With a new design and unbeatable price, DK raises the bar on travel guides with its new Top 10 Travel Guide series. Whether on business or vacation, take the work out of planning any trip with DK's Top 10 Travel Guides. Building on the success of the Eyewitness Travel Guides, DK has created a new series that makes finding the best every destination has to offer even easier than before. Whether searching for the finest cuisine or cheapest places to eat, the most luxurious hotels or best deals on places to stay, the coolest family destination or hottest nightspot, the Top 10 format allows travelers to use the insights of experts to make the most of their vacation. Accompanied by a companion website, readers can share their experiences and vote for their own personal Top 10s.
I am an award-winning travel writer, contributing to newspapers, magazines and websites worldwide. A collection of my travel writing, Snakes Alive and Other Travel Writing, was recently published by Blue Sky Books.
I also write about food and drink for the travel pages, covering vineyards in Greece and New Zealand, breweries in Belgium and Britain, restaurants in Paris, a chocolate shop in Lyon, the biggest wine cellar in the world (in Florida), interviewing an English sommelier in Paris, and sipping my way through the Champagne region of France and the sherry bodegas of Jerez (no spitting). I invented the Time for Food series for Thomas Cook (purely so that I could go to places like Paris, Venice and Amsterdam and get paid for eating and drinking there).
Combining music and travel is another love: I have written pieces about Bob Marley, the Beatles, Elvis Presley and Hank Williams.
More exotic travels have taken me camel-trekking in the Sinai Desert (right), walking in the Great Rift Valley, learning to jive in Barcelona, looking for orang-utans in Sumatra, staying with a farming family in China and sampling a naturist holiday on Crete (photos available at a price).
I have also written or contributed to over 30 guidebooks, especially on Greece, Paris and Amsterdam.
In addition, I've written three radio plays for the BBC, presented a half-hour radio travel programme about Egypt, written fiction and humour for men's magazines and even written an erotic novel. I may be the only writer to have contributed both to Mayfair (I was in the same issue as Bill Bryson) and to The Baptist Times. Not to mention a few minutes of the UK's favourite TV soap, Coronation Street, when my father was a scriptwriter on the programme.
I also write regularly now for the internet, providing online city and regional guides for Weissmann, who publish travel guides for the travel trade in the USA. I'm the Feature Writer on the UK and Ireland at Suite101, providing one article every week. My wife Donna Dailey and I now also publish and write our own travel content websites about America's Pacific Coast Highway and about Greece.
