Getting the flavour of…
An East African adventure
To get away from other tourists in the vast wildernesses of Tanzania, try a mobile safari, says Horatio Clare in the FT. Driving by day and camping by night makes for a real adventure – but with a guide, cook, crew and a support vehicle carrying “proper beds” and other luxuries, the experience can be made “blissfully” easy. The Selous Game Reserve and Ruaha National Park see very few visitors, but they are enormous – the size of Holland and Wales, respectively. Visit them with a wildlife expert such as Rod Tether, and you will enjoy breathtakingly close encounters with animals including lions and, if you’re lucky, leopards. In between, you could stop at the smaller Udzungwa Mountains National Park, to swim beneath “spectacular” waterfalls and track sanje crested mangabeys – golden primates only discovered in 1979. Natural High Safaris (01747-830950, www.naturalhighsafaris.com) has a ten-day trip for a family of four from £13,720, excl. international flights.
Hamburg’s palace of music A giant new concert hall encased in glass, the Elbphilharmonie towers over the River Elbe in Hamburg “like a glacier”. It is now the city’s “defining landmark” and reason enough to visit in itself, says Trisha Andres in The Daily Telegraph. Designed by the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, it ran nearly three times over budget (to s789m), and its acoustics, the work of Yasuhisa Toyota, are “exceptional”. Attend a concert by the resident orchestra in the evening after a day spent exploring the historic Speicherstadt, a “labyrinth” of lofty 19th century warehouses and narrow canals lined with fashion showrooms, artists’ studios and tea rooms. Also fantastic are the five art galleries of the Kunstmeile; they include the Kunsthalle, which holds a vast collection of European paintings. See www.elbphilharmonie.de/en.
Staying in a bothy on Exmoor Accommodation does not come much simpler than the National Trust’s new bothies on Exmoor, but these overnight shelters, with sleeping platforms, running water and real toilets, are proving popular with walkers, says Phoebe Smith in The Guardian. One of them, Foreland, is a converted stable beneath the village of Countisbury; the other, Hebdon Orchard, is a former apple store built in 1867, near Martinhoe. Each is available for exclusive use by up to four people for £20 per night. The 21-mile route between them follows the North Devon coast and passes through the spectacular Valley of Rocks, with its “fortress-like protrusions” of fossilised bedrock and fine views of the Bristol Channel. To book, see www.nationaltrust.org.uk or call 0344-335 1296.