HERE AND THERE

The island of Rhodes is the biggest island in the Dodecanese group of islands. It's much closer to Turkey than to mainland Greece. We...

Up in the hills, away from Heraklion, an enterprising hotelier has taken a traditional Cretan village and turned it into a hotel/function...

In Greek mythology, the minotaur was a monster with the head of a bull and the body of a man. The minotaur was the shameful offspring of...

I liked Paros a lot. It has lots of tradition and practicality, sprinkled with a little glitz. Paros is the third biggest of the 220...

Sunrise over Santorini, sailing into port from the sea. Santorini is a caldera — an extinct volcanic crater. Those two small islands in...

On our cruise from Athens we landed at six ports: five in the Aegean Sea and one in the Sea of Crete. Not a Mediterranean cruise at all!...

We took a day trip to Delphi, about two hours drive from Athens. We leave the city behind and we are soon in the rural countryside, where...

Athens Bike Tour is advertised as one of Trip Advisor's 25 highest rated outdoor tours in the world , and I can believe it. The bikes are...

It's hard to imagine how any description of Athens can start with anything other than the Acropolis, which dominates the skyline wherever...

Enough of the glitz and glitter and the biggest/tallest/newest. We're looking for the old Dubai, so we signed up for a walking tour of...

Dubai aspires to have the biggest, the tallest, the most unique. We're staying in a hotel close to the biggest shopping centre in the...

The temperature is 34 degrees C at 5 o'clock in the morning and it's super-humid. As we step off the plane, my glasses fog up for the...

The northern hemisphere may be sweltering but it's chilly here in the south. In wintry Melbourne the average high/low temperature in July...

Ballarat is a city of 120,000 people about 120 km north-west of Melbourne. Gold was discovered in the 1850s and Ballarat boomed in the...

Thirty years ago, I was working as a freelance writer and editor. We had small children in the early years of school, and I occupied...

Buenos Aires is a city of barrios, or neighbourhoods. Each neighbourhood has its own distinctive character, characters and allegiances....

Hola Argentina! We are in Buenos Aires, or to give it its full name, Nuestra Señora Santa María del Buen Aire (Our Lady St Mary of the...

And here we are in Uruguay, which Brazilians pronounce 'urrr-gggghy'. It took me a while to understand what they were referring to. A...

Further south on the Brazil coastline, we docked at Porto Belo in the state of Santa Caterina. Porto Belo is a sleepy, charming little...

The coastline of this area, in Rio de Janeiro state, is called Costa Verde (Green Coast). And it is green, thanks to that Atlantic...