A spectacular canal-boat trip
With its “breathtaking” aqueducts and glorious setting, the Llangollen Canal is “one of our most stunning waterways”, said Clive Davis in The Times – and so easy to navigate that it makes for a wonderfully relaxing boating holiday.
The canal runs for about 40 miles from Llangollen in Denbighshire, via Shropshire, to Hurleston Junction in Cheshire; but for a three-night trip, I chose just the western section, 11 miles of which are now a Unesco World Heritage Site. The 57ft-long boat, hired from Drifters, in Trevor, was “simple but cosy”, and the rhythm was so slow I felt I had travelled back in time. That said, going through the cold and clammy Chirk Tunnel (460 yards long) was quite an “adventure”, and crossing the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, 130ft above the “tumbling” waters of the River Dee, was thrilling.
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Cycling across Sweden’s lake district
There is a quiet “otherworldliness to Sweden in the late summer”, said Mike MacEacheran in The Guardian – the perfect time to cycle the Lelångenleden, a new 112-mile trail in the west of the country.
Winding from the Bohuslän coast (north of Gothenburg), through Dalsland (Sweden’s lake district) and into the “vast” forests of Värmland, it offers a fine introduction to some of the country’s most idyllic areas. A friend and I did it in three days, with gravel bikes and bikepacking equipment hired from The Dalsland Experience.
We stayed in hotels and at Ragnerud Lake campsite, which has a great restaurant. The cycling was largely flat and easy, often on “traffic-free” gravel roads; there were some “charming” lakeside towns along the way; and the wild swimming – often with saunas on hand – was blissful.
Between cultures in East Asia
Some of the local customs in Japan or South Korea can feel somewhat “impenetrable” to outsiders, making one fearful of causing offence – but on the night ferries between the two countries, there is a feeling that anything goes, said Gemma Knight-Gilani in The Telegraph.
I recently took a ferry from Busan to Fukuoka, and felt as though I was in a “surreal” limbo between cultures. With no shared rules, everyone was giving and forgiving. An elderly Japanese woman helped a young French backpacker to use a vending machine, a Chinese woman’s misguided attempt to swim in the bathhouse drew no judgemental glances – and in the dining room, the “frontier town” feeling reached “fever pitch”. American toddlers played tag, a Japanese girl helped me with the communal microwaves, and a Korean woman gave me some homemade chilli paste.
At eleven-and-a-half hours, the journey was far longer than a flight – but cheaper, too, and much more fun.
