Old habits die hard. Having spent my childhood and youth in the totalitarian Soviet Union, where foreign travel was effectively banned, I got addicted, to vicarious armchair journeys of imagination with the help of maps, timetables and dog-eared guide-books. Even now, having visited over 70 countries, I cherish anticipation, which, in all honesty, ...

Putting on my face mask during the Coronavirus pandemic, I often recall the only other occasion in my life when I had to have my face covered. I visited the site of the Chernobyl tragedy several years after the disaster with a Channel 4 UK TV crew while making a documentary about Ukraine. The fact that my father, a nuclear physicist, died premature...

In 1994, when I was living in London, a Channel 4 documentary gave me the opportunity to briefly return to Ukraine, my newly-independent, long-suffering motherland that I had originally left in 1978. That was my very first glimpse of it as a separate country, no longer a province of the Soviet Empire where one could go to prison just for uttering t...

​Vitali Vitaliev and family, including his beach-loving dog Tashi, make an ice- and Covid-breaking foray to Northern France (and back to Hertfordshire where they live), having vouched to use no more than 42 litres of fuel Additional reporting and photography by Christine Bohling Lest you should be misled by the "tank" in the headline, let me reassu...

The Art of Staying at a Historic and (Possibly) Haunted Hotel Britain – the county where the first purpose-built inn (the Old Bell Hotel at Malmesbury) dates back to year 1220 - is full of historic places to stay. We Brits often tend to take them for granted, very much unlike, say, Australians (and I am a carrier of both British and Australian pass...

​Gathering material for his next travel book in Mid Wales, Vitali Vitaliev happened to stay at the hotels and campsites that have all but over-shadowed the main topic of his research "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at..." /Oscar Wilde/ One of the joys of researching a travel book is that – irrespective of...