Points of interest ... share your insider knowledge to your city. Photograph: Rendall Fung/Corbis

We're starting a chain of city tips across the blogs... follow us down the rabbit hole

Election flavour ... choose from Obama O's or Cap 'N MaCain's cereal. Photograph: Airbed&Breakfast

A new travel-networking site sees hosts charging guests and is even selling its own brand of US election cereals. But would it get your vote?

Best thumb forward... these guys were hitching for charity, but now more people are hitching out of necessity via the internet. Photograph: David Levene

In these uncertain financial times, more and more people are turning to cyber-hitching - car pooling via the internet. Would you get into a car with a stranger?

Bust budget ... 'It's very difficult to enjoy a £6 beer when you know you can't afford a second.' Photograph: Guardian

It's not like I hadn't been warned that Copenhagen would be pricey. The city regularly features in surveys of the world's most expensive destinations, and for weeks before, every time I mentioned where I was going, someone would laugh gently, before relating some extraordinary tale about a £6 pint.

I'd also had to book a hotel of course, a process that involved much fraught clicking between TripAdvisor, hotel websites, and this currency converter, trying to stretch the budget to cover anything other than the unappealingly named Cabinn City budget hotel, around £60-a-night for the room only; or the private rooms at "designer" youth hostel, Copenhagen City, rooms £80+. In the end, I said, "sod it", whispered a short prayer to the goddess Visa, and booked the nice but hardly mind-blowing Avenue for the-relative-bargain-price-of-£120-a-night. What can I say? I'm a holiday-maker, not a traveller. There's no pleasure to be had in roughing it. Continue reading...

Are skiers destroying the environment they love? Photograph: Neil Emmerson/Robert Harding World Imagery/Corbis

Skiers are accused of destroying the very wilderness they love. We asked two experts for their views on the sport's impact, and got two very different responses. Now have your say

Getting back on track ... Eurostar train passengers at St Pancras Station in London. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP

Mark Smith, aka the Man in Seat Sixty-One, on why the recent fire disruptions haven't put him off taking the Eurostar

Newcastle's ship has sailed ... September 1 saw the last passenger ferry to Scandinavia from Newcastle

The final ferry service from the north-east to Scandinavia has sailed. Suddenly Newcastle, one of England's greatest North Sea ports, feels as landlocked as Switzerland, says Harry Pearson

We are making changes to our travel blog. From 4pm BST today, commenting will be turned off as we move to a new home. This process will last all night as every blogpost and all of your comments are transferred to our new and improved system.

On our Inside Guardian blog today, Meg Pickard, head of communities & user experience for guardian.co.uk, explains why these changes are happening while our blogs project manager Amber McNett shows off the new designs and features that you can expect to see from Wednesday morning.

Please feel free to let us know what you think of the new-look blogs. We will be reading your comments and will respond to as many as possible over the launch period.

Family ties ... (left to right) Harry with his grandfather in Whitby, and daughter Maisie enjoying the same spot

Last week my partner Catherine, 12-year-old daughter Maisie and I got out a big box of family photographs and spent a rainy afternoon looking through them. One envelope was filled with pictures from a three-week trip around Sweden we had taken when Maisie was five. Here she was standing alongside inept policemen Kling and Klang at Astrid Lindgren World near Vimmerby, here alighting from the big wheel at the The Gröna Lund Tivoli in Stockholm, and here paddling in the Baltic on the island of Öland.

"It's funny", Catherine said to Maisie, "but in all these photos you look quite cross."

"That's because I was," Maisie replied.

"What, didn't you enjoy that holiday?" I asked

"Nooo," Maisie said thoughtfully, "I did like it. But I'd have liked it a lot more if I could have understood what everyone was saying. Or how anything worked." Continue reading...

Fall guys ... scaling Kaieteur Falls in the BBC's Lost Land of The Jaguar documentary. Photograph: BBC

"It's the largest unspoilt rainforest left on the planet," says the husky narrator of BBC's Guyana-based documentary, Lost Land of The Jaguar. "Its interior uncharted, its species uncategorised ... it's unspoilt, unprotected and under threat."

Cue sweeping aerial shots over vast, virgin jungles; a thrill-seeking climber, with enthusiasm akin to Steve Irwin's, taking a treacherous abseil down a waterfall five times the size of Niagara, and reams of believe-it-or-not facts ("the size of Great Britain with the population of Liverpool" etc etc). Before long, audiences are reeling in awe at Guyana's little-known natural beauty and, like me, eagerly anticipating the next installment.

Continue reading...

Something to write home about ... the traditional postcard is making a comeback. Photograph: Lake County Museum/Corbis

As if to underline the recklessness and untimeliness of the post office closure programme, figures released this week show a revival in the fortune of postcards. Apparently, 135million cards were delivered to British homes in 2006 - the most recent figures available - an increase of 30million over 2003.

I am writing this from Southwold in Suffolk, which will shortly be the holiday destination of our Prime Minister. Here, he will find one of the post offices that has escaped his Scrooge-like attentions, and he will see that it is always full of people browsing through postcard racks, writing postcards, and what is more asking for "picture stamps" with which to send them. Continue reading...

William Dalrymple ... the writer reads travel books before he sets off, and novels on the road. Photograph: Manpreet Romana/Getty

A travel diary should be full of sensations, a guidebook devoid of them. So wrote Stendhal almost two centuries ago. Today most of us still take the wandering twins with us on holiday. We want Lonely Planet's hard facts to steer us towards a comfortable bed. But we need an adventurous first-person travelogue to thrill us out of our comfort zone and to stimulate our imaginations.

Good travel narratives get under the skin of a country. Lawrence Durrell's masterful Bitter Lemons and Patrick Leigh Fermor's Mani are packed with more insight into the Greek character than a taverna full of Rough Guide oracles. Tim Parks' Italian Neighbours is unequalled in its revelations about Italian urban life. Tahir Shah is the best contemporary literary companion in Morocco. Continue reading...

No journey too far ... a yurt camp in the desert of Mongolia. Photograph: George Steinmetz/Corbis

I spent last Thursday and Friday at a conference on tourism and heritage. Not really extreme tourism, but it did allow me to share the views of colleagues who have had a lifetime trying to figure out various aspects of tourism. Not so much the nuts and bolts of how the industry works as a sector, but more what it means in modern society.

It was as complicated as I thought it was going to be. There was the whole business of addressing the seemingly disarming question, "Why is there so much tourism?" You can answer this in several ways. First, the easy stuff about increased post-war leisure time, cheap holidays and the potent mix of technology, willingness to travel "abroad" and the money to do it. Then we entered the more complicated arena of asking what the social (rather than economic) drivers of tourism are. Continue reading...

How green is your holiday? ... tourists could lose confidence in responsible travel altogether. Photograph: Lawrence Manning/Corbis

Suddenly it seems every tour operator, airline and hotel is desperate to tell us how much they care about the environment. Forget the flat-screen TVs and Frette linen - today hotels would rather boast about their water butts and composting toilets.

Of course many firms are genuinely improving their environmental and ethical performance and are doing so with only the best motives. But others have more cynical intentions - recognising a potent new marketing tool, they are exaggerating how green, sustainable, ethical and responsible they are. The problem is working out who's doing their bit, and who's just cashing in on eco-guilt.

This week's Observer Escape looks at the rising tide of so-called "greenwash". The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has seen a surge in complaints about green claims (up from 117 in 2006 to 561 last year) and everyone from small family businesses to airlines and aeroplane manufacturers have been censured by the organisation for making misleading claims. Only last week, the ASA upheld a complaint against EasyJet for an advert in which it claimed to be greener than other airlines. Continue reading...

Warm welcome ... Vicky Baker with social networking host Lucinea in Belem, Brazil

"But why do they do it?" When you try and explain the concept of hospitality tourism to the uninitiated, this is the usual response, accompanied by a look of complete bewilderment. People simply can't get their head round why someone would volunteer - repeatedly - to open their home to complete strangers.

Of course, most hosts don't see it this way. In over three months of travel-networking across central and South America and staying in people's houses, "stranger" is not word I have heard. An email or two, plus mutual membership to a non-exclusive club (such as Couchsurfing.com, HospitalityClub.org, BeWelcome.org), is all it has taken to be treated like a friend from the moment I arrive on their doorstep.
Continue reading...