Travel to Sardinia

Sardinia - Nuraghic Warriors and Phoenician Traders
Sardinia is the second largest island in the Mediterranean Sea.
During the Bronze Age a dynamic society of warriors and traders developed on this rugged island, leaving behind them a staggering 7000 ‘Nuraghi’ - fortified round towers with associated villages. We also visit Megalithic, Phoenician and Roman sites and travel through beautiful countryside. The abundant and distinctive wildlife will delight botanists and bird watchers.

Until recently the importance of the island has been underestimated, partly because, one suspects, it was never colonised by the Greeks. Sardinia’s period of greatest prosperity and architectural splendour was BC, rather than AD. This was during the Bronze Age when a dynamic society of warriors and traders developed here, as shown by the presence of a staggering 7000 ‘Nuraghi’. The ruins of these splendid fortified round towers, some with outworks and associated villages, are a unique feature of the archaeology of Sardinia.

Sardinia has been popularly regarded as rather isolated, an impression encouraged by its rugged landscape and self-reliant islanders, who speak an obscure dialect and cling tenaciously to their customs and folklore. The archaeology tells another story, however, of rich prehistoric and classical cultures which were regularly in contact with other parts of the Mediterranean.

Together with the engaging bronze figurines - bronzetti - they provide an insight into an island society of intriguing complexity at an early date. We also visit earlier Megalithic sites, later Phoenician trading colonies and Roman cities as we traverse the island.

It is a wildly beautiful place - relatively poor and undeveloped except in pockets such as the busy capital of Cagliari, or the delightful Aragonese harbour town of Alghero.

Travel to New Orleans

New Orleans: back in full swing

The shop names say it all. Trashy Diva, Voluptuous Vixen, Constant Envy… Walk down Chartres Street in New Orleans's wilfully bohemian French Quarter, with its richly coloured houses and frilly cast-iron balconies gushing with flowers, and it is clear that this is a city where the sensual life matters.

Boutiques selling perfume, corsets and lingerie give way to handsome Jackson Square, lined with purveyors of hope. Fortune-tellers and tarot readers vie for attention with the pencil-point spires of St Louis Cathedral. A uniformed jazz band tunes up as a splendid white carriage with matching horse clip-clops off for a romantic ride through a bewitching ensemble of Spanish, French and Creole buildings.

Set beside a venerable bend of the Mississippi, New Orleans has always been that dreamy, steamy place where Uncle Sam finally throws off his top-hat and goes lindy-hopping. Tennessee Williams, Mardi Gras, Dixieland, voodoo, gumbo – the call is exotic and hard to resist.

Strangeness is everywhere. New Orleans has stalls selling alligator burgers, and tribes of men who dress up as Indians in outrageous feathered costumes that take a year to make. There are bars that resound to the foot-tapping beat of zydeco, and there are fish named pompano and sheepshead. The locals confer using words such as lagniappe (a little bit extra) and po-boy, which is a sandwich, not an impoverished youth.

It seems to have been like this for ever. In 1920, when Prohibition arrived and agents were despatched nationwide to assess the severity of the problem, New Orleans was found to have 5,000 bars.

While it took an inspector 14 minutes to be offered an illegal drink in New York, here it was just 37 seconds – generously proposed by his taxi-driver.

Comparisons with Venice are appropriate. Both cities have ravishing looks, bags of atmosphere and a precarious relationship with water. As we all know, in August 2005 Hurricane Katrina triggered floods that devastated the city.

The verdict is that this was a man-made disaster – levees meant to provide protection failed. This view is banged home emphatically in David Simon's hit television drama Treme, which is named after the city's historic and culturally rich African-American neighbourhood.

Beginning three months after the disaster, the series shows its citizens struggling to transcend the tragedy, with a superb backing track of home-grown tunes. Many locals consider it "hyper-accurate", and a third season is now in production.

"Some say we are the northernmost city in the Caribbean," a resident suggests – which is plausible given the warmth, colour and laissez-faire lifestyle enveloping me. New Orleans is the only city in the United States where it is legal to drink alcohol in the street, with 24-hour bars and signs saying "Cocktails to Go". Every weekend the pedestrianised party-strip of Bourbon Street becomes a raucous, boozy mayhem filled with out-of-town drunkards festooned with coloured beads.

International travel- Canada's spirit bear

Life through my lens: Canada's spirit bear
Mark Carwardine, the zoologist and BBC presenter, recalls an unforgettable first encounter with a spirit bear in Canada.

Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean. Spanning over 9.9 million square kilometres, Canada is the world's second-largest country by total area, and its common border with the United States is the longest land border in the world.

I had been waiting quietly on the riverbank for several hours, listening to the gentle patter of rain. Every so often a black bear would pass by, fishing for salmon on its way upstream. But suddenly an apparition emerged, ghostlike, from the dark recesses of the forest: a rare and elusive spirit bear.

I was in Canada’s Great Bear Rainforest, the largest remaining tract of intact temperate rainforest left in the world, which stretches seamlessly from the northern end of Vancouver Island all the way to south-east Alaska.

This breathtaking wilderness is chock-full of wildlife, but the spirit bear is the jewel in its crown.

One of the animal world’s great enigmas, it is a walking contradiction – a white black bear (an extremely rare colour variant of the American black bear). It is neither a polar bear nor albino. It has normal pigmentation in its eyes, nose and skin and the whiteness comes from a recessive gene, so, to be born white, the bear must inherit the gene from both parents. Also known as the ghost bear, or Kermode bear (named after Francis Kermode, former director of the Royal British Columbia Museum), it is elusive and rarely seen – except for a few weeks every year in one tiny corner of the forest.

Found nowhere else in the world, it spends the winter fast asleep and prefers to hide in the dark, tangled recesses of the forest. But if you go to the right place, at the right time of year, your chances of a close encounter are surprisingly good.