Features

City breaks with a twist: Europe’s 10 best homestay experiences

Pin This feature has been made possible by Homestay.com, an accommodation marketplace connecting guests to local hosts in over 150 countries. If you want to discover a new side to your favourite cities, save money, learn the lingo, and eat, drink and dance like a local, swap your hotel for a homestay. To help you…

Solo travel in Australia: everything you need to know

Australia remains a classic travel destination. A steady stream of gap-year backpackers, career breakers and round-the-world-trippers head down under to sample Sydney’s energetic nightlife, visit the Great Barrier Reef, marvel at Uluru, cuddle a koala and learn to surf. The country is a great place for solo travellers, particularly first-timers – it’s friendly, fun and…

A first-timer’s guide to Darwin: Australia’s tropical capital

Tucked away in the “Top End”, closer to Indonesia than Sydney, Darwin is the least known of Australia’s regional capitals – stunningly remote, buffeted by extreme weather, and with an atmosphere like nowhere else in the country. Here’s our guide to Darwin – and what to expect on your first visit to this fast-growing, youthful,…

A taste of Kolkata: the foodie capital of India

India’s most underrated city, Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) is a far cry from its negative stereotypes: it’s friendly, attractive and home to some of the best – and most diverse – food in the country. Shafik Meghji picks out seven essential foodie experiences. 1. Pick up a kati roll Kolkata’s ultimate street food is the kati…

How to have your own Jungle Book adventure

Ahead of the release of the new live-action Jungle Book film, Shafik Meghji uncovers the Indian landscape that inspired Rudyard Kipling’s classic tale – and picks out five other destinations where you can find the characters’ real-life counterparts. The national parks of eastern Madhya Pradesh are often described as “Kiplingesque”. This landscape of creeper-clad forests,…

Why Córdoba is Argentina’s most underrated region

Although long popular with Argentine tourists, Córdoba Province receives few foreign visitors, despite being one of the most diverse parts of the country. This underrated region is home to hip cities, kitsch Germania, iconic revolutionaries, skydiving hubs, UFO-spotters, and perhaps the finest horse riding on the continent. Because its capital is getting cool The capital of…

The subtropical river system just 30 minutes from Buenos Aires

Just outside Buenos Aires, Argentina is one of South America’s most unexpected landscapes – the Paraná Delta. Part of the continent’s second largest river system, it is accessed via a Victorian-style toy train and the town of Tigre, an idiosyncratic cross between England’s Henley-on-Thames and Italy’s Venice.            With a population…

Want to support Nepal? Go there on your next trip

Four months after two devastating earthquakes struck the country, Nepal is slowly getting back on its feet. Shafik Meghji explains how, ahead of the peak tourist season, travellers can help the country recover by booking a holiday. Why should I go? Tourism is a vital part of the Nepali economy, directly supporting almost 500,000 jobs,…

Unexplored Mexico: Chiapas and Tabasco

For many years Chiapas and Tabasco were famous for revolutionaries, chilli sauce and little else. But these neighbouring Mexican states are increasingly appearing on tourist itineraries, drawing in travellers with their magnificent ruins, colonial cities, unique indigenous cultures and lip-tingling cuisine. Shafik Meghji heads off the beaten track. Chiapas Stretched along the Guatemalan border in…

Escape rooms: would you pay to get locked up?

Paying a stranger to lock you and your friends in a room filled with fiendish puzzles sounds an unlikely holiday activity, but “escape rooms” are springing up around the world. Shafik Meghji got locked up in Budapest… The email was brief and ever so slightly unsettling: “Please arrive punctually at 16:30 to Erzsébet Körút 8,…

Off the map in the Atacama: Chile’s eerie ghost towns

Thousands of foreign travellers visit the geysers, salt flats, oases and volcanoes of north Chile’s Atacama Desert, but few make it to two of the region’s man-made attractions: the starkly beautiful ghost towns of Humberstone and Santa Laura. Shafik Meghji takes us into these abandoned settlements.  Yellow tsunami “hazard zone” signs, planted like sunflowers on…

The Bolivian food revival: will it work?

Bolivian food has long been in the shadows of its more acclaimed South American neighbours, but the co-founder of Noma – the renowned Nordic restaurant named best in the world earlier this year – aims to change that. Shafik Meghji popped into his new venture in La Paz for alpaca jerky, freeze-dried potatoes, custard apple…