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Welcome to another issue of what I believe is the most colourful newsletter on the web! This issue, our fourth, includes our usual roundup of interesting travel information.
Your Travel & Leisure Newsletter team continues to travel - in the name of research, of course. And sometimes just for the pleasure of it. I recently visited Manila, enjoying a fine stay at the  ever reliable Mandarin Oriental Hotel in the Makati business district. Meanwhile, Editor-at-Large, John Borthwick revisited Thailand, this time with award-winning Emirates.
Importantly, we're keen to gauge interest in our new Travel & Leisure Privilege Club that will be launching later this year. The highlight will be a special invitation to experience, at a very good rate, the Phuket Pavilions, a spectacular resort that has just opened. Or, locally, we're inviting members to be pampered at their preferred Angsana Spa - there are two in Sydney and one at Palm Cove, Cairns. You are also invited to dine beside Sydney Harbour at the elegant Sails Restaurant at Lavender Bay. The Travel & Leisure Privilege Club will be free to join. Just register your interest and we'll be in touch with a list of exclusive privileges. Just drop us an email and we will happily put you on our priority list!
Happy Travelling!
Derek Taylor
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South Australia's beautiful Kangaroo Island at first glance seems like a chunk of the Outback that has run away to sea. The 4500 sq km island (Australia's third largest), located south of Adelaide, has plenty of creatures including sheep, echidnas, koalas, cockatoos and, of course, kangaroos. And where the lush grasslands roll down to the sea, they meet waters so Capri blue that it looks like Mudgee gone to the Mediterranean. Travel on and you find sea lions  lording it over the beaches and fur seals romping in wave-pummeled coves. Amid the all this fresh air and blue sky you'll also find some very sophisticated accommodation.
Surrounded by its own spacious natural sanctuary, a new concept in intelligent hospitality has taken root on Kangaroo Island LifeTime Private Retreats. Choose from one of only three secluded, beautiful homes and discover the joy of being you amid one of the world's great island hideaways. This is the prefect executive retreat and more. Here you can touch and taste simple pleasures: fly a kite, watch the kangaroos, plunge into the surf, roam the cliffs and return to find your personal chef has created a private lunch with local goodies. And later, when the stars come out, you can dine beneath them. Not a bad way to get back in touch with what counts.
www.life-time.com.au/retreats.html
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 The fabled Sultanate of Oman, dramatically situated on the coast of the Arabian Peninsula, overlooks three seas the Arabian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. Yet this ancient realm is far more than dunes and shore. Besides being one of the true heartlands of Arab culture, Oman has a
rich landscape that ranges from rugged mountains and deepwater fjords to lush green hills, oasis towns and beaches that stretch along 1,700 km of coastline.
Oman's capital Muscat blends prosperous modernity with its Arabian heritage. Meanwhile, a journey to regional centres such as Salalah, Sohar, Nizwa and Sur (home port the legendary sailor Sinbad) will show you a land of surprising variety, of castles and forts, archaeological ruins and fertile farmlands.
One of the great discoveries about Oman for many visitors is that it is a
water sport playground, with excellent scuba diving and fishing in many
places, plenty of dolphin and whale-watching opportunities, sea kayaking and
windsurfing and, perhaps surprisingly, even good surfing.
Muscat, the gateway to your Oman adventure is served daily by direct
connections from Bahrain on Gulf Air. Coming soon to Muscat is the spectacular, new Shangri-La's Barr Al Jissah Resort & Spa. The resort
comprises three luxury hotels for both business and leisure guests, set amid
124 acres of landscaped gardens, overlooking the Gulf of Oman. All 680 rooms
are sea-facing and range from no less that five-star to five-star deluxe and
six star. Luxury, indeed!
www.shangri-la.com
www.omantourism.gov.om
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Dry-throated terms like "Red Heart" or "Dead Heart" evoke images of Central
Australia as a barren and waterless place - an impression that is itself
dead wrong. Central Australia has, if you look, water, water everywhere. You
can drive the waterholes of Central Australia on a fascinating two-night,
three-day trip from Alice Springs to Ayers Rock, following a 700-km western loop through the West MacDonnell Ranges and Kings Canyon. Places like Standley Chasm, Ellery Creek Big Hole and Serpentine Gorge make a brilliant corrective to the notion that Uluru and the Olgas are the only things to see in Central Oz.
Much of this spectacular excursion is within the huge West MacDonnell National. All day you drive through a landscape that is so "Namatjira" that it is like driving through one of his paintings, with its dappled trees, ochre escarpments and shadowed distances. Not so flash might be the dinner menu at an overnight stop: a "zoo food" meal where we celebrate theAustralian coat of arms by eating it,'roo, emu and all. Let's say, the accommodation is better than the (witchetty) grub.
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A modest infinity south of the Red, if not Green, Centre is South Australia's most famous Outback town, Coober Pedy - or "Coobpeedie" as the locals say it. Flying in, you notice the desert below littered with mullock heaps flung up from hundreds of opal mine burrows. It looks like the finals of the gopher Olympics.
At 845 sealed road kilometres north of Adelaide, Coober Pedy today is the Outback Redeemed, the House-trained Mulga. "Population's 3500 residents, but there's actually twice as many out in the scub - but not the kinda people that want be on the electoral roll, if you know what I mean," you may be told by a man who, of course, declines to give his name. Like most residents, he both lives and works underground - opal miner by day, post-mod Hobbit by night.
Over 100,000 travellers a year drive or fly into town, most hoping to
purchase at least one opal. "My last mine was so big that I could burn
around inside it on a front-end loader," brags the owner of an equally large
opal showroom on Hutchinson Street, the main drag. Like many others here, he realised that the secret to anything was to move up the food chain - from
opal mining to opal marketing. As one an ex-cattle cocky eloquently puts it:
"Bugger cattle. Farming tourists is the most profitable job around here."
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A few years ago I had an assignment just south of Launceston, at Evandale, home of Australia’s penny-farthing bicycle fantatics. You  didn’t know we had any? Evandale's great annual event is its National Penny Farthing Championship which draws riders from around the world. Perched on these mad, monetarist conveyances, these Handlebar Harrys race each other furiously through the town's colonial-era streets. Stand clear and cheer.
"Farmers' Glory, Prisoners' Hell. / Land of Buggers, Fare ye well!" Convict author "Frank the Poet" McNamara left no doubt about his view of old Van Diemen's Land. Things are a great deal more civilised these days. Forget the apple mono diet. Tasmanian food can be fantastic, especially the scrumptious chocolates, oysters and wines. It makes touring here a double treat.
To work up an appetite head to Freycinet Peninsula's National Park. Its huge granite massif, known ominously as The Hazards, looks like a careworn Ayers Rock that’s gone walkabout for a seaside holiday. We hoofed up and over the saddle between its Gothic spires to reach fabled Wineglass Bay and its isthmus of pure white sand and cerulean shallows. Five hours and twelve kilometres from our start, we made it back to civilisation, parched. "What'll it be?" asked the barman at Freycinet Lodge. "A cold one, or a dive straight off our wharf?" "Both," we answered.
The Tasman Highway runs south through old sandstock villages and little places with graphic names like Break-O'Day River, Bust-Me-Gall-Hill and Break-Me-Neck Hill. We bypassed the villages of Snug and Sandfly, and somehow missed both Paradise and Nowhere. But anywhere there in summer is, you might say, Paradise enough.
 Life on Egypt's great River Nile seems eternal. I once travelled part of it by felcucca - spectacular, albeit slowboat fun. The usual and faster way is by Nile cruiser. Join the great river at Aswan and from here you can follow it to the Mediterranean, some 1000 kilometres away. Aswan is the heart of Upper Egypt. In colonial days, "the" place to stay here was the Cataract Hotel, and it still is. Don't miss sipping Turkish coffee on its balcony while watching the cataracts. I've taken the half-day air trip from Aswsan to the great temple of Abu Simbel, Pharaoh Ramses II's attempt at self-deification in stone. The journey is a something of a sheep-crush experience but the temple complex is compensation for the fast-forward itinerary. The temples are now 61 metres above where the Pharaoh built them, having been moved in the 1960s and reassembled above the rising waters of Lake Nasser.
The Nile steamers of colonial days have been replaced by cruise ships. Docking in one at Luxor, you meet the full force of ancient Egypt. In the Valley of the Kings and the Queens among tombs some four millenia old - of queens Hatshepsut and Nefertari, Pharaoh Tutankhamen and others - you'll also encounter the full force of modern Egypt's hawkers of tourist souvenirs. We beat a retreat to the Royal Bar of the Sofitel Winter Palace Hotel to sip gin fizzes before heading off to the evening sound and light show at the grand Temple of Karnak. Following the Nile north, you reach Cairo where the Egyptian Museum and the loot of a thousand tombs reminds us that few countries have a history as profound as Egypt's. Giza, 13 km from Cairo, is ancient Egypt's most famed complex. The Great Pyramid of Cheops remains where it has stood for some 4500 years, flanked by the faceless Sphinx and the pyramids of Chephren and Mycerinus. You're not allowed to climb the pyramids. So I did. Got to the top of Mycerinus and back before the guard could holler 'Backsheesh!'
Your Egypt journey usually starts and ends in Cairo, which is the perfect stop-over on Gulf Air's route from Australia to Europe via Bahrain. From Bahrain there are easy connections to Cairo, from where a short journey brings you to the Nile Delta, Alexandria and the Mediterranean. Ride in a horse carriage along Alexandria's spray-drenched corniche that was the decadent, between-Wars playground of an international elite. Author Lawrence Durrell immortalised this gilded epoch in his Alexandria Quartet. Recall it (re-read it) at the historic Cecil Hotel - your room may even be the one in which Durrell wrote much of this famous work. Some years ago I couldn't afford a room there, so I sat in the coffee shop, reading Durrell and looking around for the reincarnation of his tearaway beauty heroine Justine.
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Why go to Thailand when Thailand has come to you? Angsana Spa — the signature brand of the Banyan Tree resorts — runs one of Australia’s best day spas at Double Bay, Sydney. (There’s another at Rydges Jamison Hotel in the city, not to mention the Angsana  Resort & Spa at Palm Cove near Cairns). You step off leafy Bay Street into a fine old terrace house with an intimate ambience that’s perfect for a good spa treatment. When it comes to “character,” polished timber floors and Victorian-era architecture have it all over the acres of black marble and buffed metal found in more modern structures.
The spa’s professional masseuses are all Thais trained at the Banyan Tree Academy in Phuket. One of their most popular treatments is the Fusion Massage (a combination of Thai and Swedish techniques) which will see you drifting in and out of deep relaxation for ninety “I-don’t-want-this-to-end” minutes. The Angsana Spa makes no unsustainable, New Agey claims for “healing” or “therapy”. Instead they offer a wide range of Thai, Indonesian and other styles of relaxation massage that are extremely popular, especially among their high proportion of “repeat” regulars. The treatment rooms are serene, unpretentious and clean. The ambient music is low, the light levels are subdued and there are no intrusions. Just the laying on of hands and stress dismissed.
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