and others show soviet kids in the woods. It’s incredibly photogenic and I can’t stop snapping away. Our guides show us before and after pictures, at one point showing us that this field we were in was once the town square. Nature has completely taken over much of the city with trees bursting through concrete, turning the old sports stadium into something more like a wood. We poke around the supermarket, which once was able to have signs for luxury foods and even have the food in stock, Pripyat being such an important town in the USSR. Near the supermarket the guides get their dosimeter out and poke it near a drain. There is distinct beeping, they explain that nobody knows what’s down the drain but nobody wants to find out.

Soon, our trip to Pripyat draws to a close and we pass the checkpoint back into the normal world. We wave goodbye to the atomic dogs and I wish I’d seen some atomic kittens for the comedy effect, but you can’t have everything. I think to the future, in my nuclear bunker/nursing home where I tell people that I visited Pripyat and think of what could have been.

A holiday to…Ukraine. The food experience.

After the Georgian feast on day one, my friend and I went back to Communist HQ Hotel to watch some baffling TV before sleeping fitfully all night. Top tip, try to eat before 10pm. Day two began with a leisurely breakfast followed by a food tour with a local, organised via http://tasty-kyiv.com. Putting the food tour early in the holiday is a great idea, so you have a much better idea of the Kiev food scene.

Our guide Tania was a delight, and our tour began by walking through the city centre, talking about what it was like to grow up at the end of the Soviet Union, living in Kiev during the Maidan revolution and what it’s like to live in a country at war with Russia. From my British perspective, this is a war that has ended because it’s not on rolling news. Tania politely rebuffed this, and of course she was right. Since my visit, I have found myself reading stories of a war that is just simmering away, grinding the people down. Take this story of men who can’t collect their pensions because the office they need to visit is through the front-lines. I can’t but feel that the Ukraine authorities could help pensioners better if they had the will, but wars are funny things.

To get to our first stop, we have to pass a building right in the centre of the city that advertises a “Gentlemen’s Club” which is, I’m sure, full of fulfilled women dancing for pleasure and true gents there to support the arts. We arrive in the central food market where anything that can be pickled is there, in a jar. All this pickling makes for great photos and I sneak a few before a stall-holder tells me not to take photos in case the jars get upset, or some such reason. As we move through this labyrinth of pickles, Tania tells us about the traditional methods of storing food that still hold sway today. I can’t say I have a great love of pickled foods, and I have renewed respect for my fridge. Further on, we see a staple of Ukrainian cuisine, Salo. It’s cold, white pork fat, often served with something pickled and while it looked appealing, I couldn’t quite bring myself to eat it. Despite being an aspiring vegetarian, I tried a slice of deer and my friend had a slice of horse which was a no-no from me.

The second stop was a legendary site in Kiev, the first place in the city to serve up fast food before the likes of McDonalds arrived. Kiev perepіchka is a tiny booth on the street that serves up sausage in deep fried dough. You can immediately tell it’s trash food, but it’s so tasty that even when the strip of paper they give you to clean up with simply moves the grease around your face, you don’t care. Perhaps you could revive a flagging relationship by romantically licking the fat off each other’s faces? Or bring your own tissues.

We continue our walk and learn more about the city and revolution, before Tania takes us to a restaurant and bar called The Last Barricade. It’s hidden within the discretely ugly Globus shopping centre, right in the middle of where the 2014 protests were. Part of its appeal is that you’ll need some local knowledge and a password to get in. The password is something suitably impossible to say. Tania tried to teach me the words, which I dutifully mangled and we were permitted behind the iron curtain. Symbolism is heavy here, where you pass through a wall to enter the bar and bricks in the building are designed to look like paving slabs pulled up during the most intense stage of the revolution. There are even sculptures of hands by the entrance, suggestive of people working together. We’re told at the bar that all the produce is proudly Ukrainian. It could be easy to think that a restaurant that’s also partly a museum celebrating Ukraine’s trio of revolutions since 1991 is going to be a political meal (our specials, empty promises and lies on buses) but the food is brilliant and it manages to be both a place that succeeds on novelty and on its own terms as a restaurant. We had varenyky, which is a little like ravioli with fillings. The cherry varenyky was worth a return trip alone.

On foot once more, we headed to Kanapa for borscht and this walk showed off Kiev’s unexpected beauty. Architecturally, large parts of the city are an eclectic mix of art nouveau, baroque, soviet stylings and modern buildings often cheek to jowl so one photo can capture wildly different styles. Alongside this are the many beautiful churches that dot the northern end of the city, making a walk from the centre something worth doing that can easily eat up half a day. St Michael’s Golden-Domed monastery looked timeless in the sun, and you’d be forgiven for thinking it is ancient but the original monastery was demolished in the 1930s and is only twenty years old. Almost opposite is the equally stunning St Sophia’s Cathedral where you can climb the bell tower for far-reaching views. St Sophia managed to avoid destruction, becoming a museum rather than a place of worship. Both are topped by dramatic golden onion domes. Walk just another five minutes and you’ll spot St Andrew’s Church, which sits majestically atop a hill, but it is slowly falling apart so watch out for falling masonry or stressed out clergy.

The weather was the most perfect of Autumnal days, with the sun casting a glow on everything and the slight smells of wood-burning in the air making us all feel very enchanted with the city. Tipping us into cosy overload was Kanapa, set in a painstakingly restored 19^th century wooden building on the very pretty, and pretty touristy, Andriivskyi descent. Somehow we had the restaurant almost to ourselves. Outside was a terrace overlooking a heavily wooded park and I could have stayed there all afternoon. I was a bit worried about eating borscht, maintaining a lifelong distrust of beetroot, but it turns out that I was completely wrong. The borscht was served inside a hollowed out cabbage alongside some bread. The flavours were rich, with neither the sweetness nor the sour cream or dill taking over. I was so inspired by the food that I have since made it at home and it turns out in a past life I was a Ukrainian woman who made this stuff for her family every week. I mean, it tasted really good.

The food tour continued into its fifth hour, so it’s superb value for money. We end at Lviv Handmade Chocolate for a coffee and some of those handmade chocolates they keep banging on about. I bought chocs for my beloved, who is a bit like my mum in the “is it dangerous?” stakes, and one day I’ll let him know that the chocolate I bought, with its fancy Russian-language packaging, is a delicious local blend of Chernobyl milk and Fukushima cocoa with just a hint of cinnamon. The rest of the shop was filled with all manner of delicious chocolate, which is an ideal mum-present shop. When I saw my bank statement a while later, my supposed largesse was exposed when I was charged under a fiver for the lot. This gives you an indication of just how affordable Ukraine is. I read that it’s the cheapest destination you can visit in Europe and while there are plenty of hipster hangouts that charge more, it’s still a great bargain. Let’s just hope that Ukraine doesn’t go the way of so many affordable destinations, with endless stag and hen do’s. The horror! We say goodbye to Tania, giving her €35 each, great value to my mind when she was so engaging to speak to and made the whole day feel much more than what I had expected.

All of this food and talk of revolution got me thirsty for a beer and as luck had it, I had saved Craft vs Pub on Nyzhnii Val St into my Google maps and it was a stroll away. En route, we saw more grand buildings and a trolley bus terminus which I always love to see. I have never really understood these things; neither a bus nor a train or a tram. They were fit to bursting with people heading home from work and though tempted to get one somewhere, neither of us wanted to be getting out Google translate on our phones and showing the driver the Ukrainian translation of “how does this work, how do we pay, help us we’re English” so we didn’t bother. Using just our feet, we found Craft v Pub and had a pint of something lovely and cheap. It was another place that wouldn’t look out of place in London.

For our evening dinner, we had a long list of places to go to and were excited about the feast we would have. We hedged our bets on one restaurant, to find it closed so ended up at Kureni, which has many great reviews. Warning bells should have gone off when we saw that the restaurant is within a park, with nothing around it and darkness all around. When we saw the restaurant, we could see the lights were on, but nobody was eating there. It looked like a lair for a Bond villain who has no friends and we were hangry, so we tried to convince ourselves that an empty place was exactly where we wanted to eat. The confused-looking waiter quickly flicked more lights on, put on a tv and some music to try and create some atmosphere. In the end, the food was decent. My Chicken Kiev (at some point, it was inevitable I’d order this) was solid but not spectacular. The Georgian wine was good and the meal was well priced. The tragedy was that we’d eaten so well all day, and knew the city could do better, which meant that day three needed to include some of the best food Kiev could cook up. Back at the hotel/strip club I plotted for the morning; there would be more churches and a magical-looking soviet construct to visit.

A holiday to…Ukraine. The Kiev experience.

At times, I like to stress my mum out. It’s a sort of bloodsport. Not content with worrying her in Algeria, where she shrieked gems like “Won’t ISIS kill you? Is it safe? The Sahara desert?! I’ll stand in front of the aeroplane and stop you!!” I decided to delight with her my plans to visit the site of the Chernobyl disaster and the abandoned town of Pripyat. She was clearly less bothered with this, because she only said she’d block up the front door to stop me sending “radioactive postcards”. I’m grateful she didn’t know about the whole war with Russia thing. 32 years on from Chernobyl, there’s no consensus on Ukraine; you’re either crazy to go or you’d be crazy not to go. Honestly, I think there’s more chance of dying from boredom listening to people worry than there is in going to Pripyat for the day. And have you noticed that nobody calls it The Ukraine any more?

Needless to say, there’s much more than the world’s worst nuclear disaster and accompanying deformed animals (the ones I saw looked fine to me) to Ukraine. Kiev is a mixture of buzzing capital, memorial to commie concrete lust and entirely normal city. After landing at the airport, where any traveller’s heart will get a little thrill from the unfamiliar language, a taxi ride will swiftly take you through endless Soviet blocks, some of which are atrocities to architecture and others endearingly insane. There are three blocks, reminiscent of giant futuristic hairdryers, by Pozniaky metro station that equally delighted and disgusted me.

We were staying at a hotel that is simply one of the best slices of modernist architecture I’ve ever seen. It’s certainly the most stylish hotel I’ve stayed in, from the outside. Hotel Salute is a cylindrical beauty that reminds me of the Capitol Records building in LA, but with a slightly sinister edge, partly due to the circular windows at the top of the building that give a feeling of being spied upon. It should have been more akin to a skyscraper, but due to arguments during the design phase, it was cut in half. It remains a building that has a sirens call of “photograph me”, which I did at every opportunity.

The Salute’s lobby is a wonder of shiny metal panels that could be lifted from a sci-fi film, when we meet the inhabitants of an evil alien ship. It’s a lobby entirely at odds with the exterior. In the evening, a cardboard cut-out of Marilyn Monroe gets brought out to invite us to see the sexy ladies performing in the room where breakfast is served; as I didn’t take advantage of this I couldn’t tell you if the sexy ladies were writhing over the cold cuts or not.

Highly traditional Ukrainian beer hall, with neon lobster

Our first stop after marvelling and photographing the hotel for hours was Syndicate Beer and Grill. Once again, I make a first stop on an exciting foreign holiday somewhere totally familiar and unexotic. When in Jordan, I took my friend to a bar that served Cottage Pie and young Jordanians danced to Rhianna. At Syndicate, there is no cottage pie, but there is heavy use of neon, bare brick walls and filament lightbulbs that could have you thinking you’re in Shoreditch circa 2013. It feels in no way Ukrainian until we order an item on the menu called pickled fries, which sounded interesting. One slight mistranslation later and we received fried pickles which are much nicer than I’d have imagined. We also ordered a nano portion of parmesan fries – the staff should have served them with a magnifying glass, so measly was the offering. The beer was brewed on site and was fantastic. By the end of my second drink, it also struck me that this beer was strong. The steps leading up to the exit had “who’s going to be drunk” written on them. The answer was obvious.

After this, we went to Arsenla metro station, the world’s deepest underground station, which goes 105 metres beneath the surface. Heading down one very long escalator, my friend proclaimed the metro was deep but nothing special. Naturally, the second escalator was just around the corner and when we timed it, the journey from entrance to platform takes 4m 32s. I guess it had to stop at some point before we entered the bowels of hell. Deep as it is, the Kiev metro is a wonderful bargain at 22p a journey and it even takes contactless payments. It’s like some futuristic miracle. If you’re in any way interested in the architecture of travel, you’ll find yourself trapped in photograph loops in many of the stations, forgetting what you were supposed to be doing. The level of care and attention in these stations is gorgeous; true palaces of the people. While no Moscow metro, it’s still a superb system that puts many Western European metros to shame.

Eventually, our stomachs reminded us we were hungry so we head to a Georgian restaurant, home of my favourite cuisine. Having been to Tbilisi and Batumi, getting to eat this food first-hand, I had high expectations for Shoti, if only we could find it. My downloaded Google map of the neighbourhood directed me to a building site and then an alleyway. Lots of backtracking later we realise that Shoti is unhelpfully written to sort of look like WOTV with the Ukrainian for restaurant underneath. But once inside, the decor of the restaurant and the logo of the restaurant, in the shape of an Adjarian khachapuri, reassures you that all is well. Shoti feels swish and the staff are friendly and attentive. We ordered our favourite Georgian dishes of badrijani, khachapuri and khinkali, washed down with wine. The badrijani, aubergine with walnuts and coriander, was as good as I’ve ever tasted it. The khachapuri, a bread made with a sort of pickled cheese, dripped gooey mess all over my plate and was clearly very bad for me but tasted magnificent. The main part of the meal, khinkali, which is a meat dumpling, was outstanding. By this point, we were too full for pudding. A shame, as Georgian puddings can be very good, but they’ll never eclipse the starters and mains.

Former Soviet states seem to have Georgian restaurants all over the place and it’s easy to see why. The flavours couldn’t be any fresher, with heaps of coriander wrestling for your attention alongside cherries, garlic, pomegranate and walnut. The cuisine is far removed from the stodge people often think of when they think of eastern European food. Perhaps it’s simple geography that helps make Georgian food a blend of Mediterranean and Caucasian cooking. Either way, in Kiev make sure you visit at least one of the many Georgian restaurants. You might realise it’s the food you’ve been missing all along.

The joys of being an independent traveller

In a reflective mood, it occurred to me that some of my favourite travel moments are defined by having an open mind on where to go and then somehow getting there, even if turns out to be a right pain in the arse. I was first bitten by the travel bug in 2005 when I convinced a friend to visit Stockholm with me. In the winter. Ridiculous. But the flights were about £12, so, why the hell not?Evidently, this isn’t the definition of flinging myself off the beaten track, but being a third year uni student, it’s the polar opposite to a ladz holiday to some island full of babes and booze, and since then I’ve never looked back. And at the age of 36, I don’t see any lads holidays in the future.

Stockholm archipelago in 2005, taken on a charmingly crap camera

Despite my fear of crashing and burning into the ground because, in my mind, all aircraft are just flying tubes of petrol, I loved the moment the plane went above the clouds and I saw a beautiful sea of rippling sky-pillows beneath me. We explored Stockholm, visited the island full of art galleries and even took a boat out to Vaxholm island where it absolutely pelted it down with incessant rain. To be contrary, I acted like this was exactly what I wanted, but my friend remained glum and didn’t believe my tricks. Luckily, we found a cafe that sold cake with vanilla custard and hid from the deluge.

Other holidays followed, including an exciting trip where we went from Brussels (hugely underrated city!) to Cologne (bland) as a spontaneous day trip and then more standard trips to Madrid and Barcelona. A visit to Tallinn and Helsinki confirmed my adoration of all that northern Europe can offer and in 2009, a trip to Georgia, near Russia, really lit a fire about the sorts of holidays I wanted to have.

I fell for Georgia almost immediately, struck by wooden scaffolding, cleaners harassing rubbish on the streets with brushes that looked fairly similar to broomsticks and, not being unkind, genuine hags. Tbilisi was a magical eye-opener and part of the thrill and annoyance that comes with travelling off your own steam was experienced at the train station. We needed to get a train from Tbilisi, across the country to Batumi, now some sort of cut-price Vegas by the sea. We queued patiently to get train tickets, so locals would push in front to argue with the person giving out tickets and leave with tickets. I couldn’t argue in Georgian, and I’m not terribly keen on doing it in English, so when we got to the counter, we were denied tickets because of a power cut. I had wondered why things were gloomy. We did eventually get tickets when a tour guide we spent two days with, argued with the ticket seller on our behalf.

In Georgia, we arranged to go on a cycling tour, and the package was to part ride, part drive to a village called Tianeti. We spent a night with a host family who cooked us a feast of the most spectacular Georgian food, food I still cook to this day and rate as amongst the tastiest on the planet. I was in traveller heaven. I’ll always remember the woman picking out wild garlic and coriander from her garden. The flavours were spectacular. We all got drunk.

I have a book of soviet bus stops, so seeing one was well exciting

A year later, a friend and I went on an ambitious tour of Sweden, starting in Stockholm and taking in the archipelago, as well as Umeå, Luleå and Arjeplog all by planes, trains, boats and automobiles. The island of Finnhamn was intensely relaxing and in terms of amenities, it had a little store open ’til 5pm and then a fantastic restaurant, open late. Once again, we were caught out by taking matters in our own hands and not booking in advance, finding that the restaurant was fully booked until at least 10pm. With no other options for food open to us, we sat on the terrace, looking at the view in front of us and adding secret glugs of Finnish Koskenkorva vodka to glasses of coke.

Finnhamn

We visited Arjeplog for the midnight sun and when recently discussing that evening in Arjeplog, our memories were specific to the point of words we spoke. It is burned into my memories as something so mind-blowing it’ll be there in that photo montage bit you get before you die. As we took a night train over 1000km back to Stockholm, a woman in the train cafeteria asked us what we had been doing in Arjeplog and the answer that we’d done almost nothing but look at the scenery, walk and stare open-mouthed at the midnight sun. This didn’t seem to move her to tears as it had me. But that’s the Swedes for you, they are rather reserved.

In 2011, I went on a trip to Jordan and Syria, where I got to enjoy see Amman, Petra, Jerash and Wadi Rum in Jordan. Our hotel in Amman had been bombed by Al-Queda in 2005, so every time we entered our bags were X-Rayed and we were vaguely patted down, but I still felt very safe in the country and refused to let the actions of some pathetic terrorists stop me exploring the world.

In Wadi Rum we stayed in a tent made out of goat hair and spoke to people who were on an organised trip, which had cost one couple thousands of dollars and included things like hot air balloon rides – I will never entrust my life in wicker baskets powered by flames – and camel rides, where the camels growl, spit and walk at a slow pace. They believed that the Goat Hair Inn was some sort of exclusive place; I did a Google search after seeing how incredible Wadi Rum looked and $120 dollars later, my friend and I were staying in the exact same conditions as them. We all ate food that was cooked in a pit below the sand and afterwards, my friend and I stood in the desert, transfixed by the silence and stillness of the emptiness all around. Later that night, I got paranoid that we’d be stung by lobsters, until my friend told me I was actually afraid of scorpions. Great, that’s two animals that wanted me dead. I slept like a log in the end.

Wadi Rum

After this we headed to Syria, where things were slowly unravelling, the Friday we were in Aleppo was the deadliest in the unrest so far, with reports that up to 100 people were killed. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary for us, but it was clear that tourism was way below what would be expected. After a trip to some ruins outside Aleppo, we encountered a small protest where people waving olive branches were briefly around our car. Knowing that the government was shooting live ammunition and tear gas at people, my body froze with fear that something would go wrong, but we passed on. Later that evening, we found ourselves in a gay sauna, suggested to us by locals who clearly thought we’d appreciate the experience. It was bizarre when I had to ask the masseuse to give me a half-hearted rub; he seemed taken aback that someone wanted to do anything other than flirting. I’m fairly certain that hammam was partially destroyed by fighting. It always feels exciting to find a guide on the street and use their services to explore a place, and in Syria we found a driver who suggested we take a day to visit the Dead cities in-between Aleppo and Idlib and to the magnificent remains of Krak des Chevaliers, near Hama. Why trust a random bloke in the middle of the street, you say? He showed us lots of leaflets in the boot of his car and he had a lanyard, so we felt pretty sure he was the real deal. Luckily, we were right.

I couldn’t recreate this holiday now, but I am forever thankful that I got to do it at all. Had it been just a few weeks later and I am sure I’d have backed out, especially as the Foreign Office at this point had make Syria entirely red on their travel advice map, a colour if remains to this day.

Aleppo Souq

My 2012 jaunt to Cuba was thrilling for many reasons, but what stood out to me was the informality of the country. You really could hang out looking like a confused tourist wearing a straw hat and someone would come along to offer you accommodation or tell you your accommodation was on fire/full of rats and voila, you’d have a place to sleep. I recall how we dropped by a place we’d previously stayed at in Havana, needing to find somewhere to stay and the owner flipped through a rolodex and called some friends. Twenty minutes later we were in someone else’s home and they were frantically making swans out of towels for us. In my notebook, I had written that there was a woman in Viñales who made heart-breakingly good food and somehow, without GPS and wifi, we found her house, knocked on her door and asked if we could eat there. Sure, she said, in her pyjamas. There’s a certain sense of adventure in just turning up at a stranger’s home and hoping for the best, but generally, Cuba didn’t let us down. I recall being in the stunning city of Trinidad, heading to a beach near our fantastic accommodation, Casa Munoz and after our beach excursion, where real life Cubans were downing neat Havana Club in the sea, we had no transport back. A man with a truck sensed we were tourists – the straw hats, the pale skin and union jack tracksuits probably gave us away – so he let us jump into the back and took us to Trinidad. What a dude.

Friends that have been in the past few years have come back with mixed feelings; wifi seems to be everywhere, which for me takes away from the magic of escaping the news cycles and restaurants either need reservations or have queues going out the door. Places are fully booked, you need to reserve. Americans are everywhere. Where’s the magic in that?

Havana

Bosnia was the next up in 2014, and I feel a certain affinity with this place as my Dad was there during the Balkans war. Mostar was our first stop and my friends seemed somewhat uncomfortable with the sheer number of bullet holes in the walls, if a wall still stood. As the city grew closer, our taxi driver tried to sell us some “top quality sunglasses” which we reluctantly passed on, what with us all wearing our own sunglasses. While a bit shocked that some twenty years after the bloodshed, the town still looked broken, I also fell in love with the human spirit and the country. Seeing the Mostar bridge was both awe-inspiring and heart-breaking; watching videos of the bridge being shelled was a horrific reminder of how wars kill people, history and cultures and very often achieve nothing at all. Sitting at a table with a view of the river one evening, a lone firework explodes, telling Muslims observing ramadan that it’s time to eat. Soon around us are families chatting and eating and the city feels beautifully peaceful. The next morning, we stroll around the town looking for Muslibegovic House. Naturally, the only person around to help us spoke no English so we peek behind every door and fence to find the beautiful Ottoman-era house that my map tells me is definitely, probably, just there. Eventually, we find it and it is worth the wait. Unblemished by war, it’s a stunning building with a peaceful courtyard. I particularly liked the mannequins that are re-living the lives of the Ottoman-era. One looks just like David Bowie. You can stay in the house and it’s just €90 a night. Now to convince my boyfriend that he wants to visit Mostar…

Mostar

Sarajevo is an easy sell for a tourist; it’s a great city, full of energy, optimism as well as reminders of the war. I loved the Baščaršija, the old town where you get a sense of east meeting west. Many cities really do like to claim this but here you get to see Austro-Hungarian Europe one moment and a Turkish market the next. It’s a perfect warren of merchants to explore. At the time, I wrote that the city marketed itself as the place where we witnessed the “start of the 20th century” and where the “20th century ended”. At the beginning, Franz Ferdinand was shot and World War 1 began. At the end, words like ethnic cleansing become necessary and museums like the War Tunnels remind us of the three year blockade of Sarajevo. the History museum of Sarajevo showed fascinating images of the city during the war and now. The reconstructed Sarajevo City Hall, shelled in 1992, looks spectacular and the stained glass ceiling is a thing of wonder.

Sarajevo City Hall

So many of my travelling adventures have been helped no end by drunken conversations, searches on Google maps, happy coincidences and curiosity. So, my advice to everyone is pretty simple. The world is a great place and people are wonderful. Go and see it! Holiday resorts can wait.

A trip to… Porto

When I told friends I was going to Portugal for a holiday, I was met with nods of approval from those in the know and a slight tilt of the head for those yet to sample the delights of Spain’s neighbour. Perhaps the problem is that Portugal is the little sibling to Spain, a cultural juggernaut with everything a tourist could ever want. Yet, Portugal is an easy sell, it’s home to two hilly and sensuous cities in Lisbon and Porto, it has attractions from Roman ruins to Sintra’s fairytale castle and a long coastline, cooled by the ocean to stop it getting too hot, most of the time. For every hour of sunshine in London, Portugal has two. And, there are the custard tarts.

My second visit to Portugal took in Porto, the beautiful city of Coimbra and the seaside town of Matosinhos, but it all starts off at the airport. On arrival, we proceeded to follow the signs for the metro, only to be confronted by blank walls, escalators going the wrong way and smokers huddling in a corner. Retracing our steps, we did the same activities in a different order. As if by magic, an escalator appeared behind a shed which took us down to a car park. It seems that when you follow a sign for the metro, and finally see a ticket machine, it could either get you a few hours parking or into the city. It’s a crap shoot. Eventually, we made it to the train station ticket hall, only to find that the €15, 3-day travel passes we wanted, had to be bought in the tourist centre back in the airport. So far, so horrible.

A trip later on the weird, two-car metro trains that grind along the tracks, we checked ourselves in at White Box apartments, a minimalist hotel on a pedestrianised shopping street. For lunch, we went to try out the Porto “delicacy” Francesinha, at Bufeta Fasa. This most indelicate meal consists of bread, ham, some smoked sausage, chorizo, steak and melted cheese covered in a beer and tomato sauce. With fries. And a beer. It was enormous, and for those on a diet, contains over half of your daily food allowance. By eating it, you are destined to pile on the pounds but on the bright side, it’s so cheap that you’ll also save the pounds. Now I’ve eaten one, I am never tempted to again, but rumour has it that Bufeta Fasa is the best in town. The waitress seemed to be in a mild state of hysteria whenever we interacted. Was she trying to tell me this meal would give me a heart attack after I headed into the city with its infinite number of steep alleys?

1) Tiles are everywhere

In Porto, as in Lisbon, if something can be tiled, it will be tiled. Some of the earliest examples are Azulejo tiles, bringing an Islamic taste to the streets. These tiles do not feature images of people, so will be geometric or floral in style. The main train station, São Bento, has the history of Portugal tiled on the walls. In a nutshell, Portugal has had many fights. Horses feature heavily. Visiting here will ensure an epic start to any journey, though most people were taking photos of the twenty thousand tiles, rather than travelling. Other landmarks clad with intricate tiling include the Chapel of Souls, with the facade almost entirely covered in blue tiles, dating back to 1929, representing the life of Saint Francis of Assisi. The nearby Church of Saint Ildefonso and Igreja do Carmo complete this triptych of tiling, all close by each other.

Chapel of Souls

2) Museums

Porto has plenty of museums to nose around, including the Photography museum, housed in a former prison, which when we visited included a selection of photos of the Royal Family hanging out in various sunny climes. I longed to be back in time where everything seemed so glamorous. On closer inspection, everybody was dripping in sweaty woolen suits and it took an age to travel everywhere. The museum featured an exhibition of photography by homeless people and this was both powerful and touching as the photographers had such a different perspective on the city – benches and doorways took on a new meaning and their was some real talent on display. The best part of the museum was the collection of old photographic equivalent, from ancient Zeiss lenses to Kodak Brownies and a gallery of spy cameras. The exhibition made the past, with cameras hidden in cigarette cases and wallets, seem highly paranoid and anxious.

Old camera equipment

The Serralves museum is a fair trek out of town, but it’s world-class and utterly transfixing when you arrive. Don’t do what we did which was to take a tram to the Casa de Musica stop and then walk for half an hour to the gallery down a dreary main road. Plenty of better options are available, such as buses from Bolhao to the museum. Set in beautiful gardens with over 200 varieties of plants and trees including pine, chestnut, oak, Lebanese cedar and even Giant sequoias from the US, the museum occupies a space that is ideal for a lazy afternoon’s wander around the gardens and some art.

Serralves

Across the Duoro river from Porto’s old town is Gaia, which is itself a city. Here is where all the Port is stored in huge warehouses that stretch on and on with big names like Sandeman, Churchill’s, Taylor’s and Graham’s all offering wine cellar tours which will take you through the history of port. We stopped off for a port cocktail outside Sandeman, taking in the views over to Ribeira and being entranced by the beauty of the river, the bridge and the Rabelo boats, unique to this part of the world.

Livraria Lello isn’t a museum, but may as well be. The bookshop with a staircase that apparently influenced JK Rowling when writing Harry Potter, is unlike any other I’ve been to. Like Ernest Hemingway, Rowling seems to have visited anywhere and everywhere, but the interior does have a Potteresque flavour to it. You have to buy a ticket to get in, which you will have refunded if you buy a book. Nobody was really looking at the books, instead, we were all snapping away at the elaborate staircase, the vaulted ceiling and the stunning hand-carved decorations. It is a clever idea to charge, because the interior is too beautiful to lose and if nobody is purchasing anything, its future would be uncertain.

Livraria Lello

3) Food and drink

One of my favourite spots in Porto was near Praca de Lisboa. Here, the deceptively simple idea was to place a gorgeous garden with green spaces for people to enjoy, on top of a shopping centre in the middle of the city. We enjoyed a mojito from the bar in the garden and spent ages sitting in the sunshine, looking out at the city and wondering why this doesn’t happen everywhere. I was particularly pleased that you don’t have to buy anything at the bar to enjoy the space, and a bit delighted that the bar sells generous glasses of wine for €3 a glass and cocktails at €6 a pop.

Just moments away from Placa de Lisboa is the exceptional tapas restaurant Caldeireiros; when we went, we managed to bag the last table going and had one hour to be in and out, so my advice would be to book in advance. Even though every dish came with a mine’s worth of salt in it, the flavours were exquisite and this was the culinary highlight of our trip. While slightly more expensive than elsewhere, there’s nothing to fault.

A view of the old town

In comparison, the Majestic Cafe on the city’s main shopping street, is a disgraceful rip-off. The cafe has a Belle-Epoque interior that rivals anything in Brussels or Paris and it is genuinely beautiful to look at, but like an attractive person, it knows it and treats you accordingly. €12.50 will get you a distinctly average espresso, a latte and two stodgy nata. Serves me right for idealising beauty, when any less beautiful cafe on the street will treat me like the prettiest boy in the room.

4) The Old Town

I’ve written about beauty in abundance all around Porto and I’ve yet to mention what for many will be the highlight of the city, the old town, Ribeira. Strung out along the riverside by the Luis I bridge, a hotchpotch of ancient buildings tumbles down from high terraces, creating a picturesque delight. On the ground, most of the buildings are tourist trap bars and restaurants but the atmosphere is fizzing with life and more than a fair share of buskers. Taking a step into the old town is to take a step back in time, into a warren of tightly packed apartment blocks, plazas, churches that appear at sharp angles and views that demand to be explored. Porto is a wonderer’s dream and a photographer’s nightmare. Bring a spare memory card, or lots and lots of film.

The old town

As a city break, Porto is hard to beat. I find it hard to switch off, but on this trip I was so relaxed, I could have melted into the floor. Just walking around, stopping off for a drink and a snack is pleasure enough. One mystery remains, though. British phone boxes are scattered through the city, but I’ve no idea why. It was reassuring at least to see that none of them worked, just like at home.

TICKETS MONEY PASSPORT