Lights, camera... ACTION! This week we launched a new series about visiting movie locations in California, the home state of the entertainment industry. This came about because everywhere we went when we were there looked familiar. Then we realised this was because we’d seen many of the places in films or on TV. An amazingly diverse range of locations are available to directors within a relatively short distance from Hollywood.

We started off with a post on Alcatraz, the setting for a classic Clint Eastwood thriller – Colin is pictured in the cell block there. READ MORE

Next up was a piece on Death Valley, where scenes from the first Star Wars movie were shot. READ MORE

Next week we’ll continue with an item on locations and buildings seen in Alfred Hitchcock’s horror classic The Birds.

We made a short video trailer based on Star Wars' opening crawl to promote the locations series on social media. We're old enough to have seen the original movie in the cinema when it was first released in 1977. It's funny to think that the first words viewers see are "A long time ago", and now the release of that film happened, well, a long time ago. WATCH VIDEO

A second video, about a performance art event we went to in a Hong Kong office tower yesterday, has attracted more interest on social media than any of our previous ones. Office workers streamed past on their way to get a lunchtime sandwich, many without looking at what was happening, as the mesmerising performance took place. WATCH VIDEO

Sad to see that two of the travel industry's most venerable names continue to face financial problems. The London Times today reports that Thomas Cook – founded 178 years ago – is on the brink of collapse after running up huge debts. Meanwhile Cox & Kings, dating from 1758, has seen its share price plunge spectacularly amid downgrades and debt defaults. Maybe old, established companies are just too slow to adjust to changing conditions in a market that's now dominated by the internet. We travelled to India with Cox & Kings – here's what we thought: READ MORE

Iran has been in the news this week, and may not be everyone's first choice when planning a holiday. This is a shame for two reasons. First, it's been named the world's most affordable tourist destination in the World Economic Forum's Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report 2019. The study ranks countries in a number of categories, and Iran is top in the "price competitiveness" list. The second reason is that everyone we know who's visited Iran says it's a beautiful country with warm, friendly people. It's a shame when politics gets in the way of people from different countries meeting and understanding each other.

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