My list of unique eating places

A chance question on Facebook recently asking about my favourite restaurant got me thinking - do I have a favourite eating place? On reflection I realised I don't as there are too many to choose from. There are many restaurants I've enjoyed for different reasons, depending on whether I was looking for relaxation, luxury or a fantastic view. So here are some of my favourites:

• Most 'desert island' - during one of my trips to the Maldives in 2005 I stayed on board the Four Seasons Explorer. One evening we were taken to a deserted island where the crew dug seating into the sand. When we arrived back on the ship later the remaining crew members played us music on local instruments. A truly magical evening.

• Most 'spiritual' - when we lived in South Korea we spent a weekend in a Buddhist temple, and on another occasion we also participated in a day of temple food cooking. Korean temple cuisine is vegetarian and generally avoids garlic, onions, leeks, wild chives or shallots due to their pungency.

Eating temple food at Gilsangsa, Seoul

• Most 'axis of evil' - any of the meals I had while visiting North Korea!

one of the dinners I had in North Korea

one of my lunches in North Korea

• Most northerly - lunch in the Icelandic town of Akureyri which is 65°N. We had spent the day diving in the nearby fjord.

• Highest altitude (on land) - any of the meals we had in Tibet which has an average elevation exceeding 4,500 metres (14,800 ft).

• Most 'chillax' - at a hammock restaurant in Cambodia somewhere on the road between Tonle Sap and Siem Reap.

hammock restaurant near Tonle Sap, Cambodia

• Highest above ground - in April 2011 we were lucky enough to spend two nights in what was then the world's tallest hotel above ground - the Shanghai Park Hyatt. Our room was on the 81st floor and meals were in the restaurants on the 87th and 91st floors - almost 400 metres above ground.

• Highest on a building roof - in 2009 we were in Bangkok on my birthday and to celebrate we had dinner at the open-air Vertigo restaurant of the Banyan Tree Hotel, located on the hotel's 61st floor.

a vertigo-inducing dinner?

• Favourite dessert - at the Bistrot de la Porte des Lilas here in Reunion Island they have my all-time favourite dessert: discs of chocolate interspersed with raspberries and fresh cream :-)

my favourite dessert

What about you? Do you have any unique eating places to share?

North Korea: to visit or not to visit?

From an ethical point of view should you visit North Korea? What do you reply to anyone who says the money you paid for the trip has been spent on the North's missile and nuclear weapons programmes, and that tourists are helping to prop up the regime with their cash and visits that legitimise the administration? 

This was the subject of an article published on Deutsche Welle's website in which I'm quoted. I'll leave you to read the article here.

You can read the account of my 2010 trip to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea here.

What do you think about visiting? Let me know in the comments below.

You might also like:

• Alternate universe : Pyongyang
• Ship shape ? (or submarine shape ?)

Alternate universe : Pyongyang

Charlie Crane is an advertising and editorial photographer in the UK. But his most stunning work is a personal project that he shot a few years ago, in North Korea’s capital city.

“If there is no possibility of getting underneath the surface then the answer was to photograph the surface itself,” Crane writes in his artist statement. In other words: “Photograph what they want you to see.” Crane’s North Korean minders couldn’t have guessed that the resulting images would depict such a sterile, empty city. Save for a handful of people—who are almost invariably shot alone, against static backgrounds that make them look like department-store mannequins—Pyongyang looks totally abandoned. (You’d think the neutron bomb had just hit.) And yet these photographs are chillingly beautiful, and all the more poignant for the suffering they somehow manage to exclude from the frame.

Check out some photos from Charlie Crane’s “Welcome to Pyongyang” series or see more of the photos on Crane’s website.

Other photographers with arresting photos of North Korea, particularly the Mass Games, are Sam Gellman and Werner Kranwetvogel.

via Very Short List.

You can read about my own trip to the DPRK here.