Getting the flavour of…

A gourmet bus tour of London

Tour buses of the capital are usually only for visitors, but there’s one that may just tempt London dwellers to hop aboard. Bustronome is the city’s “latest offbeat attraction”, says Helen Coffey in The Independent: a tour with an “upscale dining experience” in a bus that’s been converted to a restaurant with booths and mood lighting. The service starts off with champagne, as guests are handed a map and an audio guide of the passing landmarks. This is no “cheap gimmick” either – it’s genuine fine dining. Everything’s delicious and the wines are excellent, but what’s really clever is the “magnetic place mats” for cutlery and the stands to steady glasses against jolts. It may be all that wine, but the city looks “charming” from here; it’s London from a “whole new perspective”. Bustronome (bustronome.com) has dinner for £135pp with wine pairings. Tracking tigers in Laos Laos is considered a “linchpin in illegal wildlife trafficking”, and its documented trade in tiger parts and ivory “makes for very unsavoury reading”, says Claire Boobbyer in The Guardian. But it’s not all bad news. The Nam Et-phou Louey protected area shelters endangered Indo-chinese tigers, leopards, macaques, black bears, civets and 288 species of birds in a “rich animal oasis”. On the slopes of Mount Forever, ecotourism is supporting the conservation with an exhilarating five-day, 25-mile trek run by the Wildlife Conservation Society. You spend the night in stilt huts and awake to the bird “choir”, before setting off amid cascading waterfalls and giant banana fronds. And if you don’t spot a tiger, the guide can still show you one – in photos taken by hidden cameras in the park and stored on his tablet. Audley Travel (audleytravel.co.uk) can arrange this trip as part of a longer tour. Paris’s grand arcades There’s nothing like rain to “put a dampener on a city break” in Paris, says Carolyn Boyd in The Times. This was also true in the 19th century, when “there was no such thing as a cagoule”. The answer was to build arcades for the “well-heeled”, where they could shop, dine and stroll without “ruining their attire”. There were about 100 at the peak; today, 20 or so survive, “hidden in the 1st and 2nd arrondissements”, and harbouring interesting little boutiques and “elegant” antiques shops. Some arcades, like the glass-roofed Galerie Vivienne and the Passage Jouffroy, lined with haberdashers and “charming” bookshops, are chic and fabulously ornate. But despite its “ugly” façade, Passage des Panoramas has a “certain magic” too – its narrow corridor feels like an Arabian souk. When exploring these delightful “antidotes” to featureless modern malls, a little rain is pas de problème.