NEWSLETTER 60: April 2021

Thank you for your interest in the Afaranwide travel blog.

Picnickers at Glyndebourne

THIS time last year, as Covid tightened its grip on the world, we wrote about how the organisers of the series of famous UK events know as the Summer Season were struggling to cope. We’re revisiting the Summer Season and will be publishing a series of posts about this year’s arrangements for the likes of Wimbledon and Royal Ascot. These and other famous occasions normally attract many travellers from abroad. According to the UN’s World Tourism Organization, sport and culture tourism were important drivers of the industry before the pandemic. First up in our series will be Glyndebourne, the original country house opera festival, which is famous for its al fresco picnics. It has a history as dramatic and romantic as any opera, having sprung out of a wealthy landowner’s love for a singer. Look out for this and further Summer Season posts.

Hearst Castle

THE multi-Oscar-nominated Netflix movie Mank has focused attention on Hearst Castle, the lavish spread built by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. A key scene involves Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz gate-crashing a fancy-dress dinner part at the castle. Another scene shows elephants and other animals in Hearst’s menagerie. When the zoo closed, zebras and other animals were released and can be seen to this day grazing by the roadside. Look out for our upcoming post on this amazing place in San Simeon, California.

A wild storm blowing in from the Sahara caused strong winds and spectacular waves in the Algarve this week

WE REMAIN in Portugal’s Algarve as we wait for the Covid situation to, hopefully, improve before we return home to the UK. We’re in very good company, as the great Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei has moved here. He’s settled in a country estate outside Lisbon, where he’s working on a monument honouring Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader.

Forever Bicycle by Ai Weiwei

“I love Portugal,” Ai, 63, told Reuters. An exhibition of his work is due to open soon in the capital. We visited one of Ai’s shows in Melbourne a couple of years ago. It was a joint affair that also showcased Andy Warhol, but the power of Ai’s works blew away the American’s pieces.

Carrie Lam on Red Nose Day show

EVERY couple of years, the Red Nose Day charity fundraiser is screened live on TV in the UK. Comedians and other celebrities take part, raising millions for good causes. The latest show, broadcast by the BBC last month, was understandably dominated by Covid. It included a moving and uplifting video of The Proclaimers’ Sunshine on Leith, with Zoom choirs and reminders of the impact of the pandemic. Who should pop up in the middle of it but Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam, who became a bitterly divisive figure during the protests that rocked the city in 2019. She’s seen receiving a Covid vaccine jab. Lam was sanctioned by the US last year for, according to then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, undermining Hong Kong’s autonomy. She is loathed by the city’s pro-democracy movement. We were surprised to see such a deeply political and contentious figure featured in a feel-good video on a charity show. There’s certainly nothing comic about Lam – you can’t imagine her wearing a red nose. We asked the organisers, the Comic Relief charity, why she was chosen. A BBC spokesperson told us: “The purpose of this particular sequence was to reflect vaccines taking place across the world, no more than that.”

Cheetahs at Sheikh Hamdan's zoo

SHEIKH Hamdan bin Rashid al Maktoum, deputy ruler of Dubai, died last month aged 75. Most of the obituaries focused on his success as a racehorse owner. But less well known is that, like many wealthy Arabs, he had a great love of wildlife. I was given special permission to visit his large private zoo in Dubai, and was interested to learn about its involvement in an international cheetah breeding programme. The resulting blog post is Afaranwide’s most popular ever. – CS

Asian tourist in New York

WE'RE all focused on when we can get moving again, but I’m intrigued by how much the past year will have changed who wants to go where. Travel media company Skift reports that 82 per cent of Chinese tourists told a survey conducted in China recently they would feel “unsafe” going to the US. Canada, Australia and the UK were the next three on their list. This is largely (but not only) due to the spike in hate crimes against Chinese people abroad after the pandemic was found to originate in Wuhan. “Friendliness” and “safety”, previously seen as separate issues, have merged and will no doubt take some time to heal. It reminds me of a fashion chain owner saying at a forum I attended in Hong Kong last year that no one wants to wear his Asian-inspired creations anymore, for the same anti-Asian reason. As someone who has lived and worked in both China and Hong Kong, it saddens me to think the world will divide and split even more as we emerge from this dreadful virus. – SB

Art Deco joy at the Dr Sun Yat-sen museum in Hong Kong

I’VE SPOTTED a travel must-do that I didn’t know existed – Art Deco Nanjing. Apparently, Republic of China leader Chiang Kai Shek moved the country’s capital from Beijing to Nanjing in the 1920s and tasked architects with transforming the city. The trip, by the ever-innovative Bespoke Travel Company, takes in glamorous old cinemas, Soong Mei Ling’s “palace”, and Dr Sun Yat-sen’s mausoleum. The company offers unusual trips such as “red Beijing”, Beijing by motorbike and sidecar, and a Midnight in Peking walking tour. – SB

Empty plane during pandemic

WE GET lots of requests to write for other bloggers but one from Kosmos Car Rentals in Greece was unusual – as travel writers, what is our advice to their customers as we come out of the pandemic and start planning holidays again? They’d seen our blogs about travelling on near-empty planes when we had to leave Hong Kong last autumn and I couldn’t resist answering. This was largely because when I first went to Greece in my trusty VW campervan Bertie I fell in love with the country and hope others will too. – SB

LAST MONTH I reported that I’ve applied to take part in a trip around the Moon – well, we’re all feeling a bit restless during lockdown. Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa is looking for eight crew members to join him on the flight aboard SpaceX’s Starship. Unhelpfully, an unmanned prototype Starship exploded during a test flight on March 30. I’ve now completed the first stage of the selection process and should hear whether I’ve been accepted for the next one by the end of April. If chosen, I would become only the second person born in Scotland to reach space (not counting Scotty from Star Trek). The first was Virgin Galactic’s David Mackay, but he just went on a brief suborbital hop to the edge of space rather than spending five days flying around the Moon. Mind you, with more than a million applicants for the lunar flight, I guess the odds for me making it are astronomically long. – CS