BY SEA: If money is no problem, you have time on your hands and H yearn to return to a more gracious and relaxed way of travelling, consider crossing the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth II. During the trip, you can calmly plan your stay in New York.
From Australia, New Zealand and South Africa From Australia: There’s twice-weekly air service from Sydney to New York via Los Angeles. Package deals, excursion fares for 14- to 28-day stays and APEX fares for 14- to 45-day stays are available.
New York map queens Photo Gallery
They sent me a travel warrant and I found my way to the Hotel Europa, off the Cromwell Road near Earls Court. It was a funny, quirky place, a tall dirty-white terraced building in a row of tall dirty-white white terraced buildings, silent as a crypt inside, with a hunchback porter and a creaking old-fashioned cage lift that went so slowly it barely seemed to move. I felt as if I were cast in an old black-and-white film. In the evening I went down for dinner and was placed on a table with a pock-marked youth a year my senior called Dave. He was going for the same interview the next day. Dave was 17 and made himself out as a man of the world. He announced we would go to Soho after dinner and get some girls’. My experience of getting some girls was brief sporadic groping on a few odd occasions but I hammed that I was up for this and off we went: me in my grey school suit, Dave in a cool brown corduroy jacket. The evening was disastrous because the pubs wouldn’t serve me and the club we went to wouldn’t let me in. I was humiliated, unable to carry off my image: in my boyish daydreams I might have been a sophisticated, nightclubbing girl-magnet, but my dreams crashed to earth in the cold reality of West End London on a Tuesday evening.
