Ecuador’s old colonial heart used to be a no-go area. But since it has had a makeover, it’s a must-visit. Sarah Barrell goes exploring downtown

Strange to think that stopping for ice cream could be considered part of an historical tour. But in the “new” Quito old town, it seems things are changing so fast that a septuagenarian ice-cream seller with a lifetime pitch on a corner of Plaza San Francisco is considered something of an endangered relic.

Of course in the old town, a Unesco World Heritage Site since 1978, there’s no lack of historical attractions. This sky-scraping city, capital of Ecuador in the northern Andes is home to some of the most stunning Spanish colonial architecture on the continent. The spires of some 30 churches spike Quito’s skyline, including the oldest in the Americas, the Iglesia San Francisco, the jewel in the crown of yet another superlative – the continent’s largest religious complex. Sitting at an altitude of 2,800m, Quito has always been breathtaking, but in the past few years the city’s colonial hub has undergone a facelift that will truly take your breath away.

Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/americas/south-america-special-ecuador–all-change-in-the-city-of-clouds-526242.html

Roam the higgledy-piggledy streets, take in the views from the cable car, and dine at 10,000ft – don’t forget your oxygen chaser

Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/americas/south-america-special-24-hours-in-quito-526243.html

At the beginning of September, the Hamptons resounds with the clatter of designer deck chairs going into storage, shutters being hauled down and the collective groan of Manhattan’s chattering classes returning to the city. A cavalcade of overstuffed SUVs filters back through bridge and tunnel trailing Kate Spade beach bags and pedigree pooch accoutrements. Such unseemly seasonal migration isn’t undertaken by the classiest second-home savants, however. The place to be, especially as fall comes around, is upstate New York.

Like the Hamptons, New York’s Catskill Mountains and neighbouring Hudson River Valley are around two hours’ drive from Manhattan. And like the Hamptons, this part of upstate New York has an impressive celebrity caché, except luminaries flocking to this region tend to be of the calibre mentioned in the arts section of the New Yorker, rather than caught in indiscreet poses by the National Enquirer. “De Niro, Liv Tyler, Bowie: they’re like part of the wildlife,” says Kate Pierson, member of the new-wave pop act the B-52s and owner of a new motel near the Catskill’s town of Woodstock. “But this area has always been a retreat for musicians and arty urbanites, so celebrities are pretty much left to themselves.”

Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/americas/travel-special-september–upstate-new-york-521853.html

Guyana’s interior is pioneer country. Those who go are rewarded with elegant places to stay, says Sarah Barrell

It’s 10.30am and the shop assistant is already sweating. The transaction isn’t a tough one. I’m an easy mark, armed with American dollars and a consumer’s hunger for one of the traditional Berbice chairs on sale, complete with planter’s arms and chintzy upholstery, but the simple act of breathing here induces a sauna-like glow.

“So you been to Berbice then?” says the salesman with a slow West Indian drawl. I explain that I haven’t visited the former sugar plantation town in Guyana’s interior, which produces the eponymous chair. “But I am going down the Essequibo River,” I offer. “Into the interior and the Amazon.”

Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/americas/guyanas-jungle-lodges-516307.html

Sarah Barrell advises on the best places to spend, eat and rest in her adopted city of New York.

Since the mid 1990s, when New York lifted strict zoning law restrictions limiting the number of chain stores in one area, Midtown in Manhattan has become more like the Midwest, with dull franchises predominating.

Well-heeled local shoppers head to the very north of Midtown bordering the bottom end of the Upper East Side (around Madison Avenue) for the classier stores – think big-name designer houses with thousand-dollar price tags and bouncers on the doors.

The Telegraph Travel section

Avoiding the day-trippers who flock there, Sarah Barrell camps in the Galapagos and gets a fresh insight into everyday life

It sometimes seems that the more spectacular a location, the more violent its creation. Take Santorini, in Greece, for example, or Iceland; these barren landscapes are the result of their earth-shattering volcanic births. But nowhere in the natural world do you get as much bang for your buck as in the Galapagos, an archipelago located 960km from the South American mainland, flung into existence by an underwater chain of volcanoes and spread across 45,000 square kilometres of Pacific Ocean.

Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/americas/galapagos-exploring-these-unique-volcanic-islands-512984.html

The clubbing scene has moved to Montreal. No, really. Sarah Barrell reports.

Fair-weather friends Montrealers are not. This far north, chilly evenings are already turning the leaves into the reds, yellows and oranges of a fiery fall.

The summer marathon of outdoors festivals is over and snow will soon be on the ground. But this hasn’t sent Montreal’s party masses into hibernation. And nor will it.

On a rib-shaking Tuesday evening last January, I saw smart young things slip-sliding across sheet ice, making their way to the Wonder Bar at the new W Hotel.

Read more: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/northamerica/canada/733711/Canada-cool.html

Old money, liberal values (well, arty ones) – that’s the Hudson Valley. Sarah Barrell heads upriver to hang with the A-list

The Hamptons, darling, they’re so last summer. Those in the know don’t close their beach houses, because they don’t have beach houses. Nothing so St Tropez tacky graces the property portfolio of New York’s second-home savants. The place to be, particularly during fall, with its oh-so-idyllic landscape of pumpkins and autumn leaves, is the Hudson Valley.

The buzz in New York about rural boltholes centres on the Hudson Valley and neighbouring Catskill Mountains. Writers from food and travel magazines are making pilgrimages upstate and the property pages are asking of towns in the valley’s Dutchess County “is this the next Hamptons?” It’s not. It’s more like Gloucestershire: understated, rural with old-money credentials that stretch back centuries. And unlike the Hamptons, visitors don’t need well-connected friends to get a bed. Six hotels opened in Dutchess County last year and there’s no lack of venerable old inns. Rhinebeck, a pretty market town in central Dutchess, is home to The Beekman Arms, the “oldest inn in America”.

Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/americas/is-this-the-next-hamptons-we-rather-hope-not-509539.html

Guyana’s rainforest buzzes with the cries of piha birds, howler monkeys and macaws. Sarah Barrell treks to their exotic beat.

To be woken by a wolf whistle is a novelty not many enjoy, but there it was, rousing us from sleep with a flirty insistence. Later, as the sun climbed to warm the top of the jungle canopy, the whistle of the screaming piha bird, the Amazon’s signature alarm call, was drowned out by the ominous rising, rolling roar of the red howler monkey, chasing us across the peaty rainforest floor like a haunting. By noon the ear-splitting screech of scarlet macaws could be heard overhead and, following a deafening downpour of rain, a bell-bird announced the sunshine with the oddly incongruous whine of a garden strimmer.

Noise pollution may have become an irritating part of modern life but in the rainforest and savannah of the Rupununi, a remote region in southern Guyana, it’s a case of sound and fury signifying, well, everything. What time it is, when the rains will come, when they will end, and when the sun will make the ground steam and mists rise into the trees with such primordial potent that each morning, you swear, must surely be the first on earth.

Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/americas/guyanas-rainforest-rumble-in-the-jungle-508066.html