Mark Hodson

Best: RANIKHET EXPRESS

Indian train travel is always an adventure, and my favourite place to sit is between the carriages, wedged by the top step, watching India glide by. This time, I was returning to Delhi from trekking in the Himalayas. After that, the fierce air-con and darkened windows felt like the inside of a Securicor van, but from my favoured vantage point the breeze was aromatic, the sun was warming and the locomotive’s horn provided the backbeat to my daydreaming. Superb. I travelled with Audley Travel (01993 838000, www.audleytravel.com), which tailor-makes Indian journeys. SD Enterprises (020 8903 3411, www.indiarail.co.uk) handles Indian rail bookings.

Worst: THE PYRAMIDS SON ET LUMIERE

Sunset at the pyramids: the sky blazes crimson, the desert breeze chills and the Sphinx ebbs broodily into the shadows. It’s wonderful, and it’s followed by a son et lumière show — which isn’t. It’s bad enough that the pyramids are floodlit pink, green and blue, and flash on and off like a 1970s disco, but the soundtrack is naff, too — all booming banalities and crashing cymbals. As the narrator bellows his first “Riddle aaav the Sphinx”, the statue’s face explodes into arc-lit lurid green. It looks like Shrek in a car crash, and it’s no way to illuminate the past.

Richard Green

Best: WATERGATE BAY, CORNWALL

The revamped Watergate Bay Hotel (now renamed the Hotel and Extreme Academy, which sounds more like a garden of torture) gave us one of our best family holidays. The place has garnered publicity recently for Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen Cornwall, but as close foodie friends had had a hideous night there, we stuck with the more laid-back Beach Hut beneath it, and the hotel’s trump card — one of the finest beaches in England, which, unusually, allows dogs year-round. So it was two parents, three kids and one hound go mad in Cornwall. When the weather was filthy, we hit the cosy bar and watched Jamie’s place take another kind of pounding. Visit www.watergatebay.co.uk.

Worst: HEATHROW AIRPORT

Nothing comes close to arriving at Heathrow at 6.30am on August 10, 2006, looking forward to a week in Italy, and finding chaos and rumour (where do all those staff disappear to at times of crisis?). As Joe Strummer might have asked: should we stay or should we go? The kids, of course, didn’t like the idea of flying when bombers were (as whispers had it) rampant. I hated the idea of spending days in an airport (I find minutes hard enough). We turned around, grabbed a cab, put the bags and the dog in the car, and drove to Cornwall.

Rob Ryan

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