Travel stories from the writer Mark Dapin
‘Why a Danube river cruise is the perfect father-son getaway’
A seven-night Danube cruise becomes a chance for one father to reconnect with his son and reflect on how quickly childhood passes.
– Citro, 29 July 2026
When my son was small, he used to crawl beneath the bedclothes with me in the morning. I held him as tight as a belt, his skin against my skin. Then one day – when he still seemed desperately young – he stopped coming into my bedroom for a cuddle, and I knew that he never would again.
Today my son is 21 years old. We are the same size, and he wears my clothes. Late last year, I took him on a seven-night voyage up the Lower Danube on the shiny, confident AmaMagna, the largest river cruise ship in Europe…
‘Review: Namia River Retreat in Hoi An, Vietnam’
I marinated myself in a wellness retreat… here are my thoughts.
– Escape, 2 April 2025
A wellness stay at Hoi An’s Namia River Retreat doesn’t mean cocktails by the pool are outlawed.
Namia River Retreat is a five-star “wellness inclusive resort” that opened last December outside the ancient town of Hoi An on the central coast of Vietnam. I thought that “wellness inclusive” meant you didn’t have to spend your entire holiday being “well”…
‘Review: Melbourne hotels: Why you should stay at Hyde Melbourne Place for a movie-set feel’
There’s something of a movie-set feel about Hyde Melbourne Place.
– The Nightly, 28 March 2026
Many of the guests seem like characters, made up by artists, dressed by wardrobe, playing the parts of well-heeled tourists.
My neighbours seem to have made it (whatever “it” might be – an HBO dark comedy, perhaps?). I feel serious luggage envy on eyeing their roller-bags and suitcases on the porters’ trolley.
Checking in is an oddly sensual experience. A strange movie clip of voluptuous lips, longing eyes and twisting bodies plays on loop on a giant screen behind the receptionists. Guests are issued with key cards that register your floor before you enter an elevator, although everybody tries first to select a number from the column of buttons inside the lift…
‘Stylish, central, good value for money – is this Rome’s perfect hotel?’
Whimsical fun awaits in every corner of this property.
– Explore, 27 February 2026
CitizenM Isola Tiberina opened in April last year, the first hotel in Italy from the Netherlands-based art-and-tech-driven Gen Z-humouring chain with several properties around the world, including Europe, Asia and the United States….
‘Earther’s Paradise’
A week at Gwinganna Lifestyle Retreat (Gold Coast Hinterland, Australia)
– GQ Australia
The morning I leave Gwinganna Lifestyle Retreat in the Gold Coast hinterland, my body feels like a warm, rubber doll. My arms drop loosely from my shoulders, my legs hang slack at the hips, my hands are soft, my back is supple. Even my ears are spongy and relaxed. Particularly my ears, actually…
‘It’s all in the past’
Travel can be inspired by the hope that history will come alive – and it’s also history in the making.
Escape, 26 July 2026
I used to think I could be a tour guide to historic sites. After all, I’m a historian and a journalist so I already know everything. The only skills I’d need to master would be holding up a small flagpole and talking while walking backwards…
‘24-Hour Party People’
Mark Dapin joins the weekend revellers in Bucharest.
– Escape, 31 May 2026
I didn’t expect a party town, but the Romanian capital of Bucharest is a non-stop banging night-time playground. And here’s a handy travel hack: do not try to ease your post-pub-crawl hangover with a cup of “Communist coffee” – it will only make it worse (more on that later)…
‘West Coast Cooler’
Off to Perth, Western Australia
– Travel+Leisure
I’m wandering through downtown Perth to the Carrillon City shopping precinct, on a hot, clear morning. My eyes are continually drawn in two directions at once: up to the peaks of cocksure 20th-century skyscrapers and down to the gables of unassuming 19th-century chapels…
‘The Heat is On’
Learning to cook curry on Brick Lane (London’s East End, UK)
– The Times (UK)
It’s midnight in Brick Lane and a curry tout and a young Bengali are squaring up for a fight…
DARK TOURISM
‘The Way Out: Exploring the Tokyo ‘labyrinthine’ with famed crime writer Jake Adelstein’
Journalist and Tokyo Vice author Jake Adelstein explores the changing ways – and hidden gems – of a city he knows rather damn well.
– The Nightly, 12 November 2025
For nearly two decades, Jake Adelstein was the only foreign journalist working the crime beat at Japan’s largest newspaper, digging into the underworld with a stubbornness that landed him numerous threats and on criminal hit lists.
He broke stories that toppled cops, exposed billion-dollar crime syndicates, and chronicled the rise – and slow implosion – of the modern yakuza…
‘Palermo: How the anti-Mafia spirit continues to shape life in the heart of Sicily’
In Palermo lives a new and unique shrine to the brutal realities of the Mafia’s once dominant reign.
– The Nightly, 15 November 2025
Against a hillside on the highway from the airport to Palermo stands a stark white shed daubed with the words “NO MAFIA” in soaring blue letters.
The angry slogan draws drivers’ eyes to the spot where Sicilian judge Giovanni Falcone and his wife, magistrate Francesca Morvillo, were murdered, along with their three-man security detail, by a colossal mafia bomb on May 23, 1992…
‘Hollywood Endings’
On board the Hollywood Tragical History Tour (Los Angeles, USA)
– Good Weekend
If gawking at the grandiose homes of a bunch of overpaid movie stars sounds too, too tourist-trappy, maybe you’re ready for the darker, deadlier alternative…
‘Art of Darkness’
A visit to the Andy Warhol Family Museum of Modern Art (Medzilaborce, Slovakia)
– The Sydney Morning Herald
It’s my girlfriend’s birthday and she wants to go somewhere special. “But Auschwitz is special,” I insist. She says she had something more romantic in mind. Women, eh? I know just the place – the Valley of Death…
‘Pack up your Troubles’
Tours of Belfast, Northern Ireland, with Republican and Loyalist guides
– Good Weekend
What do you do when your war is over, and the only adult job you have ever had is as a gunman? You can sit around the club singing rebel songs with old comrades, and drink Guinness until you die. You can reinvent yourself as a youth worker, a cautionary tale for teenagers drawn to violence. You can use your military skills as a gangster. Or you can become a tour guide to your own life…
‘A Bridge too Far’
Sorting fact from fiction at the bridge on the River Kwai
– Good Weekend
In the World War II Museum in the town of Kanchanaburi, Thailand, on the banks of a river that has become known as the Kwai, lies a horrific diorama of an unknown war crime: the massacre of Australian and British POWs, herded by their Japanese captors onto the bridge over the river as it was about to be bombed by Allied planes. Plaster figures of naked men lie bleeding…
‘Puttin’ on the Blitz’
On a tour of London’s wartime landmarks, Mark Dapin finds the commentary twice as interesting as expected
– The Sydney Morning Herald
At first, it looks as though I’m the only traveller to turn up for the London’s Burning walking tour, and the official City of London guide, Keith Warner, is clearly worried when I say I have to go and buy a sandwich. “You’re coming back, aren’t you?” he asks…
‘Curry, Cats and Chaos’
Bangladesh: an uncharted land for adventurers to explore
– The Sydney Morning Herald
I’d read warnings about travel in Bangladesh: the toilets are filthy, the kitchens are like toilets, and travellers will get sick. Hartals, or general strikes, regularly paralyse the state. In the villages, people are taken by Bengal tigers. But nothing filled my heart with quite as much fear as the item on day two of my Experience Bangladesh seven-day tour program…
‘On your Marx, get set … gone’
In Hungary and the Czech Republic, Mark Dapin goes in search of the collected works of communism
– The Sydney Morning Herald
It’s hard to find any communism anywhere in Hungary, which is strange because there used to be heaps of it. Sure, there are decaying blocks of brutalist apartments and the countryside is scarred with factories built of cement and string – but the founding fathers of socialism have all disappeared…
COLUMNS
‘How Peach Turned me into a Blue Possum’
Mark Dapin describes his transformation from the lowest form of skiing life at the aptly named Falls Creek in Australia
– The Guardian
After I stacked for the eighth time in 25 minutes, I realised I was not going to be able to teach myself to ski among the snowgums of Australia. I had fallen forwards, backwards and to both sides. I had landed on my wrists, my arms, my knees, my thighs and my shoulders. There were no new ways to fall. I asked a friend what I could do to improve my technique…
‘Europe travel: Why undertourism is the real problem on the busy holiday continent’
Most dictionaries don’t even accept that ‘undertourism’ is a word, although I promise you it’s a thing.
– The Nightly, 7 March 2026
Most dictionaries don’t even accept that “undertourism” is a word, although I promise you it’s a thing.
But we hear a lot about overtourism – luxury cruising the latest travel-industry sasquatch and a noisy, foul-smelling monster leaving giant carbon footprints wherever it goes.
And sure, there are port cities in Europe with more day-trippers than residents, where plagues of tourists snapping selfies while queuing outside snack bars for the same Instagrammable panini only lead to longer lines, higher prices and the locals unable to secure a decent sandwich…
‘I lost my passport in Singapore, this left me speechless’
There are many reasons I have fallen in love with Singapore, but this travel disaster made me realise it’s the best city on Earth.
– Escape, 12 June 2026
My heart nearly dropped to the tiled floor of the hotel lobby when I slipped my hand in my back pocket and realised my passport had slipped out…
‘Lost in France’
Ah, the joys of spending les vacances being driven around sun-kissed countryside. Well no, ‘passengering’ is a tough job.
– The Times (UK)
When people ask, “Did you face any special challenges driving around France?” I say, “None at all.” This is because I cannot drive. Passengering around France, however, I confronted several peculiar obstacles…