Combining in-depth information with high quality maps and photographs, this guide features detailed descriptions of major cultural, architectural and historical sites and includes commissioned walks and drives, plus regional and city maps. Places of interest are also highlighted on the maps.
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.
