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.

November 2019 (3 min read)

The Hotel Hydro Majestic in Medlow Bath, NSW, re-opened four years ago after a 30-million revamp. I never visited before the doors closed in 2008, but I can tell you now that the contemporary carpets and furnishings are gorgeous, from the firework bursts of crimson in the carpet of Cat Alley to the honeycomb runner in the hallway of the guest rooms.

August 2019 (2 min read)

Amid the crush of Friday afternoon traffic, I am hurtling down the highway from Sydney to Wollongong with three kids in the car, one of them the Chinese exchange student, and cursing the whole idea of a weekend at the Novotel Northbeach hotel.

June 2019 (2 min read)

“That’s just the way he walks”, says the friendly driver of our little shuttle bus around Q Station Hotel as she pulls up close to an echidna shuffling along on the grass near the road. It is a fantastical spiky beast, with a strange, rolling shuffle that makes me think it’s either drunk or unwell.