Tom Hall: travel, London, other things

Over on Lonely Planet I’ve posted my travel highlights from the past decade. Here, I thought I might run the best bits from 2009 before the year is out. What are yours?

Leaving Zimbabwe on the Victoria Falls Bridge

Feeling the torrents of Victoria Falls on my bare chest. Lacking a rain mac, I whipped off my top and let the surging Zambezi Waters do their worst. One wonder of the world which lived up to the name. While in Zimbabwe I picked up a few $100 Trillion bills, which made for good presents. I gave one to Tony Wheeler, who left in on Jack Kerouac’s grave in Lowell, Massachusetts. Jack gave me my first itchy feet, so this felt quite appropriate.

One hundred trillion dollars - as Dr Evil would say

Riding through the Windhoek (Namibia) rain and rush hour to finish my stage of the Tour d’Afrique, one of the finest adventures of my life.

Like the man himself, Windhoek's Robert Mugabe Avenue goes on forever and induces misery

Eating chips on the Kusttram in Belgium, and getting on Marvin Gaye’s trail in Ostend.

Thor Heyerdahl’s Oslo: the Kon-Tiki discovered, and warming up in the Tiki Bar before walking beautiful Autumnal streets.

Oslo Opera House

I loved being in transit at Changi Airport, and went for a swim at sunset. If only all airports were like this.

A happy picnic lunch at the Gare de Lyon, Paris, then across France by TGV, to a tiny hameau with a river at the end of the road to swim in, and my family to have fun with.

Glasgow, at last. So many highlights, but drinking 1% ginger beer in Monorail Records and communing with the ghosts of the Hi-Hi in Cathkin Park. Then being far too excited to sleep on the Sleeper Train home.

Glasgow's Cathkin Park

London to West Brom: a grand bike-ride

England’s wonderful secrets: a church in an Oxfordshire field, a summer’s evening at a riverside pub in the Norfolk Broads, a man’s face at The Hawthorns as I told him I’d cycled from London, fell running on the West Riding, the London Transport Depot in Acton and Gunnersbury Park.

Here’s to a great 2010. Happy Christmas to everyone who has stopped by this year, and I hope to see you again.

It’s too early to call it even a sneak preview, but my hard hat tour of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam was nothing less than thrilling. The museum closed its doors in 2003 for a complete refurbishment after decades of less-than-sensitive alterations to Pierre Cuyper’s iconic 1903 structure. There is a limited display of the museums masterworks, which happily includes Rembrandt’s The Night Watch and a few paintings on display at the city’s superlative-inducing Schipol Airport. This winter an exhibition of Hendrick Avercamp’s lively paintings of Dutch ice skating in the seventeenth century fits very well with what was a frozen city when I visited. The rest, comprising thousands of priceless works, stays underground.

The Rijksmuseum

If from the outside the Rijksmuseum resembles a building site that’s because it is one. My behind-the-scenes peek involved donning hard-hat and steel-capped shoes and promising not to take pictures. But the Rijksmuseum is a work of art in itself. Cuyper defied convention to produce an ornate and colourful building at odds with the Calvinist restraint dominating Dutch culture at the time. His work is shining through the scaffolding. Each hallway, room, stairway and chamber homages a different architectural style. You walk through a Gothic hall into a room filled with classical columns, then into a mock-medieval monastery. Staircases resemble a fairy castle. Stained glass and column mountings homage in name and image the great artists and buildings of the Netherlands. And underneath it all, a 9m-deep excavation has been designed to ensure that cyclists will be able to pedal their bikes right through the museum. They’ve been able to do this since it opened, we are told, it’s only right that this should continue.

Our guide rushed from room to room, raving about Cuyper’s work and the ambition of the renovation work. The enthusiasm was contagious. By the time the museum reopens in 2013 half a generation of visitors to Amsterdam will have missed out on seeing one of Europe’s finest art houses. Early indications, however,  are it will be worth the wait. And let’s be honest, there are worse places to have to find something else to do than Amsterdam. Take the Hermitage Museum, opened in June to great acclaim and housing a revolving collection from St Petersburg’s legendary palace.

Multi-storey cycle park at Amsterdam Centraal

Here’s my video of the trip.

Clark Boyd from PRI, Lonely Planet’s US Travel Editor Robert Reid and myself have recorded a couple of podcasts which we hope will form part of a regular series.

You can find them at Talking Travel with Lonely Planet & The World

And while we’re doing multimedia, here’s a video of me and fellow rider Mara Vorhees on the Tour d’Afrique

Comments welcome!

Arriving back at St Pancras after an afternoon out giving a talk at a school in Derbyshire I noticed that the escalators leading down from the eastern exit to the concourse and down under Pancras Road were open.

Descending into the Underground station’s new northern ticket hall, freshly opened this week, was a revelation. As anyone who’s tried to buy a ticket on a Saturday morning will testify Kings Cross has needed huge amounts of new space, ticket machines and information booths for years. And now it’s got it. The escalators to the Northern Line (I haven’t explored the other lines yet) bypass the chaos of the old access points completely. The prominent signage to the Regent’s Canal is another nice touch.

It’s slightly disorienting to suddenly have a different set of twists and turns to negotiate. This map from TfL helps make sense of it. Click to enlarge.

London has one terminus (St Pancras) to be proud of, King’s Cross being fast renovated and a tube station for them both that’s finally heading in the right direction. The escalator up from the Piccadilly Line with gaping holes in the roof will not be missed. More from TfL

I teamed up (wearing my Lonely Planet hat) with BBC Knowledge to help them promote some programming themed around ‘The World’

The result is a site in English and Polish which take readers on a trip around the world, helping  them plan their travels according to their interests and passions. You’ll find my suggestions for the world’s best ancient sites, country retreats, underground experiences, activity trips, star-gazing, lost cities, train journeys, movie locations, cycling trips, relaxing, sea views and road trips. I’d love to know what you think.

Click here to take a tour.

I get a lot of Marvin Gaye fans coming to the site, hopefully who aren’t disappointed by the brief mention of his time in Ostend in this article.

There’s a classic documentary about the soul legend’s time in Belgium, Ostend Terminal by Richard Olivier. As well as showing Marvin at peace and performing beautifully it documents his thoughts on Ostend, often to a backdrop of black and white footage of the town in its belle epoque heyday.

Marvin + Ostend = Sexual Healing

In perfectly describing the port as ‘a beat back, maybe two beats back’ from the cities he was accustomed to living in Gaye shows a talent for catching the spirit of a place.

You can find the full documentary here.

The Guardian’s David Stubbs also wrote an excellent piece about Gaye’s time in Ostend in 2005.

Here are two recent pieces I wrote for Lonely Planet:

The world’s hottest cool places

Europe’s best night trains (with nice wallpaper)

Comments welcome there or here!

‘There is in London all that life can afford.’ – Samuel Johnson

The alleys and lanes snaking north from Fleet Street are full of interest, and are an easy detour for a quick fix of London history. Their car-free atmosphere offers a taste of how London once was, with city workers hurrying here and there. If you follow your nose you might end up at Gough Square, home to Samuel Johnson’s House and what, as far as I know, is the only statue in London devoted to a domestic cat.

Dr Johnson hiding round the back of St Clement Danes on the Strand

Hodge, the immortalised moggy in question, lived with Johnson in the house on Gough Square for many years. So devoted was Johnson to him that he’d go out to personally buy him oysters, then so plentiful as to be staple grub for London’s poor.

Hodge - note the oyster shell

Dr Johnson, who was prone to black moods, seems to be have been most upset by Hodge’s demise. One of his inner circle, Percival Stockdale, eulogised Hodge in an apparent bid to cheer the Doctor up.

Here’s an excerpt:

The general conduct if we trace
Of our articulating race,
Hodge’s, example we shall find
A keen reproof of human kind.

And Stockdale concludes:

Then in thy life exert the man,
With moral deed adorn the span;
Let virtue in they bosom lodge;
Or wish thou hadst been born a Hodge.

Not lucky enough to have been born a Hodge, it was a black cab back to the office for me.

The usually-closed entrance on Southampton Row

It was then with some excitement that I arrived at Southampton Row for a tour of the tunnel, offered as part of a viewing of London artist Conrad Shawcross’ latest installation. I wasn’t sure how many were here for the art and how many for a gawp at this secret place, but there were twenty excited people in my lunchtime group.

Rusty things under Kingsway

Tracks

Trams woz ere (once)

First we descended the ramp to the old station platforms. Wandering along the tracks gave a sense of the size and space of the tunnels, and how different so much of London would have been with trams trundling up and down streets. The network seems with today’s eyes to be hopelessly overblown, but in many places trams ran in place of conventional buses. It’s difficult to imagine Camden, Kentish Town, Archway and East and North Finchley with steel wheels on the streets. Yet Melbourne, Australia kept its urban trams and is rightly famed for it.

Not much survives of the station which has since been used for filming and the storage of stuff: rusting lampposts, shrink-wrapped machines and bits and bobs owned by Camden Council, who own the space. Posters on the wall didn’t appear original, though one had some interesting detail of the Northern Heights section of the Northern Line.

Stroud Green, Crouch End, Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill tubes, RIP

I turned around to notice the group has strolled off leaving me goggling at the walls, so I took the opportunity to dart up a flight of stairs and, with my head poking through a grate at street level, startle a few passers-by.

I’m not an art critic but found the installation itself astonishing. Giant spindles attached to a custom-built (and locally made) pair of machines, which inch-by-inch pull away from each other in the process winding coloured wool into a length of rope as long over 50 metres long. The machine moves on wooden tracks laid down especially. We were asked not to take photos but you can find an image in this review. It would be thrilling to imagine Shawcross being let loose on the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.

The slow walk to ground level completed the group dissipated quickly, absorbed back into the busy pedestrian traffic around Holborn tube on a Friday.

I wrote some tips for the Daily Telegraph website yesterday on how to see London for less, wearing my Lonely Planet hat. London is never going to be cheap in the way that classic backpacker destinations are cheap, but currency fluctuations mean you needn’t be a Russian oligarch to have a good time here.

What’s the trick? Book ahead for flights and be smart with hotels, getting on mailing lists and looking out for room sales. Americans are used to calling hotels and chancing their arm at haggling to get a better rate – London-bound visitors, especially those planning on going four star or higher, should do the same.

Most of all, make the most of what is cheap or free: bus travel, some of the best museums and galleries in the world and lovely green spaces. While saving money you’ll see the best of the city.

There are more London tips in my free travel planning articles.