Tag: Travel

Discovering and observing Skopje, North Macedonia

It’s been a constant feature of my travelling life that whenever I visit a small country for the first time, the kind of country that I and most of my friends know very little about, I always find far more of interest than I could possibly have imagined beforehand. And so it has proved in my first visit to Skopje, capital of the Republic of North Macedonia.

Skopje has the unusual geometry of being long and thin – over 30 km long but mostly less than 5 km wide. That’s because it’s built along the length of the Vardar river, snaking gently from East to West along the river’s course and surrounded by mountains. The imposing Skopje Fortress is situated atop a substantial bluff immediately north of the Goce Delčev Bridge, the main river crossing point for car traffic. The Kale (the Macedonian word for fortress) has been there, in various forms and various levels of repair, since the sixth century CE, which makes it one of the oldest castles in Europe.

The Stone Bridge with Mount Vodna in the background

From the city’s river valley position, mountains are visible from most sides (which makes orientation straightforward). Kossovo and its capital Pristina are behind the Skopska Crna to the north. Closer and to the west the, Šar Mountains separate Macedonia from Albania. In the south, within the official city limits, is Mount Vodno, whose summit, named Krstovar peak, has been dominated since 2002 by the enormous Millennium Cross, a landmark that’s unmissable from just about anywhere in the city. Below the summit is a most extraordinary place to visit: the Byzantine Church of Saint Panteleimon, founded in 1164.

The church building, which has been lovingly restored, is of great elegance and beauty, with graceful symmetric proportions, domed towers and a combination of brick, stone and rendering, glowing pink in the autumn sunshine when we visited. Inside is an even more exciting sight: the many original frescoes which have been cleaned up to shine brightly even in the subdued light. The Pietà is an eye-opener with its clear depiction of Christ and the Virgin Mary as flesh-and-blood human beings, making a nonsense of the western Art History idea that Giotto was the first artist to do so – it would be 150 years before the world would see the Italian master’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua.

Skopje: St Panteleimon Church - Fresco of Pietà

We were shown around by the man in charge of the church and of the monastery of which it forms part, who calls himself simply Father Panteleimon. He is a phenomenon in himself: a deeply devout man, but one who has clearly had a life before taking holy orders. He spared no effort in probing us to find points of connection with his world and his experience: in our case, this turned out to be an improbable combination of beekeeping, mountain herbs, the music of Arvo Pärt and a church in Kent with windows by Marc Chagall (we were less enthusiastic about his love of Depeche Mode, whose lead singer Dave Gahan, it turns out, is also an Orthodox Christian).

While Skopje is a very old city, it is also – in a sense – a brand new one: that’s because a massive earthquake in 1963 flattened the place almost completely. The ensuing international appeal enabled the city to be completely rebuilt, which was done in a consistently modernist style. This was not necessarily to everyone’s taste, and in 2014, a massive project was launched to rebuild or re-facade buildings into a neo-classical style, with much white plasterwork and many classical-looking columns. It’s been divisive, to say the least: cheap frippery to the modernists, welcome relief to the traditionalists. Since I didn’t see what it looked like before 2014 and since I’m not as commited to modernism as the architect friend who showed us around the city, I won’t pass judgement except to say that I found it perfectly pleasant to walk round, with the National Theatre particularly appealing – although I have to confess that the rows of statues which lined the “Bridge of Civilizations in Macedonia” and the “Art Bridge” next to it were grim.

Skopje: Figures outside National Theatre

There’s a lot of street sculpture in Skopje, much of which I really enjoyed. I loved some of the statues outside the National Theatre, as well as a pair of women diving into the Vardar just by the Stone Bridge and a group of figures on its south bank near the Holiday Inn. The two pairs of lions which guard the Goce Delčev Bridge – one pair classically figurative, the other more abstracted – are controversial, not because of their quality, which is rather good, but because the lion is the symbol of the ruling party at the time they were erected, so this was a blatant piece of grandstanding.

Divers by the pillars of the Stone Bridge

And you can’t miss the two truly blatant examples of grandstanding that are the giant statues of Alexander the Great, on horseback in Macedonia Square, and his father Philip, on foot across the river. The pair were clearly intended as a two-fingered salute to the Greeks in the long-running dispute over Macedonia’s name: the problem is that both nations are desperate to claim Alexander the Great as being their own. The Macedonian claim is territorially correct, given that Alexander’s birthplace is inside the country’s borders; the Greek one is culturally valid in that he was clearly a product of the Hellene civilisation and clearly predated the Slavic and Ottoman civilisations that form the Macedonian people today. The dispute was eventually settled in 2018 by the solution (which I personally find rather childish) of changing the country’s name from “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” to “Republic of North Macedonia”). The statues, I’m sorry to say, are completely tasteless, although the nearby Fountain of the Mothers of Macedonia, which incarnates Philip’s mother Olympia as four stages of motherhood, is an altogether better effort.

We just had time for two of the city’s many museums. The airy Museum of Contemporary Art, on the same bluff as Skopje Fortress, holds regularly changing temporary exhibitions and boasts panoramic views of the city from the terrace outside. Slightly spookily, they were preparing to host a conference of 250 FBI operatives when we arrived: I’m not sure what the Feds would have made of “Museum open until further notice”, a collection of hilariously sarcastic anti-establishment memes by artist Cem A (with delicious irony, as I write this, the museum is actually closed to host a different conference). The second was the Archaeological Museum of Republic of North Macedonia, packed with artifacts through the ages, such as the superb funerary gold mask and glove pictured here, from the Trebenishte necropolis near Ohrid in the south of the country, probably from the 6th-5th century BCE. Lake Ohrid, we are told, is seriously worth visiting, but we didn’t have time for the two-and-a-half-hour drive each way.

Skopje: Museum of Contemporary Art - meme by Cem A.

Skopje Archaeological museum: funerary gold mask and glove from the Trebenishte necropolis

In addition to all this public stuff, Skopje’s broad riverbank walks, extensive City Park (surprisingly green in September after a long, dry summer) and its lively old bazaar make it a pleasant place to visit. However, the city and the country have a dark secret: corruption. Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index for 2024 ranks Macedonia as 88th out of the 180 countries it studies, and locals point to cronyism and siphoning of funds from government projects. The results are visible on the streets of the city: perfectly decent buildings are undermined by poor maintenance, while green spaces are marred by insufficiently frequent rubbish collection. What we didn’t experience (being there in September) was the winter pollution: apparently, too many people burn coal or wood, and the ensuing smog lingers because the spaces for wind to blow it away, as envisaged by the post-earthquake town planners, were filled in by buildings. Effects of corruption are also visible in net migration statistics, with far too many young Macedonians leaving the country to seek better opportunities elsewhere.

Which is sad, really. Skopje is an attractive city in a fertile country. The climate is broadly lovely. The food is great, within a fairly typical Balkan range of dishes, in which the stars are Macedonian tomatoes, which rival the best in Italy for utter deliciousness. Some of the local wines were really quite impressive. The vast majority of people we met were utterly charming. The ethnic tensions between Macedonians, Albanians, Turks and others, seem broadly contained, at least by comparison with the norm in this part of the world. Let’s hope that the gap between Macedonia’s potential and its current reality will be narrowed in years to come.

Travel notes from Indonesia above water

Our recent trip to Indonesia was mainly about diving (see the previous post). But as on all diving trips, there was also a day or two of seeing around, in fairly out of the way parts of the country. Our first day out was in the small port of Labuha (population 10,000, according to our guide), on Pulau Bacan in the Maluku Islands, aka the Moluccas, the famed Spice Islands which were of such great interest to European colonists. (“Pulau”, by the way, means “Island”, and the “c” in “Bacan” is pronounced “ch”). Our second was in the considerably larger city of Manado (population 458,582, according to Wikipedia, or 1.4m for its metropolitan area) at the Northern end of Sulawesi – the large island immediately recognisable on a map because of its spidery arms.

Here, in no particular order, are some impressions that we gathered about the country.

Firstly, there’s been a lot of development, most probably in relatively recent years. My memories of past visits to Malaysia or Indonesia are of a lot of simple wooden buildings in a fairly standard style that you would see anywhere in Asia, and not all that well maintained – the climate doesn’t really lend itself to the spick and span look to which Europeans aspire, and in any case, doesn’t need it in terms of perfect insulation. In both locations on this trip, there were plenty enough of these, but there were also large numbers of modern structures in concrete and steel. The bigger and fancier ones were either government buildings or places of worship (mosques in Labuha, churches in Manado), showing clear evidence of investment from sources outside the region. But even ordinary homes included some buildings that looked very solid and well made.

The growth very much follows a ribbon development model. On both routes from our boat mooring point to the city, there was hardly any open countryside bordering immediately onto the road – for almost the whole length of the road, there was a strip of buildings one deep (be they houses, shops or something larger). These were not major roads; the road quality seemed to be very good along most of the length, but with multiple places where the weather had wrecked a chunk of road. Particularly near Manado, there were a fair number of crews mending the worst damage – but for the most part, these were very small crews with very little equiment – a couple of men with shovels and a sack of cement.

Fundamentally, Indonesia has the potential to be a wealthy country. It was a major oil producer in the past and remains a major gas producer, with an annual production of around 60 billion cubic metres – which makes it the largest in the region after China and Australia. And it’s incredibly fertile: pretty much anything can grow here. I can’t really speak for the large populous cities in Java and Sumatra, but in Manado, our guide related how a US visitor had told him that whatever apocalypse happened in the world, “you’ll be fine here. You’ll always be able to feed yourselves”.

And, indeed, the country was an incredibly foody place. We were expecting the glorious spice traders in Labuha – after all, the place has been the epicentre of nutmeg, mace and cloves for centuries. What we weren’t expecting was the incredible food market, with dozens of stalls selling all manner of fruit and vegetables, bean curds, spices, palm tree products, raw and smoked fish, chickens. The quality and vareity of vegetables was the real eye opener: ranging from characteristically Asian items like long beans and pak choi through to recent imports like avocados, through to things we’d never heard of like papaya flowers (tasty, and allegedly good for diabetics). The two lunches we had on these trips were in pretty ordinary hole-in-the-wall type places, and the food on both was outstanding, doing full justice to these lovely ingredients.

The other food and beverage surprise was a reminder that this is a coffee-growing country: one of the best cappuccinos I’ve had in a long time was served to us in the improbable venue of the Hapa Kitchen and Bakery, a small café airside in Manado Airport.

We had several reminders of how religiously and ethnically diverse the country is. While most of it is Muslim, there are big Hindu areas (most notably Bali) and big Christian areas (of which Manado is one). In the past, different religions seem to have co-existed in relative harmony, but there was a bad conflict, “the Ambon Riots”, in the Maluku Islands at the turn of the millennium. The obvious visible effect of this was at the end of class time at a very large boarding school, with hundreds of girls spilling out of the school wearing hijabs. According to our guide, the wearing of hijabs started in the wake of the Ambon Riots. The other sign of diversity was seeing instructions in more than one language: while the vast majority of Indonesians speak the lingua franca Bahasa Indonesia, it’s the primary language of only 20% of the population, with over 800 languages recorded in 2010. (Having said which, both Manado and Labuha have a higher-than-average proportion of Bahasa-speakers).

The flora and fauna are also diverse. Like most British, I suspect, I was unaware of the name of the Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, a contemporary of Darwin who gave his name to the “Wallace Line” which splits Indonesia down the middle, with mainly Asian species on one side and Australisian species on the other. That made it surprising to discover that Wallace is very much remembered in the Maluku Islands, where he did a substantial amount of field work. Our guide on Bacan island wore a T shirt emblazoned with the gorgeous butterfly Ornithoptera croesus, otherwise known as Wallace’s Golden Birdwing. There are also many species whose latin names have the suffix “wallacei”.

Having said all this good stuff, you can’t deny that Indonesia is still a developing country, and there are things that you’d hope they will improve – for example, our seat belts only worked on one car journey out of six. Generally, attitudes to safety seem on the lax side – we certainly saw that on our boats, with luggage piled up in front of the compartment with the life jackets, or with the boat handler cheerfully smoking a cigarette three feet away from a fuel tank whose cap had been replaced by a bit of rag. And I’ve already mentioned the most important of my worries in the diving post – plastic pollution. There are separated recycling bins in Manado airport, which I suppose is a start, but we did see an awful lot of food packaging littered on the streets.

Still, those are relatively modest cavils. The truth is, all we got was a little sampler of this fascinating country. I hope I’ll be back for more some day – and to other islands.

Indonesia underwater: Coral Eye and South Halmahera

It’s been nearly three years since our last diving trip, to Wakatobi in Indonesia, at the southern end of the Coral Triangle. For this latest trip, we’ve decided to move further north in the triangle, starting at Coral Eye, a so-called “Marine Outpost” on Bangka Island, a short distance away from northern Sulawesi and its main city of Manado.

I’ll leave non-diving-related comments about Indonesia for another post, and I won’t repeat the “why we love coral reef diving” explanation of the post I did at the time. Suffice to say that most of the things I said about Wakatobi apply to Coral Eye, to a greater or lesser extent. On the other hand, I think it’s worth exploring the similarities and the differences between the two resorts, both in the diving and in the general ethos.

The primary intent for both Wakatobi and Coral Eye is the same: provide the guests with a luxurious experience and friction-free diving in waters rich in marine life, while at the same time making an effort to do good to the planet, or at least their particular corner of the planet. A veil is discreetly drawn over the carbon impact of actually getting there (both places are pretty remote from the overwhelming majority of their guests).

For both, the “do good to the planet” agenda starts with the need to protect the reefs and the fish life. This requires a constant programme of engagement with the local communities to affect their behaviour, most notably in discouraging destructive forms of fishing: dynamite fishing has been common in the Philippines and Indonesia for years, and fishing by releasing poison is another activity that the planet would be better off without. The locals need to be persuaded (a) that both methods are disastrous to their long term well-being and (b) that the resorts can put in more money into the local economy – either by direct funding or indirectly via employment and purchases from local suppliers – than destructive fishing can possibly provide. Fortunately, the more intractable problem of dragnet fishing isn’t common in these kind of areas, coral reefs being really not the ideal venue for it. A more difficult struggle is the battle against plastic, which gets dumped into the sea at a depressingly high rate.

The differences between the two resorts are driven partly by the geography of the two sites and partly by their different histories. Wakatobi is bigger; it occupies the whole of a relatively small island but is close to communities on islands nearby. Their engagement is all about providing education and employment for the locals, with many “graduates” who have worked for the resort getting jobs in other parts of Indonesia.

Coral Eye, in contrast, started out not as a luxury resort but as a marine biology research station. Early in its history, it became clear that the owners could provide funding for the research (for example scholarships and grants) by letting rooms to the general public. It then emerged that the more luxurious the experience, the more money could be generated. Divers from faraway countries were thrilled to mix with researchers at the dinner table and learn more about the marine life they loved watching, and were prepared to pay good money for the experience.

New building in progress at Coral Eye ©️ David Karlin — New building in progress at Coral Eye

Covid blew a hole in all that. Visits from the researchers became less frequent, so you currently have to be lucky for your trip to coincide with one – there were no biologists present in our trip, although we did see a bunch of the experiments they set up underwater at one of the dive sites. But plans to change all that are at an advanced stage. A new central guest area is almost complete (including a good sized swimming pool, both for general use and learning to free dive). When the new area opens, the existing guest area will be repurposed as a dedicated research centre, allowing Coral Eye to resume its research activities on a larger scale. If all goes well, when it’s complete, it will be possible for guests to gain a far deeper insight into marine life than a mere “look at all the pretty fish”.

In terms of the diving itself: we found the marine life to be very much comparable to what you see at Wakatobi in its profusion and diversity, with sightings of many fish and reef creatures we hadn’t come across before. Mostly, the coral isn’t as scenic – many of the dive sites are blocks or pinnacles of coral scattered over a sandy area (some of then quite large, to be fair) – but there were exceptions amongst the dozen sites we visited: Sahaung 1 was a glorious castle of coral with a blaze of gorgonians that I haven’t seen in many years, while Sahaung 2, next door, was more like the castle’s towers, with imposing pinnacles. For wall dives, you’re recommended to take the hour or so’s boat ride to Bunaken National Park, or to stay at Coral Eye’s sister resort Siladen, from which it’s more easily accessible.

Underwater and on land at Sali Bay ©️ Frederico Navarro

For the second week of this year’s trip, we chose to continue eastward in the Coral Triangle to Sali Bay, on a small island off the coast of South Almahera, the southern chunk of Northern Maluku province, in the Moluccas (the famed Spice Islands). It’s well further off the beaten track than Coral Eye, and our travel agent promised that “Being the only resort in the region offers an unrivalled advantage of being able to explore new undiscovered dive sites.”

This turned out to be false. Although Sali Bay was the first resort in the area, it’s now been joined by at least three more within a fifteen minute boat ride (on a not particularly fast dive boat), and the area is served by various liveaboards. Still, it’s fair to say that in our time there, we only saw other divers on very few occasions. And undiscovered or not, there are two things to be said hugely in favour of the area.

Firstly, the fish life is more profuse than anywhere I’ve ever seen. In one dive, we spent more than twenty minutes accompanied by a shoal of blue triggerfish – they just kept on coming. And it’s not just the one species: both in the blue (with schooling snappers and jacks) and on the reef (with every patch of coral thriving with anthias and damselfish as well as a massive variety of other reef fish), this was an impressive place.

Pygmy seahorse ©️ Frederico Navarro — Pygmy Seahorse ©️ Frederico Navarro

As to the coral: it might not be the most scenic (it’s a similar coral-block-on-sandy-slope landscape to Coral Eye, albeit the slopes are steeper), rather than the more spectacular vertical walls. However, it’s in rude health and it covers a very wide area. We often talk about the areas of branching corals at a depth of around 4-6m at the end of a dive as a “coral garden”: on that metaphor, one of our dives was a “coral Hyde Park”, stretching on far further than we could cover in our time available. In general, one could see multiple species of coral side by side, with exceptionally large colonies of each. So we may not have felt like intrepid dive explorers, but it was a heartening experience to see coral in such good shape.

With one caveat. Some boat rides felt like ploughing through a sea of plastic, mostly food packaging and bottles. Most probably, this wasn’t local – at a population of 10,000, the nearest town of Labuha isn’t exactly a thriving metropolis, and other guests told us that the rubbish had only arrived recently, so I suppose it was probably carried in on currents in the wake of a typhoon in the Philippines whose tail end we caught. But local or not, concentrated or not, it was a sobering experience. The charities trying to deal with the issue of plastic in the oceans need our support.

Plastic on beach at Sali Bay©️ David Karlin

Plastic in water at Sali Bay ©️ David Karlin

Huge thanks to Frederico Navarro, a fellow guest at Sali Bay, for the wonderful underwater photos

What I learned about Paris

We spent the months of April and May in Paris – a mixture of pleasure and business, giving us the chance to see many clients throughout France. It’s a city in which I spent several years as a child – but that was over half a century ago, so it was a chance to rediscover the city.

Some of what we found agreed with what our expectations from previous visits or from things we’ve read. But here are some things that surprised us. I should point out, of course, that anything in here is a result of our own experience – other people visiting other parts of the city might feel very differently.

Belleville Carnival — Carnival at Belleville

Living in a residential area is an eye-opener

On previous visits, we’ve stayed in places where tourists go: the Marais, the area around the Opéra or the Champs-Élysées. My childhood was in the ritzy 16ème (yes, I know this signals heavy over-privilege). This time, somewhat by accident, we ended up in an apartment in Belleville, of Rendezvous/Triplets fame. It’s a residential area that attracts few tourists and is very racially mixed – lots of Africans, lots of Chinese and Vietnamese, some South American, some indigenous French, a smattering of others. And we loved every minute.

We could step out of our apartment, be swamped by a riot of colours and scents and be surrounded by the kind of shops where normal people go to buy everyday stuff (food, clothing, housewares, electronics). The whole place was unbelievably lively with the buzz of people going about their daily lives. The banks of the pretty Canal Saint-Martin were almost permanently rammed with young people hanging out, picnicking, drinking or just chatting. You just don’t get that sense of really living in the city in an area where most of the people are tourists and most of the shops are oriented to them.

People are strong on minor courtesies

Parisians have a reputation for being brusque and surly, but with very few exceptions, that wasn’t our experience. People in shops varied from generally welcoming to seriously charming. The degree of pushing and shoving was far lower than in London, either on crowded pavements or in the Metro, where people readily gave up their seats, especially to women older than them (the same rule doesn’t seem to apply for men). This seemed particularly to be enforced by non-white mothers with their occasionally-reluctant children.

The major exceptions here are the cyclists and e-scooter riders, many of whom travel fast and ignore traffic lights. To cross a street, look them in the eye and walk predicatably so they know how to avoid you.

Parisian street cleaning is awesome

Parisians are fond of a good whinge when it comes to their public services. But our experience of their street cleaning was uniformly excellent. We were on the Rue du Faubourg du Temple, a street choc-a-bloc with food shops and cafés. By 11pm every day, there was a quantity of rubbish on the streets. Overnight, however, an army of hose-equipped trucks and broom-equipped cleaning staff would roam the street. By 7am, the place was sparkling.

The swimming pools are also awesome

We swim most mornings. The availability of public pools was extraordinary, with 41 across the city (the coverage is variable, but our apartment was within a 10 minute walk of two 25 metre pools in excellent shape). A short metro ride would have taken us to various 50 metre pools, including Piscine Suzanne Berlioux, improbably located underneath Les Halles, the giant shopping centre in the centre of town. And the prices are jaw-droppingly low: 44 € gets you a three month pass valid in all 41 pools – or 22 € if you’re over 65.

The changing rooms are mixed, with cubicles for changing – which was perfectly fine and sidesteps what is currently a political hot potato in the UK. However, the showers only have individual cubicles for the disabled, so you have to shower with your swimming costume on. And during school periods, the early morning time slots available to the public are restricted. But we rapidly embraced our morning drill of “get up at 7am, swim, buy croissants on the way home”.

The dark side: there’s a lot of homelessness and begging

Sadly, we couldn’t walk too far without coming across someone sleeping rough, or someone asking for a few coins. The begging was usually pretty gentle and surprisingly polite, although there were instances of beggars who got aggressive. Several, we suspected, were mentally ill. And to judge by the number of ads and fundraisers for food banks, there are also a bunch of people who can’t feed themselves.

I don’t honestly know how this compares to other cities. My gut feel/memory says it’s worse than London and not as bad as San Francisco, but that’s a pretty unreliable guide.

The melting pot approach to multiculturalism is beginning to work

When a country has large a immigrant population, there are two main ways to approach multiculturalism. The approach promoted by many on the left of UK politics is the maintenance of identity, the idea that people have a right to their ancestral culture and heritage, which should not be “appropriated” from them. Faith schools and ethnically unmixed areas contribute to that.

The French do the opposite: what they call la mixité. It’s closer to the US idea of a “melting pot” but more extreme – religion and race are excluded from the public sphere. One is encouraged to be “colour-blind”, so that people of all races get the same upbringing and the same opportunities.

Or at least, that’s the theory. The reality has been very different, as expressed in the horrific treatment of immigrants from the Maghreb, by recruitment outcomes which varied wildly according to whether or not you had a Muslim-sounding name, and in Paris, by the concentration of immigrants in the impoverished parts of the banlieue (the suburbs outside the Périphérique ring road), leaving “Paris intramuros” to French whites.

But I saw and heard evidence that la mixité is beginning to become a reality. I saw many more mixed race couples than on previous visits to Paris. I saw black customer-facing staff in some very smart shops that wouldn’t have dreamed of having them in the past. And the “Grand Paris” project, the extension of the Metro into the suburbs, is beginning to break down the previously hard border between the city and the banlieue.

It’s baby steps at this point, but the signs are promising.

The green side: we discovered the Coulée Verte and the Bois de Vincennes

Paris isn’t celebrated for its green spaces, but there are a some real gems. The one we discovered on this trip was the Coulée Verte (formerly the Promenade Plantée), a narrow strip of land high above the streets that run from Bastille towards the Bois de Vincennes, the former royal hunting forest at the South-East of Paris. The Coulée Verte is about an hour’s walk end to end and is gorgeously landscaped: it’s like having a very long and thin botanical garden, interspersed with little nooks to chill out or gaze down at city outside. It’s blissful.

The Bois de Vincennes itself is huge and very beautiful. We didn’t make much of a dent in its overall size, but managed a long walk alongside the boating lake. I’ll be back.

The city is ever shifting

The status of different areas of Paris isn’t fixed. On the Left Bank, back in the 70s, the Boulevard St Germain and the Boulevard St Michel were the hippest of the hip, celebrated both in popular culture and in literature and the home of cool new fashions from Yves Saint Laurent and others.

We found it rather sad, the streets mainly populated by guided parties of tourists there to relive its former glories. The fashion world has moved elsewhere: the Avenue Montaigne for brands favoured by the high rollers – Dior, Chanel, Prada and the like – and the Marais for a younger, more boho crowd (or bobo, as the French call it).

The Marais is changing, also. At one time, it was very much populated by younger professionals, with many foreign students or people early on their career. That’s been changing: the eclecticism is still there, but one senses that it’s catering to tourists far more than to locals, heading towards becoming a theme park of its former self. Personally, I suspect it’s a result of AirBnB and (to a lesser extent) Brexit, but I can’t be sure.

And the stuff you know…

I haven’t even mentioned the things you already know all about – the phenomenal food, both restaurant meals and produce for cooking at home, the breadth of the cultural offering in both visual and performing arts, the cityscape with its famous monuments and that incredible light. Suffice to say that I’ve fallen in love with the city all over again.

Discovering Haute Couture: Dolce&Gabbana’s Captivating Exhibition in Paris

I’m not normally a follower of haute couture: the images of elaborate dresses that I can’t imagine anyone actually wearing leave me thinking of the Raymond Chandler tag “as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency” (Chandler was referring to the game of chess, but we all have our own bugbears). So when someone told me that the one unmissable exhibition in Paris was the “Dolce&Gabbana: Du Cœur à la Main” show at the Grand Palais, I was dubious in the extreme.

Still, our informant was quite firm on the matter, so I took my heart in my hands and booked our tickets (which were rarer than hen’s teeth and only available for early mornings or very late nights). And thank goodness I did, because I left the exhibition with my mind completely blown, with a completely fresh understanding of what this kind of fashion can mean.

On the one hand, it’s true to say that the vast majority of what was on show was indeed clothing, in the sense that it’s in the form of sets of garments that people can wear. However, that turns out to be almost incidental: what Domenico Dolce et Stefano Gabbana are displaying in the “Alta Moda” in this exhibition is an array of works of art in different media, which happen to be in the shape that you can drape over a mannequin (or, presumably, the occasional supermodel or super-rich real person). And the beauty and craftsmanship embodied in those works of art is simply mind-boggling.

Apart from the obvious needlework and pleating, the art/craft forms in use include tapestry (both woven and cross-stitch), printing, painting, metalwork and even glass-making. Dolce&Gabbana seem to be experts (or have experts on tap, anyway) on every one. The exhibition is mostly of the finished products, but it’s sprinkled with video of the artisans at work, so you can marvel at the skills on display as well as goggle at the garments that result.

It helps that Dolce and Gabbana evidently share two obsessions of mine: opera and Sicily. You’re assaulted by everyone’s favourite opera highlights (Pavarotti singing Nessun dorma, Callas singing Casta diva, you get the idea) as soon as you’re in the exhibition, and it largely continues that way – but what really blew me away was some of the wearable versions of the posters for various famous premières at La Scala.

Two rooms were devoted to Sicily. The first was a modest antechamber with only a few garments but walls filled of black-and-white reportage photos of the island. That opened up into the brightest sunniest vista I’ve ever seen indoors: a blaze of Sicilian sunlight created by the boldest of colours. The themes I loved were the stories from Orlando Furioso – peerless knights, fair damsels, evil sorceresses and so on – that you’ll find in Sicilian puppet theatre, complete with a full size travelling cart that the puppeteers would have used to tour their show from village to village. And the brightness was applied to homewares as well as garments, with Smeg fridges as you’ve never seen them. (You could buy a gorgeously bedecked espresso pot if you wanted – not much else was on sale).

But back to that question that bothered me about coming to this show in the first place: would anyone really wear this stuff? And why? Are we just at a kind of massive craft fair where all the goods on show just happen to be people-shaped, or is this just providing a vehicle for oligarchs’ fantasies of what their wives and girlfriends should wear? I’ve rationalised a kinder answer – I don’t really know, of course – which is to consider professionals where the way you look really is a key part of the product (I’m thinking Lady Gaga or Margot Robbie, let alone models like Agel Akol or Bella Hadid). In that category, if you’re going out to a big occasion where you know the paparazzi will be out in force, then wearing something utterly individual and striking isn’t just a matter of vanity or self-indulgence, it’s simply good business. Even if you feel like you’re walking around in something that should really be in a museum. Like the Grand Palais.

By the time I get this posted, you’ll missed the Paris version of this show, but the exhibition will then be travelling to other cities “on a world tour”. Even for a non-fashion-lover like me, I think it’s worth the trip.

Springtime in Paris: the bakeries of Belleville

When people think about Paris, the top things they think about are the landmarks (the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe and so on), the great public buildings (the Louvre, the Opera), and the cafés and restaurants. But there’s one aspect of Paris that isn’t necessarily on everyone’s list: the place is a baker’s paradise.

We’re currently on a two-month stay in Paris. Rather than being in a standard tourist area, the apartment we’ve rented is somewhat north-east of the city centre in Belleville, made famous by Sylvain Chaumet’s wonderful animated film Belleville Rendezvous (aka The Triplets of Belleville). It’s an ethnically mixed residential area, with a large population of North African origin as well as a lot of Chinese and Vietnamese mixing with the white population. Our apartment is on the Rue du Faubourg du Temple between Belleville and République metro stations. In the course of that one kilometre stretch, without going into the side streets, I counted fourteen bakeries of different kinds. Most of them are places I’d be more than happy to patronise near my home; the best are utterly outstanding.

Here’s a little guided tour – in no particular order (and not geographically).

The most outstanding bread so far came from next to Goncourt metro: the Urban Bakery Goncourt, a branch of a small chain, with ten shops across Paris, which descibes itself as a “Boulangerie Engagée”. They do a wide selection of breads with different grains – rye and buckwheat as well as standard wheat – which simply burst with flavour.

The Urban Bakery does some pâtisserie, though bread is clearly its main focus. However, it’s next door to Yann Couvreur, which doesn’t do bread but does uber-posh, innovative pâtisserie (at eye-watering prices, one has to admit). Couvreur is a famous pastry chef who also has branches in the Marais and in the main Galeries Lafayette, plus a café in town.

Nearer to République, Aux Péchés Normands does great bread and fabulous croissants and pastries, if perhaps not quite up to the refined levels above. But I can attest that their lemon meringue tartlets are a thing of beauty.

The really unexpected one was Mami, which describes itself as a “Boulangerie Levantine”. Taking its inspiration from all things Jewish and Middle Eastern, it has mouth-watering Babkas and a variety of Challahs, including a Za’atar-flavoured Challah, which is something I’ve never seen before but is quite delicious.

The area has many North African inhabitants (particularly Tunisians, it seems to me), resulting in the presence of many shops specialising in Arab and Maghrebi breads, sweets and pastries. It’s Ramadan at the moment, so every evening, there are vast arrays of goodies stacked on trestle tables outside the shops, which wolfed down when the fast ends at sunset (to be fair, they also seem pretty busy through the day from both Muslim and non-Muslim shoppers). The one that seems permanently rammed is called Bennah – I took photos of three others and I probably missed a few.

For something completely different, there’s Le gâteau doré fiesta Pâtisserie. It’s a cake shop which sells large cakes for birthdays and other events, apparently in large volumes. Its unusual feature, however, which has led me to dub it the “pornographic cake shop” is the array of scantily-clad plastic women in the window, waiting to adorn the birthday cake of your fantasies. (To be fair, there are also more conventional figures of brides and grooms, furry animals, national flags and so on).

Le gâteau doré fiesta Pâtisserie - cake decorations

Le gâteau doré fiesta Pâtisserie - cakes

On the other side of the road from Le gáteau doré is a more demure looking (and possibly more upmarket) shop specialising in cakes for events, the Pâtisserie La Romainville. Another cake shop – the one nearest us, Délices de Belleville – is also labelled with the Chinese characters for “happy cake”.

And there is no shortage of standard boulangerie-pâtisseries, the sort that will sell your morning baguettes and croissants as well as a variety of other stuff. Several of these don’t even have a brand name attached and are just labelled Boulangerie Pâtisserie or Artisan Boulanger Pâtissier or similar.

And that’s not counting the several supermarkets along the way that will sell you bread, croissants and cakes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a place where you can’t walk for 50 metres without running into a bakery, and I’ve certainly never lived in one. And I love it.

Wakatobi: underwater heaven in Indonesia

I’m going to find it difficult to explain Wakatobi to you. If you’re not (yet) a scuba diver, I’m going to attempt to describe the whole experience of coral sea diving in a few hundred words. If you are already a scuba diver, you’ll understand the general attraction, but Wakatobi is almost certainly a different experience from anywhere that you’ve dived previously (unless, I’m reliably informed, you’ve been to Rajah Ampat).

Overwhelmingly, people like me who love warm water diving in coral seas do it for one big reason: we love gazing at the wildlife (there are other sorts of diver, like the ones who dive deep into ice cold water to hunt for artifacts in wrecks, which is a different experience altogether). So when we talk about our dives, we discuss excitedly whether we saw a turtle or a shark or a manta ray, or a tiny brightly coloured mandarin fish found only in this particular corner of ocean, or of a coral shrimp so tiny and translucent that it took the sharpest of eyes to notice it. Many divers are obsessive about writing up every dive in their logbook, not least because the major certification bodies make this an important part of one’s training, and old habits die hard. On a good dive in normal sites, which would typically last somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes, you might expect to see a dozen or so notable things (the definition of “notable” is fuzzy, but everyone agrees that it includes sharks, rays and turtles, and it usually includes any bright, colourful or physically odd-shaped fish that isn’t present in massive numbers in the area you’re diving).

The thing about Wakatobi is that on just about every dive, you reach the “dozen notable things” mark in about the first five minutes. Then, the number keeps clocking up as you go, accelerating as you reach the shallows, especially if the sun is out. If you try to remember all the species you’ve seen on a dive, you’re on a hiding to nothing; even counting them is beyond my ability. I’ve tried remembering all the species of butterfly fish – just one small section of the marine diversity out there – and given up when it gets to a dozen (it turns out that around 60 of the world’s 120 species are present in the area). In other dive areas, you might struggle to think of any really significant thing you saw during a dive. At Wakatobi, you have the opposite problem: you’re getting sensory overload. It’s best to start a dive with a couple of things you’re going to look out for, like, for example, counting butterfly fish species, counting turtle sightings (my maximum count was twelve) or searching the sand for its inhabitants. The goby-shrimp combo is a particularly cool sand-dwelling symbiosis: the shrimp lives in a hole and does the housekeeping, ejecting anything it considers not to be nice and clean, while the goby (a silvery fish around 3cm long) stands on guard outside.

If you compare coral reef diving to wildlife-watching on land, the difference in sheer profusion and diversity is simply enormous. Whether it’s a safari in Africa, hoping to see the “big five” (elephant, lion, leopard, rhino, buffalo), looking for bears or moose in Scandinavia, or just bird-watching in the UK, you can spend most of your hours in the field waiting for some animal to put in an appearance. On a coral reef, by contrast, there is a riot of colour and shape all around you.

It’s not just about the fish. The coral comes in a thousand forms. The hard corals are generally named after things on land: potato coral, lettuce coral, mushroom coral, plate coral, brain coral (you get the idea). They can make very large formations indeed. Some sea fans can be well over the size of a person. Roma, one of Wakatobi’s dive sites, has two enormous “coral roses” of overlapping plates which must measure at least 30m in diameter. Towards the top of the reef, you can see single formations of staghorn coral that last for 100m at a time, hosting an unbelievable variety of reef fish sheltering in its branches. The soft corals can be equally eye-catching, like watching a colony of Xenia coral feeding, each of its dozens of arms waving in the swell, with a star of eight feathery “fingers” opening and closing to grab nutrients which pass by. Blown up in your mind’s eye, it’s the stuff of horror movies. There are many other creatures that are not corals. Ali Baba could hide inside the basket sponges without a problem; Lampert’s sea cucumbers form scary white patterns around the outside. There’s the tunicate family: solitary tunicates with a delicately veined pattern like fine porcelain, bluebell tunicates, electric blue translucent ovals which you’ll see in colonies scattered across the reef. Sailor’s eyeballs are a type of anemone which look for all the world like giant pearls.

Everyone has their own favourites. I love the ambush predators, like the crocodile fish which looks extremely like its landbound namesake, except that it’s perfectly camouflaged for the underwater landscape. We’ve seen a scorpion fish coloured white as it swims through the water, then settling on a reddish brown rock and then changing in an instant to match the place where it has settled, waiting for prey to arrive. There’s also defensive camouflage: at 20-30cm, a trumpet fish isn’t exactly a small item, but it’s surprisingly difficult to spot one when it’s pretending to be one of a bunch of sea rods. Many divers and most dive guides seem to love nudibranchs; personally, I struggle to see what the fuss is about. At the end of the day, even if it’s brilliantly coloured and boldly patterned, a snail is a snail. But big shoals are always a thrill, particularly when they’re tiny fish swirling around in a “bait ball”, whose shape morphs as they move with the current’s ebb and flow or perform some shift to attempt to confuse predators. I also love seeing parrot fish bump the coral, bite off a chunk and grind it up into fine sand which you can see them excrete (after they’ve ingested the nutrients). It’s not far off the mark to assert that the fabulous beaches of white sands in these parts are largely composed of parrot fish droppings.

By the way, I haven’t attached any underwater photos because I stopped taking them a few years ago: I realised that I wasn’t enjoying dives any more because I was spending all my time worrying about the camera and the pictures. There are plenty of people who disagree with me, as a search for “Wakatobi underwater” will quickly show you.

Wakatobi is located just off the south-east corner of Sulawesi (that’s the spindly one on the Indonesian map) in the so-called “coral triangle”, which brings me to the first of my three caveats: it’s a bitch to get to. If you’re coming from the UK or the US, you have to spend the best part of a couple of days getting to Bali, and it’s then a two and a half hour charter flight to the airstrip on nearby Tomia island. They do their best to make the trip smooth and efficient, but any way you look at it, Wakatobi is in the middle of nowhere.

Second caveat: you won’t see much in the way of large pelagics here (sharks, rays, etc). And finally, Wakatobi isn’t a cheap ticket by any stretch of the imagination. It’s a luxury resort with a capacity of around 60 guests, where they take exquisite care of you. You do pay for what you get, although not at the level of the ritzy international brands.

Somehow, when you leave, the team there manage to make you feel like you’ve just left a long lost second family. I don’t know quite how they do it, but whatever the magic is, it results in a lot of return guests. We’ve just done our third trip and it won’t be the last.

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