Bordering Europe, Asia and the Pacific and Arctic oceans, Russia’s immensity is not only limited to its geographical size. Steeped in rich culture, history and architectural grandeur, it’s an almost overwhelming country to comprehend.
Once shrouded in mystery thanks to a past that involves Soviet regimes, revolutions and ruling Czars, the Russia of today is a bold and modern culture, with a vibrant, thriving creative arts scene.
While the iconic cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg are laden with palaces, statues, orthodox churches, internationally renowned museums and palaces; chic wine bars and high-end department stores pepper the landscape and are integral highlights of any Russian journey.
Visit Moscow’s historic Red Square; take a trip to Pushkin to visit the late baroque inspired Catherine Palace, the magnificent summer residence of Catherine the Great; or spend an afternoon at the iconic Moscow Kremlin, soaking up the incredible history between the five palaces and four cathedrals. If you’ve got any energy left, enjoy a visit to the Kremlin Armoury, one of the oldest museums in Moscow, established in 1851.
Once you’ve had your fill of museums and palaces, get off the beaten track and explore Russia’s stunning countryside on board the famed Trans-Siberian railway, coupled with a visit to the pristine beauty of Lake Baikal.
Or for a truly authentic Russian experience, visit a traditional Russian sauna (banya) and enjoy a birch branch ‘beating’… which isn’t as bad as it sounds! The Sanduny Baths in Moscow is the oldest and most luxurious banya in the city.
Imperial Russia is a seven-day, six-night tour that gives travellers a fantastic insight into a complex country with a fantastic blend of history, culture and natural scenery.
Our little inflatable bounces across the choppy waters of Eyjafjörður, just 80 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle. At the helm is modern-day Viking Erlendur Bogason, who not only discovered the subaquatic volcanic cones we are going to dive on, but, like a figure from Norse mythology, is their designated protector. Nobody dives on the vents known as Arnarnesstrytan, or the nearby Strytan formations, without Bogason’s say-so.
Save for yesterday’s foray into the Nesgjá chasm, a four-metre deep, three-metre wide coastal fissure, I’m a cold-water diving virgin. And I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared.
Trepidation courses through my veins as I contemplate plunging into the inky fjord. The Icelandic weather, mostly chilly and drizzly over the past 10 days, has brightened, and the dark swell and surrounding snow-topped ridges sparkle in the afternoon sun. Still, the water looks frigid.
Bogason pulls the inflatable to a halt. I fumble with my equipment and squeeze a rubber balaclava over my head, readying myself to dive on these hydrothermal vents.
We roll backwards into the arctic water, leaving my old mate Phil, who is along for the ride, to captain the boat.
I locate the descending line and begin removing the air from my buoyancy control device and from inside my dry suit. Within a minute I’m 15 metres down, beside Bogason, on a sand patch. I sink to my knees to steady myself and switch on my torch. A dozen cod swirl into view. Then my beam picks out a monster, about a metre long, swimming straight at me.
I gulp air. As it gets closer to me I feel as though I’ve come face to face with a creature from the imagination of Hieronymus Bosch – or hell. Its eyes bulge, pronounced lips and rubbery jowls merge, and razor-sharp fangs gleam from its mouth. It’s Stephanie, a wolffish, come to welcome us to her patch. She’s the weirdest living thing I’ve ever seen.
Bogason uses the beam from his torch to indicate where we’re going next. I try to follow but can barely move for my own weight. I add some air and start finning after him, toward several conical outcrops emerging from the murk.
But as I swim I begin to ascend. I’ve made a rookie error and pumped in too much air. I push hard on the void button on my dry suit but rise uncontrollably. Bogason lunges for my leg to try to anchor me but can’t hold on, so off I go, up and away like Mary Poppins.
I hit the surface and gulp seawater from waves buffeting my face. Bogason bubbles up beside me, asking if I want to give it another shot. I’m trembling and disorientated, but I may never have this chance again.
Finally, I’m kneeling at the edge of a volcanic cone. As Bogason illuminates the vent, I watch hot, saltless water, estimated to be 11,000 years old, belching out. It’s a sight divers travel thousands of kilometres to see; scientists believe, through study of the bacteria and microbes living in its hot springs, that this unique cavity provides clues to life’s origins on earth.
I run my hand through the 78°C water, rendered touchable by the cold fjord. Bogason fills a flask – he’ll use it to make hot chocolate back on land.
As one of the planet’s youngest landmasses, rising up a mere 20 million years ago from submarine explosions in the mid-Atlantic ridge, the island feels like a work in geological progress. Over 12 days I’m road-tripping around this explosive and ever-changing land in the company of Phil.
Some destinations, like Egypt and Italy, lead you into the past; others, like Dubai and Shanghai, make you ponder the future. None, in my experience, plunges you into the present so forcefully or gives you such a sense of the Earth’s elemental power as Iceland.
On a drizzly August morning we roll out of Reykjavík and head west along the country’s ring road, intent on venturing beyond the tourist radar and camping in the wild, which is permitted throughout Iceland. Given this is one of Europe’s least populated nations, with just 330,000 inhabitants, it is rarely hard to find space.
Day one delivers several firsts, beginning with a 35-metre descent into a cave inside a lava flow. Formed 8000 years ago on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula, it’s close to where Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth was set.
That night, after driving through the contorted black rocks of the Berserkjahraun (Berserkers’ lava field), we pull into a farm to sample hákarl, the Icelandic ‘delicacy’ of rotten shark meat. Each year the farm processes up to 80 Greenland sharks – they grow larger than great whites and live at depths of up to 2190 metres – putrefying their toxic flesh over six months to make it edible. It’s a tradition that stretches back more than 400 years. To us, the small cubes of meat taste like old cheese infused with petrol.
During another sunny spell, we pitch our tent in the Westfjords, Iceland’s least visited and populated region. Our campground is an empty field behind a fine sandy beach, with a backdrop of three waterfalls rumbling down a hillside. Once we’ve set up, we huddle by the fire until midnight, the summer light barely dwindling.
The next morning we hike the 300-metre-high cliffs at Látrabjarg, Iceland’s westernmost point, pausing occasionally to watch tiny puffins return to their nests from the snarling Atlantic. Following a mountain pass, we disappear into the clouds before descending to a road curling through glacial valleys and around several fjords.
To reach Ísafjörður, our base for the next few days, we drive into a tunnel that burrows down, almost vertically, more than six kilometres and delivers us onto a spit protruding into a fjord, surrounded by snow-dusted mountains.
It doesn’t take long to walk the length of Ísafjörður. We end up at Tjöruhúsið (the Tar House), where we dip into the seafood buffet to sample cod cheeks and, rather reluctantly, meaty minke whale. It isn’t an endangered species, but eating it still doesn’t sit well.
“This is all stuff Dad used to cook us when we were small,” says the owner’s son Magnus Hauksson, “and when he offered it to visitors it got so popular we had to open a restaurant.”
A boat carries us to the Hornstrandir Nature Reserve for a 14-kilometre trek guided by Vesteinn Runarsson, a young local man with snow-white eyebrows. He takes us up a mountainside covered in streams and wildflowers to a snowy ridge, and down again to a long beach backed by ice-packed dunes.
“We’re nearer here to Greenland,” says Runarsson, as we scramble around a headland, “than we are to Reykjavík.”
Perhaps not surprisingly for such a remote part of an island isolated by weather, winter darkness and geography, witchcraft flourished in the north. We discover this en route to Akureyri, the country’s second largest city, at Hólmavík’s Museum of Icelandic Sorcery & Witchcraft. We also learn that in the nineteenth century most convicted witches were men and wince at a replica pair of necromancy pants. Reputedly made from human skin, they assured the wearer instant wealth.
In Akureyri, we join guide Marino Svensson for a super Jeep tour. The vehicle’s an elevated 4WD with giant tyres that can forge through deep snow. Svensson takes us further east to the Myvatn region, seething with explosive geysers and pseudo-volcanoes, and pock-marked with spirals of solidified black magma.
From the Goðafoss waterfall, rushing down a lava field like a set of billowing curtains, to Hverir, where we walk in a lunar landscape that broils and bubbles with mud pots, to Krafla, an active volcano, where we drive through clouds of steam…it’s an unforgettable journey.
For the next three nights home is a wooden cabin at Ytri-Vik farm, 23 kilometres north of Akureyri, at the edge of Eyjafjörður. Like most Icelandic homes, it has geothermal heating (including the floor) and an outdoor hot tub, fed by a bore. The view across the fjord at sunset, when bloodied clouds cling to the glowering snowy peaks, is entrancing.
On our final night we attempt to camp again beside Iceland’s largest lake, but the tent is buffeted by overnight wind and rain and, at 3am, collapses. We retreat to the car and, at nearby Thingvellir National Park, the site of Iceland’s Viking parliament, dry everything out under the rising sun.
Established in 930AD, this was the world’s first democratic parliament. It saw the adoption of Christianity in 1000AD and the foundation of the Republic of Iceland, after centuries of Danish rule, in 1944. Sitting at the junction of the American and European tectonic plates that run across Iceland, which are cleaving apart at a rate of two centimetres a year, this World Heritage site is a moving setting for the final morning of our trip.
Once a gathering place for peddlers, sword-sharpeners, tanners, brewers and clowns, who performed at extravagant banquets, all is quiet now save for the grumble of shallow falls rushing between high basalt walls in the Oxara River. But, like so much we’ve seen, the site is imbued with a palpable, planet-building energy.
There’s no land in sight, just thick fog. Like us, it is a reluctant morning riser. Soft yet firm, it nestles on the eerily calm Adriatic around our kayak. Only the trains roaring along the causeway to our right give us some assurance we aren’t lost.
We just have to believe Venice is out there. Clearly rubbish paddlers, nothing we do stops the boat going left, towards Slovenia. Maybe we should have joined the gondola hordes after all?
Half an hour’s hard exercise later, the mist lifts and our doubts vanish. As we twist clumsily into the glinting Rio di San Girolamo, I feel proud. We’ve made it into the soporific Monday morning waters of the Ghetto. Locals unloading goods from their boats stop and stare. Then the first tourist shutter clicks. Oh, it makes you feel smug.
What a wonderful, sun-bathed morning to be a traveller. There’s an exhilarating freedom gliding across these ancient waters, taking whatever back stream we want. A wonderland of weatherworn masonry, mysterious windows and colourful vessels unfurls alongside us. We are masters of our ship.
We drift south, through the dank arteries of Rialto. We sneak the wrong way up a one-way canal to poke our noses into the Grand Canal. The traffic is scary, but we can soak up the scene from the sidelines, clutching onto one of those barber-shop mooring poles. We have no rope, after all, and can only guess at the parking rules.
Thus the relay-style refreshment stop that follows. I hold on to a rusty ring on the steps beneath the Ponte San Provolo while my paddling companion Susan sources a take-away plate of cicchetti (snacks) from Bacaro Risorto. Then we each run for a welcome drink at the public fountain on nearby Campo San Zaccaria.
Fortified, we tackle the open sea again. The vaporetto (water taxi) hub outside St Mark’s makes paddling a perilous, iPhone-threatening game. We quickly salute the majestic piazza, and St Theodore and his crocodile, then plunge under the Bridge of Sighs into the water alleys behind the basilica. There, we earn a place in more Chinese holiday albums as we try not to bash and scratch the laden gondolas coming the other way.
But road rage is scarce. More likely a cheery ciao and smile. Only one gondolier gets stuck in, saying we simply aren’t allowed. And maybe we aren’t. My advice? Kayak Venice before the fun police move in.
If you’re into flying using just the power of the wind, there can be few better places to run off a mountain top than at Monte Grappa in Veneto, a region in Italy’s far northeast. With around 300 flyable days a year, stable weather conditions, almost no strong winds and easily accessed take-off positions, Monte Grappa is unparalleled as a playground for para-gliders and hang-gliders.
The rolling green Veneto foothills are the backdrop here, stretching all the way to Slovenia and Austria. Experienced gliders can fly for several kilometres east and west without bumping into a no fly zone, while competition pilots have completed flights up to 100km long! Eight take-off areas are available to suit all wind directions except the north wind (which rarely blows).
If you don’t have a licence yet, Monte Grappa is the perfect place to earn your wings. It’ll take a few months of studying meteorology and aerodynamics, along with practice flying guided by instructors, but after that you’ll be free to cruise the skies like a bird.
Alternatively, strap yourself to an expert for a tandem flight, and let a skilled pilot can do all the hard yards while you enjoy the ride over vineyards and picturesque villages.
While it may resemble a set from Lord of the Rings, we promise a visit to this little hidey-hole sauna is far more relaxing than a day spent in Hobbiton. Located in Northern Italy’s Passeier Valley, the luxe Applesauna is hidden on a green hill in the expansive apple orchard at farm-turned-three-star Apfelhotel Torgglerhof. Using a Finnish sauna method, stones are heated on a stove and water poured on top to create the warm and steamy atmosphere needed for guests to relax. Timber benches frame concrete walls and floor-to-ceiling windows welcome natural light. Best of all, guests steaming inside are treated to panoramic views of the hotel’s surrounding treetops and the ice-capped mountains of the nearby Sarntal Alps. When the steam has settled, a nearby cottage has been transformed into a rest area where cups of tea and fresh fruit (no doubt an apple or two) are served as body temperatures cool.
During my time as a motorsport journalist, I knew exactly where to go for a good lunch. With any of the Italian teams, although supposedly racing, they always had time for bread, olive oil, espresso and pasta. They troubled to cart these things halfway across Europe, and I remember being impressed. Clearly these people knew something about food.
I’m less convinced now. Not after Sicily.
Hold your stones, foodies! I speak from bitter experience.
The trouble started at the airport, where the car rental guy suggested I wouldn’t find a feed along the autostrada at night. Fearful of starving in the wilds, I grabbed a pizza at a Palermo servo. It was thick and square and filled with enough boiling mozzarella to anaesthetise one’s mouth for dental surgery. Chewy isn’t the word – it was like eating a hot shoe with salami on top.
That was as good as it got. Next day in Noto, my beautiful hillside base of 20,000 souls, I thought I’d find a charming trattoria for a cheap, relaxed lunch. Naïf that I am! Sure, I did come across a cosy restaurant down a cobbled alleyway that offered cucina tipica Siciliana. Just one problem: Ristorante Meliora was closed until the evening.
Noto was deserted. A beggar woman came to me, making an eating gesture. At last, a Sicilian who was thinking about food! She’d probably been looking for a restaurant for years. About 150 of them by the looks of her. I wanted to cry. If she was still struggling after all this time, what hope did I have of getting a meal?
I’m used to swathes of southern Europe being closed on random weekdays, but this was too much. I couldn’t even find a place claiming to serve food on days when the owners did get out of bed.
Was a bowl of pasta, or, God forbid, a risotto so much to ask? This was Italy, wasn’t it?
At last a good samaritan led me to a sort of pie shop, which was dark and echoed. Its owner just stood there. It was rather like the shopkeeper sketch in Little Britain, but I managed to emerge with a few take-away arancini and something resembling a Cornish pasty, but filled with spinach and ricotta. It was viciously dry. Yes, another truth Italy’s culinary apologists don’t want me sharing: Italians are not good at pies.
Exhausted from my lunch quest and refusing to face another restaurant hunt, I went home and made do with a packet of chips and cold arancini for dinner.
The next day, I drove into the hills. I saw amazing things: hermitages in caves, spooky convents, towering viaducts. I explored a deserted for-sale house and found – not kidding – a skeleton on the driveway. And yet, I couldn’t find a ristorante for lunch. Not even a place that would sell me a small take-away sandwich. No wonder southern Europe was in recession; I had a wallet full of cash and couldn’t find anyone enterprising enough to take it.
Grumpily I went back into Noto, where I stumbled on a cafeteria-style place that looked pretty dubious. Behind the glass counter, however, I spotted something resembling tortellini; pre-cooked, slathered in red sauce and dumped in a bowl. Still, it was something I could point my finger at, and I was hungry. It reached my table at an indifferent temperature and had the texture of stale orange peel. Maccas could do pasta better.
That night’s gourmet Italian dinner at the B&B was French bread, Dutch cheese and Greek yoghurt. I know, right?
Then it was the weekend, and I hoped the local eating scene might burst into life. I thought Ristorante Meliora might be worth another try. But no. Closed. A suspicious local leaned out a window and yelled words to that effect, while looking at me like I was bonkers.
I pushed past a portly teenager in a bid to secure a pizza at a place labelled “pizzeria”, but all I found was a woman doing paperwork. She didn’t look up and I didn’t speak Italian. So I pushed back past the large lad (at least someone in Noto was well-fed), and it was another doomed night.
Italy had one more day to leave a good taste in the mouth. I gave nearby Siracusa a chance for Sunday lunch. And lo, I found an open trattoria with ease! Then they cooked me a tasteless, watery ragu and brought me a sizeable carafe of wine I didn’t want, for which they then tried to charge me. Foodie fail.
Look, Italian food is fine when it’s in a Jamie Oliver cookbook. But if you’re planning on going to the country itself, you might want to do a little more research than I did. Unless you’re planning on a weight-loss retreat, that is.
The matronly woman sitting behind the glass-fronted reception booth in Kotiharjun Sauna looks me up and down. Already, I can tell she’s pinned me as a first-timer – just another tourist coming to try out Helsinki’s oldest public sauna – so there’s no point in acting otherwise.
“How does it work?” I ask her.
“Towels cost three euros to rent, and the change room is through that door,” she says, pointing to her left. “Come in and out as much as you like.”
Since I’ve also booked a massage, she offers me a choice. “Male or female?” she asks.
“Female,” I blurt out. “Definitely female.”
She picks up the telephone and makes a call. Upon hanging up, she addresses me once again. “Okay, her name is Frida,” she says, fuelling steamy thoughts of an attractive popstar sensuously kneading my back like there was no place else she’d rather be. “She will come and collect you when she gets here.”
I ask her what I should wear. “Nothing,” the woman answers. “Wrap a towel around you when you walk from room to room or if you go outside. Otherwise, you should be naked.” I swear she winks at me.
Inside the change room, the timber lockers look like they might have been the original installations from when the sauna first opened in 1928. I peel off multiple layers of winter clothing then stuff them inside, replacing them with a towel that I wrap around my waist for the walk to the adjacent sauna room. Others forego even that.
The sauna room is dark and clammy and the occupants are mostly older men. I can’t help but notice that all of them are completely nude, some more discreetly than others. When one of them asks me where I’m from – I haven’t said a word, yet he intuitively knows I’m not one of them – I tell him I’m from Australia.
“Oh, Down Under,” he replies. I reflexively cover my crotch.
The man, whose name I don’t ask, suggests I sit on the wooden upper level; the remaining three terraces are bare concrete. “We call it the pipe rack,” he says, referring to the hottest area inside the room.
It isn’t long before sweat begins to drip from my brow and pool at my feet. My nasal hairs also feel like they’re burning whenever I inhale and I start to wonder how long I can last when a tall, slender man pokes his head around the door.
“Anyone order a massage for three o’clock?” he shouts through the mist.
When no one answers, I gather he must be referring to me. “I did,” I reply, hesitantly, “but with Frida,” realising all of a sudden that Frida might be a man’s name in Finland, where they call their sons Kimi and Keke and Lasse.
“Your hotel rang and booked me directly yesterday,” he explains.
“Bugger!” I murmur, perhaps a little too audibly. “I guess it’s me then.”
I’m directed upstairs, where my masseur busies himself layering paper towels over a massage table that’s placed in the centre of an otherwise spartanly furnished room.
“Come. Lie here, face down,” he instructs.
“What do I do with my towel?” I ask.
“We can use it like a blanket,” he says to my relief; it means I won’t be completely vulnerable.
From that point forward, I’m able to relax while the 25-year trade veteran works on my back, neck and shoulders. Thirty minutes later and I’m wishing I’d booked an hour-long session.
When I leave the sauna and step outside, I feel great. My core temperature remains stable, my skin feels clean and my muscles are relaxed. Best of all, any fears I had about romping around naked in a roomful of strangers has been put firmly behind me. So to speak.
As timeless as it is quirky, Amsterdam is the kind of place romantics put on their bucket list, and the type of destination travellers want to come back to. Ignore the rise of river cruise ships. Forget about the coffee shops. Instead, enjoy the curiosities in a city where you can ride a bike through a museum filled with billions of dollars of art – on your way to dinner at a restaurant whose previous tenant operated red light windows, of course. While Amsterdam’s tick-the-box attractions can easily fill your days, take advantage of the country’s excellent rail services to venture a little further to less visited destinations like Utrecht, Rotterdam and The Hague to truly understand why the Dutch way of life is so desirable.
AMSTERDAM – DAY ONE
Amsterdam is a city conquered by water. Get better acquainted with the waterways by hopping on a 75-minute canal boat tour departing Amsterdam Centraal Station. Next, book in advance to visit Amsterdam’s most important and sombre attraction, Anne Frank House, where the young girl hid during the Nazi occupation of Holland. Afterwards, head to the nearby Begijnhof for some quiet reflection away from the din of bicycle bells. Considered the city’s worst-kept secret, the garden and private chapel is accessible by an unmarked heavy wooden door just off the plaza known as the Spui. When darkness falls, check out the Paradiso, Amsterdam’s cathedral turned live music venue, favoured by performers for its acoustics and atmosphere.
AMSTERDAM – DAY TWO
After an obligatory tiptoe through the tourists at the Bloemenmarkt, the city’s floating flower market, head to Museumplein to get your culture on. Seeing Holland’s best art galleries in a day requires strategy: pre-book and hit the Van Gogh Museum when it opens, follow with a lap of the underrated Stedelijk modern art museum next door, before rounding out the day at the Rijksmuseum when crowds have dropped off. At dusk, visit De Wallen, the city’s old Red Light District. Worthy of a visit but vastly overhyped, bypass the overpriced bars here and head down the cobbled Zeedijk, settling into one of the city’s old brown bars (so named for their wooden interiors) for a tipple of jenever (Dutch gin).
AMSTERDAM – DAY THREE
Keep the party going with a visit to the Heineken Experience, showcasing Holland’s best-known beer export. Along with organised tours and sample beers, you can pick up what is for many the ultimate souvenir: a bottle of beer with your name on it. Not quite your cup of brew? Those looking to fill their suitcases should seek out Amsterdam’s 9 Straatjes or Nine Streets, a stylish concentration of the city’s best local designer stores, art galleries, upmarket cafes and vintage shops. From there, put your pedal power to good use to explore the leafy green surrounds of the picture-perfect Jordaan residential and arts neighbourhood, or if you’re not museum-ed out, head to Hermitage Amsterdam, which hosts satellite exhibitions on loan from the larger Russian collection in Saint Petersburg.
UTRECHT – DAY FOUR
Jump on a train to Utrecht, a university town described by locals as Amsterdam without the tourists. Rent a bike from the tourist office, and head out along the River Vecht past the eighteenth-century windmills, historic country castles and tiny villages for a taste of local life in the Dutch countryside. In the afternoon, return your bike and climb up the 600-year-old, 112-metre Dom Tower, the city’s most famous landmark. After smashing the 400-odd steps to the top, reward yourself with a beer at Oudean, a medieval castle turned brewery on the canal in the historical centre. Finish the day at Olivier, a decommissioned church turned Belgian beer cafe.
ROTTERDAM – DAY FIVE
The Netherlands’ most futuristic city is an hour away from Amsterdam, but a world away in modern design. Take in its jarringly post-modern architectural highlights including Erasmus Bridge, the famous yellow cube houses and the enormous tunnel-esque Market Hall. While adventurers can abseil down the landmark Euromast observation tower, those after a slower pace should seek out the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. In the late afternoon, stretch out on a terrace for some premium people watching opportunities along the Witte de Withstraat, one of the city’s most vibrant bar and arts hubs. Once you’ve sunk your pint of Amstel, browse the collection of museums and art galleries, keeping an eye out for de Aanschouw, the world’s smallest art gallery, with works changing weekly.
YOUR TRIP Accommodation
Accommodation can get pricey in Amsterdam. Dorm beds at the Flying Pig start at US$15, while Hans Brinker, which once dubbed itself the ‘worst hotel in the world’ has twin share rooms for US$39. Our pick? Stay in a houseboat B&B on the canals. Prices vary depending on the season, with cheaper, more spacious options located out of the main canal belt with bike rental from US$108 for two. flyingpig.nl hansbrinker.com
houseboatrental.amsterdam
TOTAL = US$540 (or US$270 per person)
FOOD AND DRINK
Holland’s best culinary treats are cheap and cheerful. During summer, pickled herring (affectingly known as Dutch sushi) can be sampled for a few euros, while bitterballen (deep-fried gravy meatballs) are a popular bar snack. At 3am nothing beats a fried treat from a FEBO hole-in-the-wall coin machine, but for a filling, sit-down meal, try Caribbean-style Suriname food. Plan on budgeting around US$72 per day.
TOTAL = US$360
TRANSPORT
Return flights from Sydney to Amsterdam with KLM – US$1181
Return train to the airport – US$13
Train ticket Amsterdam to Utrecht return – US$21
Train ticket Amsterdam to Rotterdam return – US$37
Bike hire for five days – US$45
TOTAL = US$1297
TOURS AND ACTIVITIES
Anne Frank House – US$12
Canal Boat Tour – US$37
Van Gogh Museum – US$22
Rijksmuseum – US$23
Stedelijk – US$21
Dom Tower – US$10
Heineken Experience – US$21
The Hermitage – US$21
Euromast abseiling or ziplining – US$65
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen – US$20
TOTAL = US$252
GRAND TOTAL = US$2179
DESTINATION HIGHLIGHTS
From the city to the coast and countryside, the Netherlands is one of the most liberal and forward-thinking European countries – it’s also an engineering marvel. While most visitors are aware Amsterdam is below sea level, few know that over a third of the country is too.
VITAL STATS
They say there are more bicycles than people in Amsterdam, with 800,000 bikes in the city – but what happens to them all is a mystery to most. Many are dumped, some stolen, but thousands are estimated to end up in the canals each year, so it’s worth not just locking but also securing your rental bike each time you hop off.
WHEN TO GO
Spring (coinciding with tulip time) and summer is peak season for the city, however with most attractions located indoors, Amsterdam is the perfect year-round destination.
TOP TIP
Visiting during summer? Rock your socks at Friday Night Skate. Rollerblading might have fallen out of fashion elsewhere, but lives on in Amsterdam. Each Friday evening during summer the streets are shut down and thousands show up to skate behind DJs in trucks blasting tunes along a kilometre-long route. It’s so popular, there’s also a Wednesday Night Skate in Rotterdam.
Think of Milan and you might think of fashion, art, Leonardo da Vinci and world-class museums. But despite being Italy’s second most populated city with a bustling centre, it also has some equally beautiful green spaces to escape to.
Parci Sempione is one of the biggest, covering around 38.6 hectares (95 acres). Located in the historic centre, this is where you’ll see two of Milan’s prized landmarks, the Arch of Peace and Sforza Castle. Also worth checking out here is the Civic Aquarium of Milan. Once you’ve had a wander, stretch your legs on running trails through the trees or chill out on the grass in the sun, before finishing up with an aperitivo at Bar Bianco.
At Parco Montestella, the Italians have turned what was once a mound of debris left over from bombed buildings in WWII into an artificial hill, dubbed “little mountain” by the locals, offering great views over the city.
If jogging is your thing, the Giardini Pubblici Indro Montanelli is the ultimate place to lace up your sneakers. It’s also home to the Civic Planetarium Ulrico Hoepli. For a taste of traditional Italian park life, head to Giardini of the Guastalla where you’ll find a Baroque fish pond and neo-classic temple hiding amongst centuries-old trees. Families will love the Parco Aldo Aniasi with its extensive playgrounds and picnic areas.
Whatever your thing, Milan has a green escape with your name on it.
If those blue waters of the Adriatic Sea weren’t dazzling enough to look at, try snorkelling in them beneath the white limestone cliffs of Cala Corvino Bay. With the help of a mask and snorkel you can explore the spectacular string of caves, arches and grottos that scatter the coastline. Thanks to its rocky base, the waters here are renowned for their clarity and aqua hue.
Professional guides know where to go to show you the best spots: sites such as the Aquarium, a semi-submerged cavern full of sea sponges, the Sirens and the Pacchi caverns. At the Grotto of the Fairies, a little-known pool on a tiny beach with fine white sand, you’ll even spot marine fossils in the rock.
A head torch will help you explore inside caverns while shallow pools are ideal for poking around in search of critters. Guides are knowledgeable in marine biology and will give you a heads up before jumping in so you know what to look out for.
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