Recent Articles in Journalism

Ultimate Arctic
Nov 6, 2008

Wanderlust, November 2008. There are few experiences that compare to the intense sense of peace you feel when travelling with a team of huskies along a wilderness trail, silent except for the sound of paws on snow. Or to the wonder inspired by the extraordinary blue that emanates from an iceberg. Or by the sight of a female polar bear romping with her cubs...

Lunch with an Italian Wine Impresario
Sep 29, 2008

Food & Wine, October 2008. "I’m leaving tomorrow morning, very early, for Sicily,” Count Paolo Marzotto tells me. It’s hard to grasp why anyone would leave this idyllic spot, let alone fly at the crack of dawn to the opposite end of Italy. It’s a balmy Sunday afternoon, and we’re enjoying a family lunch with the Count’s wife, Florence Daniel, and their daughters, sons-in-law and grandchildren at Villa Nievo, their home in Vicenza, 40 miles west of Venice. Our table is on a flagstone terrace that runs the length of the older wing of the 300-year-old house, where the stucco exterior is painted a deep cranberry.

Down the Yukon River
May 1, 2008

Condé Nast Traveller, June 2008. New-found creature comforts make the voyage into Canada's wildest landscape a lot more appealing.

Classic Travel: Martha Gellhorn on Honeymoon, 1941
Apr 1, 2008

Wanderlust, April/May 2008. The front line of the Sino-Japanese war was a strange place for a honeymoon, but this was what Ernest Hemingway insisted on calling it. He’d married fellow war correspondent and novelist Martha Gellhorn a couple of months before she was to report for Collier’s on the Chinese army in action – and he went too.

A Watery Weekend in Isle of Man
Apr 1, 2008

Wanderlust, April/May 2008. “You’re not thinking of going out in this, are you?” the café owner asked as he served us. There was something about his frightened eyes that suggested he was speaking to a pair of lunatics about to breathe their last gasps of salty Manx air...

After the Gold Rush
Feb 14, 2008

Wanderlust, March 2008. The discovery of the yellow stuff near Dawson City in the Yukon in 1896 led to the greatest gold rush in history, with thousands braving the perils of the sub-Arctic wilderness in search of wealth. Polly Evans follows the trail of the Klondike stampeders

Canoeing the Yukon River
Feb 14, 2008

Wanderlust.co.uk, 14 February 2008. Thousands once stampeded down Canada's Yukon River in search of gold, but these days its greatest draw is utter tranquillity

Yukon Territory
Dec 17, 2007

BBC Wildlife, December 2007. Not many people choose to live in the remote reaches of the Yukon, says Polly Evans, so this vast wilderness is a haven for wildlife.

 

Life in the Saddle
Oct 1, 2007

Brummell, October 2007. Foolishly, I promised my mother I’d call her to let her know I’d arrived safely at Estancia Los Potreros, a 2,400-hectare cattle ranch in Argentina’s Córdoba province. Finding my phone had no signal, I asked my host Robin Begg, an Anglo-Argentine whose family has owned Los Potreros for generations, how I might make a call. “Oh,” he said, unruffled, “the landline doesn’t work and there’s no signal for mobiles here. But if we saddle up a couple of horses and ride to the top of that hill over there – ” he waved airily into the distance, over the rolling hills of golden tussock grass –“we may be able to get a connection.”

Mush, my beauties – we're a long way from Jamaica
Sep 23, 2007

Sunday Times, 23 September 2007. They say the Yukon Quest is the toughest dogsledding race in the world. It runs each February between Whitehorse in Canada’s Yukon Territory and Fairbanks, Alaska, across 1,000 miles of frozen wasteland. For 10 days mushers survive alone and unaided with their dogs in blizzards and temperatures as low as -40C – surely no environment for a Jamaican. But that’s not how 44-year-old Devon Anderson sees it...