Visitors to the USA arrive clutching driving licences as tightly as passports, since viewing the land of the free usually means handcuffing oneself to a steering wheel first.

Day one On Chinese soil at last. For the last 35 years, I’ve revered Chinese food: what will the real thing be like?

China is an education. Will the world's most populous country become for the next generation what the world's richest country has been for ours?

The pleasures of wine travel are seldom scenic.

Greece is a country of water and sky as much as rock and soil. This elemental interfingering - bay, mountain, cape, isthmus - always leaves the traveller with a sense of elation.

There, next to the shuttered kiosk, was the first bridge: stepped, balustraded, the black night water slopping beneath it, a rakish police launch moored to one side. Beyond, half-visible through the thick fog, lay a stone path, a portico, another bridge.

Portugal's Upper Douro Valley is a hot attic room in the rambling mansion of Iberia. I first visited 18 years ago. Tractors had, by then, replaced the squeaking bullock carts remembered by old Douro hands, but in other respects it remained a journey to wallow in for those prone to agricultural nostalgia.