Travel

From Camlica Hill, the highest point in greater Istanbul, we can see across the Bosphorus to the Golden Horn and beyond to the fortified walls built by the Romans 1,600 years ago.

Once the domain of Jack the Ripper and gangsters, East London Cockneys now rub shoulders with artists and middle-class professionals

Swimming 850 metres from a small dingy to a tropical shore flanked by big swell seemed logical until the halfway point. From the boat, the green and white calm of Ilha de São José seemed attainable, even without a surfboard.

There's nothing like a classic Dutch passenger river barge. Long and wide, strong and steady, it inspires trust.

Photography Louise Christie Crickey! Queensland's Fraser Island is one big sand pile. In fact, the 123-kilometre-long strand ranks as the biggest sand island in the world. For those familiar with B.C.

Our trip to the Black Sea began on the Dnieper River in Ukraine and ended in the tiny Turkish fishing village of Sariyer at the mouth of the Bosphorus.

Holed up for a week at a budget hotel near the 1,000-trains-a-day Gare de Midi (or Zuid) metro-rail station, surrounded by a matrix of roads and overpasses contemptuous of pedestrians, did not initially endear me to Brussels.

Teenagers on rented Segues weave through the crowds of tourists strolling the Yalta waterfront. Ice cream vendors and souvenir hawkers share the quay with open-air beer gardens abuzz with talk and laughter.

We travelled by train from Palermo, south to Agrigento.

In Sicily, I wondered if I wasn't the unwitting victim of some cosmic brand of "omerta" - Mafia lingo for an act of non-co-operation. Nothing big. I didn't encounter a crime boss and no one asked me to accept a bribe.