She also suggests checking the type of breakdown cover when buying a policy because some providers require drivers to

She also suggests checking the type of breakdown cover when buying a policy, because some providers require drivers to specify the number of days they will be abroad.Alarmingly, she adds, the BMRB’s research found that 32 per cent of those British drivers questioned failed to take out any European cover whatsoever.Others precautions, however, are simply a question of common sense. “Make sure you really use your mirrors if your car is right-hand drive,” said Mr Charlesworth, “and make sure you know the phone number of the emergency services for the country you’re travelling in.”Perhaps the least surprising BMRB finding was that when driving abroad, the vast majority of Britons, 85 per cent, in fact, always remember to pack at least one thing – their lunch.. Ever since Jamie Oliver revealed the precise ingredients of chicken nuggets in all their gory detail, our house has been a nugget-free zone. It hasn’t exactly been hard – even my kids turn green at the thought of scoffing hens’ private parts – but eating out has been trickier. Those pesky nuggets still appear on pretty much every kids’ menu. You have to cross the Channel to escape them, and that isn’t always convenient.

It’s not just kids’ food that’s bad, but restaurant attitudes towards the children themselves. A survey by Tommy’s, the baby charity, found that one in four parents in the UK has had trouble with restaurants’ unwelcoming attitudes to children. High chairs and even smiles are often non-existent at decent eateries, and even people with older children or teenagers can have a tough time finding a welcome outside the usual burger and pizza joints.. Day breaks across the bay

08.00: Open the curtains and survey the scene. Look beyond the crowds gathering on the sea wall to that hulking shadow cast across the waters of the bay.

That’s the reflection of your hotel, The Oberoi (1), a modern monolith on Nariman Point, (00 91 22 5632 5757), with 333 rooms arranged around a sky-high atrium.. My fingers are searching for any sort of grip A 2mm-wide lip of rock, a crack, anything I try to read the rock like Braille Nothing. “Move your right leg up,” shouts my new friend and “spotter”, Tod. I edge my foot up, smearing the sticky rubber sole of my climbing shoe to the rock and pressing myself as close as I can to its face.
To no avail: my muscles start to twitch and my hand can’t find any sort of purchase. I’m not roped in, so I know that if I jump I will land back down at the base of the rock.I let go and fall all of two feet, landing beside Tod. “You made it look too easy,” I complain to him.It was 234 years after the sacking of the imperial city of Vijayanagar in 1565 that the British, in the form of the amateur archaeologist Captain Colin Mackenzie, chanced upon its ruins Mackenzie was later to become Surveyor General of India. The ruins that he had discovered on the Deccan Plateau in what is now Karnataka State in central India were once the capital city of one the most powerful Hindu empires in India’s history.With the introduction of British Airways flights to the Karnatakan capital, Bangalore, this World Heritage Site now named Hampi is poised to be rediscovered by the British.

Hampi was long a word-of-mouth stopover on India’s traveller circuit. The village that has slowly spread in and around the ruined temples, forts and civic buildings of Vijayan-agar and along the Tunga-bhadra River that bisects the site enchanted those retreating inland from Goa’s now-pass?each parties. But it also attracted rock climbers and, in particular, boulderers, from Europe and America. Why? Because Hampi is what heaven looks like to a boulderer.Bouldering, as the name hints, is the sport of climbing boulders (as opposed to cliffs or mountains), and the attractions of the area for enthusiasts can immed-iately be seen from the description of the area by the archaeologists John Fritz and George Michell: “Granite boulders of varying tones of grey, ochre and pink dominate the landscape, distrib-uted either as hills and long ridges or as piles of rock that seem to have been thrown down by some primeval cataclysm.”The landscape for miles around Hampi is certainly one of the most mesmerisingI’ve ever seen; millions of rounded boulders, from the size of a football to the size of a bus, are seemingly swept into piles as if by a cosmic broom. Some stand alone; others balance one on top of another, or congregrate in great mounds beside collapsing temples.There are sound geological reasons for this unique landscape. It wasn’t caused by earthquakes or volcanoes but by three billion years of erosion by sun, wind and rain. “Some geo-logists think that these are the oldest rock formations in the world,” says Vivek, who runs the small lodge-style Hampi’s Boulders retreat in a private nature reserve in nearby Narayanpet where I stay.You might, like me, prefer the alternative explanation.

Hampi is one of Hin-duism’s most sacred places: in the Ramayana legend it is called Kishkindha, the forest domain of the monkey-god Hanuman.According to the Ramay-ana, such was the strength of two brothers, Sugriva and the impetuous Vali, rulers of the land, that a battle between them for suprem-acy resulted in the hills being broken into pieces as they threw boulders at each other. Events in the Ramay-ana are depicted by relief images carved on boulders, some of which have been used to build temples.But it took a DVD to turn the trickle of in-the-know travellers into a flood. That DVD, released in 2003, was entitled Pilgrimage, and featured Chris Sharma, a phenomenal young American climber. Sharma, who had been climbing professionally since the age of 12, was 22 when he made the climbing film that still draws boulderers like Tod from California to India.”Hampi is a place of pilgrimage, because it is the birthplace of Hanuman,” he explained at the time.