Hinch Travel

One of the side effects of being under house arrest for five months in 2011 was that I was forced to spend December locked up in my apartment rather than strolling up Fifth Avenue, rugged up in a New York winter.

There’s an airline joke about a guy going into a bar and the reason for telling it will become obvious.

I was tempted to say ‘Don’t fly V Australia to Los Angeles this year’. That is…unless you can afford to fly Business Class. Save a bit more and really treat yourself next year. But that wouldn’t be very fair considering that on the flight I took Economy was almost full and the website reviews show some very happy campers.

Aaaah… Los Angeles. LA. The ‘City of the Angels.’ Home of Hollywood and the ‘boulevard of broken hearts.’ The place they call ‘a freeway in search of a city.’ LaLaLand. The home of the so-called Beautiful People.

Ged ouda here! A place to stay in midtown New York with a balcony? Ya gotta be jokin’. Not only a personal balcony towering over Lexington Avenue but views along E 50th street right across to the Hudson River plus skyscraper views downtown and across town from the bedroom and living room windows.

I have had a sporadic but interesting relationship with train travel over the past 45 years. My first international adventure – when I set out to explore the job opportunities in the big bad world – included a train trip through the Rockies from Vancouver to Montreal.

‘Wastin’ away again in Margaritaville, lookin’ for my lost shaker of salt. Some people say there’s a woman to blame… but I know it must be my fault’.

It was a fair question: ‘Am I getting older or are skirts getting shorter?’ My wife was charitable in her reply: ‘Shorter skirts are in this year.’ Actually, her initial response was less charitable. She said: ‘Both’.

Not only is the Kiwi a bird that cannot fly I discovered on a recent trip ‘across the ditch’ from Australia to New Zealand that ex-Kiwis sometimes can’t fly either. And the forced grounding can be frustrating.

It was the annual two weeks winter break away from the 3AW microphone during a non-ratings period. I was determined not to devote every waking moment to such necessary things as a painful visit to the periodontist, a session with my lawyer over an ongoing defamation action I’m taking in the Supreme Court, and some editing work on the Hinch magnum opus, Human Headlines. Read all about it!

I came here on a premise this trip: That too many of the nine million tourists each year, especially Australians, only think of Kowloon when they visit this reclaimed part of China.

For years Government ministers and travel industry nabobs in Melbourne have looked with envy at other major cities around the world and wondered why their city didn’t have a beacon, a tourism icon, a branding symbol to lure travellers south into their web.

You would have to have rocks in your head or be a Rockefeller or a Packer with a safe full of rocks (as in diamonds) to do what I just did.

That was the sort of reaction I received when I announced that I was going to spend a weekend at Corio Bay – with She Who Hates To Travel.

If you have read some of the Hungry Hinch restaurant reviews recently you’ll know that 2006 was the year I went on a mission to seek out great Bed and Breakfast places throughout Victoria.

About twenty years ago a confident American stood, warming his butt by the pot belly stove, at my farm house on Mount Macedon.

A few years ago I visited Kyoto and Hiroshima in Japan to research a new novel – which is still gestating.

Glen Shorrock and The Little River Band recorded a tribute to Paris “the City of Love” and sang about “gotta get back to the Seine city”.

When Sydney restaurateur Neil Perry was announced as the new food and wine guru for Qantas I must admit that I thought: what a wank. I mean, I knew that he ran some top-rating restaurants in Sydney – like the Rock Pool – but even good airline food is usually still, airline food. The days of huge plates of Beluga caviar on airlines like Qantas and Varig are long gone.

Hooray for Hollywood! Nothing should shock you about this place. Ask Fatty Arbuckle or Errol Flynn if either were still alive. It is bizarre but it is exciting. And The Beverly Hills hotel on Sunset Boulevard probably sums it up as much as the fabled Hollywood sign.

It’s an old joke but a goodie. People in other, less affluent suburbs, call it Double Pay. But I have recently rediscovered this piece of Sydney and I love it.

It is a terribly gauche thing to say, I know, but London was never really “my thing”. In the 1960s colleagues all flocked to London. They camped in Earl’s Court in such numbers that the locals nicknamed it “Kangaroo Valley”.

i am writing this at an outside table at a Brasserie in the Opera District in Paris. The pavement table is so close to the busy road – the Blvd Des Batignolles – that your salad dressing fights with theVespa fumes.

In 2004 I wrote a travel article about Bed and Breakfast places around Victoria. It appeared under the atrocious pun of a title: B and B Me Up Scotty. And the article said in part:

The easy, but trite, way to start this travel feature would be to quote the famous song: The Last Time I saw Paris.

They had a Round Table at King Arthur’s mythical Camelot.

The pictures – magazines and movies – incredibly do not do the place justice.

This may seem to be a strange addition to the Travel section on this website. Especially when, in recent months, we’ve covered places in New York and Los Angeles.

It started for me nearly four years ago in a Toorak bistro. I was halfway through a smoked salmon omelette when a Sunday Herald Sun story caught my eye and sent me into a reverie.

Maybe it is because I am getting old but I love B and Bs. I love quaint old hotels and homesteads in the country that have open fireplaces downstairs and quilts upstairs. Places that unashamedly treat you like a pair of comfortable slippers while you partake of a Bed and Breakfast.