Wanderlust Issue 181 (November 2017) Alternative Thailand ♦ Che’s Latin America ♦ Foodie Greece ♦ Wild Africa ♦ Great Barrier Reef ♦ World Guide Awards – Results ♦ Pocket guides: Brussels, Hull and Boston
Che Guevara’s Latin America T R AV E L M A G A Z I N E W i n!
mission to A photo com 3,000 ,£ a Costa Ric writing a or sh ca in Thailand to t en assignm p4 e Se
www.wanderlust.co.uk November 2017
Cross the continent in his revolutionary footsteps
Foodie Greece
Aegean island-hopping without the crowds
Alternative
THAILAND
Leaving the tourist trail for the kingdom’s secret spots
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Great Barrier Reef, Australia Boston, USA Wild Africa Guide Awards
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CONTENTS
Issue 181 November 2017
360˚ – NEED TO KNOW
TRAVEL MASTERCLASS
nder 6Viewfi 12GoNeednowto know this month... 14 Eat this... 165 minutes with... Bruce Parry 18 Know your… Cook Islands 20Travel with a top guide 22
Remembering rhinos, looking up at Hong Kong, and a petal blessing Why some lost icons may not be gone forever Bypass the beaches for Phu Quoc’s wilds and colonial history Cash in on Georgia’s national dish – the cheesy bread khachapuri The explorer on his time with the world’s tribes How the archipelago is keeping its coral safe Trips with great guides nominated by you
▲ Cover story
36Alternative Thailand
Leave the tourist trail behind for the ‘other’ Bangkok, untrod southern beaches and the quiet jungles and crashing waterfalls of Thailand’s wild national parks
▲ Special feature
92
World Guide Awards
Meet the unsung heroes of travel. We’ve narrowed our shortlist to three, but who will win Wanderlust’s World Guide Awards 2017?
64The masterclass 67Instant expert: Tasmania 70Take better travel photos Travel clinic 72Traveller’s 74mats guide to… sleeping
Been inspired by our World Guide Awards? Then follow our how-to, so you can become a great tour leader
It’s 375 years since Abel Tasman discovered the Australian isle, and its landing sites still shine Travel often seems a blur, but our expert snapper’s tips can help you capture the bustle Dr Jane on staying healthy when on an extended trip
For cushioned camping, these mats offer maximum comfort for minimum weight
46
WIN! A writing assignment in Thailand, p46 A photo commission to Costa Rica or £3,000, p90
Do you love green travel? Share your eco adventures with us and you could be sent on a writing assignment to Thailand, courtesy of the Tourism Authority of Thailand
131 “The days of easy gags like Only Fools and Horses’ Del Boy declaring he’d been ‘to Hull and back!’ are long gone.” Rhodri Andrews
TRAVEL PHOTO OF THE YEAR COMPETITION, p90
106 Bolivia, p106
Win a dream photo commission to Costa Rica or £3,000 cash with the Wanderlust Travel Photo of the Year 2017 competition! “We drove through wide valleys dotted with vineyards and modern houses. One even boasted its own lighthouse – quite a surreal sight to encounter in a landlocked country.” Nick Boulos
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WHO WILL TAKE THE GOLD...? Wanderlust World Guide Awards, p92
Alex Stoneman/Greenpeace
FEATURES FEATURES
Great Barrier Reef Sydney 24Beyond 24 Foodie Greece 48 India 82Swaziland, South Africa and 76Botswana Philippines 98
This coralWales icon is New South far from doomed, but travellers can also isn’t just about Oz’s most famous city a parta world in safeguarding the underwater –play there’s of epic coastlines, great wonder As visitors returntoo to wilderness and wine-rich valleys to explore the western Aegean, we great savour its Discover the last habitat crowd-free trails, epic history and incredible of the Asian lion in Gujarat PLUS: Ourfood guide to India’s other must-see species Join 2014’s Wanderlust Leave behind the bustle Travel Photo of the as theyofsnap of Manila forYear the winners, raw splendour rural the Okavango Delta, Kruger NP beyond... Luzon, exploring vertiginous riceand paddies, Che’s Americavolcanoes We follow cliff-hanging gravesLatin and spluttering in the revolutionary’s final just footsteps Tanzania East Africa isn’t known on the Che Trail, to Five reveal another sideMahale to Bolivia for the Big – head to the PLUS TraceforChe’s travels acrosswild Latin America Mountains its star attraction: chimps
106 116
FROM THE ROAD
100Your story
POCKET GUIDES
Reader Graham Pembrey spies an abandoned Thai guesthouse, and reader Rebekah McVey realises there’s no place quite like home Readers’ pictures Your top takes, including rolling along Bolivia’s ‘Death Road’, soaking up the beaches of Indonesia’s Padar Island, enjoying the ancient city of Persepolis and relaxing with Vanuatu’s locals Letters In our mailbag: roadtripping on a staycation around Scotland’s wilds; seeing Uganda’s charms; helping out (and saving cash) on an African safari; being wowed by Belize’s beauty and much, much more...
102 104
24 hours: 129First Brussels, Belgium
Brussels is a city oft-misunderstood. Glorious architecture, a grandiose centre and a peeing statue – what’s not to love about this historic hub?
131Short break: Hull, England
Save your sniggers – the UK’s 2017 City of Culture is a destination reborn, with its rebellious past, poetic icons and wild coast
icon: Boston 133Travel Massachusetts
The state is famed for its rich maritime history, but it’s the legacy of its Pilgrim settlers and their ship, the Mayflower, that makes it a beguiling place to explore
36 92
Hull, p131
Brussels, p129
“For photographers it’s a ticket to dawn-lit raids on the tall grasses around drinking holes to snap the ‘Big Five’ slaking their thirst and a first-hand look at the lives and traditions of villages.”
Georgia, p16
“Sitting on the edge of a long, wooden bridge, my feet dangling over the edge, I stared straight down to the waters of Lake Vajiralongkorn in the little-visited district of Sangkhlaburi.” Stuart McDonald
Greece, p48 Thailand, p36
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Phu Quoc, p14 “I watched, transfixed, as a jewel-like goby ventured from its burrow into a psychedelic ‘garden’ of blue and yellow Christmas tree worms, their feathery feeding frills unfurling from trapdoors on the coral’s surface.” William Gray
Great Barrier Reef, p24
TALKING HEADS Bruce Parry, p18 “We’re like the circus that comes to town. On my way in I wondered if I was part of the problem or the solution.”
Tasmania, p67
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Australia Fighting back
Certified eco-tourism boat operators are an increasingly vital part of the fight to save the Great Barrier Reef
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Reef R E L I E F
The Great Barrier Reef is in trouble, but travellers can play their part in offering a lifeline to Queensland’s coral kingdom. We visit the icon to see the conservation efforts for ourselves... WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHS WILLIAM GRAY
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Australia
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how cyclones were becoming more frequent and virulent. An hour later, however, Dom wasn’t smiling. Paddling back to the resort on Fitzroy Island, we’d stopped for a snorkel on its fringing reef. “You can really see what’s happening here,” he said. He swam back to shore after just a few minutes, but I lingered, morbidly captivated by swathes of bleached coral smothered in a brown turf of algae. I had travelled to the tropical north of Queensland fearing it would all be like that. Following 2016’s severe bleaching event, when rising sea temperatures caused corals to become stressed and expel their life-giving symbiotic algae, the UK press latched on and virtually pronounced the entire 2,300km-long Great Barrier Reef dead. News travels fast – especially bad news. When I arrived at Cairns airport at the start of my trip, a taxi driver told me he had been picking up an increasing numbers of visitors on a “last chance to see”. They wanted to dive the reef “before it was too late”. Having written my first book on coral reefs 25 years ago, I was eager to see firsthand what was happening now. But far from going to read the reef its last rites, I was interested to see how responsible tourism was helping to throw a lifeline to this threatened natural wonder.
Slow & steady
“I’m not a doom and gloom guy,” protested Gareth Phillips, a South African marine biologist who runs a visitor education project in Cairns called Reef Teach. This was during one of his evening talks, where he regales audiences with everything from fish ID to the sex lives of corals, yet his underlying message was serious. “The Great Barrier Reef is on a cliff edge,” he told me. “It’s still considered healthy – fit enough to respond to bleaching – but if we don’t act now, it will fall.” Gareth’s tips were the perfect primer for my next trip. “The reef is the size of around 70 million football fields,” he told me.
Previous spread Alamy
T
he manta rays were heading straight towards us: two giant black diamonds rippling beneath the surface of Australia’s Coral Sea. As we drifted towards them in our double kayak, I could see that each one must have measured at least three metres across. A wing tip fluttered briefly above the azure water – almost close enough to touch – then they turned and vanished, like smoke shredded against a summer sky. Behind me, kayaking guide Dom Drotini let out a long, soft whistle from beneath his tattered straw hat: “Incredible! I’ve only seen them here before a couple of times.” Dom was a man of the sea. At the age of 14, he gave up school and went to work on a trawler. By the time he was 21, he had his own boat, pearl-diving and fishing off Queensland’s Cape York Peninsula. During our gentle paddle along the sheltered north shore of Fitzroy Island, near Cairns, he told me about the uncharted caves and pristine reefs he had dived and how, once, he had been surrounded by a ‘super-pod’ of 5,000 false killer whales chasing tuna through the Torres Straits. We beached the kayak on Little Fitzroy (there are over 900 islands in the Great Barrier Reef) and began climbing over jumbled boulders ensnared by the aerial roots of strangler fig trees. Below us, an osprey took flight from its nest while two bronze whaler sharks squirmed through the turquoise shallows, scattering fish like silver sparks. “This is one of my favourite spots in the whole world,” said Dom. “I’ve sat here and watched humpback whales with their calves resting just off those rocks down there.” I couldn’t bring myself to ask him about coral bleaching. I couldn’t bear to wipe the smile off his face with talk of ocean acidification or Wanderlust November 2017
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Finding cod
Diving alongside a huge potato cod at Cod Hole; (left) exploring the coral of Agincourt Reef in the outer reaches of the GBR Marine Park
‘Kneeling in a semi-circle on the sandy seabed next to the towering ramparts of the reef, we watched half a dozen sofa-sized groupers converge on us’
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FOOD FOR THOUGHT With the islands of the Aegean having dropped off travellers’ radars, we head to Lesvos and Chios to soak up their food, culture and history in crowd-free bliss… WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHS PHOEBE SMITH
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Greece
Exposed Aegean
Rather than the white of legend, the typical windmill in the region is actually exposed brickwork
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“F
lamingos aren’t actually pink.” My guide Eleni’s words made me stop studying the clearly blush-coloured feathers of the birds that I was watching through my telephoto lens, to check that I hadn’t perhaps inadvertently pressed my eye to a pink-filtered stereoscope instead. “Of course, they are pink now…” she continued, “but they have to eat tonnes of brine shrimp constantly in the first two years of their lives to make that happen.” That sounded like a whole lot of shrimp to me. But if my last couple of days here on the Greek isle of Lesvos were anything to go by, they had certainly chosen the right place to gorge themselves into a pink-tinged stupor. It all started – as the best trips always do – with food... and lots of it. From being presented with a double-portioned dinner when I arrived at midnight at my hotel in the capital of Mytilini, to a gargantuan breakfast buffet in the morning, a second breakfast when I met my other guide Elsa later, and her subsequent insistence that we stop at least twice for coffee (and cake) en route to the west of the island. The first surprise, I mused as I sipped my second frappé, was that there were no crowds. Though once a destination bustling with European tourists, visitor numbers since 2015 have been hit hard in the wake of news channels worldwide broadcasting endless footage of refugees arriving on this small Aegean island (roughly the same size as Skye in Scotland), just off the coast of Turkey.
Greece “The refugees are not an issue any more. Most moved on to be with family in other countries,” said a curator when I arrived at the Museum of Natural History in Sigri, over on the island’s west coast. “But we did notice a difference in numbers the year immediately after.” It has been the same for much of the western Aegean. And though visitors are returning to Sigri and Lesvos’ neighbouring islands, it is a slow process. In the interim, for intrepid travellers like me (and you, dear reader), undeterred by headlines, the chance to explore its food, culture and wilder reaches in undisturbed peace is too much to resist.
Into the woods
And so, I found myself taking a glass-bottomed boat in blissful solitude out from Sigri to the tiny isle of Nisiopi (opposite the museum) in search of the fossilised remains of a once verdant forest. Today, this treeless ‘woodland’ is an almost camouflaged network of petrified trunks, all coated with volcanic lava from some 20 million years ago. Through a process of demineralisation – where organic matter is replaced by minerals – the ‘trees’ appear as stone boles of yellows, oranges and reds, all their rings and knots etched in white as though scratched by a fingernail. It’s said to be one of the oldest and best preserved examples of its kind in the world, though not well known outside of Greece. I was in my element, strolling in the sunshine and discovering trunk after trunk on the island’s eroding edges, from conifers such as pines, to laurel, beech, walnut and cinnamon. Arriving back in the town, food was on the agenda again. This time it was from a local women’s co-operative selling homemade snacks – cheese, bread, olive oil and pasteli (a honey and sesame seed bar) – as a way of generating money for the community. Before I could decline on account of still being full, I found myself with a plate full of treats, which I dutifully devoured without complaint. ⊲
Think pink
(clockwise from this) Flamingos feed on brine shrimp on the Kalloni Salt Pan; ‘sardhelles’ grilled in lemon; cycling around the Salt Pans; delicious kolokythoanthoi are courgette flowers stuffed with cheese; Eressos is the birthplace of the poet Sappho
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