7am. A time I very rarely see unless someone is throwing me an hourly wage, but, since I was traveling towards a city I have not visited since I was a kid, I was more than happy to oblige with the early morning wake up call. I was going back to California, back to the [...]

Getting stuck behind a small van on a single-lane mountain road in Spain is a bit like getting caught behind an old person in the supermarket. I’d promised José Losantos of Bodega “Doña Felisa” that I would join him on a tour of his vineyard near Ronda, Malaga at 12pm sharp (it was 11.50), and [...]

Huge, designer apartments set into the cliff-face that overlooks the city. The V&A Waterfront. Glossy stadiums. Even Table Mountain: the cable car that transports you to the top connotes that the mountain has been transformed into a commodity and thus a symbol of wealth. A tourist in Cape Town would be forgiven for believing that [...]

It was always a longshot: flying all the way to New Zealand to support the England Rugby World Cup team. And like fellow Englishman Jonny Wilkinson, my longshot missed – badly. Fortunately, New Zealand has plenty to offer beyond the tournament. Distraught about England’s lame defeat by a French side who barely made it through [...]

It was 5am and I’d been waiting on hold to Qantas airlines for almost five hours. Panic had turned to delirium as I wondered if I would ever get through to an actual human being. I was supposed to be on a plane at 9am but all flights in and out of Melbourne had been [...]

Marrakech. A blast of colour the moment you leave the airport – from the striking blue sky to the crimson walls of the aptly named Red City. It’s bustling with life and almost choking under the smoggy fumes of the death-defying traffic, and the residents are as vibrant as the hues that define the city [...]

Stafford is a town like any other.  Too far north to be part of the West Midlands, but thoroughly left out of the North West, it exists in relative isolation in the middle of the country. It was a home to me for eighteen years before I left for university, coloured by friends, family and [...]

People travel for many reasons: for raw pleasure, to challenge themselves, to see new places, and to meet new people. It has been the people I have met in my first two weeks in New Zealand that have impressed upon me the most. The country is stretched to capacity by the invasion of rugby fans [...]

The last time I took a day trip to Paris on the Eurostar it was Christmas time and I was eager and to see the whole city in a day. I took in all of the major sights, but two days later the whole experience seemed like a dream. I had, had little time to [...]

Frank Sinatra once said that ‘Las Vegas is the only place I know where money really talks–it says, “Goodbye.”‘ In many ways this is true, but there is much more to Vegas than poker chips and the roulette table. The life of a poker player goes past the floors of the casinos and onto the [...]