(Reuters.com) – Thirty national pavilions and two enormous curated international shows sprawl across acres of public garden and over a vast unused shipyard. Galleries and cafes are commandeered for a further 89 national shows and an ever-expanding menu of collateral events.

The quiet canals and quaint byways of Venice fizz with feverish excitement as the who’s who of the art world come to town to inaugurate what some people call the United Nations of Art.

Walking into the Venice Biennale – the largest art festival in the world – can feel rather overwhelming, and amid the to and fro Venice can become a confusing place. Stay sane and enjoy the trip with a few tips on how to plan for the event, which runs through November 27th.

Where to Stay

Hotel rooms, which are in short supply in Venice at the best of times, become extremely scarce during the biennale and booking well in advance is strongly advised. Venice is awash with unfortunate stories of stranded travellers.

As the old saying goes, location, location, location is especially true in this island city. Though small, Venice is poorly connected and the Vaporetto waterbus, the city’s only public transport service, was on strike during the biennale preview days in early June. Getting around on foot might be the only alternative if the city’s small and expensive fleet of water taxis are fully booked.

Fortunately, many of the grandest hotels in Venice are located within easy distance of the biennale’s grounds as well as the Piazza San Marco at the centre of town. The grand arches and faded splendour of the Hotel Danieli (<danieli.hotelinvenice.com>), overlooking the mouth of the Grand Canal, is ideally located for exploring both. One wing of the hotel was recently refurbished and the terrace restaurant on the roof offers breathtaking panoramas of the busy waterways to enjoy over dinner.

Hotel Bauer (<www.bauervenezia.com/>) is another favourite of biennale regulars. Located between Harry’s Bar and the Rialto, the lobby and terrace bar become the main social intersection for the art pack after dark. Conferences, private events and impromptu after-parties fill the ground-floor rooms through the biennale season, and the hotel offers a luxurious place to stay for travellers who have more people to meet than hours in the day.

Travelling with Children

Venice can be a lot of fun for children too, and just across the water the Lido offers an expanse of greenery with walking, cycling and swimming facilities very close to the main city. The beaches of the Lido are romantic, nostalgic and make for an excellent day out. The area is also just one Vaporetto stop from the Giardini, another enormous public park full of art as well as green space for children to enjoy.

Many of the national pavilions exhibiting in the Giardini offer interactive exhibitions, for example the USA pavilion features a singing ATM, and performances by the USA gymnastics team have been incorporated into two of the installations. Big Bambu, by Mike and Doug Starn, is showing in a collateral event (unofficial artistic contributions) on the Grand Canal and allows visitors to climb to the top of a giant tower made from bamboo.

Don’t Miss

This year, the national pavilions are the main event with outstanding contributions from Poland, Germany, America and the UK in particular. In the middle of the gardens, an enormous repurposed US army tank lies on its back with a treadmill and runner perched on top of the left corner. The rest of the exhibition addresses similar attention-grabbing themes, such as the role of America’s military.

Israeli artist Yael Bartana is Poland’s choice for this year’s biennale; …And Europe Will Be Stunned is a bold and provocative video installation that advocates the return of three million Jews to Poland in three skilfully produced parts.

Around town, collateral events lurk in almost every corner. Drop into shows at Palazzo Papadopoli, Palazzo Fortuny and the Dogana del Mar, as well as everything else you have time for.

(The opinions expressed by the writer are her own.) (Editing by Peter Myers)

(Reuters.com) – London is home to one of the most diverse and exciting restaurant scenes in the world. But sometimes, packed in among the masses of mediocre fare, exceptional dining experiences must be sought out rather than stumbled upon.

Here, four of London’s most widely acclaimed chefs – Gary Lee of The Ivy, Rainer Becker of Zuma, Tong Chee Hwee of Michelin-starred Hakkasan and Dave McCarthy of Scott’s – talk about what they believe goes into making a restaurant experience particularly memorable, how they pull it off at their own establishments, and what they look for when they hang up their aprons and head out to eat.

THE COMFORTS OF HOME “In the end people come back for the food” concludes Rainer Becker, head chef at Zuma, as we discuss what lies at the heart of a memorable dining experiences. Everyone agrees that good service, ambiance and company are must-haves when it comes to enjoying a fabulous meal. But making diners “happy”, which The Ivy’s head chef Gary Lee says is his main aim, is ultimately all about delivering food that “satisfies the soul as well as the stomach.”

This goal sounds both ambitious and enigmatic. To achieve it, Gary Lee draws his inspiration from childhood memories and comfort food; food that arouses happy associations makes for a very special kind of satisfaction. The smells rising from the kitchen at The Ivy, where I met Lee, confirm his theory. The aroma of simmering cauldrons of beef stock, and the buttery warmth of the pastry ovens are wafting into the chef’s office, reminiscent of long Sunday lunches and traditionally slow-cooked British food. Lee says that though the dishes may be simple and familiar, cooking them to perfection or updating the dish in subtle ways is his secret to success.

When looking for something similar himself, Gary Lee named Wild Honey in Mayfair as a place to enjoy well prepared meats. The unfussy, wholesome menu and unpretentious atmosphere are what Lee enjoys best about this restaurant. Invigorated and animated as he talks about a meal he recently had there, Lee says the dishes are simple but the execution is “flawless” and the focus is squarely on enjoying the food.

Chef Tong Chee Hwee of Hakkasan draws his inspiration from his mother and grandmother’s home cooking. He recalls the wooden stove used in the family home, their careful attention to farming home-grown ingredients. Indeed, insisting on high quality ingredients and honing an intuitive understanding for them is, for Chef Tong a hallmark of good cooking as he describes the long hours he spent peeling crab meat and garlic early in his career and how important handling the ingredients can be in learning about taste and texture before cooking even begins.

That’s why Chef Tong loves to eat at Ba Shan in Soho. The Szechuan peppers are the first thing he mentions – they come straight from Szechuan, and have no bitter after-taste, which too many peppers have. He particularly recommends the “hot and spicy numbness” of the Mouth-Watering Chicken, which he says is traditionally prepared – not too heavy and very moreish – and that reminds him of the flavours and essences of food from China.

EDIBLE ENTERTAINMENT Rainer Becker of Zuma is similarly enthusiastic about the informal dining ambiance. That’s one reason he says he enjoys British pub food so much – the atmosphere is casual and social, and many pubs also boast impressive menus. He recommends in particular the Harwood Arms, Fulham’s light, lively Michelin-starred gastropub, and Aglio E Olio, another down-to-earth neighbourhood favourite. Located in West Brompton, Becker comes here to enjoy a low key evening thanks to the really delicious pasta and local ambiance.

But the food culture Becker discovered when he visited Japan for the first time remains a defining vision for him in his cooking today. The Izakaya style of eating in Japan is the inspiration behind Zuma, and the artisanal touch in Japanese food, the attention to detail and ceremonial flourish finds echoes in its menu, natural interiors and hand-thrown ceramics that are unique to each dish.

In the same vein Dave McCarthy of seafood-specialist Scott’s tells me about the visual drama of seafood and how much delight his customers take in prising open shells and cracking claws, sometimes abandoning cutlery to use their hands while eating. Eating delicate food such as fish with bones or shellfish, which can be laborious and requires care, is something many of his customers see as a treat. At the same time, getting involved with your food adds an “extra sensory and social dimension” to the meal and brings people together by turning the food into a conversation piece or an ice-breaker over the table.

So it makes sense that both McCarthy and Becker name Heston Blumenthal’s newly opened restaurant Dinner at the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park as one of the most exciting meals they have recently enjoyed. Blumenthal, known for the elaborate theatricality of his menus, with whizzing, popping and melting ingredients, turns a meal into an exotic food odyssey with surprises in every course.

The novelty of the meal is a source of great excitement for both chefs and delivers bang for buck because the food itself is delicious and entertaining. Bon appétit!

Find the London restaurants named in the article:

Zuma, 5 Raphael Street (here)

The Ivy, 1-5 West Street (www.the-ivy.co.uk)

Hakkasan, 8 Hanway Place (w3.hakkasan.com/hanway-place)

Wild Honey, 12 St George Street (www.wildhoneyrestaurant.co.uk)

Ba Shan, 24 Romilly Street (0207 287 3266)

Harwood Arms, 27 Walham Grove (www.harwoodarms.com)

Aglio E Olio, 194 Fulham Road (0207 351 0070)

Scott’s, 20 Mount Street (www.scotts-restaurant.com)

Dinner, Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, 66 Knightsbridge (here)

(Editing by Peter Myers)

(To read earlier posts from Mongol Rally, click here)

It was time to put our knowledge of off-road driving to the test and manoeuvre the car as lightly and gently as possible over the potholes to the safety of a garage.

The sight of a gaggle of sunburnt, shirtless mechanics smoking on a garage driveway was a relief. It took the combined intelligence of the three members of my rally team and four Kazakh mechanics to communicate, mostly using sign language, what was wrong with the car.

The dusty back windscreen of the car became a handy blackboard as we agreed a price. We were ushered into a roadside café to wait while the repair work was done and snacked on savoury doughnut/dumplings stuffed with ground meat. Evidently it was a local favourite as we had been eating it for lunch and dinner ever since we arrived in Kazakhstan.

About an hour later, we were back on the road with a new set of suspension springs and a new spare tyre. The car felt good and we crossed the border into Russia later that afternoon without incident.

Remarkably, the landscape changed at the border. The endless, grassy plains of Kazakhstan slammed into dense woodland as we entered Russia. The Siberian pine forests were silent, dark and eerily beautiful.

Though the land is mostly flat, as we drove over the occasional hill we could see the forest sweeping away towards the horizon. We were told that in the remote parts of the forest, bears and wolves are still wild. The sun shone a weaker, watery yellow and soon we could feel the air was sharper and chillier than before.

The roads were lined with low, quaint log cottages. Sometimes the cottages were painted in bright shades of blue or green with white accents and almost all the small homes had ornately carved window frames.

The cities of Siberia that we passed through — Barnaul, Novosibirsk, Kemerovo and Krasnoyarsk — were sprawling and pleasant, a mix of well- planned parks and avenues lined with grand public buildings of the Soviet era and the severe concrete look of pre-fabricated residential construction.

Some older timber mansions had been well preserved, freshly painted in a rainbow of pastel shades.

We were delighted that the roads in Siberia were wide and smooth because the driving in Kazakhstan had been tedious and required an enormous amount of concentration.

We were running behind schedule and took advantage of the good roads to make up distance. In the end, we had fallen too far behind schedule to catch up fully and it was necessary for me to leave the rally a few days early.

As I write from Moscow airport, en route to Mumbai, the rest of my rally team is taking the car on towards the finish line and hope to reach Ulaanbataar, Mongolia within the week.

Unlike the low-lying desert basin of Central Kazakhstan, the northern and eastern regions gently rise up to a high altitude plateau that extends east into Russia, China and Mongolia. The grass here was longer and greener and gentle hills were faintly visible in the distance.

We were heading for a town called Semey, about 1,000 miles away on the border with Russia. We were nearing the 6,000 mile mark in our journey – two thirds of the way to Mongolia – and our car was beginning to struggle.

The treacherous terrain was taking its toll and over the next two days we limped from one mechanical challenge to the next. About 155 miles outside Almaty, the condition of the roads sharply deteriorated, becoming virtually unusable.

The gravel surface in between stretches of badly ruptured asphalt reduced our progress to less than 10 miles per hour and we swerved and skidded to avoid giant potholes that could have engulfed both front wheels of the car. It felt like the car would shake itself apart.

Around 29 miles later, we had suffered two flat tyres and were left with no spare wheels in case we had another puncture. We had no idea how long we still had to travel before we reached a road with a better surface.

On our map we could see no towns nearby where we could seek help or buy spare wheels. We had not passed any traffic all day and 93 miles later, we were exhausted and beginning to worry about our progress.

The next day saw no improvement in the condition of the roads and we struggled on at a crawl. After several hard knocks against lurking potholes we started to hear a heavy, dull metallic thud coming from the belly of the car.

The sound was unnerving. We stopped to check our luggage, we checked the engine for leaks and broken parts, we checked to see if the exhaust had come loose but could not locate the source of the thumping.

It took us some time to realize that our rear suspension springs had snapped. The car was simply unable to withstand the impact of so many potholes.

We needed to repair the suspension urgently, but it was getting dark and we didn’t know where we were. The only sign of habitation we saw all day was a ghost town, completely abandoned.

We decided the best option was to set up camp and wait for daylight.

A couple of hours after leaving Aral we could see the first signs of increased prosperity – herds of sheep and cows grazing and some land cultivated for agriculture.

The main city in this area is Almaty, which was the capital of Kazakhstan until 1998, when the northern city of Astana replaced it. However, Almaty is still the country’s economic centre.

We hoped to reach the city by nightfall.

On our way to Almaty, we decided to stop in two towns along the way – Turkestan and Shymkhent.

Turkestan is a bustling, dusty place with little to tempt tourists except that it is home to the elegant but unfinished Yasaui Mausoleum.

The mausoleum is the resting place of Khoja Ahmed Yasaui, the 12th century Turkic poet and sufi mystic. It was built in the late 14th century by order of the Mongol Emperor Timur.

However, construction ceased after Timur’s death in 1405 and the mausoleum was never completed.

We could see the impressive turquoise domes of the mausoleum from a distance and three of the outer walls are covered in bright tiles. But the facade of the building is made of exposed brick. This is the part of the mausoleum that was never completed.

Further south lies Shymkhent, the busy transit hub on the Uzbek border. Here, we visited the hectic main bazaar, which locals in Turkestan say was one of the best in Central Asia.

The wholesale market was indeed a sight to behold – melons and watermelons grow abundantly in Kazakhstan and rows of traders were loading these huge fruits onto trucks bound south for Uzbekistan.

After Shymkhent the road turned northeast towards Almaty. The road runs along the northern edge of the dramatic Tian Shan mountain range, which forms a natural border between Kazakhstan and Kyrgystan.

The Tian Shan extends from the Pamir in the south to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of Western China and is an exciting destination for trekking and mountaineering.

As we climbed higher, the rolling slopes became grassy and we could smell the sweet, fresh scent of wild herbs and flowers. The different shades of green and yellow glowed in the afternoon sun.

At first appearance Almaty is a grey, concrete city with wide boulevards of fast-moving traffic. However, the central district is leafy and lively with beautiful parks and street-side cafes.
We visited the exquisite wooden cathedral in Paniflov Park. The yellow walls and painted domes were reminiscent of ice cream colours and the singing inside was so beautiful that we stayed to hear the whole service.

In the Old Square, the now unused buildings of the old government still stood grandly, surrounded by fountains and wide pedestrian avenues. Retired men sat in small groups and played cards while young people walked arm in arm.

Aral is a small fishing village situated on the northeastern shores of the inland Aral Sea. Today, however, there is no water in sight. During the Stalin years, Aral suffered the collapse of its major industry – fishing – at the hands of collectivization, the agricultural policy pursued by Stalin between 1928 and 1940.

The waters of the Aral Sea and its vital river sources were diverted for irrigation of cotton fields with catastrophic consequences. The Aral Sea shrank to 75 percent of its former surface and lost 80 percent of its water.

Native species of fish and other marine life were wiped out. The waters of the Aral Sea now lie 70-100 km away and the town has still not recovered. Fishing boats lie unused on the parched sea bed.

For us, Aral was primarily a rest stop. The blistering heat of the Kazakh Steppe and the treacherous terrain made for an exhausting but exhilarating crossing. We entered Kazakhstan at the border between Astrakhan and Atyrau.

We navigated the car across a flimsy floating pontoon bridge that was made of oil drums strapped together with metal girders. It was essential to move slowly and steadily, to avoid the bridge from swaying and upsetting the passage of smaller vehicles and motorbikes behind us.

Western Kazakhstan is home of the country’s oil industry, with Atyrau serving as the launch point to the major reserves such as the Tengiz oil field on the northeastern shores of the Caspian Sea.

The surrounding landscape is sandy and arid, with camels roaming between telephone poles and oil derricks. As we pushed north from Atyrau, we entered the desert of central Kazakhstan. We drove for days without passing a village or town and the land was so barren and dry that it could not support even small herds of grazing livestock.

During the day, the heat of the Steppe was crippling. At over 40 degrees, heat hazes streaked along the horizon and there was no tree or shade as far as the eye could see. The nights, though cooler, were too hot for sleeping in the tent. Instead we rolled out our mats on the open ground and slept under the clear starry sky.

Navigating the dirt tracks that criss-cross central Kazakhstan was tricky because of the lack of landmarks on the plain and the off-road surface of the tracks tested our car to its limits. More than once, our car got stuck in the sand with the tyres swerving and skidding, unable to grip the fine, dust-like sand.

We pushed the car from behind and when that didn’t work we tried sitting on the hood in the hope of weighing down the front of the car to help the wheels gain traction. Eventually a passing freight truck – the only traffic we saw along this track – stopped to haul our car out of the sand and towed us on to firmer ground.
 
Later the same day, our car beached on a sand drift. The sand was over our axles and the only solution was to dig our way out, despite the relentless and scorching sun.

That day, progress was slow. Luckily we had planned well and had extra water and petrol with us to last till we reached Aral. Tonight, we look forward to some much needed rest and we set off tomorrow for Shymkhent.

(More posts from the Mongol Rally here)

From the start we planned to drive across Europe as quickly as possible, knowing the poor roads, the intense heat and the vast distances in Central Asia would be the most testing part of the trip.

By day four of the rally, we had reached the western border of Ukraine. Along the way via Bruges, Nurnberg, Prague and Krakow the small fields and rolling hills of Western Europe had given way to a blaze of sunflower fields yawning towards the horizon under a big, bright blue sky — the inspiration behind the Ukrainian national flag.

In Ukraine, our rally experience shifted gear. We now had to contend with all signs in Cyrillic script and a formidable language barrier since nobody in our team spoke a word of Russian. The road quality deteriorated sharply. Ukraine has no major highways and as we progressed east the potholes became so large and frequent that it was hard to average more than 20 mph at times.

This did, however, give us the chance to explore the country roads and towns. We discovered provincial towns such as Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk were in severe disrepair with creaking Soviet-era infrastructure and housing.

Closed factories, abandoned rail lines and exhausted quarries sprinkled the outskirts of these regional hubs and there were few signs of commercial vibrancy despite the buzz of economic activity elsewhere in the country.

However the charming tiled cottages of the villages, abundant fresh produce and the warmth of the people we met on the way made for a memorable few days in Ukraine.