Paula Hardy

It’s not often you learn of one of the year’s most exciting hotel openings while visiting a foundation focused on migration. But that’s how I hear about La Fiermontina Ocean, a discreet luxury retreat on Morocco’s wild and unspoilt North Atlantic coast. I am in Rabat with Bilal El Hammoumy, founder of Inclusive Morocco, a travel company focused on showing tourists the country’s cultural diversity. While eating orange blossom-soaked doughnuts in the kasbah, our conversation turns to Morocco’s unique position as a bridge between Africa and Europe, and a nexus of travel, trade and migration over the course of centuries. Which brings us to Fondation Orient-Occident, which for the past 30 years has worked on supporting local communities and building bridges across the Mediterranean. As we tour its facilities and visit the skilled embroiderers in its atelier, Bilal tells me that the foundation’s inspired president, Yasmina Antonia Filali, is also the co-founder of La Fiermontina Ocean.

A few days later, I’m on my way there. After whizzing down the glittering coastline, we turn onto a dirt track that disappears into an oak forest. When the trees clear, they reveal golden wheat fields fringed with yellow helichrysum and cow parsley. We stop by a herd of grazing goats at the crest of a hill and get our first view of the quilted countryside that leads to the hotel’s stone reception house. With its patchwork of shamrock green, sage and yellow fields, ploughed corn rows, wind-whipped lines of olive trees and a slash of silver-blue sea on the horizon, it looks like a surreal Gerda Wegener painting.

This piece was first published by Conde Nast Traveller Middle East in December 2024. Continue reading here.

A blue tug draws our vintage dahabiya out into the prevailing wind and our captain unfurls its distinctive 12-metre-high sails. As the fabric billows, the tug sets the double-masted houseboat adrift. The water slaps against the hull and frogs croak in chorus. As the sun sets, the Nile turns to liquid gold, reflecting pink plaques of drifting cloud; originally, the boat, too, would have been covered in gilding – dahab means gold in Arabic. We glide by papyrus islands sheltering yellow-footed cattle egrets and black moorhens, where water buffalo wallow and farmers tend groves of mangoes and fields of sugarcane. The sky turns vermilion then lilac then deepest indigo behind palm trees whose gently swaying fronds look like the raised arms of temple supplicants.

Like a carriage on the Orient Express, the 100-year-old Set Nefru is exquisitely crafted. There are fewer than five of these beauties left on the Nile and all the others are privately owned, one by Parisian shoe designer Christian Louboutin. Set Nefru is the recent acquisition of Al Moudira, a hotel-home filled with Middle Eastern antiques tucked away from the mayhem of the major monuments on Luxor’s rural west bank. It is a worthy caravanserai for the “great Nile road”, where a cosmopolitan crowd of travellers can find respite on their journey south.

This piece was first published by Conde Nast Traveller Middle East in July 2024. Continue reading here.

Marrakech started the year in an upbeat mood as international collectors flocked to the 1-54 contemporary African art expo beneath the Mamounia’s painted cedarwood ceilings. Sponsored by Christies and attended by VIPs from the Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou and Smithsonian, the fair hosted a record number of galleries, welcomed serious collectors who bought works at record prices, and inaugurated the opening of two new art spaces. In short, it was a spectacular success.

It also felt like a fresh start following the terrifying earthquake that shook southern Morocco, and Marrakech, on 8 September 2023. That once-in-a-century event and the devasting images that emerged shocked the world and halted what until then had been a phenomenal year following Morocco’s history-making semi-final in 2022 World Cup. The aftermath was brutal (and reconstruction continues), but the whole country rallied in a phenomenal aid effort that got things back on track just in time to host the IMF conference and La Mamounia’s 100th birthday in October. Because of that unique community spirit the Ministry of Tourism declared 2023 a record year for tourism with 14.5 million visitors, the highest ever in Morocco’s history. 

This article appeared in the Telegraph in March 2024. Continue reading here.

Venice is an act of pure imagination. Just think about it: a city of marble palaces built in a marshy lagoon. It makes no sense at all as a place of human habitation. And, yet, in this liminal landscape, in the absence of cars, I feel more connected to other people than anywhere else. That's because Venice only works by an act of extraordinary collaboration. Nowhere else is our contribution so urgently needed. Because make no mistake Venice is the future’s frontline. And, with its heart-breaking beauty - constructed entirely by human hands - it reminds us that we are not passive observers, but artists, doers and changemakers, too.

This text is the introduction to the new edition of Lonely Planet's Pocket Venice guide. It is due to publish in Spring 2025.

Zil Elwannyen Sesel, as the Outer Islands are known in Creole, are scattered across a vast expanse of ocean 230km to 1150km southwest of Mahe. Barely peeping above sea level, they are mostly coral atolls - rings of reefs and islets that mark the ghostly rim of ancient volcanoes now submerged. It’s a place so pristine it provided the location for one of Blue Planet II’s most memorable sequences, when giant trevallies leapt from the sea to snatch baby terns in flight, to present David Attenborough’s astonishment.

In a world where biodiversity is being lost at an astonishing rate, Seychelles Outer Islands are rare, precious and important.

This is an excerpt from the Lonely Planet guide to Mauritius, Reunion and Seychelles, for which I was lead writer and contributed all the Seychelles text. The guide was published in November 2023, and you can find a copy here.

A half-moon hangs in the morning sky beside the Koutoubia minaret, fading fast. Like Florence’s Duomo or Paris’ Notre Dame, no matter how many times you see this perfectly proportioned 12th-century tower, it always makes you pause. It is particularly lovely in the morning above a sea of leafy orange trees that municipal workers carefully trim.

That it is still standing at all after the 6.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Morocco’s High Atlas mountains at 10.11pm on September 8, 2023, is a miracle. Home videos from the night show the 252-foot-high minaret swaying dramatically while flocks of roosting birds evacuate en masse and holidaymakers run clear in confusion.

Over coffee at his co-working space, L’Blassa, in the Marrakech neighbourhood of Gueliz, entrepreneur Oussama Laftimi, tries to describe the experience. “The ground was moving like a wave and the noise, the noise was so loud,” he says. “Like the roar of wind but deep inside the earth. I can’t describe it.”

This piece was published in the Telegraph in November 2023. To read the full piece, click here.

As magical experiences go, sitting in the Chellah – a medieval, Unesco-listed Merenid necropolis in Morocco’s capital Rabat – watching contemporary dance master Shahrock Moshkin Ghalam playfully pirouette takes some beating. The last rays of sunlight bathe him in a golden glow and beautifully back light virtuoso tar player Aïda Nosrat, kanoun player Christine Zayed and percussionist Saghar Khadem, who play while he dances.

The performance was one of nearly a hundred at the 2019 edition of Mawazine, the world’s largest and most diverse music festival attracting 2.75 million people. Since 2001, it has been organized by the Association Maroc Cultures under the high patronage of King Mohamed VI himself. Vast laser-lit international concerts, intimate dance recitals, street performances and creative workshops take place across seven stages, in local neighbourhoods and at heritage sites like the Chellah.

Marwane Fachane, CEO of the city’s top cultural agency the Hiba Foundation, says, “there is an institutional vision for Rabat to be Morocco’s window to the world, which is why culture is now central to the city’s development.”It’s also why Rabat was nominated Africa’s Capital of Culture in 2022. Mawazine is just the biggest in a long list of cultural events that fill the city’s calendar including the Roots Film Festival, the Rabat Book Fair, an internationally acclaimed art Biennale and the Jidar Street Art Festival.

The Hiba Foundation supports many of these initiatives with a mandate to foster Moroccan talent across all the arts. Their three-storey heritage home on Avenue Mohammed V includes a one-of-a-kind theatre-cinema auditorium, dance studios, workshop spaces and a café which hosts a packed weekly programme of jam, stand-up, improv, slam, book readings and concerts. Yet still Rabat flies beneath the world’s cultural radar.

This piece was first published in the Financial Times in August 2023 as part of a promotional campaign by the Morocco Tourism Board. Read more here.

Morocco’s 3500km North African coast is where the Atlantic trade winds originate. Hot air over the equator rises towards the cold North Pole and as the earth rotates beneath the air mass sinks into a heat-induced low over the Sahara. These winds are perpetual and constant and represent the biggest wind energy movement in the world.

Merchants, adventurers and sardine fishermen have been navigating the swells off this wind-whipped coastline for centuries. Now it is surfers who flock to the waves of Taghazout, Tamraght and Imsouane between Essaouira and Agadir. Since the 1960s, the country’s surf scene has grown steadily. Now there are over 100 camps and schools and 95 named breaks, as well as top riders such as Olympic competitor Ramzi Boukhiam and five-times National Champion, Maryam el Gardoum, who runs the country’s first female-led surf school, Dihya.

Lily O’Hara is a co-founder of Surf Maroc, the country’s leading surf and yoga centre. “When we first opened in 2003, Taghazout was a little fishing village with rough roads and few facilities,” she says. “Now there are cycle lanes all the way to Tamraght, skateboarding parks, fibre-optic cable, the beaches are spotless and we’re introducing e-bikes to our properties.”

This piece was published in the Fnancial Times in August 2023 as part of a promotional campaign with the Moroccan Tourist Board. Read the full piece here.

Tangier, Tingis, Tanja, Tanger – this storified city is Morocco’s most edgy in more ways than one. Walk up to the Kasbah district and you’ll find yourself at the northwestern tip of Africa, staring out at the Atlantic and Mediterranean, with Europe just nine miles away across the Straits of Gibraltar. It is a perfectly poised metropolis set on ancient maritime routes between North and South, East and West.

Stand awhile at the sun-struck ramparts and you’ll experience a sense of total suspension. This feeling of in-betweenness is a core characteristic of the city. Only here could the Rolling Stone’s conjure their otherworldly 1989 track Continental Drift with a trance troupe called the Master Musicians of Jajouka. Likewise, Beat Generation giants Paul Bowles, Brion Gysin and William Burroughs produced their most edgy work in the International Zone of the 1950s. And, today, contemporary artists such as Yto Barrada still probe the multiple identities of this shape-shifting city.

Hicham Bouzid, co-founder of the cultural non-profit Think Tanger, reflects on this outlaw originality. “Tangier is a very vibrant place,” he says. “It is a true crossroads, not just internationally, but between the surrounding rural region with its deeply rooted traditions and the energy of the city’s multiculturalism. This creates a unique space.”

This article was published in the Financial Times in August 2023 as part of a promotion by the Moroccan Tourist Board. Read the full piece here.

Nowhere is the Nile more beautiful than at Aswan – ancient trading outpost and guardian of Egypt’s southern gateway. While the river runs unimpeded to Cairo, Aswan sits on the granite shelf of the First Cataract, the river eddying picturesquely around riverine islands and great granite boulders. Impassable to boats, the Cataract (literally ‘waterfall’) was for centuries the natural border between Egypt and Nubia, the powerful kingdom to the south that controlled trade from sub-Saharan Africa from whence came gold, ivory, slaves, carnelian, incense, dates and camels.

Such remote and romantic borderlands generate myth-making. Aswan and Elephantine Island are key elements of Egypt’s origin story when Abu was capital of the first Upper Egyptian province in 3000BCE; here, too, resided Hapi, the hermaphrodite river god responsible for the inundation alongside Anukis, Setis and Khnum, the great ram-headed creation god of the cataract region.

Travel here catapults you through the ages. At Al Kab you’ll find the first hieroglyph and the last at Graeco-Roman Philae; Kordofan camel-herders still travel the Forty Day Road to Daraw’s market; and, the immense 1970 High Dam rivals the engineering feat of the Great Pyramid to hold back the Nile’s flood waters, drowning Lower Nubia beneath its placid waters. Travel by boat where you can and, at the end of the journey, you’ll be rewarded by the epic temple of Ozymandias – Rameses II – at Abu Simbel.

This is an excerpt from the Southern Nile Valley chapter of the Lonely Planet guide to Egypt. Published in November 2023.

Another Italy altogether, Calabria and Basilicata offer a candid travel experience full of ancient history, sparkling seas, unusual food and intriguing small-town culture. Deeply rural Calabria and Basilicata are two of Italy’s least visited regions. They’re the right place to be if you want to immerse yourself in authentic local realities - not the folkloric version of Italy, but the real deal made up of many contradictions.

The area’s inaccessible and sometimes inhospitable nature is a blessing and a curse. It has preserved innate characteristics but also stymied development. The regions are still among Italy’s poorest and there’s a long history of brigandage in these hills. The ‘Ndrangheta, Calabria’s home-grown Mafia, is considered the richest crime syndicate in the world.

Long-held stereotypes paint a picture of a backward and unchanging southern scene. But in an era of climate change and overtourism, the slow pace of life, a strong sense of community, locavore cuisine and largely unspoiled wilderness make this an increasingly attractive destination.

This text is the introduction to the Calabria and Basilicata chapter of the 2023 Lonely Planet guide to Italy. To buy a copy, click here.

There is a scene unfolding in Souk Semmarine. A drum reverberates. The air fills with the shimmering sound of qraqeb (castanets) accompanied by the syncopated calls of Gnawa musicians in flame-red robes. They process like Pied Pipers down the main artery of the market, drawing a wave of people in their wake.

Marrakech has been all but silent this winter — borders were shut to tourists in November as Omicron spread — so the sound of music and human voices is exhilarating. Shopkeepers appear on their thresholds beneath gleaming brass lanterns and brightly coloured slippers, smiling, snapping pictures, curious about the crowd. Who are these extravagantly dressed people? Where did they come from?

In fact, they are storytellers, here for the inaugural Marrakech International Storytelling Festival, a week-long event that has emerged as a silver lining from the difficult past two years.

This article appeared in the Financial Times in March 2022. Continue reading here.

A hundred years ago, Trieste was one of the great seaports of the world – an animated Riviera town, and a Mitteleuropean trading hub as easily accessible by rail from the Baltic as it was from Egypt by boat. The city’s home-grown shipping company, Lloyd Austriaco, pioneered the first leisure cruises, and helped bankroll the Suez Canal in order to ensure Trieste’s pivotal role between Europe and the rest of the world.

So, how is it these days that so few people are familiar with Trieste? While Venice hogs the headlines with the never-ending controversy of megatonne cruise ships entering its fragile lagoon, Trieste, barely two hours away, was designed for ocean-going traffic. It has a natural, 18-metre-deep port, a miles-long sandy beach and a handsome promenade with a string of jetties overlooked by luxurious Liberty-style hotels, including the Savoia Excelsior Palace, aka the “Ocean Liner Hotel”.

It’s as if a great forgetting has taken place. History, politics, geography, literature and, yes, even travel writing, have conspired to obscure Trieste’s obvious charms. In part, this is due to the immense success of Jan Morris’ acclaimed book, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. Penned 20 years ago when she was 75, Morris was at the height of her writing powers and this beguiling book wove an elegiac web about the city. Every writer (and maybe every traveller) ever since has experienced Trieste through this regretful filter.

This article appeared in the Telegraph in April 2021. Continue reading here.

When General Gordon of the ill-fated Khartoum siege visited Seychelles in 1881 he returned to London claiming he had found the original site of the Garden of Eden. It’s a claim that stuck and now forms part of the island nation’s promotion of itself as a paradise for idyllic holidays on the world’s most beautiful palm-fringed beaches.

But Seychelles is so much more than a fly-and-flop destination. It is a modern-day Jurassic Park – an evolutionary isolate with no indigenous mammals where reptiles reign supreme on 115 islands, which are themselves the remnants of an ancient landmass that broke off from the supercontinent Gondwana 125 million years ago.

It’s weird and wonderful biota includes a Sooglossus frog smaller than a fingernail, a crab so big it can climb a palm tree and cut a coconut free with its pincers, a quarter-ton giant tortoise, and a mythologised aphrodisiacal, 20kg nut – the coco de mer – once worth its weight in gold and still so coveted rangers guard the prehistoric palm forest where it grows.

This pantheon of relict species survives thanks in part to Seychelles remote location in the midst of the Indian Ocean. Mahé, the main island, is 946 nautical miles from Mombasa and 1753nm from Mumbai. But it is also thanks to the pioneering work of the Seychellois, who in the 45 years since independence have gone to extraordinary lengths to protect half the island nation’s landmass and 30 per cent of its 1.35 million sq km ocean territory, meeting the United Nations 2030 sustainability goals a full ten years ahead of schedule.

This article appeared in the Telegraph in March 2021. Continue reading here.

I’m 73 years' old and I’ve worked in the Marrakech Medina for more than 50 years. I make cloisonné, an ancient style of filigree and enamel jewellery, which comes from Tiznit, a famous centre of silversmiths in southern Morocco.

It is difficult work as the pieces are small and require a mastery of the tools. First I must weld the fine metal wires into a pattern of circles and scrolls. Then I fill the tiny spaces with powdered pigments, which I solder to form the brightly coloured enamel pattern.

I left school at 10, and worked as a welder until a family friend who was a jeweller started to teach me this craft when I was 16. He worked in the Mellah, the Jewish quarter of the Marrakech medina. At the time, it was full of Muslim and Jewish gold- and silver-smiths. Finally, when I was nearly 30, I rented my own space in a foundouk (traders warehouse) in Souk Biyadeen. It is a special place for me since it is where my workshop was born and where I found my passion for this craft.

Over the years, I have seen the medina change completely – now there are fewer artisans, new shops, manufactured souvenirs. Before Covid-19 I was one of only two artisans left in my foundouk. Now with the virus we don’t know what other changes we will see.

This piece was published by The Telegraph in December 2020. Continue reading here.

The cover image is © Elias Nazih

‘The living world is a unique and spectacular marvel.” So says Sir David Attenborough in his new documentary A Life on Our Planet, a cautionary tale about the tragedy of our time: the rapid loss of the world’s wild places and the devastating diminishment of the biodiversity that makes up the web of life on the planet. It’s a heart-wrenching but urgent watch. The scale of damage is huge but there are surprisingly simple solutions. And, travel, if properly managed, has a vital role to play in helping to preserve, protect and sustain those wild places.

That is certainly something that renowned fly-fisherman and Blue Safari Seychelles co-founder Keith Rose-Innes believes. He has spent 24 years exploring one of the most beautiful places left on earth, the Outer Islands of Seychelles – a place so pristine it provided the location for one of Blue Planet II’s most memorable sequences: a shoal of monstrous giant trevallies leaping from a shimmering sea to snatch baby terns mid-air.

“I was the first person to see that,” says Keith, whose fishing partner Devan van der Merwe helped the crew capture the shots. “A lot of things you see on Blue Planet can be seen here. This is as wild as you can get from a marine point of view.”

This article appeared in the Telegraph in November 2020. Continue reading here.

The cover image is © Blue Safari Seychelles.

There’s excitement in the conference hall as I take my socially distanced seat. Sixty journalists are gathered here from the UK, USA, France, Spain and Japan (only the Brazilians couldn’t make it). Local TV crews flank the stage. Lights dim, and we don our translation headsets like UN delegates. The big news? La Mamounia has reopened.

General manager Pierre Jochem, who has been at the helm of Morocco’s most famous heritage hotel since 2013, fields the first question, “Can La Mamounia and Marrakech survive Covid-19?” It is an urgent local concern, as tourism contributes seven per cent to Morocco’s GDP and Marrakech is the country’s most popular destination.

It might also explain the heartfelt welcome I received the previous night. Silk-jacketed Fayle Medoune – who started at La Mamounia just 15 days before lockdown – greeted me in the Salon of Honour like a long-lost friend. As we walked to my suite down the Caravaggesque corridors, he told me how he moved here from the Burj Al Arab, because La Mamounia is “the best, most authentic palace hotel in Africa”.

Back in the conference room, Jochem responds, “It was important for us to reopen, not just because it was time for our 600 staff to get back to work, but because we wanted to show that Morocco is back in business.”

This piece was published by The Telegraph in November 2020. Continue reading here.

As a few faint rain drops began to fall in the courtyard of Riad Mena, a seven-room guesthouse in the Marrakech medina. Hotelier Philomena Schurer Merckoll looked skyward at the ominous grey clouds assessing the likelihood of a downpour. This was in February, when a seasonal shower was the biggest threat to a social gathering.

At risk beneath the citrus trees were white linen sofas and red silk-embroidered floor cushions, laid out for cocktail hour, before a dinner in honor of Marrakech’s design talent. But with artworks arriving and international guests expected, she shrugged, determined the evening should go on. The furniture was rapidly whisked inside and then reassembled an hour later when the shower passed. Looking back now, in a radically altered world of shelter-in-place orders and social distancing, guests fondly recall the evening as one of the last occasions they were able to mingle freely with old and new friends. “It’s wonderful to remember that dinner now,” said Schurer Merckoll late last month. “It feels so special, because it really gives me hope of more positive times to come.”

Schurer Merckoll, 36, was raised in London by German-Norwegian parents and later spent years living in Paris, Berlin, New York and Mexico. She first traveled to Marrakech with her mother in 2005 to visit a family friend, and bought Riad Mena, an Arabo-Andalusian mansion built in the early 19th-century for a family of courtiers, on the same trip. She spent the next seven years painstakingly renovating it with the Franco-Swiss interior designer Romain Michel-Ménière, before opening it as a hotel in 2014. Initially, she had plans for a maximalist Moroccan scheme, but after finding a 1980s-era glass-and-steel Paolo Piva table in the nearby souk early in the project, she chose a starker midcentury modern aesthetic instead. As a result, the airy whitewashed rooms, which have glossy tadelakt (polished plaster) floors, are filled with Italian and Scandinavian vintage furniture offset by local textiles including kilim-covered poofs and cushions made from handiras (Moroccan wedding blankets).

This piece was published in T Magazine, the New York Times Style Magazine, in May 2020. Continue reading here.

Covid-19 has changed everything. In particular, it has changed everything about travel. As a Lonely Planet writer you learn fast that change is the only constant on the road. Still, no one was expecting the changes announced last week: that Lonely Planet is to close its Melbourne production facility and London offices “almost entirely”, as well as its magazine and Trade and Reference division. The famous guidebooks will continue to be published through the company’s Dublin and Tennessee offices, but they will also face some job cuts.

As travel has outpaced the growth of the global economy for the last eight years, Lonely Planet has grown to become the world’s largest travel publisher, accounting for 31.5% of the global guidebook market. But with planes grounded, borders closed and people quarantined, where travel is headed next is anyone’s guess. “[It’s] a sad and difficult day for all of us in the Lonely Planet family,” wrote managing director of publishing, Piers Pickard.

This piece was published by the Guardian in April 2020. Continue reading here.

Venice’s booming tourism industry is threatening the city’s very survival. But grassroots initiatives are making a difference – and may even help other cities.

Friday 15 March was a rare day in Venice: on the concourse in front of the Santa Lucia train station, Venetians outnumbered tourists. Young Venetians had skipped school to join the global youth climate strike, holding placards with statements such as “If climate was a bank, you’d save it.” The movement is especially relevant in Venice, since a 50cm rise in sea levels could see the city vanish beneath the waves.

This piece was published by the Guardian in April 2019. Continue reading here.

For years Trieste has laboured beneath its reputation for melancholy. Twenty years ago, travel writer Jan Morris called it the ultimate “nowhere-place”: an Italian city suspended in a vanished Austro-Hungarian past surrounded on all sides by Slovenia, Croatia and the Adriatic Sea. But borders aren’t where things end, they are where they begin, and Trieste is finally on the radar.

This piece was published by Lonely Planet in October 2019. Continue reading here.

The t’bourida – Gunpowder Festival – is one of the oldest folklore traditions in Morocco. Thousands of men ride in this roving rodeo – and now a handful of Moroccan women have saddled up to take them on.

“I didn’t even know that women could ride in the t’bourida (also known as fantasia, a French term),” says Moroccan photographer Zara Samiry in a voice that conveys her astonishment. “Then one day I saw a report on TV about some women riding in the festival – alongside the men, with their own guns. I was amazed so I decided to try and find them.”

This piece was published by Culture Trip in March 2020. Continue reading here.

The cover image is © Zara Samiry

It might not look like it in the dusty streets, but the Marrakech medina with its earthen ramparts is an enormous walled garden intricately divided by a jigsaw of dwellings. This model of a garden city reflects deeply held Islamic beliefs about privacy, pleasure and the restorative power of nature.

Marrakech summers regularly top 40C (104F). By 10am it is already hot. By midday the sun strikes the paving stones of the Jemaa el-Fnaa with the ferocity of a hammer on an anvil and people flee the plaza, disappearing down shadowy alleys and vanishing behind heavy cedar doors to escape the relentless heat in secret riad gardens.

In such an unforgiving environment, the greenery of a garden is an incomparable luxury. In the desert, an oasis means life itself, and as Islam emerged in the desert, an Islamic garden represented an earthly analogue for paradise itself. Even the word paradise comes from the Persian pairidaeza, which means an enclosed garden.

This piece was published by Culture Trip in February 2020. Continue reading here.

Urban legends have been made in Marrakech for a millennium, spun by Berber warlords, sugar-baron Sultans, Sufi saints and Rolling-Stones reprobates. As a result, the city has attracted more than its fair share of conquerors, travellers, entrepreneurs and creatives, but what do the locals make of their much-loved city?

This piece was published by Culture Trip in January 2020. Continue reading here.

Morocco may be a short hop across the Mediterranean from Europe, but other than the tourist magnet of Marrakech, this dazzlingly diverse country remains relatively unknown abroad. That’s a shame, because Africa’s westernmost kingdom has sublime tucked-away spots, stunningly varied geography, and a cultural richness that few places can match.

This piece was published by the Telegraph in January 2020. Continue reading here.

Youssef Safine has lived on a narrow street called Talmud Torah his whole life, a few doors down from the historic Slat Al Azama Synagogue. That is where he, as a Muslim child, learned the stories of the Mellah from an elder of Marrakech’s Jewish community.

This piece was published by Culture Trip in December 2019. Continue reading here.

Dundee isn't an obvious destination in a country with so much to offer, but Scotland's fourth largest city has big plans to transform its gritty, post-industrial landscape into a thriving hub of culture and design excellence, and one project is spearheading those changes: the new V&A. Opening in September 2018, Kengo Kuma’s awesome, space-age museum is the crown jewel in an urban redevelopment that’s turning heads both at home and abroad.

This piece was published by Lonely Planet in March 2018. Continue reading here.

Situated in the middle of the Indian Ocean, 400km northwest of Madagascar and over 1000km from the East African coast, the Seychelles is an ancient archipelago of 115 islands. While most travellers arrive trailing confetti and are content to just fly and flop on some of the world’s finest beaches, the islands possess natural wonders that hold far greater value.

This piece was published by Lonely Planet in February 2018. Continue reading here.

Click, click, tamp, swoosh! Click, click, tamp, swoosh! Clouds of steam plume above the shining, eight-spout Gaggia and a thick stream of unctuous, dark coffee trickles into tiny espresso cups, some topped with a velvety cloak of frothed milk, before clattering down on the marble-topped bar.

The breakfast crowd presses forward uttering rapid fire calls for “un caffè!,” “un cappuccino!,” “un macchiato!” When the coffee arrives, a space at the bar opens and a rare moment of calm descends. There is nothing besides the hot, bittersweet taste of the coffee and a word or two of conversation with your fellow barflies. One sip, two sips, possibly three and it’s gone, and the day surges on.

Given their love of the bean, you might think that Italians invented coffee. They didn’t. Coffee is native to East Africa and the first records of it being roasted and drunk come from Sufi shrines in Yemen in the 15th century. But ever since the so-called “wine of the Arabs” reached Europe, landing on the quay in front of the Basilica di San Marco in Venice in the 17th century, the Italian passion for coffee has created a culture unrivaled anywhere else in the world and which now underpins an industry second only to crude oil, valued at over US$100 billion.

This piece was published by L’Italo Americano in December 2017. Continue reading here.

Marrakesh is a city on the edge. Here, Europe, Africa and the Middle East mingle, and past and present are hard to tell apart. This ancient trading hub is a creative sweet spot where ideas thrive and flourish, making it a muse for artists and designers from around the world.

This piece was published by Lonely Planet in November 2017. Continue reading here.

Wander the back streets of Murano and you can hear the roar of furnaces behind blind factory walls. The air trembles and there’s a perpetual orange glow in the high clerestory windows that remain just out of reach. It is the hot air from the glass ovens burning at 1500˚C that rushes like dragon’s breath through the industrial pipework to plume atop tall chimneys like the blow of a sleeping Leviathan in the shallow Venetian lagoon.

Seldom do visitors get the chance to peer inside, for since the 13th century when the glass foundries moved to Murano as a fire safety precaution, trade secrets were so closely guarded that any artisan who left the city was considered guilty of treason. But these days it is Murano’s cloistered masters who are in danger of extinction due to competition from cheaper imports, a decline in young apprentices and a lack of innovation befitting the 21st century.

This piece was published by L’Italo Americano in October 2017. Continue reading here.

I can’t think of the right way to ask, but I’m perturbed by the button labelled “enema”. We’re standing in the lovely grey-green quartzite bathroom of a vast villa at Zil Pasyon, Six Senses’ new sybaritic retreat on the island of Félicité in the Seychelles.

Despite the insanely beautiful view through the wraparound picture windows of chrysoprase-coloured waters, we stand huddled in the corner. That is, my husband and I and Andrew, our GEM (Guest Experience Manager), who is enthusiastically showing us the functions of the hi-tech loo.

Andrew takes the control panel off the wall, wielding it like a games console as the lavatory gently gurgles, spritzes, blow dries and deodorises with alarming animation. While I know integrated wellness is at the heart of the Six Senses concept – and is one of the reasons that readers of Telegraph Travel voted it the best hotel group in the world in 2016 – this is not what I was expecting.

This piece was published by the Telegraph in October 2016. Continue reading here.

An arctic breeze blasts down the Helsinki streets. Offshore, the Baltic waves shimmer like liquid silver. Snow tries to fall. Make no mistake, Mother Nature dictates life in this Nordic city, where winter brings long hours of darkness and summer days stretch for 19 dizzying hours. Only the ritual of the Finnish sauna regulates life through the seasons, offering the heat of summer in its roasting interior followed by a maniacal leap into the icy chill of the sea.

The ritual – both an embrace of nature and a defiant fist-shake in its face – reflects the affinity Finns have for their environment, which is evident everywhere in Helsinki.

This piece was published by the Independent in March 2016. Continue reading here.

Warm, lemon-yellow sunshine on a cornflower blue lake; the sound of leaves falling in the forest like soft rain; carpets of crimson berries crunching underfoot – nowhere does autumn come in such a burst of sensory glory as in Finland. Locals even have a special name for the fleeting season, ruska, and for a few short weeks in September and early October ruska pilgrims head out to catch summer’s final flourish before the winter darkness descends.

This piece was first published by Lonely Planet in October 2015. Continue reading here.