I love Venice the most late at night. The way light on the canals dance dapples on stone walls. The way voices echo from what sounds like a bar, but you can never find them: each narrow street seems to dead end on water, and you have to backtrack and start over again. I loved wandering back from a late dinner and buying a glass of grappa from a bar near the Rialto bridge. I took my drink over to...
It’s incredible how disruptive the apartment hunting process is here in Malta. The entire game is dominated by agents, who earn a commission equal to one month’s rent each time they successfully match owner with tenant. Unlike in Canada, a lease doesn’t just continue month to month once the initial term has expired. A year is a year, and the contract is deemed to be over unless you sign on...
The Victoria Lines is a 12km long series of fortifications that cuts across the island of Malta from coast to coast, along a steep escarpment called The Great Fault. […the Great Fault was actually no one’s fault… just geology…] They were built by the British between 1870 and 1899, to defend the main part of the island from a landing and invasion in the north. The Grand Harbour became the Royal...
Christmas is just another day for me. I’m not religious, and if forced to choose I would pick the old Greek and Roman pagan gods over any current creed or belief system. We don’t have any family in Malta either. And so, rather than sit around at home working, we decided to take advantage of the silence of the countryside to do a little exploring. It was a nice sunny December day, and the guns of...
This is what it looks like at the end of the world. If you sail past the horizon — right out there — you’ll fall off the edge of the Earth. At least, that’s what the early navigators thought. But the bravest among them proved the theory wrong. Cabo de Sao Vicente is Europe’s most southwestern point. And it was the last place these Portuguese explorers would see when they set out to discover...
I had an opportunity to spend a week in Amsterdam recently. I was in town for a conference on how to maximize my use of air miles and elite status to get travel benefits, and I decided to stay a few more days to check the place out. It was my first visit to this city, and I want to share a few highlights with you. We rented an apartment in the Western Islands, and it proved to be the perfect...
I’ve never been the sort of traveler to obsess over frequent flier points, or to spend hours trying to game the system. Where my time is concerned, quite frankly, I’d rather have more of it than save a few bucks or get the occasional free upgrade. But my friend Craig Ballantyne of Early to Rise recently turned me on to a couple of cool “mileage hacker” newsletters. And when an opportunity came up...
The Romans made their presence felt in every part of the Mediterranean basin. And so when I travel the region, I always make a point of looking for Roman ruins. I was headed outside the Mediterranean this time, but the Empire was there too, and the southern coast of Portugal — the Algarve — did not disappoint. I found a significant Roman site just a 15 minute drive from the apartment I was...
I decided to do something different this year. Rather than knock on doors to get candy, or run around town throwing eggs and evading capture, I thought I’d spend the night in jail. But not just any jail would do. It had to have a reputation for dark deeds, and at least a few hauntings. What better place than the Inquisitor’s Palace in Birgu? In a string of innovative tours — which recently...
My Portuguese travels continued from Lisbon to the Algarve’s sunny south. I chose to explore the eastern Algarve, near the Spanish border, rather than the heavily touristed stretch between Faro and Lagos to the west. I’m told that tourism didn’t develop heavily down there because the coast to the east of Faro is made up of sandy barrier islands. A lagoon sits between these long narrow islands and...