Sometimes how you travel to a place can be as much fun as the place itself. The small planes that serve the various camps in Botswana’s Okavango Delta operate much like buses, dropping off and picking up passengers along the way. For some people, a flight in a small prop plane would be their worst nightmare; for me it was almost as much of an attraction as the destination itself!
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There are two ways to get to Taos from Santa Fe. There is the quicker (but still pretty) Low Road, and the more dramatically scenic and historically interesting High Road. This winds through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains through high desert, forests and tiny communities. On the way there are stories to be discovered, stunning landscapes to marvel at and picture-perfect churches to explore.
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Everyone needs food to survive, but some of us are fortunate enough to be able to appreciate not just as a necessity of life but also one of its pleasures. And when food becomes not only delicious to eat but also beautiful to look at, it is truly a special treat.
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For many of us the colours red and green trigger memories of Christmas. Glossy holly leaves and berries, a beautifully decorated tree, Santa in his red suit, a pile of wrapped presents. But a questionably ugly reptile? Probably not – and yet ...
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Only in North Korea, I thought, could you have a day of sightseeing like this! It was the country’s National Day, marking the 71st anniversary of the founding of the DPRK, and our itinerary for the day had been carefully planned to allow us to see how Pyongyangites celebrated the occasion.
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If you call a place ‘Paradise’ it had better be somewhere special! Luckily this area of Mount Rainier National Park really does live up to the name bestowed on it by Virinda Longmire in 1885. When she first saw this spot, carpeted with wildflowers, she is said to have exclaimed, ‘Oh, what a paradise!’
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Towards the end of the 19th century, one of many Italian families to leave their home town to seek their fortunes in England was the Quaglieri family from Arpino. They settled in Newcastle as did several other families from that region of Italy.
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'There is only one way to see things, until someone shows us how to look at them with different eyes.' (Pablo Picasso)
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When the architect Sir John Soane built his weekend retreat, Pitzhanger Manor, in what was then rural Ealing, his aim was to design a showcase for his own idiosyncratic architectural style with its stripped classical detail, radical colour schemes and inventive use of space and light. Here he would entertain some of the most influential people of the day.
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Some say the camera never lies. But does it? Even before technology made it possible to alter reality, photographers were playing around with tricks and illusions. Today it is easier than ever to edit an image; to fool the viewer into seeing something that was never there, or not seeing something that was.
