Travel & Tourism

Hotels, airports, tours, transport

• At the Airport A1 I am at the airport. It is very big. There are many people with bags. I look for my gate. It is gate twelve. I walk for ten minutes. My bag is heavy.
• My First Time on a Plane A1 Today is my first time on a plane. I am a little afraid. I sit by the window. The seat is small. A man sits next to me. He reads a book.
• The Hotel Room A1 I arrive at the hotel at six. The woman at the desk is kind. She gives me a key card. My room is on the third floor. It is clean and quiet. There is…
• A Day at the Beach A1 We go to the beach on Sunday. The sun is hot. The sand is white. My brother runs into the water. I sit under a tree. I read my book.
• The Train to Yogyakarta A1 I take the train to Yogyakarta. The train leaves at eight in the morning. My seat is by the window. Outside I see rice fields and small villages.…
• Asking for Directions A1 I am lost. I want to go to the old market. I have a map on my phone, but the streets are confusing. I stop a woman. "Excuse me, where is the market?"
• The Souvenir Shop A1 There is a small shop near my hotel. It sells souvenirs. I go in. There are wooden cats, bags and T-shirts. Everything is colourful. The shop man…
• A Boat Trip A1 Today we go on a boat. The boat is small and blue. Ten people sit inside. The driver is a young man. He gives us life jackets. "Safety first," he…
• The Night Market A1 After dinner we walk to the night market. It is full of lights and people. There is music. I smell satay and sweet corn. My friend buys fried bananas.
• Checking Out A1 It is my last day. I pack my bag. I look at the room one more time. The sea is still blue outside the window. I feel a little sad.
• The Wrong Bus A2 Last week I visited Bandung for the first time. I wanted to go to the famous tea plantation outside the city, so I asked a man at the bus station…
• A Room with a Problem A2 When I arrived at the guesthouse in Lombok, my room looked nice. It had a big bed and a small balcony. But at night I found the problem: the air…
• Working at the Front Desk A2 I started working at the front desk of a small hotel three months ago. Before that, I worked in a shop. The hotel job is harder, but it's more…
• Lost Luggage A2 My flight to Singapore was fine, but my bag wasn't. I waited at the belt for forty minutes. All the other passengers took their bags and left. The…
• The Temple at Sunrise A2 My guide told me to wake up at four in the morning to see Borobudur at sunrise. I thought that was crazy. Four o'clock! But I did it. The hotel gave…
• Ordering Food Abroad A2 On my first night in Bangkok I went to a small restaurant near my hostel. The menu was in Thai. There were photos, but I didn't understand the words.…
• My Cousin's Homestay A2 My cousin Wayan opened a homestay in his village last year. It has three rooms, a small garden and a kitchen where his mother cooks breakfast. I…
• Missing the Ferry A2 We planned to take the ferry from the harbour at two o'clock. But we had lunch too slowly, and the taxi got stuck in traffic. We arrived at the…
• The Taxi Driver A2 In Jakarta I took a taxi from the station to my hotel. The driver was an old man with a friendly face. He asked where I was from, and when I said…
• Rain in the Mountains A2 We went hiking in the mountains near Malang. The weather was perfect in the morning: blue sky, cool air, a light wind. We walked for two hours…
• Travelling Alone for the First Time B1 🔒 Premium When I told my family I was going to Vietnam alone, my mother's face did something complicated. She'd never travelled outside Indonesia, and the idea of her daughter wandering…
• The Guest Who Complained About Everything B1 🔒 Premium Every hotel has one, and last month ours was Mr Harding. He arrived on a Tuesday and started complaining before he'd reached his room. The lobby was too warm. The check-in took too…
• How to Pack Light B1 🔒 Premium For years I travelled with the biggest suitcase the airline would allow. I packed for every possible situation: a jacket for cold, sandals for heat, three pairs of shoes, a book I…
• The Tour Guide's Secret B1 🔒 Premium I've been a tour guide for six years, and people often ask what the hardest part is. They expect me to say the long hours, or the heat, or the guests who arrive late. Those are…
• A Budget Trip to Flores B1 🔒 Premium My friends thought I was joking when I said I'd go to Flores for two weeks on a budget of three million rupiah. Flores is far, it's not cheap to reach, and everything I'd read…
• When the Wifi Died B1 🔒 Premium I'd chosen the guesthouse in the mountains specifically for its reviews, which mentioned the view, the breakfast and, most importantly, the fast wifi. I had work to send and a call…
• The Overbooked Hotel B1 🔒 Premium It was a national holiday, the hotel was full, and at nine in the evening a family of five arrived with a confirmed booking for a room we didn't have. Somebody had made a mistake —…
• Learning a Little Japanese B1 🔒 Premium Before my trip to Japan I spent two months learning the basics: hello, thank you, excuse me, how much, where is the station. It wasn't a serious effort — twenty minutes a day with…
• The Village Homestay B1 🔒 Premium The homestay was two hours from the nearest town, up a road that stopped being a road halfway and became a suggestion. My driver, who'd been cheerful in the city, grew quiet as the…
• Photographing a Place vs Seeing It B1 🔒 Premium On my last trip I took nine hundred photographs. I know this because my phone told me, cheerfully, when I got home. Nine hundred in six days — one every ten minutes, roughly, of…
• What Tourists Never See B2 🔒 Premium I grew up in a town that tourists visit. That's a stranger sentence than it sounds. It means that the place I know as home — the street where my grandmother sold rice cakes, the…
• The Economics of a Hotel Smile B2 🔒 Premium Nobody tells you, when you take a job in a hotel, that the most demanding part of the work is invisible. The physical tasks are straightforward: carrying, cleaning, checking in,…
• Overtourism and the Village That Said No B2 🔒 Premium There's a village in the highlands I won't name, because naming it is the problem. Five years ago it was a cluster of wooden houses around a lake, known to a few hundred trekkers…
• A Layover in Doha B2 🔒 Premium Airports are non-places. That's the term a French anthropologist coined for them, along with motorways, supermarkets and hotel chains — spaces you pass through without inhabiting,…
• Why I Stopped Reviewing Restaurants B2 🔒 Premium For five years I was one of those people — the travellers who review every meal, every guesthouse, every guide on the apps that have made reviewing a kind of civic duty. I took it…
• The Guide Who Wouldn't Lie B2 🔒 Premium Pak Made had been guiding for thirty years when I met him, and within the first hour I understood why his tours were booked out months ahead. He was funny, precise and physically…
• Travel Insurance, and the Cost of Not Having It B2 🔒 Premium I'd never bought travel insurance. For a decade of trips, short and long, I'd looked at the box on the booking page, calculated what the premium could buy instead — a nice dinner,…
• Homesickness on a Beautiful Beach B2 🔒 Premium There's a specific kind of misery that's hard to admit because it makes no sense from the outside. I was on a beach in southern Thailand — the kind that appears on posters, white…
• Managing a Team in High Season B2 🔒 Premium Every year, from June to August, the hotel where I work fills to capacity, the staff doubles with seasonal hires, and I stop being a person and become a schedule. I've managed the…
• The Souvenir Problem B2 🔒 Premium Every trip ends with the same small crisis, usually in the last twenty-four hours, usually in a shop I'd have walked past on any other day: what to bring back. I stand among the…
• The Traveller and the Tourist C1 🔒 Premium There's a distinction that every thoughtful visitor to a foreign place eventually reaches for, usually with a slight lift of the chin: I'm a traveller, not a tourist. The tourist…
• What the Sea Means to Those Who Work Beside It C1 🔒 Premium I have spent fourteen years on a coast that other people come to for two weeks. This has given me a strange double vision of the sea, which I've never entirely resolved. To the…
• Slow Travel in an Age of Speed C1 🔒 Premium The phrase 'slow travel' has become fashionable enough to be suspicious, appearing on the covers of magazines that also advertise flash sales on flights. But the idea underneath it…
• The Ethics of the Photograph C1 🔒 Premium A woman is carrying water up a hill. She's old; the pot is heavy; the light is extraordinary, catching the dust and the folds of her clothing in a way that any photographer would…
• A Return to the Town That Changed C1 🔒 Premium Twenty-two years ago I spent a summer in a coastal town I'd stumbled into by accident, and it did what such places sometimes do to the young: it became the measure against which I…
• The Language Barrier as Gift C1 🔒 Premium I once spent a month in a country where I understood nothing. Not a little — nothing. The alphabet was different; the sounds bore no resemblance to any language I'd studied; the…
• Behind the Kitchen Door C1 🔒 Premium There's a door in every hotel that guests are not supposed to notice, and behind it is the country the hotel actually belongs to. I've worked on both sides of it, and the…
• Why We Travel C1 🔒 Premium The question sounds simple and isn't. Ask a hundred travellers why they've come and you'll get a hundred plausible answers — to see, to rest, to learn, to escape, to find…
• The Airline Seat and the Human Body C1 🔒 Premium Somewhere over the Indian Ocean, six hours into a nine-hour flight, in a seat that a spreadsheet in an office in another hemisphere had determined was seventeen inches wide, I…
• Leaving a Place Better C1 🔒 Premium Every industry has a phrase it uses to describe its own conscience, and tourism's is 'leave no trace' — a doctrine borrowed from wilderness hiking, where it makes sense, and…