You hang at an angle, feet still reassuringly touching the launch pad, suspended 130m above the floor of the canyon carved by the Nevis River in the mountains between Queenstown and Cromwell in New Zealand. The only thing stopping you plunging to a very messy end all those metres below is a harness connected to the release mechanism above you.

You are wired up to the Nevis Swing, one of Queenstown’s must-dos for adrenalin lovers.

It’s not too late.  You can still chicken out and the A J Hackett crew will winch you back inside to the safety and sanity of the launch pad.

But at this moment you understand what they mean by “feel the fear and do it anyway”.

Even getting to the launch pad is an adrenalin junkie’s happy place.

It starts with a ride on a 4-wheel drive bus up a winding, twisting narrow gravel road … Read more

With international travel severely restricted it may seem the wrong time to launch a book on road trips in Britain.

That hasn’t stopped travel writer David Morris releasing his eBook, “Great British Road Trips”.

“I figure that the desire to travel is still strong,” he says, “and though they can’t set sail right now, people are planning their next adventure for when the world returns to normal, whenever and whatever that may be”.

“For many, many people a visit to the UK is on their bucket list and the best way to see the countryside outside of London is by car.

One of the attractions of the online eBook are money-saving tips that the author has learned from 40 years of visiting Britain.

It’s not as easy as it seems

“A road trip in Britain isn’t, however, as easy to do as it sounds,” he says.

To start with, you … Read more

What is the best passport in the world?  And the worst?

A comparison of the passport “value” of various countries makes interesting reading.

It’s easy to assume that a British or American passport would open more immigration doors than any other.

Not so, by quite a margin.

Best passport in the world?  Belgium. It allows you to travel visa free to 90 countries, with a further 31 allowing a visa on arrival. All-in-all 121 countries that a Belgian may enter easily.

In the same league, ranked in order, are France, Germany, Finland, Austria, Luxembourg, Spain, Switzerland, Ireland and New Zealand.  They all have easy access to 121 countries, the difference being the visa free v. visa on entry. Bottom of that list, for instance, is New Zealand which has visa free entry to 81 countries and visa on arrival at 40 borders. A total, also, of 121.

A British passport … Read more

The eagle has landed. Snapped this shot of a Haast Eagle sculpture on the road from Queenstown to Glenorchy at the head of NZ’s Lake Wakatipu.

Glenorchy-based sculptor Dan Kelly used century-old steel fence standards from a high country station to create this 1.2m high sculpture of the now extinct bird, in its time the top predator in the New Zealand.

It’s one of a number of eagle “pieces” he has created along with similar works featuring New Zealand birds.… Read more

Sorry Britain – there’s no such thing as spaghetti bolognese . . . not in Italy, as I discovered on a recent visit to Bologna.

It is, like chicken tikka masala, entirely an English invention and, according to any Italian cook, not one of the better ones.

Nonetheless it is a compulsory item on the menu in any one of Britain’s 4700+ Italian restaurants.

The Lady Driver and I specifically stopped off in Bologna to have spag bog in what we assumed was its native habitat.

On the dinner-time taxi ride into the old city, our driver realigned our gastronomical thinking.

It’s a “ragu”

In Bologna, one of Italy’s best food havens, “bolognese” sauce is more correctly called a ragu – a meat sauce.

It is all about how the sauce sticks to the pasta.

A ragu does not go well with spaghetti, which is too thin to hold the … Read more