Take a dip in some of the world’s top mineral springs.

A tiny bar serving potent green tea cocktails in the backstreets of Kanazawa seems the oddest setting for my first encounter with a geisha...

Grit over glitter, that's the authentic Naples

Be careful. It's something we hear again and again when we talk about our planned stopover in Naples en route to a weeek on the Amalfi Coast....

In Japan, creativity seeps into everything outside the traditional frame of canvas and festival.

t’s still early on a warm night in Kana­zawa, but things are already getting a little rowdy at the next table...

Art of the Sublime Part 2

After frenetic Kuala Lumpur, this island’s fine white sand, turquoise sea and tropical jungle are a welcoming world away.

Lying north of the Strait of Malacca in the southern Andaman Sea near the border between Malaysia and Thailand, the island of Langkawi, the so-called “Jewel of Kedah”, was once home to fishermen and farmers and a haven for pirates with nary a luxury resort in sight.

After an accidental start, Iceland's lagoon wonder is a major tourist attraction and now a lucrative business.

Framed by a black lava rock wall slick with water, Grimur Saemundsen is discreetly surveying his kingdom....

Here’s a toast to wine-loving popes and the ancient Roman trade route along the Rhone.

As the sun sets, I’m watching the Rhone from the balcony of my cosy, well-appointed stateroom on the Viking Longship Delling ...

American explorer Hiram Bingham vividly recounted his first sight of Machu Picchu in his classic 1922 book Inca Land: Explorations in the Highlands of Peru. ...

"IT would have to be one of the most dramatic descents in the world. As our plane approaches Alejandro Velasco Astete Airport in Cusco, Peru,...

Treks with a touch of luxury in South Australia

From the air, Wilpena Pound is pure theatre. Like a desert mirage, the steep ochre walls of this ancient crater rise dramatically out of the arid orange plains of outback South Australia’s Flinders Ranges...

It’s a fine, unseasonably warm autumn’s day as we make our slow spiralling descent down hairpin bends and enter the final 14-kilometre, recently sealed stretch of road leading to the gates of the Emirates Wolgan Valley Resort and Spa...

Forget apples. Tasmania is the holy grail, it seems, for those seeking to shed skins and reinvent identities.

You meet all kinds of people on a food-themed cruise of Tasmania. A German-speaking linguistics graduate turned ginseng grower and salmon farmer...

On a balmy Saturday night on Hamilton Island’s Pebble Beach, four Australian Ballet dancers whipped out virtuoso pas de deux from August Bournonville’s Flower Festival in Genzano, The Nutcracker and Swan Lake in front of a 150-strong black tie crowd. ...

ON a freezing Monday night in St Petersburg the venerable Alexandrinsky Theatre, a stone's throw from the city's glittering Nevsky Prospect thoroughfare, is ablaze with light and crammed with a jostling opening-night crowd. ...

It is a crisp Saturday evening in Lima, Peru, and the traffic in upscale Miraflores is a whirl of horns and squealing tyres. ...

‘She would have seen this very same view when she was standing here.” Under the blind gaze of a trio of alabaster statues guarding the Jordan staircase in the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, Mikhail Dedinkin points across a sea of heads to the broad, silvery Neva River framed like an exquisite still-life by a nearby window. ..

IT'S almost midnight in sticky, monsoonal Mumbai and the car containing arguably the world's most famous actor is racing a fat yellow moon reflected in the serene Arabian Sea. ...

The city is returning to its glory days, writes Sharon Verghis.

When Graeme Murphy and his dancers first visited Shanghai in the early 1980s, as part of a three-week cultural exchange between Australia and China, they found a city seemingly preserved in amber. ...