One of the Amangiri's gorgeous loungers.

It’s hard to find more beautiful scenery anywhere than the national parks of Utah and Arizona. And the easiest way to visit them, logically, is to decide on an itinerary and then stay each night at motels nearby or in the parks’ guest lodges. That way you’re only driving from park to park and if it’s summertime you can be up early and hike while it’s not too hot – after all, Arizona in July can reach temperatures of well over a 100 Fahrenheit.

But the problem with this is that most of the accommodation in and around the parks, other than the Desert Pearl Inn in Zion, is pretty average. So the second option is to base yourself in one place and then each day drive to one of the parks – and back.

This is what we did choosing the Amangiri at Black Water near Lake Powell – and we think we chose correctly. Amangiri, in the Aman Hotel group, is possibly the most beautiful inland hotel in the world. A strong claim, but from the moment you arrive, particularly if you have a room both overlooking and leading into the desert, you know you’re somewhere very special.

We won’t try to add to the excellent existing reviews of the hotel, one by Bella Pollen already featured on Globalista, and the other by Geoff Dyer originally in the Financial Times, but instead we’ll be more prosaic and highlight some of the things we loved and some we didn’t.

The view.

What we loved. The rooms are extraordinarily beautiful. We stayed in a Desert Suite ($1000): The rooms couldn’t be more comfortable. Not everyone is going to love sinking into the softest beds imaginable but we found them the most comfortable that we can remember sleeping in anywhere. The bathrooms with their open view of the desert are superb. And finally the way the terraces have been designed – with two beds for watching the sunrise and sunset and for stargazing – couldn’t be improved on.

The pool and the beds around it are also fabulous – so lovely and inviting that you have to think twice before leaving the hotel and venturing out into that beautiful scenery. And the spa is probably amazing – as we are not spa people, we can’t comment authoritatively on this.

Add to this a wonderfully simple check-in, in your room with only one signature required and none of the tiresome welcome drinks in reception that other fancy hotels insist on when all you want to do is get to the room. Simplicity is a hallmark: Delightfully, you don’t need to sign for anything while you are there and we wish other hotels would institute this policy. It’s so much more pleasurable than having to wait around for your bill. And the hotel’s attention to detail was very much appreciated: It’s worth sending out your laundry just to see how beautifully they’re returned, while the personalized parking service meant that we left fresh bottles of water already in the car every morning.

But, finally and most spectacularly, the setting is stunningly beautiful.

What we were less enamoured with. Our gripes are minor and don’t in any way detract from the pleasure of staying at Amangiri. However, the food was a bit hit-or-miss: Breakfast is a rather sad affair featuring a few bowls of melon, grapes and little else; lunch is much better with excellent salads and a superb Wagyu burger.

Supper is variable. It can range from the parsimonious (an eggplant tortellini starter with two small tortellini) to okay (the wood oven cooked lamb and steak) to the excellent (the wood grilled chicken). The specials, though, are often too inventive and simply misfire: A duck special managed to bear no resemblance to a duck anyone might have previously encountered and not in a good way.

On another corporeal note, the hotel has been designed, not for spirituality, as the manager would contend, but for sex – whether in the bed, the bathroom, the terrace whilst stargazing, the pool, indeed everywhere. So do NOT go alone which is what I did, the “we” in this review being a royal we. It would be too, too poignant.

The cost of the Amangiri excursions is frankly outrageous.

And then there were the excursions. At Globalista, we don’t normally comment on the cost of anything unless we think something is poor value – and we’ll make such an exception here. The cost of the Amangiri excursions is frankly outrageous. To take a few examples, a car ride for a family of four to the Grand Canyon will cost $1500 for the day and if you want a proper Field Institute guide at the Canyon, that’s another $1400; a three-hour trip around Lake Powell in the cheapest of the hotel boats will cost $1300; just walking around the hotel property for two hours with a hotel guide is over $300. It’s one thing to pay $1000 a night to stay in the most blissful hotel imaginable, but $1500 for a day at the Grand Canyon, only two and half hours from the hotel, is madness.

The effect of this is that the hotel isn’t terribly helpful advising what to do, at least when it doesn’t involve taking one of the hotel’s own excursions. This is surprising, as Aman Hotels are usually brilliant at advising where to go, particularly where travelling around is part of the experience.

In light of that deficiency, we have compiled for you the unmissables and everything you need to know but might not have been told.

Unmissables

Glen Canyon and Lake Powell Glen Canyon, carved by a long stretch of the Colorado River, and Lake Powell, the man-made lake created by the Glen Canyon Dam, are absolutely spectacular. You’ll first see the lake from Highway 89 – that first view is dramatically beautiful and really can’t be surpassed.

You arrive at the lake by turning when you see the signs for Wahweap Marina. Don’t be put off when you reach the shoreline and see the giant carparks, camping sites, caravans, RV’s and the hundreds of houseboats moored alongside. When you get out on to the lake, particularly cruising through the canyons, it’s magical – that is, when you aren’t being buzzed by jet skis.

There are five ways to see Lake Powell, though the hotel, just 15 minutes away from it, will only tell you about three of them. Firstly, you can take the hotel’s own 36ft Cobalt cruiser; for three hours, it will cost $1800 including service. You can slum it – comparatively – and take the hotel’s Open Bow Tour Boat, at $1300, and you can also ask the hotel to organise something more modest, which they quoted at $1000.

Or you can rent your own boat from the clearly marked Boat Rentals. A 19-foot powerboat runs $400 for the day or $300 for a half day, while a 36-foot Weekender houseboat costs $600 for that day; be sure to remember your ID.

Finally, for a significantly less expensive option, you can visit the Lake Powell Resort reception and book a public tour; a two-and-a-half-hour tour, which, frankly, is plenty, will cost $68. The recommended Canyons Adventure Cruise leaves twice a day between April and October at 9am and 1pm, and between May and September, there’s an extra cruise leaving at 4pm.

A word of advice: Make sure you are one of the first on the boat and sit on the top deck in one of the two rows in the shade. Otherwise, depending on the time of year, you’re either in the blistering sun or sitting in the windowed lower deck.

It is Grand.

The Grand Canyon As with Lake Powell there are a number of options for getting to the Grand Canyon, and again, the hotel options are by far the most expensive: You can do a combined land and air tour organised by the hotel, at $2800 for two people, or just a scenic flight organised by the hotel, at $1780 for two. A hotel car and driver runs $1200 for two.

Or, you can drive yourself for about $100, including petrol and $25 entrance fee – the only downside, unless you share the driving, being the journey back.

When you arrive at the canyon entrance, it’s a 25-mile “scenic drive” to the village. Be warned: It’s not that scenic, as for 95 percent of the drive, you’re in a forest. When you arrive at the village make for Mather Point, park the car and then walk the clearly marked Rim Trail, which is an absolute must. It’s pretty busy – not to say noisy with more mothers than you can imagine screaming at their children not to stand too close to the edge – but don’t be put off, the views are sensational. The most popular and easiest walk is about 2 kilometers and you can either walk back the way you came or use the shuttle buses.

Bryce Canyon is a seriously unmissable excursion

Bryce Canyon The Grand Canyon may get all the attention, but the lesser known Bryce Canyon, also around two-and-a-half hours from the Amangiri, is a seriously unmissable excursion – even if you feel you’ve had your fill of canyons. If you’re going there from the Amangiri, head north on Highway 89 to Kanab, a magnificent drive in itself; at Kanab you keep heading north for another 60 or so miles till you see the signposts for Bryce. From Kanab, the scenery changes completely and within minutes you’re driving through a lush green valley interlaced with streams and ponds – more Wyoming than the dusty reds of Utah.

Before arriving at the canyon you’ll pass the breathtaking Red Canyon. It’s worth stopping and walking on the path that runs alongside the road.

Arriving at Bryce, you’ll find a number of viewpoints. Stop at all of them – the views of the amphitheatre are completely different at each one. We also recommend the Rim Trail walks. The easiest one is from Sunrise to Sunset and back, about half a mile each way. If you’re fit and willing, then you can descend down into the base of the canyon; the easiest of these is the 1.8-mile Queens Garden hike.

Zion National Park Zion National Park is an hour-and-a-half drive from the hotel; seeing it fits comfortably into an afternoon. The Park is incredibly beautiful – so don’t just restrict yourself to the magnificent 11-mile scenic drive.

Exploring the Upper Canyon requires going by shuttle, as cars aren’t allowed through the Canyon, but that’s easy enough: Shuttles leave every six minutes from the Zion Visitor Centre. You can either opt for the super sedentary option and simply stay on the shuttle (the roundtrip takes 80 minutes) or get off at one of the clearly-marked stops and walk or hike one of the beautiful trails.

There are a number of options here, from a simple river walk from Canyon Junction back to the Visitor Centre, to the much more adventurous and vertigo-inducing Angels Landing hike, starting from Weeping Rock. A word of warning: If you opt for the most popular walk, the 1.3-mile roundtrip, largely paved trail to Lower Emerald Pools, it’s not going to be a spiritual solitary walk. Instead, you’ll find yourself in a daisy chain of walkers in both directions, so this is only recommended if you’re short of time or, like us, unfit.

Paella in Barcelona. Photo credit: Terence, Subtle Devices

Meanwhile, The Independent’s Nick Clarke is forced to find other restaurants in The Hedonist: Copenhagen. “All dressed up with nowhere to go, I attempt to book a table at Noma – the world’s best restaurant, don’t you know – but am told by the lady on the reservations line that I can’t have a table until February. I tell her that I’ll be starving by then and will have to eat elsewhere.”

Hearty doesn’t have to mean bland, either: In The Guardian, Paul Sullivan reports on How to dodge the stodge in Prague: “This traditional lumpen fare is what tourists still expect to eat on a trip to eastern Europe – and there are still many places where you can sample it. But the past few years have seen a slew of contemporary restaurants open in Prague, offering excellent modern cuisine.”

And, if you want to stay warm outside as well as in, The New York Times’s Paola Singer discovers Punta del Este, Uruguay, and its new food festival. “Some of the best chefs in the region have opened restaurants in this beach town, which is fast emerging as a foodie destination.”

Get outside
Want to work off some of those great meals?

“Now I was walking downstream in Cumbria. It was a holiday: I hoped to let my thoughts settle, but I also hoped to learn more by walking the ground because the Eden is the vital artery of the constituency of which I am MP.” MP Rory Stewart is Discovering Eden in the Financial Times.

The Guardian’s travel experts bring us Insiders’ guide to the northern lights: “This winter, the lights enter the most lively phase of their 11-year cycle, meaning the next three years are a great time to go. And there’s plenty of choice when it comes to where to go; Scandinavia, Canada, Alaska … even Scotland.”

In The Telegraph, Simon Horsford is discovering America: a road and rail trip from Boston to Savannah. “It was reading John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley that sparked a desire to embark on an American road trip… And whereas Steinbeck travelled with his French poodle, I was taking my wife.”

And The Independent’s Christabelle Dilks explores Argentina: Lakes with a Latin flavour, declaring, “It’s like Scotland, but with the lights on; or the Alps, but empty of people. It’s the part of Patagonia no one mentions: perhaps too picturesque to fit the rugged image.”

Snowy, snowy Sweden. Photo credit: Visit Sweden

Oh, the weather outside is frightful…
But if you’re into that sort of thing, this weekend’s travel writers have you covered.

In The Independent, Tam Leach is on the Trail Of The Unexpected: Swedish Lapland. “Yet it turns out that there is much more to northern Sweden than the Lapland bit” – including Scandinavian design and architecture, the aurora borealis and great second hand shops. Kevin Rushby explores roughly the same neighbourhood, staying in A hotel like no other in Arctic Norway for The Guardian: “It’s an idea so simple, so beautiful, that you can’t believe it was not thought of before. Sail a ship into the Arctic as the winter freeze grips, let it get trapped in ice, then run visitors out there by dog sled or skidoo.”

If you’re looking for a slightly more traditional winter snow experience, The Independent is offering up The Essential Skiing Guide, covering Italy, Switzerland, France, Austria, and also the rest of Europe and the rest of the World. Meanwhile, over at The Telegraph, writer Stephen Wood is taking A back door to beauty: Sion, a place that offers a surprising approach to some splendid Swiss skiing: “The part of the Rhône Valley around Sion and Sierre is also an unusual place to ski, at least for the British,” but Wood urges skiers to venture beyond Verbier to this unusual region.

Bourbon Street, New Orleans. Photo credit: Wally Gobetz, www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/

To the east and a bit farther south, welcome to Miami and the art of cool: “Miami Beach is gaining a reputation as a year-round cultural destination,” says Johnny Morris in The Telegraph. “It all feels very urbane and cosmopolitan, and not the sort of thing you would expect to find in a neon-lit seaside resort on the edge of the Atlantic.”

And, on the other side of the country geographically and in just about every other way is Seattle, in this guide to the West Coast US city: “This is the most literate city in the US, has the highest number of college graduates and instinctively zigs when the rest of the country zags. It’s a city whose presiding geniuses are Kurt Cobain and Frasier,” declared Mark Jones in The Telegraph.

Everyone likes polar bears.

Think outside this winter
In the Financial Times, Anthony Lambert spends Halloween in the world’s polar bear capital, Churchill, Canada: “Since successfully (and truthfully) branding itself the ‘polar bear capital of the world’, Churchill has attracted thousands to see the animal that has become the symbol of wildlife imperiled through climate change.” Meanwhile, still in Canada, The Guardian’s Sarah Baxter spends a night Stargazing in Nova Scotia in Canada’s Kejimkujik national park, a “Dark Sky Preserve, a title bestowed by the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada only on areas of wilderness with little light pollution and perfect conditions for stargazing.”

Just a bit farther south, Kevin Rushby, writing for The Guardian, declares, “Yellowstone, the world’s oldest national park, is the best place to see wolves in the wild…And in winter the wolves are at their most visible, stark against the snowfields.” His trip is, in his words, A howling success: encounters with Yellowstone’s wolves.

Cocktails at Bar Hemingway in the Paris Ritz. Photo credit: Kenn Wilson

Or maybe something a bit more substantial? Anthony Grant, writing for the New York Times, reports on Israel’s Creative Cooking: “The creative streak coursing through many a Tel Aviv kitchen has spilled over to Jaffa, its ancient and often aesthetically unruly sister.” In Vientiane, The Independent’s Steve Vickers discovers food, warm and Coffee on the banks of the Mekong, in Vientiane: “Here, on the broad, frangipani-lined avenues that separate Vientiane’s temples from the arabica-brown slosh of the Mekong river, a culture of coffee and croissants reigns supreme.”

Then there’s staying warm the good old-fashioned way: Going to the Caribbean. In The Telegraph, Claire Wrathall revels in the offerings of St Lucia: The most perfect island in the Caribbean: “For this is a place rich in things to do, from riding Creole thoroughbreds through the waves on Cas-en-Bas beach to zip-lining through the rainforest canopy. It’s also paradise for walkers as St Lucia abounds in trails.”

Ski Turkey! Photo credit: Estonian Foreign Ministry

Ski season is upon us….
This just seems like a bad idea: The Guardian’s Daniel Metcalfe trips the Elastic fantastic: When skiing meets bungee-jumping, in the French village of Saint-Jean-de-Sixt. “[T]he idea is that you ski, sled or cycle down a 28m-long ramp and are hurled in to the open air to fly, and then slide gently to the other side. The point, of course, is the near-death illusion, which even for the hardest stomachs, doesn’t disappoint.”

Though not a near-death experience, Gemma Bowes, also in the Guardian, is looking for a different kind of ski trip and tries Skiing in Turkey: a long way from St Anton. “It can’t beat Cham for skiiing, but if you want a cultural adventure with skiing thrown in, it works. Skiing down in the dark and the fog on our last night, we could hear the call to prayer echoing across the snow, and I thought, sometimes being different is enough.” The Independent’s Stephen Wood takes up the charge and catalogues winter sports in the world’s strangest ski destinations. Forget France and Austria, look further afield to Russia, Morocco and Japan.

And, for those really not up for bungee jump skiing, Martin Love goes for a Family ski: never say never in South Tyrol: “The unusual combination of dazzling peaks surrounding a huge snow bowl means the runs are tailor-made for novice skiers: long, gentle, wide and with few trees to crash into. Adrenaline junkies would find it a bit tame. But for us, a bunch of hopeless beginners, it was ideal.”

Theatre in Samara, Russia. Photo credit: Wasile Grabar

On the city beat
Off the slopes and back on the streets, this week’s travel writers visited some news cities and some old favourites. Rowan Moore of the Guardian explores Samara: the disappearing wooden city on the Volga: “You probably haven’t heard of Samara, even if it is the sixth largest city in Russia, and architecturally unique. The centre of Samara is a varied but harmonious ensemble made up of thousands of decorated wooden houses, of a unique and graceful variant of art nouveau.”

Stateside, The Independent’s Kate Simon enjoys fall in Boston – ‘A place that’s for ever reinterpreting itself’. Declaring, “Boston is one of the most delightful cities in the States,” Simon added, “It has a depth that most American metropolises can only dream of, expressed in fine historic buildings and sights.” Staying in New England, the Financial Times writer Mark C. O’Flaherty investigates New York’s new bohemia: “Bushwick feels reminiscent of 1980s downtown New York City – a touch of youthful pioneer spirit mixes with hedonism and white middle class anarchy.”

In The Independent, Helen Buhaenko journeys through France and Italy, on the urban trail of the poet Shelley: “Shelley took an apartment hotel in Paris. I followed suit and stayed in an apartment in the heart of the old city; the perfect place to snuggle into an armchair and read up on the Romantics’ adventures.”

And if following in the footsteps of the Romantics works up an appetite, The Telegraph’s Natasha Edwards has you covered with the best new Paris restaurants: The rise of the baby bistro. “Now the city’s bistros are opening ‘baby bistros’. These are quite hard to define – think of casual deli-grocery-eateries or wine cellars offering food, where the fashion is for high-quality ingredients, simply prepared.”

Finally, Tyler Brûlé, writing in the Financial Times, returns to find A relationship rekindled in Sydney, Australia: “I hadn’t been to Sydney for more than four years. Was it still going to feel familiar? Would I feel at home? Or was there a perfectly good reason that it had fallen off my itineraries, and was I setting myself up for disappointment?”

China's silk road desert. Photo credit: Jeffrey Kong

The spooky and surreal
Looks like it’s that time of year again – spooky, surreal travel, just in time for Halloween. In the Financial Times, Edwin Heathcote explores Seaside surrealism through ”Living Architecture”, a project helmed by Alain de Botton which “commission[s] a series of new houses from notable architects, available to anyone to stay in and designed to give the reluctant English a chance to revel in the luxury of modern architecture.”

On the darker side of things, the New York Times’ Dan Levin explores China’s Sea of Death and finds that A Desert Blooms Along China’s Silk Road: “Although the place is called the Sea of Death, there was a surprising amount of green, but there were no birds and no other people, just a solitude, which felt, well, biblical.” And if abandoned houses are creepy, how about entire cities: The Financial Times’s Claire Wrathall visits the abandoned cities in Cambodia’s other Angkor Wat: “But to ‘do’ Angkor Wat as a day trip from Bangkok is to miss some of the most extraordinary abandoned cities in existence. For Angkor Wat is

only one of dozens of such sites within a 15km radius of Siem Reap.”

Meanwhile, in death-related puns, The Independent’s Simon Usborne is skiing in France, with Two feet in La Grave, “a place whose deathly name is whispered on chairlifts and between bar stools all over the world by people who have heard it offers probably the best lift-served off-piste skiing on the planet.”

Finally, tipping the scales for mystical rather than scary, Andy Isaacson experiences an Amazon Awakening for the New York Times: “I had traveled by car, plane, boat and foot — more than 100 miles from conventional civilization — to reach a place where the old ways have not been forgotten, where local people interpret the world through their dreams.”

This doesn't look like fun. Photo credit: Andreas Praefcke

And on other trails, Ruth Ellen Gruber of the New York Times was On the Trail of Gustav Mahler, spending “a late-summer weekend following the trail of the composer’s early life in the beautiful Vysocina highlands of Bohemia and Moravia” in the Czech Republic. Speaking of classical, The Telegraph’s Nicky Holford is in Turkey: Walking ancient paths on the Lycian Way. “The walk is a classic journey through history.”

Your new ski buddies in Antarctica? Photo credit: Mike Hipp

And if that doesn’t get your blood flowing, how about some truly undiscovered country? Also in the Financial Times, Xavier De Le Rue explores “skiing’s final frontier” – Antarctica, the White Continent, on board the Clipper Adventurer, a 90-meter ice-reinforced ship: “[W]e would spend a week touring the fjords of the Antarctic Peninsula, raising anchor every evening and exploring new mountains every day.”

Speaking of ‘beaten path’ puns…

The New York Times’ Marco Velardi explores the Caffè Society of Milan: “There’s more to Milan dining than Da Giacomo and Fioraio Bianchi Caffè. These local favorites will get you off the eaten path.” Still in Italy? Head south with The Guardian’s John Brunton, who recommends the Wein and dine … in Italy’s South Tyrol: “Mountain farmers sell their fruit and vegetables, wonderful cured hams and sausages, honey and delicious cheeses, but the big attraction is a group of old ladies, gathered around a long wooden table in a rough assembly line, making fresh pasta.”

And if you’re still hungry, why not jet over to Bilbao? In The New York Times, Lisa Abend recommends the top restaurants worth visiting In Bilbao, It’s Not Just the Museum: “The dishes being turned out by Mr. Martínez and a handful of other local chefs are already so accomplished, and yes, artistic, that it’s fair to talk of a whole new Bilbao Effect, this one taking place in the city’s kitchens.”

Escape to the city

Looking for a metropolitan diversion? The Independent’s Chris Leadbeater is in Bangalore: Turned on by India’s IT city, “South India’s thrusting business city – a jumble of a metropolis where first-world finances rub against third-world poverty.” Meanwhile, elsewhere in The Independent, Andrew Spooner urges us to sidestep Bangkok in favour of Chiang Mai, ‘A princely citadel turned metropolitan’: “Contemporary and engaging, with a lot less of the traffic, pollution, stress, political upheaval and stifling heat of Bangkok – visit between November and February to enjoy a climate akin to a perfect British summer’s day.”

The New York Times’s Joshua Hammer introduces us to A Finnish City Prepares for the Limelight: “Now one of Nordic Europe’s best-kept secrets is hoping to regain a prominent place on the map. The European Union has anointed Turku one of its two European Capitals of Culture for 2011.”

And on the road perhaps more travelled, Rachel Donadio, of The New York Times, spends 36 Hours in Rome, noting, “Lately, Rome has welcomed some new sparkle. A futuristic museum in the historic center has added color to the city’s architectural scene. Around town young chefs are experimenting with local ingredients to create new tastes. After years of hitting snooze, this ancient city might just be waking up.”

From our friends at Globalista – serious travel guides for serious travellers.

Last year, George Butler, a London-based illustrator, decided to go on a road trip – an 8,500-kilometer road trip, one that took him through 15 countries and about half of Africa. Butler left London on November 23, 2009, and spent more than six months en route to Libreville, Gabon, gaining the kind of insight into West Africa that you just can’t get from your general travel press. Globalista sat down with Butler on his return, and asked him about his adventures – including a lucky near miss with some would-be kidnappers in Niger and getting stuck in a gold mine in Obuasi.

George Butler's amazing images from his journey into West Africa. www.GeorgeButler.org

Here below are a few highlights from that interview; to read the rest of Butler’s conversation with Globalista and examples of his work, check out Globalista’s blog.

Why did you decide to go to West Africa? You only ever hear in the news how difficult it is or how hard it is to live there. I just wanted to see what it was like for myself rather than just go on what you read in the press or what you see when you’re watching Oxfam or Red Cross adverts.

Your experiences seem to be overwhelmingly positive from the journal entries, apart from the kidnap attempt. What happened there? Above the Niger is the Tuareg, which is a tribe, and below is Bambara. The politics between them has always been a bit awkward. So they had a rebellion in the 1990s and now there’s a surge of kidnappings which started to happen as we left England and by the time we got there it sort of reached its peak. It’s very easy to blame on the Tuareg because they’ve now finished their rebellion, for one reason or another people think it’s them that are doing it but we were actually with two Tuareg guys who because of who they knew, realised that we were being followed or we’d been a target from coming through Algeria. Anyway we got to the border , it was getting dark and we had to decide whether we gonna risk it and go across with this guy who wanted a faster car. Anyway we turned around and went back, thank god.

We stayed in this little house for a few days, just to stay out of the way. Our two Tuareg guys took the cars across and we were gonna fly around and they got into Mali and these bandits arrived with guns and tied them up and blindfolded them.

Because they were local, there was never any interest in them, it was ‘Where are the tourists? Why didn’t you bring them? You need to go and get them’. But they managed to persuade them that the cars were theirs so. It worked out in the end but it was really lucky. But for everything that goes wrong, there are another 25 people who are gonna help you out or find you a place to stay or give you some food.

….

Wow. And the mining – again you were really in there and seeing what it was like first hand. What was that like? Well it’s one of the times I actually got to organise something that I wanted to document [beforehand]. A lot of the time I was just arriving and trying to find a place to draw and it’s very difficult to pinpoint exactly what’s interesting in a place. But in Obuasi the whole town is basically built around the AngloGold Ashanti mine and they employ 5000 people. So I was fascinated to see underground and how it works and how they’re trying to improve health and safety and cut down on the obvious dangers of mining.

When you went down in the first mine, drawing in that environment, how did you do that? We had on this amazing kit, attached to your belt – if there’s a lot of gas in the air, you’ve got a self-rescuscitator? Anyway it can help you breathe. And a headtorch. It was impossible to draw really cause it was so noisy and there’s moisture in the air. Then there’s fans to drop the air temperature so they can work for longer.

But then it was quite nice at the same time – I didn’t have a choice whether I could use 10 different colours, I couldn’t muck around, it was a question of getting down as much as I could, which was quite a refreshing way of doing it.

But then you did get stuck down there didn’t you? Yeah, the cage which is a lift, got jammed because there was a power failure. But we still has power underground because it’s a separate system. But the cage was stuck and we had to wait down there for a couple of hours. Its not like you’re sitting in a tiny little hole – they drive these huge trucks around underground and they’ve got a train which takes the ore to the surface. So after about an hour and a half they sent someone down because they were a bit worried about their PR. They sent a guy down in his Toyota truck to pick me up and everybody else who was down there. Which is amazing because it’s 7 km to the surface, round all these tiny little blind bends. So it was actually perfect, to see what it was really like.

…

Does any particular country or people stand out? West Africa for me, it’s all  similar – the countries have just been divided up, well originally by Europeans drawing lines on maps. So it kind of all melds into one in that the best bits were the places where I stayed longer or with people that I met. I met a man on the street in Dakar – I was looking for a place to stay – and he just picked up my bag, jumped in the back of a taxi and I stayed with his family for a week, with his mum, sister and son. We shared a mattress on the floor of his bedroom for seven days in Dakar.

You go on your gut instinct. You just have to. So often there’s someone trying to make a quick buck out of picking up the obvious tourist. There’s a point I think, when they realise that actually you’re not necessarily just there to be a tourist, you might want to experience what life’s really like – this guy was very genuine. You have to trust people because if you ask someone a question and you don’t trust what they’re saying, you’ve got nothing really to go by. So yeah, it was definitely one of the better experiences I had.

Carved masks of the Dogon people in Mali, one of the many sights seen not from a safari van. Photo credit: Devriese

Hidden Africa: What you don’t see from the back of a crowded safari van
In The Independent’s Africa Round-Up: Step away from the binoculars Rhiannon Batten highlighted the best non-safari trips in Africa. From music festivals in Malawi and Mali, to village tours in Sudan and Ethiopia, to a gastronomy tour of South Africa, Batten went far off the beaten-track to recommend some unusual ways to enjoy the diverse continent. Meanwhile, in The Telegraph Simon Horsford offered up Namibia guide: sand and safari: “The diverse landscape ranges from bushland and desert to coastline scattered with animal skeletons and shipwrecks, and something akin to moonscape. Naturally there’s an abundance of wildlife, too, with encounters that were to be much closer than we anticipated.”

Holidays by railroad
In The Financial Times, Ian Hargreaves embarked on his second cross-Europe road trip. “When I started planning, my grown-up daughter and a veteran of the 1989 trip had a word to say. That adventure had, she said, been life-defining (why do children never tell you these good things at the time?) but she thought I should recall how it ended: with divorce. I gulped and started worrying about a better balanced schedule.” On the autoroute. The Independent climbed onboard a New luxury train from Moscow to French Riviera.  ”The train stops at 22 stations, cutting across Europe via Minsk, Warsaw, the Czech Republic, Vienna and Milan, before reaching its final destination in France’s Cote D’Azur, a sunny clime that has drawn wealthy Russians tourists for centuries.”

The incredible, edible ant. Photo credit: Bill Hails

Exploring a less shudder-inducing culinary avenue, The Observer’s Ian Tucker accompanies David Thompson – head chef of the Michelin-starred nahm at the Halkin hotel – on a culinary tour of the street stalls of Bangkok. “But if you want another course, you need another stall. Luckily Thompson has a plan: mains are up the road. ‘I’ve got us a table in the best section, in the gutter,’ he says with characteristic mischief.” This is One night in Bangkok on the trail of Thai street food.

Unexplored territory
Want to follow the path unbeaten by the tourist hordes? This weekend’s travel writers have the places for you: Chris Coplans explores Isaan, the least visited, northeastern region of Thailand, a place where towns “depend on farming, not tourism”. It’s a veritable feast of culture and history, with 182 Khmer sites, including the majestic Phanom Rung; this is Temples of delight in Thailand.

In the truly little-unexplored region, Sarah Barrell at The Independent navigates the relatively uncharted waters of the Arctic’s North-west Passage: A 21st-century expedition, enjoying close encounters with the local wildlife along the way  “[F]inally, polar bears have been spotted. A mother and baby bear, agile as mountain goats, come down a steep rock face, settling on the beach to watch us bob around on the Zodiacs just offshore.”

And Lionel Beehner of the New York Times spends some time On the Colombian Coast, seeking Natural Beauty, Gritty Charm, in the oft-overlooked city of Santa Marta. Santa Marta is currently enjoying a regenerative boon, induced by government spending and private enterprise, a spate of new tourist-friendly hotels, the nearby Tayrona National Park and its authentic, gritty Latin spirit.