The Mail on Sunday

TRAVEL

March 20 • 2016 The Mail on Sunday

Can you really slash the cost of excursions?

AWE-INSPIRING: The mighty grandeur of the Victoria Falls and, below, a hippo in the Zambezi river

juice and ice. Yummy! The best non-alcoholic drink I’ve ever tasted.

And a lovely lady gave us each a hand massage, another first for me.

There was another delightful touch, too. High tea, yes, high tea, is served daily at 3.30pm. Platters of pies, sausages, smoked salmon, sandwiches, pasties and much else were wheeled in. The guests made short work of it all. Meanwhile, monkeys ran all over the superbly manicured lawns and occasionally a thoughtful giraffe poked its nose round the corner.

We ended a perfect day with a trip upstream on the elderly African Queen. Alas, no Humphrey Bogart

alamy / getty images

GETTING THERE

Expert Africa (expertafrica.com, 020 8232 9777) offers a seven-night trip to Livingstone and South Luangwa National Park from £3,117pp. This includes return flights (Heathrow to Livingstone, Lusaka to Heathrow), four nights’ B&B at the Royal Livingstone (suninternational. com/royal-livingstone/), three nights’ full board at the Lion Camp in South Luangwa, all transfers, park fees and activities including game drives and walking safaris.

Cruise lines offer a vast choice of organised excursions from the ports they visit. For many, these are a major reason to take a cruise, and for the cruise companies they are a big source of revenue – except on a few very upmarket ships, excursions cost extra.

While a sightseeing tour in a large group might be £30 per person, a small group or activity-based tour could cost £100 a head. So it makes sense to keep the cost down. Most excursions are booked direct with the cruise lines, but there are a few independent agents worth considering.

Cruising Excursions (cruisingexcursions. com, 0800 091 8274) offers 12,000 excursions from more than 700 ports worldwide.

By selecting your ship and dates of travel on its website, you can view your itinerary and available excursions in each port.

Cruising Excursions boldly claims ‘prices lower than the cruise lines’. Putting this to the test, I found it true sometimes, but not always.

Cruising Excursions charges £34pp for its Rome On Your Own trip – basically a coach transfer from the cruise port of Civitavecchia to Rome, taking in sights such as the Colosseum, pictured, and back.

Norwegian Cruise Line’s Rome On Your Own transfer costs about £90, almost three times as much.

For its Rome The Complete Tour, an eight-hour guided walking and bus tour, Cruising Excursions charges £64. Norwegian Cruise Line’s eight-hour Rome Highlights

the crafty TRAVELLER

By Fred Mawer

walking tour costs about £133.

However, I found marginal differences in prices on some Caribbean islands. A half-day tour of Antigua taking in Nelson’s Dockyard costs £40 with Cruising Excursions, compared with £42 with Royal Caribbean.

On St Lucia, a Rainforest Aerial Tram excursion costs £90 with Cruising Excursions, and £98 with Royal Caribbean.

When making comparisons, be sure to compare like for like: whether lunch and entrance fees are included and the size of groups.

And remember, some ports are perfectly suited to independent exploration. In Barcelona and San Juan (Puerto Rico), ships dock within walking distance of the old city centres. And in the Caribbean, often the best thing to do is head to the beach for the day, and you don’t need to sign up for an expensive excursion to do that.

Also, consider renting a taxi for a half-day or day. Drivers can make good guides and the experience is more personal and cheaper – particularly for a family.

But fix the price in advance.

to lend a hand – that film was made up the road in what is now Tanzania anyway.

We drove six miles to the Queen, an elegant, elderly paddle-steamer, hardly suited to the hurly burly of life a few miles downstream.

Steaming slowly along the shore of Long Island in the middle of the ­Zambezi, we saw any number of birds and beautifully coloured butterflies.

Then suddenly a group of hippo­ potamus heads poked out of the water to give us a highly disagreeable look.

For two perfect hours the African Queen crawled along then, hey ho, back to dinner at the Royal Livingstone.

corner of Holland heights, you can see some of the original roof statues in the museum next door.

Den Bosch is an hour from Amsterdam by train. I stayed in a loft-style boutique hotel, the Duke, with 17 rooms on the third floor of a former post office within earshot of the cathedral bells ringing at the end of the street. Market Square is at the

GETTING THERE

Hieronymus Bosch – Visions Of Genius runs until May 8 at the Noordbrabants Museum. To book, go to tickets.hnbm. nl. For details of the Bosch 500 year-long programme of events, visit bosch500.nl.

The Duke Hotel (thedukehotel.nl)

other end, and smart shops and lively bars are within a short stroll.

Another earthly delight to tempt visitors is the local speciality, Bossche Bol, pictured below, a giant profiterole with a hard, dark chocolate shell and a soft, sweet, creamy centre.

Go on, be a devil, and try one – you don’t have to finish it!

has double rooms from about £100, including breakfast.

British Airways (ba.com) offers flights to Amsterdam from Heathrow, Gatwick and London City with return fares starting at £71. For further information, go to holland.com.

53

VOYAGES JULES VERNE

Travel 52

TRAVEL

The Mail on Sunday March 20 • 2016

National newspaper travel section of the year

He’s one of the great voices of cricket, but Henry Blofeld has found something that left even him speechless

T

he Victoria Falls are out on their own. After more than 50 years travelling the world, none of the other natural miracles I have seen has hit me between the eyes as the Falls did. Beautiful, stark, frightening, mesmerising, powerful beyond belief, taking no prisoners, this ­wonder of nature’s engineering left me speechless, breathless, nervous and soaking wet.

I am running out of adjectives and superlatives before I have even got to the start. My wife Valeria and I were staying less than half a mile from the Falls in the Royal ­Livingstone Hotel, another unexpected miracle with better than must-do status.

From the moment we arrived, the roar of the Falls was in our ears.

This 360ft sheer drop catapults two million gallons of water over the top every second of the day when at full throttle.

The spray forms a rising white cloud, visible for miles. Before Dr David Livingstone discovered the Falls, they were called Mosi-oaTunya, ‘the smoke that thunders’.

The sense of excitement at visiting the Falls was almost scary. A buggy took us the few hundred yards to the official entrance. I remembered the same thrill boiling up within me when I first went up the Empire State Building. I was nervous then, too, because I can’t cope with heights.

Then, round the next bend, with Deborah, our smiling guide, leading the way, I caught my breath. The white spray was exhilarating, beautiful and irresistible. It was hard to believe because of the recent drought that the Falls were running at only two-thirds capacity. But it was the huge sheer drop at my feet that mesmerised me.

At first, I thought this was the entire falls, not just the warm-up act. Not for long, though. The small signposts were soon pointing us towards the Knife Edge, the Danger

Point, the Narrow Bridge over a horribly deep gorge, and other nerve-shattering vantage points.

The narrow, slippery-looking Bridge was the worst of all. All of 30 yards long, it was about a yard and a half wide and stretched over a mind­boggling drop. From a distance, it had looked terrifyingly frail.

But, for the best view of the Falls, it had to be crossed.

Before we left the Royal Livingstone, we were given ponchos: ­lightweight, cover-all plastic macs.

We dived into them now, being well inside those clouds of spray.

After we had carefully descended a long, steep line of wet stone steps, the bend at the bottom revealed the heart-stopping Bridge. On our right the Falls, more than a mile from end to end, roared, frothed and fell in an all-consuming, relentless curtain of white foam.

I raised the white flag. It was not for me. I left it to Valeria and our guide. The Bridge was soaking wet.

I had rubber soles. But seeing them stride confidently across, I felt a miserable coward.

So, gritting my teeth, I ­gingerly stepped on and grabbed the rail on my left. I stared fiercely ahead, took a deep breath, and off I went.

It wasn’t as awful as I had feared. Halfway across, I even began to think that I could have taught Charles Blondin a thing or two. In the 19th Century Blondin, a Frenchman, legged it many times across the Niagara Falls on a tightrope.

Phew!

Now, every viewing point, starting with The Knife Edge,

Howzat for a view!

...the Victoria Falls, we mean — not Blowers in a waterproof poncho OH, THAT LOOKS HIGH: Blowers ponders the Falls in his poncho

seemed child’s play. With each step we got more drenched. At the end of that crazy path we stared across the main gorge to Zimbabwe. There were people on the other side standing on the edge of the precipice and looking down. I looked away.

Then it was time to retrace our steps. That Bridge again. Looking like an angel from the Chamber of Horrors in my see-through waterproof cape, I strode across, never looking down, holding on to the rail for dear life.

Then… I’d done it. Again!

The luxurious Royal Livingstone Hotel, built in the bush on the edge

of the sprawling Zambezi, is understated and unpretentious. The bedrooms and suites stretch out on both sides of the main building – and the stately reception area was full of sweet, helpful ladies dressed in matching cheetah fabric.

In the greeting room there were two large portraits of Dr L, one in camping gear outside his tent ­looking decidedly in control. All around, the decor was comfortable, unfussy and cleverly done.

The hotel stamped its mark on the signing-in ceremony by giving us each a glass of cheerful-looking brownish-red liquid. Cold tea, peach

A riveting vision of Hell — in a sweet little A giant’s head protrudes from an archway, his mouth underwater and huge hooked nose mirrored in the still canal. On the opposite bank a horrible, cloaked creature with a bird’s-skull head plucks menacingly on his harp as we glide by.

So, when our boat rounds the next bend and I come face-to-feet with the naked figure of a man being swallowed by a blue monster with a copper cauldron on his head for a helmet, I am ready for the shock.

The narrow network of waterways in the little city of Den Bosch in the south of the Netherlands passes under its streets, and this year the tunnels are being transformed by cunning audio-visuals into the fiery furnace of the damned, writhing with tortured souls – all of which you can experience

By Caroline Hendrie

in the course of a Heaven And Hell cruise.

The bizarre creatures you’ll encounter have all leapt and crept from the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, the artist famous for his vivid depictions of the diabolical consequences of sin. And to commemorate 500 years since Bosch’s death in 1516, his home town is celebrating the history of art’s wildest imagination.

The main attraction is the Hieronymus Bosch – Visions Of Genius exhibition.

It features almost every one of his surviving works, 17 paintings and 19 drawings of saints and sinners, angels and demons, which have been gathered from all

INTRIGUING: Visitors can take a canal tour to see Bosch characters – including this bizarre creation, left

over the world for the first time.

This unique show will move on to Madrid’s Prado in May. The

exhibition had me gripped, drawn into the goings-on in the triptychs and panels. It is a must-see, but

there are many other reasons to visit Den Bosch.

The preserved, fortified medieval city is putting on a dazzling son et lumiere show in the Market Square, projecting images from Bosch’s works on to the house where he was born, his studio and his statue, every evening until December.

I also took the chance to climb a scaffolding staircase, 100ft up the side of St John’s cathedral, to view the moss-covered gargoyles and the statues of buffoons, imps and fretful souls adorning the building. The faces may be gruesome, but the views of the step-gabled roofs, church spires and the marshes beyond are wonderful, little changed since the days when Bosch was working on altarpieces during the cathedral’s construction.

If you don’t have a head for