January 2022 3 min read
Which of the Shoalhaven towns of Culburra, Callala and Currarong would you choose? I say try Culburra first. Read on for ten reasons why.
April 2021 4 min read
When pilot Andrew Fewtrell isn’t pumping the bellows, the silence up there envelops me. It’s like riding on a cotton wool carpet.
April 2021 5 minute read
Berowra Waters Inn shimmered in my imagination, much like Xanadu, a place of refracted sunlight on water and food cooked to perfection.
Jonah’s hotel, January 2021
(4 minute read)
The Russian novelist Vladimir Nabakov said that about the great sunrise and life. And anyone on a jaunt to Jonah’s hotel, at the pointy end of Sydney’s Northern Beaches, would surely agree.
November, 2020 (3-min read)
The raggedy, verdant town of Mount Victoria is on the Westernmost rung of the Blue Mountains’ ladder of settlements. Up here, at 1,042 metres above sea level, the wind blows harsh in the winter and the mists settle in longer.
October, 2020 (5 min read)
We pitch up at the Rydges on Hay Street in Port Macquarie late on a Saturday afternoon to find a crowd of frocked-up wedding guests. The reception is in the hotel’s Zebu Restaurant & Bar.
The Wildlife Retreat at Taronga (4 min read)
After three sleep-overs on three different occasions at Taronga’s Wildlife Retreat, I’d go back in a twinkling. It’s only a 20-minute drive from my house, but the moment I step in to the sensational circular bar and lounge I’m on holiday. Aperol Spritz? Yes please. You need a fancy drink to match the breathtaking view from the Retreat’s broad deck: Sydney harbour is just so damn glorious on a sunny day with the Opera House shimmering under the iconic Bridge. But the heady feeling you get on walking in to Reception is also inspired by the interior design of the space.
June 2021 (3 min read)
What kind of music do a certain generation in the Arab world like to listen to in the morning? Why, the songs of the beautiful Lebanese-born Fairuz of course. Check out her “morning songs” playlist on YouTube if you want to hear for yourself, or, better still, book in to a Taste of Syria and Afghanistan Tour in Merrylands and listen to Fairuz while eating the special breakfast of Damascus.
November 2020 (3 min read)
Let me say straight up that this is a fat trek, to borrow a phrase from my generally inert teenage daughter. We used the WildWalks website to plan our trip and their timing is spot on.
October 2020 (3 min read)
My friend Mary raved about the Playhouse Hotel and the man who owns it. He has become the reason people want to visit Barraba, a tiny rather nondescript town an hour’s drive north of Tamworth (six hours from Sydney).
October 2020 (2 min read)
My family of five share a sense of foreboding as we arrive at Maitland Gaol on a sunny school-holiday afternoon. The jail was open from 1848 to 1998, which makes it the oldest working prison in Australia. The notorious prisoners who did their time here include the backpacker murderer Ivan Milat, and the Murphy brothers who murdered Anita Cobby in 1986, a terrible event I recall clearly.
January 2020 (3 min read)
“Guess how many people in Japan are a hundred years old or more?”, asks Andy Kenji Marsden, the founder of Osaka Backstreet Tours. Banjo, who is nine, thinks there could be 20 million, I guess a 1,000, Nick says 10,000 and Iris, our teenager, is the closest at 100,000. There are in fact almost 70,000 centenarians in Japan and the number is rising each year.