Ubud’s budget scene is unusually good for what it costs. Pools, free breakfast, and daily yoga are standard rather than a luxury add-on, and the difference between a big social hostel and a quiet family homestay is really a difference in what kind of trip you want, not in comfort or cleanliness. This guide covers both ends properly: proper social hostels with...
Ubud has thousands of places to stay, from ten-dollar homestays to resorts that open with a walk across a suspended bridge. Rather than one long undifferentiated list, these picks are sorted by what each hotel actually does best, so you can jump straight to the category that matches your trip. This guide focuses on the 32 strongest picks across every style and...
Where to stay in Ubud comes down to one real question: how much walking are you willing to trade for how much jungle? Ubud isn’t a single town so much as a scatter of villages that grew into each other. Central Ubud gets you Jalan Raya’s markets, temples and traffic all within a few minutes’ walk. Ten minutes further out, in either direction, the...
Cairns punches above its size for a city built around one purpose: getting you to the Great Barrier Reef. The Esplanade alone has three Crystalbrook-branded five-stars within a few blocks of each other, a Pullman on either side of the CBD, and a lagoon pool standing in for the beach the city itself doesn’t have. Up the coast, Palm Cove does the beach properly...
Cairns has an odd secret for a city built entirely around the Great Barrier Reef: the CBD itself has no beach. The Esplanade waterfront is a mudflat at low tide, crocodile warning signs and all, and everyone swims in the free saltwater lagoon instead. That single fact decides more about where you should stay here than anything else. Want to walk to your reef boat and...
The mosquitoes found me before the tree did. I was standing under a strangler fig that had been alive for something like 500 years, and all I could think about was my ankles. That was the first ten minutes of a full day on the Atherton Tablelands, the highland plateau that sits an hour or two inland from Cairns, cool where the coast is humid, green in a completely...
Singapore does not do average hotels. Within a few square miles you can find a 139-year-old colonial icon where the Singapore Sling was invented, a converted 1895 shipping warehouse with the original pulleys still bolted to the ceiling, and a capsule pod on Smith Street with a better guest-review record than some full-service hotels charging four times as much. This...
Singapore is compact enough to cross by MRT in under an hour, but the neighbourhood is still the decision that shapes a trip the most. A base in Marina Bay puts the skyline outside the window. A base in Chinatown puts a hawker centre outside the door. Neither is wrong â they are simply different holidays. This guide breaks the city down into nine areas, with real...
Tokyo has thousands of hotels, and most “best of” lists are built from the same recycled twenty names without checking whether they are still open, let alone still good. This one is not. Every hotel below was checked against its own site, current listings and independent reviews, organised by what it actually does best rather than by star rating alone...
Tokyo does not have one obvious place to stay. It has a dozen good ones, each built around a different train line and a different version of the city. Base yourself in the wrong neighbourhood and a trip that should feel effortless turns into an hour of transfers before breakfast. Base yourself in the right one and the whole city opens up within a few stops...