Travel notes & guides

Spices, cotton and copper are genuinely good. Papyrus and alabaster usually are not.

The coast is fine. Inland needs a different plan entirely, and it is mostly about the clock.

One minibus, fourteen hotels, one convoy departure. Here is what determines your slot.

Prices swing by half across the year. The cheapest weeks are not the ones you would guess.

From a shallow coral garden to a 130-metre freighter sitting upright at 30 metres.

Bombed at anchor, forgotten for decades, and still loaded with the war it was carrying.

Corals feed, hunters come out, and the water itself can light up when you move.

Four rules fix almost everything, and none of them requires buying anything.

Not sharks. Fire coral, stonefish, sea urchins and your own hands, roughly in that order.

The fun bits of a boat day, plus the two safety questions worth asking first.

Same island, reserved sunbeds, an open buffet and a catamaran instead of a wooden boat.

A three-metre marine mammal that grazes seagrass, and why nobody can promise you one.

Two things people assume rule them out, and neither actually does.

Better reefs and turtles south, more to do and cheaper flights north.

None of them costs anything and all of them are broken daily by people who mean well.

From the 8am pickup to the 5pm return, what actually happens and when.

Fava beans, falafel and flatbread, for about a euro, from a cart on a corner.

Ask for coffee without specifying the sugar and you will be asked again. Here is the vocabulary.

Al-Muizz street holds the greatest concentration of medieval Islamic architecture anywhere.

Founded by Alexander, ruled by Greeks, and it still feels closer to Naples than to Cairo.