
Cinque Terre Walking: The Upper Trails Are the Good Ones
The famous coastal path is often closed and always crowded, while the vineyard trails above it are open and empty.

The famous coastal path is often closed and always crowded, while the vineyard trails above it are open and empty.

Santorini's beaches are volcanic, which means dark sand that gets painfully hot and water that shelves steeply.

Helicopter tours in Hawaii are expensive and on two islands they show you land that no road reaches at all.

Switzerland's mountain transport is spectacular and expensive, and which pass you buy determines what the trip costs.

The Cinque Terre is easier to visit than its reputation suggests, because one train connects everything every twenty minutes.

Málaga is treated as an airport for the Costa del Sol and is a serious city with two Picasso museums and a Roman theatre.

Half of the Amalfi Coast is only reachable from the water, and the boat trips split into three quite different kinds.

The Maldives offers two completely different holidays at completely different prices, and the choice is made before you book anything.

With a rental car most of Iceland is self-guided, and three activities genuinely require going with someone.

The Amalfi Coast road is spectacular, narrow and jammed, which makes how you travel it the whole question.

Hawaii's islands are genuinely different places, and choosing wrongly is the most common and most expensive planning mistake.

Dubrovnik's old town is small and receives enormous numbers, which makes the hour you visit more important than anything else.

Norway's most scenic fjord journeys are ordinary public transport, priced as transport rather than as sightseeing.

Santorini sells a dozen excursion types and only one of them shows you what the island actually is.

The three tours everyone books out of Reykjavik do very different things, and two of them are widely oversold. Here is what each is actually like and which to skip.