art | GlobalSalsa: travel writer Belinda Jackson

Hotels reborn: 10 historic buildings that are now luxury hotels

Where are you sleeping tonight? In a prison cell? A castle? A monastery. A jam factory? I’m talking about rooms inside buildings that have been reborn as hotels – buildings that may otherwise have fallen into irretrievable disrepair, or worse.

Traveller cover photo The Interlude @ Pentridge Prison

This weekend, my cover story in the Traveller section of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age newspapers is about hotels whose buildings have served a previous life – I rounded up 10 across Australia and abroad, with an extra serve of five Australasian hotels on the side. I looked at hotels as far apart as London, Peru and Turkey, which have been train stations, palaces, even a state Department of Education. Some, like the Las Casas de la Juderia, in Seville and London’s St Pancras Renaissance, were from recent travels. Some, like The Interlude here in Melbourne’s Pentridge Prison complex, are only just about to open. All are close to my heart.

Sometimes, it’s the location or the beauty of a building that lures developers to imbue it with renewed life. Other times, it’s the building’s backstory that a visionary can weave into its incarnation, to be reborn with new purpose.

“Heritage is the art of saving what is useful and beautiful, but also updating it for modern use,” says Terry Fripp, of Kerry Hill Architects, whose projects include Perth’s much-lauded COMO The Treasury, formerly Western Australia’s historic State Buildings.

It’s the ultimate act of recycling: reusing existing resources while also giving back, in the form of hotel restaurants, bars, spas and event spaces that are, for the most part, accessible by the public.

Click here to read my story on the 10 great hotels reborn, with another serve of five Australasian hotels on the side.

or see https://www.theage.com.au/traveller/inspiration/10-historic-buildings-reborn-as-stunning-luxury-hotels-20230512-p5d7vp.html

Terminal boredom: free things to do in airports

I don’t mind wandering airports – empty or busy, I find them a fabulous use of time. I love the exotic layers you’ll find in the big, Middle Eastern hubs, as yogawear-clad Australian girls sit alongside men in Oman’s national dress of gleaming white dishdasha, or hikers unlace their heavy boots beside the perfectly manicured Parisian couple. I like finding the local cuisine – often a tricky quest amongst the increasingly globalised food courts found in most airports – and the essential souvenir.

However, if shopping for sherry vinegar from southern Spain or 80% chocolate from Ecuador is too boring for you, I offer you my contribution to the Sydney Morning Herald/The Age’s Savvy Traveller section, which lists some of the coolest free things to do in airports around the world.

Top of my list is Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport (AMS), which has a longstanding collaboration with the country’s most important art gallery, the Rijksmuseum – long before art in airports became A Thing.

Too tame? Dress up in hanbok in Seoul, pat a Giant Flemish bunny in San Fran, chase butterflies in Singapore or cruise an archeological museum in Athens.

To read my story in the Traveller section, click here

https://www.traveller.com.au/long-delay-or-layover-find-free-things-to-do-at-the-airport-h26j08

Lies, spies and disguise: visiting Albania’s museums of secret surveillance

If you ever wanted to indulge your conspiracy theories, Albania is a great place to do it.

The mountainous little country looks out to the heel of Italy’s boot, and for the last century, has played out as a field for war, foreign occupation and annexation, and the enactment of fantasies of next-level paranoid dictators.

Its capital, Tirana, is a mishmash of architecture ranging from Bronze-age fortress to Ottoman-era mosques and Soviet Brutalist monuments. But the contemporary symbol of Albanian architecture is no skyscraper or soaring minaret: it’s its bunkers.

My story about Albania’s Communist-era bunkers and the grisly House of Leaves, a museum of secret surveillance, shows a dark side to this beautiful Balkan country.

Click here to read the story, which was published in the Traveller section of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age newspapers.

If you’re keen to read more about travelling in the Balkans, take a look at my earlier story about travelling in the lands of honey and blood.

Hanging Church, Cairo, Egypt globalsalsa

Egypt; The four unmissable sites of Cairo

With pyramids and gold pharaohs, towering temples and cursed tombs, it’s no wonder Egypt’s been on the tourist trail for the last 4500 years.

One of the stories in the inaugural issue of Arrived, a new quarterly magazine by the family-owned The Travel Corporation, is about the upcoming, loooong-awaited opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM). To complement it, I’ve listed a few more unmissable sights in Egypt including Coptic Cairo, with sites dating from the birth of Christ.

Built over Roman ruins, the Hanging Church (pictured above) is one of the earliest of Cairo’s churches, and definitely its most visited. But don’t bypass the nearby cave where the Holy Family sheltered from the wrath of Herod, which to my mind is far more atmospheric, hidden as it is beneath the Church of St Sergius and Bacchus. Last time I was there, there was talk that the cave was closed to visitors, but we mingled in with a government group to once again breathe the damp, sacred air in this subterranean cave. Walking through the chaotic laneways of Coptic Cairo really is the most extraordinary experience, don’t miss it.

Walking between the palaces of medieval Cairo: globalsalsa

Walking between the palaces of medieval Cairo: new TellMeWhere2Go podcast

If Cairo’s on your travel list – as it absolutely should be – but a nasty ole pandemic is stopping you from leaping on a plane, let me help out.

Come stroll with me down Sharia al-Muizz, the thoroughfare of medieval Cairo. It’s a fascinating walk through palaces, mosques, souqs and caravanserais, some more than a thousand years old.

This is my first podcast with TellMeWhere2Go, which launched today.

Click on the Spotify link below to join me in Cairo, then take a virtual trip to some other great destinations on the podcast, from Australia’s Sunshine Coast to the wilds of Rwanda, at www.tellmewhere2go.com

Thanks for listening!

Together Apart: life in self-isolation

We have a cover!

Finally, I’m ready to start talking about the project (and the person) that has kept me a little bit sane in this whole COVID catastrophe.

Way back in March, my neighbour Jude at The Melbourne Portrait Studio and I were gasbagging over the back fence about her idea of photographing people’s lives in self-isolation.

I offered to look over the stories that her subjects were sending in to accompany their portraits, and now it’s become a book, a brand and a firm friendship.

We have a cover, a printer and a website for pre-sales (www.vanjude.com) for this wholly Melbourne project, of which I am so proud. Check it out, perhaps even order a copy?

And you can check Jude’s work out here @themelbourneportraitstudio

Tips for exploring Punta Arenas, Chile

Down the bottom of Chile, looking south toward Antarctica, Punta Arenas is at the confluence of the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans, and has a subpolar, oceanic climate. Its average daytime temperature is 15 degrees and the surrounding ocean water is typically 2 degrees: no wonder no-one is swimming.

It’s the jumping off point north to the popular Patagonian adventures in Torres del Paine National Park and south to the Antarctic peninsula.

Thanks to our fabulous guide with Quasar Expeditions, we managed briefly to slip under the skin of this frontier town – where puffer jackets dominate the fashion scene, guanaco is on the menu, the waterfront wharves are covered in murals and the houses are painted bright pinks and yellows to counteract the heavy, grey skies.

To read my story, published in the Traveller section of The Age/Sydney Morning Herald newspapers, click here.

Street art goes to new heights: The Adnate, Perth, Australia

Living in Melbourne, it’s hard not to love street art. We have such great galleries around the city, including Hosier Lane in the city centre, but stretching out to Fitzroy, Collingwood and neighbouring suburbs, where the local councils have encouraged a culture of street art, you can spy fabulous, big-scale murals across entire buildings.

One of the city’s best-known artists, Matt Adnate, has taken it one step further with his mega-murals down laneways and up high-rise buildings. So it’s great to see he’s become the newest face of the Art Series hotels, who dedicate each of its hotels to a singular artist.

The Adnate opened in Perth last week, and it’s a traffic-stopper, with a 25-storey mural on the hotel’s exterior, the largest mural in the southern hemisphere.

You can read more about it here, in my article for the Traveller section in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age newspapers.

How to buy Western Desert art: an exercise in ethics

Recently, I interviewed artist and teacher Nyunmiti Burton. She is based in Tjala Arts in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands, in far northern South Australia. What was striking was that the interview was conducted in English and Pitjantjatjara, the most commonly spoken of Australia’s few surviving indigenous languages. Our translator, Skye O’Meara, is the general manager of Sydney’s APY Art Centre Collective.

In the conversation, Skye and Nyunmiti pointed out that we know more about where our coffee and eggs come from than our Aboriginal art. Ethically produced art means the artist being paid appropriately, being created in a safe environment and sold by a business that has full financial transparency.

To read more about buying Central and Western Desert art, you can read my column in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age’s Traveller section. Click here, and thanks for reading.

For more links:

See desart.com.au the peak body for more than 40 such art centres in Central Australia.

See tjalaarts.com.au Tjalaa Arts art centre in Amata, SA

See apyartcentrecollective.com APY Art centres

Of myth, graves and art: Tasmania, Australia

Photo courtesy of Henry Jones Art Hotel

Back in the mists of time, nobody used to admit they were from Tassie, the heart-shaped island state of Australia. If you escaped from Tasmania, you rebranded and moved on.

Now, it’s deeply fashionable to be from somewhere other than Melbourne or Sydney, and Tassie is as hot as it gets, with a bumper food scene, fabulous scenery and its Henry Jones Art Hotel, which claims is position as Australia’s first art hotel.

I popped down just as winter was kicking in – a little too early to catch snow on kunanyi / Mount Wellington – but with a wind imported directly from Antarctica, which howled down the wharves, sending shutters shuddering and reminding me, in the dead of the night, of the myth and graves on which this island is founded.

You can read my review of the recently renovated Henry Jones, which was published in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age newspapers here .

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