PHOTOGRAPH: STEVE RYAN
I recently enjoyed being a guest on the podcast The Travel Diaries (find it on Apple Podcasts and elsewhere), following rather more famous travellers such as Sir Richard Branson, Nadiya Hussain and Sir Ranulph Fiennes. Journalist Holly Rubenstein gave me a cheerful grilling on my life of travels, with our discussion meandering between subterranean encounters with opal miners in South Australia and paddling through the tropical backwaters of Kerala. My most intense flashback came while describing a highly eccentric Lost in Translation style fortnight I once spent in Tokyo – memories prompted by having just read the feature ‘Only in Tokyo’ written by my colleague Amanda Canning for this issue (see p46). Brace yourself for some of the experiences Amanda encourages us to try, among them sleeping alongside Godzilla, visiting a cat temple and exploring a special reverence for the KitKat. I should point out that there’s an ‘original short breaks’ theme loosely binding this issue together, which edges progressively closer to the UK via a waterfront jog in Havana (p88), shopping in Istanbul (p1 14) and a historic bar crawl in Kraków (p58).
@peter_grunert petervg73