Travel | GlobalSalsa: travel writer Belinda Jackson

Sep

Spring in the city: good reasons to visit Melbourne

Newmarket Hotel.

Today, I was led astray, into the fabulous Melbourne Middle Eastern restaurant Maha. Little did I know that they are happy to serve up coffee to passers by, and to dish up the most divine donuts that ever wobbled on the face of the earth. They’re not even on the menu, they’re that good.

As we were mainlining the dough balls, crushed pistachios and white chocolate spill (a serve consists of five donuts – five – when inevitably two people are sharing?), I was reminded that Taste of Melbourne starts tomorrow. No time to crash diet before cruising the halls of the Royal Exhibition Building to taste dishes from some of the city’s top restaurants.

There are eight great reasons to visit Melbourne at the moment:
Fringe Festival September 21 — October 9
Melbourne Festival October 6-22
Art deco walking tours
Madonna & Child by Correggio
The Art of Brick LEGO exhibition, until October 9
New bars
Food meets design
and Taste of Melbourne September 15-18

Click here to read more.

Sep

Saturday night in Daylesford

On Saturday night, I
was in Kazuki, the newest restaurant in delicious Daylesford, about 90 minutes
north of Melbourne. Daylesford is, of course, hip to the eyeballs. Only a
population of 7000 people, yet it has art galleries, cafes, restaurants and
beautiful villas wriggling out of every pore.

Kazuki is a Japanese
restaurant on up and coming Howe St, and while I was snacking on tiny plates of
smoked eel ravioli and Japanese mushroom and celery soup, I looked across at
the next table, to see a couple enjoying a romantic evening: the wine, the
food, the view of the darkened street. The only odd note was that they were both about 20. Was I so
composed that at 20, I was taking dates out to swanky restaurants full of
ingredients I couldn’t pronounce? I can quite safely admit that no, I was far
too busy skulking around looking for low-budget entertainment in band pubs,
existing on a diet of unflavoured boiled rice, to even contemplate such
refinement.

“These kids of
Daylesford,” I thought, “they’re in a class of their own.”

Mind you, several
hours later into the evening, a band of the buggers ripped the two wing mirrors
off my daggy old, hardworking car. They’re not so bloody different, after all.

Sep

Poor Ned, it’s hard to get a head

Death mask of Ned Kelly.

Police killer or a true, blue Aussie? Bushranger Ned Kelly
is back in the news, 130 years after he was hung till dead in Old Melbourne
Gaol.

For the foreigners in the crowd, Our Ned had a penchant for
holding up banks, but was forced to go on the run after killing one or three police
officers during raids.

Ned, whose dad, Red Kelly, came from Moyglass in Co
Tipperary, was hanged in Melbourne in 1880, but his remains, along with those
of 134 other prisoners, were later moved to Pentridge Prison, in the Melbourne
suburb of Coburg. Prison officers had poured lime over the remains,
unintentionally preserving them so that 130 years later, the DNA from Ned’s
sister’s great-grandson could identify that the bones were, in fact, the
infamous bushranger’s.

Mick Jagger does Ned.

Ned’s skull was stolen in 1978, but when it was returned,
recent comparisons between the skull and his death mask, modelled on his face
while his dead body was cooling, have showed it’s not Kelly’s cranium, but is
possibly the skull of notorious British murderer Fred Deeming.

It’s a rough trot for a bloke, to have his bones carted
around in the public gaze nearly a century and a half later. And now, the Kelly
family and government bodies are beginning the wrangle over where those bones, it
will be a while till he’s finally laid to rest. But where? In a tacky tourist
trap or displayed tastefully in a museum, alongside his death mask? Either way,
his skull is still missing. To use Ned’s last words, “Such is life.”

Aug

A different direction: Lovin’ Lorne

My drive from Melbourne to Lorne, on the Victorian coastline, is not quite Hunter S. Thompson’s iconic road journey, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where he packs his attorney, two bags of grass, mescaline, acid and a salt shaker half full of cocaine: I’m packin’ my mum, some nice nectarines and a swimsuit in the hope that the water in Lorne’s Loutit Bay, aka Bass Strait, isn’t going to freeze my blood.

Click here to read more.

Aug

Where good looks count: Clear Mountain Lodge, Brisbane

Here’s a little tale about a lodge on Brisbane’s far northern fringe, near Samford. So I played down the arguments about the GPS, but it truly was a grim, bleak drive up to the lodge. Well worth it, really.

IT IS a cold and windy night, the night we head to Clear Mountain Lodge, a small hotel about 35 minutes’ drive north of the Brisbane city centre.

The lodge is, unsurprisingly, at the top of lonely Clear Mountain, in Brisbane’s little-known hinterland. In the dark of night, having been unceremoniously stranded in Queensland thanks to Chilean volcanic ash clouds, the lodge could be on the moon, for all I can see.

Thank goodness for the GPS, the neo-tech husband says. I’ll switch off my Walkman so I can hear you call me antediluvian but I just don’t trust them. So we argue all the way to Clear Mountain, before calling the hotel to check its location.

“Just drive to the top of the hill. You can’t miss it,” the receptionist says. “Don’t follow the GPS and go on Old School Road. It’ll send you down a four-wheel-drive track through a forest.” Tres Wolf Creek.

Click here to read more.

Aug

Palestine moves to north Melbourne

Snapped in Brunswick/Coburg, the Arab-tastic northern suburbs of Melbourne. It was a car shot, so sorry for the quality, it reads:

“On census day, let’s all say we are Palestinian!”

The census (where every person is counted in Australia) is being held tonight.

Aug

Cairo hormones high while NYC snoozes and loses

Cairo thrashes New York for late-night flirting. Who’d a thought?

In case you missed it this week, online dating site Badoo found that the Egyptian capital tops the world as most nocturnal city with the latest night logons for chatting and flirting on its website.

The Sex in the City capital, New York, was caught snoozing and therefore losing, coming in at a rather poor 32nd out of the 180 cities Badoo operates in. London came in 17th and Paris 18th. The naughtiest European city was Malaga, with six Spanish cities in the top 10 hotspots.

Cairo, a city I once heard described as not so much a city that never sleeps, but a city that sleeps in shifts, sees its flirt and chat activity peak at 00.45am.

Badoo’s 10 Most 24-hour cities
1. Cairo (Egypt)
2. Montevideo (Uruguay)
3. Beirut (Lebanon)
4. Malaga (Spain)
5. Zaragoza (Spain)
6. Madrid (Spain)
7. Barcelona (Spain)
8. Valencia (Spain)
9. Seville (Spain)
10. Buenos Aires (Argentina)

Aug

Upper West Side comes to Melbourne

It’s a sign of Australia’s enduring cultural cringe that Melbourne now apparently has an Upper West Side. Thank you, New York City, for helping us find new names for our city streets.

There’s always been that joke about ‘the Paris end of Collins St’, then there’s the Greek Quarter, Chinatown and the Spanish strip of tapas bars in Fitzroy. Let’s reclaim the streets: create our own Boganville, perhaps Gillard Grove, or Tonytown. Thank god for ACDC Lane, a shining light in the culturally confused wilderness.

Unfortunately, Melbourne’s Upper West Side is more mongrel than Manhattan. At the moment, our homegrown UWS is a scuzzy collection of building sites in the no-man’s-land around Spencer St, perilously close to the so-called gentlemen’s clubs (frequented by anything but gentlemen).

You can have your own slice of paradise for $342,000 for a one-bedroom apartment. Bargain of the century. I wonder how much it’d cost in NYC?

Jul

Rest and recuperate: Singapore

Seven stopover cities where you can stretch your legs and beat the humdrum of a long-haul flight

Click here to read more of this story from The Age.

Why I love Changi airport: simply because I can get my luggage trolley into the loo – a bonus for solo travellers with no mate to stand guard.

The beauty of stopping in transit in countries as tiny as Singapore is that you’re smack in the city in the flutter of a fake eyelash; it’s just half an hour from the airport to whatever nirvana you’re looking for: theme park junkies head to Universal Studios, nostalgia buffs grab Singapore Slings at Raffles Hotel and label freaks gravitate to Orchard Road.

Want a bowl of steaming laksa? Head to Katong, where a battalion of Nonyas (Malay mammas) fight it out in a long-standing battle for the best laksa in town. There are mosques for Muslims and boutiques for Indo-fashionistas in Kampong Glam and in chaotic Little India, I watch an old fortune teller use a green parrot to pull numbers from a deck of cards. It’s $S5 ($3.80) a number for a series that might win you the lottery. The parrot is working like a demon as punters stop by the little table on the footpath to try their luck.

In the waterside bar quarter of Clark Quay, tiny Singaporean princesses totter into Shanghai Dolly, a Mando-pop bar. We say: avoid if you’ve just staggered off a long-haul flight with shiny skin and less-than-luscious locks.

Singapore caters to all comers. And come they do, to a country masquerading as one of the world’s great transit lounges, open 24/7/365.

Flight time About 8hr from Melbourne and Sydney.
Who stops over? Singapore Airlines, Qantas, British Airways, Jetstar and Emirates are among the major airlines to go there.
Taxi from airport to city Metered taxis from $S18 ($14), double from midnight to 6am plus a surcharge of $S3 to $S5. The journey takes about 30 minutes. Singapore Airlines has a free service between the airport, city centre and Sentosa Island for transit passengers, from $S6 for Singapore Airlines/SilkAir passengers and $S12 for others. See siahopon.com.
Where to stay The Crowne Plaza Changi Airport is linked to the airport terminals via walkways and people movers, from $S320. See cpchangiairport.com. The Ambassador Transit Hotel in the airport’s transit lounge (therefore no need to clear immigration) sells rooms in six-hour blocks from $S76/double or has single-person rooms with shared bathrooms from $S41. See athmg.com.
Visa Not required for Australian passport holders for a stay of up to 30 days.

Click here to read more of this story from The Age.

Jul

Butter and pounds: it’s all a bit rich

How’s that couple in the UK who won £161 million the other day? That’s a whole lot of pounds. Yet they’ll keep the car and the same house, but might go on a few holidays…

Just as well they were retired, as I don’t buy that line that people say they’ll continue to work. Yeah, right! Like I’m going to keep slogging it out for some bogan boss who can’t believe I still turn up at 9am every single day.

I don’t buy that line that money won’t change us. Hell yes. Change me, baby. Change me. Bring on the vintage champagne and pool boy, I say. Sort of like that Imperial Leather ad doing the rounds at the moment. That’s my style..

One thing I would do would be to continue to eat incessantly around Melbourne. And one place I’d continue to haunt would be Le Traiteur. People, if you haven’t eaten there, go immediately. The kitchen churns out fresh baguettes and pastries twice daily, so the cafe is constantly perfumed by the smell of fresh-baked bread – that smell so beloved of real estate agents because it immediately makes us wrap our arms around our (ample) selves, and say, ‘I love this place’ (and, if it is an Australian house, ‘ I want to spend the next 30 years working to pay for it.’)

Back to Le Traiteur, it’s deliciously French with an Aussie twist, with gorgeous mustards, relishes, lots and lots of porky things and now I know where I’ll buy my next lot of saffron from. I was willingly led there by G, who knows her onions, pates, terrines and brioches. I was uncharacteristically early, so watched the legals around me scoff the last remaining pies de jour (a sensational looking chicken and leek). Dammit, I wanted to rip the pies from their very plates. But I desisted, instead taking G’s recommendation for a brioche so buttery it should carry a health warning.

The service: charming (hey, they welcomed a pram into the cafe during the lunchtime rush and owner Nick came out for a baby cuddle). The coffee: fabulous. Stick your nose in; trust me you won’t regret it.

Le Traiteur: 552 Lonsdale St, Melbourne

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