Travel Destinations

When Beijinger Rex Yang arrived in Seychelles in late January, he did not expect that a planned two-week family holiday would stretch to three months, with no end in sight. Little did he know, he would also become an accidental ambassador for the country’s tourism industry.  The Yang family is still stranded on the island of La Digue, the third-largest in the Seychelles archipelago in the Indian Ocean off East Africa.  The family’s stay was originally extended because Yang’s mother was unwell, and then further prolonged because Seychelles’ international airport was shut down as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Before the virus crisis took hold, the 33-year-old, his mother, sister and n

Of all the places to sit out the Covid-19 pandemic, few sound more appealing than a beachside villa on a tropical island.  For one family at least, that is the reality after they became stuck in Fiji on what was supposed to be a round-the-world trip of a lifetime. “We never imagined the coronavirus would spread so far and wide – or so quickly,” says Lau Hsu-yung from Hong Kong. “We soon learned it was impossible to outrun it.” In the first week of February, the family waved goodbye to their 2,000 sq ft home in Hong Kong, leaving their possessions in a 100 sq ft storeroom. Downsizing and simplifying their life was also part of the plan. “We were excited about new discoveries, new opportunitie

Harbin Ice and Snow World, one of the world’s largest ice and snow theme parks, opened to the public in northeastern China on December 23, 2019. The frozen attraction in Heilongjiang province is linked to the Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival which opens on January 5, 2020.

Harbin, in China’s far northeast, owes its modern beginnings entirely to a railway. For the first three decades of the 20th century, it was effectively a Russian city. It is a place that has sparked my curiosity ever since I came across a 1927 ship’s passenger list that revealed the name of my grandfather Frank Newman’s “second wife”: Nina Kovaleva, 25, born in Sevastopol, Russia. He would leave his Shanghai-based family with her in the early 1930s. The list also named a daughter, Kyra, aged five, born in Harbin. It was a stunning revela­tion. It implied that my grandfather, an inspector for the Harbin postal sub­district from about 1912, had led a double life for at least a decade. I conta