Michelin meals on trains, in-flight sleeping pod rentals: Fancy travel's next stops
This story is part of the June 28 edition of Good Weekend. See all 21 stories.
Let the good times roll
Love the thought of rolling through Great Britain's bucolic beauty without the petrol stops? Belmond's Britannic Explorer will take luxury on British tracks to the next level when it launches in July with 18 sleeper suites. The train will offer three-night itineraries across three destinations – Cornwall, the Lake District and Wales. Expect lots of tea, and modern British cuisine overseen by Michelin-starred chef Simon Rogan. Three nights all-inclusive starts from £11,000 ($22,900) per person, based on twin-share accommodation.
If you want the Rolls-Royce of trains, go for the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express – another one from Belmond. Its new Paris-to-Tuscany route launched in May, departing Paris Gare d'Austerlitz to arrive in Castello di Casole three nights later. It's priced from £9350 per person. This train also recently unveiled the L'Observatoire – a luxury sleeper carriage with interiors by artist JR – priced from, wait for it, £80,000 ($167,000) a night for double occupancy.
Closer to home, in April next year, Journey Beyond will release its 'next-level platinum' cabin class on select trains. The Aurora and Australis suites (which you can find on The Ghan and the Indian Pacific) will be the Adelaide-based brand's most luxurious offering yet. The Aurora Suite is priced from $7990 per person ($11,890 per person for the slightly larger Australis Suite) on the two-night, three-day Adelaide-to-Darwin trip aboard The Ghan in November 2026.
Take me to the river
Along with expeditions, river cruising is the fastest-growing sector in the cruising category. Australian Pacific Touring started out doing local bus tours before branching out into overseas cruises. In April this year, APT launched Solara, followed by Ostara in June. The near-identical ships have 77 suites across three cabin categories, and hold 154 passengers and 60 crew. The sweet spot is the Balcony Suites, offering full-length, electric slide-down windows opening onto a French-style deck. Choosing APT means you'll never have to explain a flat white, or ask for the Vegemite while sailing on the Rhine, the Main or the Danube. An eight-day cruise from Munich to Amsterdam starts from $7645 per person in a Balcony Suite.
Viking River Cruises began in 1997 with just four river ships; today, it's a juggernaut with about 80, mainly in Europe but also on the Mississippi and the Mekong. But the most immediate growth is scheduled for Portugal – with ships planned for the Douro River – and Egypt, where Viking plans to have 10 ships on the Nile by the close of 2026. These include Thoth, from October this year, hot on the heels of Amun, which is set to debut in September. Both cater for 82 guests and 48 crew. Our value pick is the 22-square-metre Veranda Stateroom, where, for $14,795 per person, you can book the 12-day 'Pharaohs & Pyramids' cruise.
Loading
Talking of next-generation river ships, Tauck is preparing to debut MS Serene in early 2026. The ship holds 124 guests and 41 crew, and will focus on the River Seine. A sibling, the slightly longer MS Lumière (for 130 guests and 44 crew), will be released at the same time. Both ships feature a large sundeck with a pool and bar area, plus The Retreat – a fitness centre, massage room and lounge area encased by floor-to-ceiling windows. An 11-day Bordeaux, Paris and The Seine cruise sailing in 2026 is priced from $10,990 per person on MS Serene.
The pointy end
Cathay Pacific became one of the few airlines to offer the privacy of a sliding door on its airline's business-class seats from late last year. While it's more of a sliding screen (you can see over the top), it still creates a 'cocoon in the sky' vibe. Each of Cathay's refurbished B777-300ERs has 45 business- class Aria Suites in a 1-2-1 configuration, with all-aisle access. The seat is 53.3 centimetres wide, with a bed length of 190.5 centimetres when it reclines to fully flat. But it's the ultra-high-definition screen that has the biggest 'wow' factor. At a whopping 60.9 centimetres, it's perfect for film buffs. The Aria Suites are only on Cathay's refitted 777s and to date, only a handful have been refreshed. Cathay flies daily between Hong Kong and Sydney, London and Beijing. Business class is always expensive, but Webjet data for 2024 shows the airline was one of the most competitively priced options.
Emirates has refitted 19 of its 120 B777-300ERs from nose to tail. Earlier this year, it began flying its refurbished four-class 777s between Dubai and Melbourne, putting its new 'Game Changer' first-class suites, with fully enclosed floor-to-ceiling sliding doors, on an Australian route. There are three flights daily between Melbourne and Dubai: two on refurbished A380s, and one on the refurbished 777 (flight number EK405). The 42 business-class seats are set out as 1-2-1, and are 52.6 centimetres wide, stretching to 199.6 centimetres when flat, and there's a 58.4-centimetre entertainment screen.
Air New Zealand unveiled its first refurbished 787-9 Dreamliner last month and it flies between Auckland and Brisbane, Rarotonga, Vancouver and San Francisco. The airline has gone from having among the worst business-class seats to an acclaimed product across two pointy-end options – Business Premier (22 seats) and Business Premier Luxe (four seats) that come with sliding privacy doors. Seats in both areas are 54 centimetres wide, reclining to 203 centimetres when flat.
An option to look out for 2026 is Air NZ's innovative SkyNest, which will only be available for economy passengers. SkyNest is the airline's bunk-bed-style sleeping pod, where you can book a four-hour session to lie down for considerably less than you'd pay for a business-class seat.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Perth Now
an hour ago
- Perth Now
Little-known homeowner side hustle to keep booming in Perth
Perth homeowners have a sporting chance of earning thousands of extra dollars. New research shows that 70 per cent of Australians would travel domestically to watch or play sport, and 21 per cent have Perth on their itinerary. Perth has been the centre of the Australian sporting universe in recent weeks with rugby league's State of Origin, the Matildas and the touring British and Irish Lions all heading to town. That's before the biggest of them all — the Ashes — head to Perth later this year, complete with England's Barmy Army, with all of the visiting fans pouring big money into the State's economy. And, of course, the Dockers and Eagles draw big crowds every week. The survey, by Airbnb, shows soccer is the number sport people travel for, followed by AFL and tennis. One person who has cashed in on the sporting boom is Andrea from Wembley Downs. who rents out part of her house to visiting fans and pocketed thousands of dollars. 'After the children moved out we considered downsizing, but instead converted the extra space into an Airbnb,' she said. Nine months ago Andrea began renting out part of her Wembley Downs home and has since welcomed hundreds of guests who flew to Perth purely to watch sport. Credit: Supplied 'We often get feedback from guests that the location was perfect for them to easily head to their sporting events. 'Being situated close to Perth's biggest stadiums is one of our key selling points, so it wasn't a surprise to welcome plenty of sports fans.' She said the variety of sport-loving guests staying at her home had been a 'lovely surprise'. 'Families come for their children's basketball and netball tournaments, we've had coaches and competitors staying for State athletic meets, guests going to AFL matches and already have guests lined up for the Ashes Test in November,' she said. 'Some may see it as unconventional, to alter your home and share it with travellers, but it's added a lovely layer of experience to our lives.' The research showed a typical host earned $915 over the weekend of the Perth Test against India in November last year. Airbnb country manager Susan Wheeldon told The Sunday Times that despite the cost-of-living crisis, Aussies were still happy to splash cash on sport. Susan Wheeldon. Credit: Supplied 'I think people are still looking for joy in their lives and to be able to get out with mates and to go and see sport,' Ms Wheeldon said. 'Most Aussies grew up playing team sport and watching sport, it is just such a part of the Australian culture . . . there's nothing quite like it.' She said it was also great for hosts. 'Becoming an Airbnb host during these major sporting events is such an easy way to help homeowners to build opposite the cost of their mortgage or the cost of of life in general,' Ms Wheeldon said.
Sydney Morning Herald
3 days ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Last stop, end of the world: Take a train to the tip of Tierra del Fuego
This story is part of the June 28 edition of Good Weekend. See all 21 stories. Standing at the end of the world felt a lot like home to me. At the train depot, overlooking evergreen forests and a bay of mountains, I stopped to grasp the scene. The piercing morning sun stalked low, out of sight behind the summits of Tierra del Fuego National Park. But for the signposts in Spanish and unfamiliar trees – Magellan's beech, not Atlantic oak – I could have been on Scotland's rugged west coast. I'd come south – all the way south – to the Argentine city of Ushuaia, at the southernmost tip of South America, in search of epic landscapes, adventure and a historic frontier in train travel. Tierra del Fuego National Park, the shoreline trails of which I was exploring, is home to the 'End of the World' train (El Tren del Fin del Mundo), and it is a fragile leftover from one of the world's most remote penal colonies, of which more later. It also represents a profitable money-spinner for the blossoming tourist industry in this complex region of wild sea channels, twisting fjords and ferocious winds on the borderlands between Argentina and Chile. For my part, I've had similarly thrilling train experiences across the continent. A journey on the Machu Picchu train 25 years ago in Peru; a rooftop ride on Ecuador's zig-zagging Devil's Nose railway; a sunset visit to Bolivia's 'Great Train Graveyard', near the pearly salt pans of the Salar de Uyuni. But this one on Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego is by far the toughest to get to and so has a particular air of abandon – and freedom. The irony is that this is the railway line first built in 1909 by convicts as a 24-kilometre freight line to transport materials by steam locomotive between sawmills and Ushuaia prison. As local guide Grisel Guerrero tells it, no one wanted to live in this far-flung region with little or no opportunities in the 1890s. But the overflowing jails in Buenos Aires, nearly 3200 kilometres away, presented the unlikely solution. 'It was our Siberia,' Guerrero told me, while we strolled Ushuaia's waterfront that morning. 'Like the history of the British in Australia, our government formed a penal colony, sending many of the worst offenders here. It would take up to six months to arrive by ship, so before then it was almost impossible for the Argentinian government to populate this land.' Surrounded by the Beagle Channel and hemmed in by the Fuegian Andes, the landscape is far more dramatic than Russia's vast and unwelcoming North Asian province. As improbable, hard-to-believe-in places go, it's also worth the expense and time to get to. Lining this largely unpeopled coast are empty beaches and river estuaries teeming with brown trout. There are silvery sawtooth peaks and abrupt glaciers. In such beautiful surroundings, it's small wonder that many prisoners decided to stay after earning their right to freedom. By 1952, following an earthquake and landslide, the train had closed. These days, the UK-built convict train – revived in the mid-1990s as a heritage railway – wouldn't rival many for glamour. Nor would it match any Tube line in London for efficiency. The distance you travel is only eight kilometres, with one intermediary stop at gently gushing Macarena Waterfall. Besides that, the toy-town-like train takes one hour to reach the end of the line. In Ushuaia itself, the former prison complex, Museo Marítimo y del Presidio de Ushuaia, now charts the intriguing time line of the country's early penal colony. But the rewards of riding the slowest train in South America are profound. After the clanking of gears, there is the screech of wheels on the 500mm gauge track and the shrill blow of a whistle carried on the wind. The ride from platform to national reserve is admittedly the stuff of a theme park, with staff garbed in cosplay inmate uniforms, but you realise, excitedly, that this is also an invitation into one of the wildest corners of the Americas. Loading For me, the highlight was the intricacy of land and sea that surrounded us at journey's end within Tierra del Fuego National Park. On board, you only have to look out of the window to feel awe. 'This is the end of the world for us,' Guerrero told me, upon the train reaching its last stop. 'Some say that's a negative way of describing Ushuaia, so now we also say it's the beginning of everything. South America, the Pan-American Highway, the start of our lives here. There is no shortage of opportunity and adventure.'
Sydney Morning Herald
3 days ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
In a remote snorkelling paradise north of Australia, I see the world anew
This story is part of the June 28 edition of Good Weekend. See all 21 stories. Barely the length of a fingernail, Bargibant's seahorses spend their entire tiny lives anchored by their tails to a gorgonian sea fan, cantering gracefully in the warm currents, following a sedate, monogamous existence of male pregnancy and suction feeding. They're so small and so expertly camouflaged – covered in lurid-coloured knobbles, exactly mimicking their home – that no one noticed these pygmy seahorses existed until 1970, when a couple were accidentally unhitched by a marine biologist studying sea fans. Bargibant's seahorses are a minuscule part of the astounding biodiversity of Raja Ampat, an archipelago off remote West Papua, the portion of the tropical island of New Guinea annexed by Indonesia in 1969. Raja Ampat (or Roger's Armpit, as a jokester in my life quipped) is said to have the richest biodiversity of any marine environment in the world, supporting 75 per cent of all known coral species and many still unknown in vast, intact reefscapes fringing 1500 karst islands. The numbers are boggling. On land, 874 plant species, almost a third of them orchids, some 300 bird species, including the rarest of rare birds-of-paradise, and marsupials: echidnas, tree kangaroos and cuscuses (a sub-species of possum) among them. Underwater, more than 1500 species of reef fish and thousands of assorted creatures, from nudibranchs to sea squirts – though, really, who could count? Pull on fins and a snorkel mask and glide over any reef here, and the uncountable numbers are beside the point. I didn't see a Bargibant's seahorse, or even a fraction of the wildlife. The miracle of the seahorse for me, the miracle of Raja Ampat, was not actually seeing it – but being able to see it. The exhilaration of kayaking between jungle islets and snorkelling over teeming reefs was ultimately less miraculous than mustering the courage to embark on such an adventure. This story starts with a seven-year-old girl wearing her first pair of spectacles (pink plastic, chunky lenses already). I still recall the shock when I realised how little I had been seeing, and I felt that jolt every time I got new, thicker lenses as the myopia and astigmatism barrelled along. I wore contact lenses into my 20s, until I developed a reaction to preservatives in the lens fluid, and by my early 30s I was an early adopter of corrective laser surgery, which worked brilliantly – for a decade or so. By then the slow spread of corneal scarring across both eyes had begun, most likely caused by the long-ago contact-lens misfortune and more from the laser. Years later the scarring had become so severe that even the thickest, most specialised optical lenses failed to give me decent vision. The longer I postponed surgery, my doctor kept warning me, the more difficult the corneal scraping operation needed to remove the scars, a procedure known as superficial keratectomy. The longer I waited, the more fearful I became. Slowly, without really noticing, I stopped doing things: driving at night, ordering from chalkboard menus, swimming. I persisted with snorkelling – my great love – by fitting various masks with prescription glass, but they were heavy and slipped and leaked, and so did my confidence. I can't remember when I stopped snorkelling. Long enough that I'd forgotten the adrenaline rush of the first inhalation, the electric volt of liberation from a body weighted in air, the thrill of being just another creature alive in the ocean. Earlier this year, two years after long-delayed surgery on both eyes, I catch a current as swift as an escalator, as warm as a bath. Beside me is a coral garden of barely believable richness and colour, growing on a shelf that slopes gently from a limestone islet, then drops off a cliff into an inky void. Instantly the neighbourhood fish pile onto the escalator with me and together we sweep over a Nemo father ushering his babies into the safety of their anemone home; we fly over Moorish idol couples promenading serenely; watch a riot of Kusama-esque clown triggerfish chase their polka-dotted rivals. As promised, the corals are astounding. Some look fungal, some floral, others look distinctly genital. Many are indescribable. Above the hum of hyperactivity I can hear parrotfish pecking for their dinner. Every creature is furiously occupied: hunting, eating, growing, dying. And every fish, thousands of them, every outlandish coral configuration, every fluorescent colour and psychedelic pattern is sharply defined and miraculously visible – without glasses. Raja Ampat is a holy grail for serious divers ... who dive up to four times a day. I see the world as if for the first time. And this is how I spend the next 10 days in the Coral Triangle: weeping with wonder, euphoric, drenched in sweat or seawater, mind-blown and largely lost for words. Either not myself or the most intense version of myself. Raja Ampat is a holy grail for serious divers, who typically book live-aboard vessels for a week or more and dive up to four times a day at their choice of scores of ocean, reef and drift dive sites. I, too, might have become a diver, but these days I'm grateful to be tank-free. I've always loved the lo-fi simplicity of snorkelling, its lack of pretension and DIY sense of freedom. For the same no-fuss reasons I've taken up sea kayaking, the aquatic version of walking rather than driving or cycling. Like the divers, I'd heard stories of the coral wonderland of Raja Ampat. Imagine, then, the thrill of finding a company* that stages live-aboard kayak-snorkel expeditions, allowing intrepid dawdlers to explore Raja above and below sea level at the pace of someone seeing the world anew. My kayaking buddy and I arrive in the unremarkable provincial city of Sorong, a four-hour overnight flight east of Jakarta, and climb aboard the Jakaré, a handsome 30-metre phinisi, a traditional timber yacht design. 'Hello-'ello-'ello-'ello-'ello!' cries the crew, beaming, and this is the joyful ululation that greets us every time we depart and return on kayaks or aboard Jakaré's Zodiac, used to dart between snorkel sites. There are 10 of us wannabe adventurers and 12 crew, among them our German-Canadian kayak guide, Frank. 'Somewhere between a walk in the park and climbing Mount Everest' is his frequent quip when asked the exertion level of an excursion. His wicked sense of humour is matched by a GPS-sharp sense of direction navigating Raja's labyrinths of islands and lagoons, all the more impressive considering he spends most of his year working in forest restoration in British Columbia. 'This afternoon we're paddling to Dugong Lake,' he says early on, adding cryptically, 'it's not a lake, and there are no dugongs.' It's our introduction to the region's mangrove forests, unlike any I've seen before: vast, wallowing in clear water and rooted in dazzling white sand. We slide over beds of eel grass alive with nursery fish, duck beneath low-slung mangrove branches, twist and turn in single file along serpentine alleys. The air is drowsy with butterflies. Palm cockatoos scream overhead. At the end of a narrow chasm is an S-bend that spits us into a glassy bay full of mushroom-shaped islets, their limestone walls eroded neatly at water level and ringed by colour charts of reef-dappled blue. At a distance these islands are Pixar cartoon characters bristling with mop-head palms and dripping with vines and carnivorous pitcher plants. Look hard, though – there's time to do that under paddle – and each islet is subtly different, some carved into flutes or etched like dinosaur scales and splashed with ochre and black 'graffiti', some shaped like conical hats, others dissolved into chimneys and arches that we glide beneath and between. Though I see only two patches of dead coral, cause unknown, a snorkeller inevitably obsesses about the health of the world's reefs. Raja Ampat sits at the confluence of the Indonesia Throughflow and the great currents of the Pacific and Indian oceans, so along with the nutrient-rich water that fuels the region's incredible biodiversity comes plastic waste and elevated water temperatures. At a time when 84 per cent of the planet's reefs have been affected by the worst global bleaching event on record, scientists warn that even so-called 'thermal refugia' such as Raja Ampat – places with reefs that are flushed by cooler, deeper water that can buffer corals from rising surface temperatures – may no longer be shielded. One day we swim, spellbound, with manta rays, watching as they circle and hover in a queue over underwater pillars. Rising sea-surface temperatures aren't the only cause of coral death; a growing threat in Raja are blooms of cyanobacteria that can smother entire colonies, a threat largely attributed to increased human sewage as tourism has surged in the past five years. I think a lot about the preciousness of what I'm seeing, and I find child-like reservoirs of energy, for there is so little time and so much to see. Days follow a pattern of perpetual motion and jam karet, the useful Indonesian phrase meaning 'rubber time'. Each morning we're anchored in a new spot, from where we head out on two or three kayak outings and a couple of snorkels and pause for feasts of fish, fruit and Indonesian stir-fries and curries. Some days we add a swim in an underground river or hike into a forest to watch birds-of-paradise. One day we swim, spellbound, with manta rays, watching as they circle and hover in a queue over underwater pillars attended by cleaner wrasse, the little fish bartering a gill-cleansing scrub for a free meal of parasites. We paddle with reef sharks and turtles – or were we snorkelling at the time? I start thinking of our sorties as 'kayak-snorkels'; in many lagoons the corals grow so close to the surface and the water has such clarity we don't need to get wet to see their vivid colours and fantastic forms. Loading Then again, we're never dry – tropical cloudbursts open over us, fat raindrops bouncing around our paddles and skin remains clammy day and night. As we plunge deeper into the archipelago the membrane between air and water, kayak and snorkel, reality and dream, begins leaking. The humidity and the temperature are climbing in unison by the time we paddle into Pulau Balbulol in the southern reach of the archipelago, its constellation of conical islands rising 20 metres sheer from iridescent water. Just beneath the surface are clearly visible red corals and shape-shifting shoals of neon damsels. I stir the air, or the water – it's hard to tell – then stop paddling, adrift beneath pink orchids dangling off the walls. The only thing that moves with purpose is a mighty hornbill lifting off from the jungle overhead, noisy as a cargo plane in the prehistoric silence. Meanwhile, life beneath the surface is frenetic. Next morning Jack the divemaster takes a break from the divers and joins the snorkellers. I love his big smile, his daily briefings with hand-drawn maps, his diver's repertoire of expressive hand signals identifying marine creatures. With him we tumble out of the Zodiac into water that seems to fizz. Instantly a current sweeps across the shelf beneath us, ruffling a bed of dusty-pink coral petals, and I'm bobbing alongside fusiliers and angelfish, sweetlips and parrotfish. We nod to each other companionably and keep moving – things to do. I follow Jack's hand signal to a giant clam, pursing its purple lips suggestively as we float by. He mimics a snapping crocodile and, sure enough, there's a large unmistakably crocodile-shaped fish settled almost invisibly into the sand. I'm trying to take all this in – this brilliant technicoloured dream – when the shelf falls away abruptly and a cool current rushes from the deep. It sweeps me up and around a corner blanketed in lacy sea fans and suddenly I'm flying inside a school of tiny shard-like fish, shattering and surging. For a moment my vision dims, eyes filled with tears. Then I blink and I'm seeing the world again, as if for the first time. * Specialist adventure travel and guiding company Expedition Engineering, based on Vancouver Island, Canada, runs a handful of kayak-snorkel expeditions each year in Raja Ampat on the liveaboard yacht Jakaré. The writer travelled at her own expense.
