Here’s six great things to do in Greece:

1: See a Santorini Sunset
The island of Santorini exploded, dramatically, 3600 years ago, leaving behind it a series of fractured cliffs dropping vertiginously into the Mediterranean. With its multicoloured beaches and tiers of bright houses stepped down the cliffs, it’s well worth the ferry trip out there. The sunsets? Some of the best in Europe.

2: Eat at Balthazar
If you’d ever thought food in Athens was all about kebabs, a trip to Balthazar will make you think again. During summer, this long-running, still hip restaurant occupies the most beautiful courtyard, decorated with ancient trees, rippling mosaics and low cushions to drop onto. The deceptively simple food is astounding. Make sure to book.

3: Take the Back Way to the Acropolis
The cradle of democracy, the temples of the Acropolis still tower over Athens today, and a walk to the citadel is a must. Start from the Plaka side of the mount and a little-frequented path winds up through tiny, white and blue houses and narrow stepped alleyways with meditative cats. It’s a beautiful walk to an extraordinary place.

4: Visit Delphi
Set on a sheer spur of Mount Parnassus, Delphi was the sanctuary of the Greek god Apollo. It’s the place where his priestess made prophecies that changed the fate of nations, and home to one of the games that prefigured today’s Olympics. The beautiful theatre offers breathtaking views.

5: Cruise the Caves of Diros
In the Mani region of southern Greece, an underground river meanders through dazzling chambers with sculpted stalagmites and crystal clear waters. Lights illuminate the colours below the surface and above, in hues from red to white via blue.

6: Explore Mycenae
If you’ve come across the tale of Troy, you’ll know Mycenae, home of King Agamemnon (an enormous tomb, which some believe to be his, lies not far from the citadel). Around 3000 years old, this ancient town still towers over the surrounding landscape, its giant walls and carved lions a testimony to its power.

Do you know Greece? What would be your top picks? Drop me a line in the comments. I’d love to know.

Thanks to Thomas Cook Style for sponsoring this post. Thanks to Kaikanne for the Santorini image.

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Pulau Derawan, a tiny palm and sand island off the coast of Indonesian Borneo, is famous for sea turtles.

Now, in general, when it comes to sea turtles, it’s wise to keep your expectations low. Maybe, just maybe, there’ll be a glimpse of a reptile or two sculling in the blue yonder, when you’re diving. Maybe, just maybe, over a long enough night, one will lay her eggs on shore.

The first words we heard in our guesthouse on Pulau Derawan? “Can you see the turtle?”

Over the course of four, very leisurely days, we’ve watched females laying their eggs by night. Helped store the eggs in the hatchery. Released new hatchlings into the great wide ocean. Sat on the dock watching turtles grazing, hunting, surfacing for air.

Oh, and swum with manta rays, too.

These amazing creatures soar and swoop through the waters around Sangalaki Island serene, graceful and unafraid, like opera cloaks possessed by the spirit of the sea.

Were we diving? No.

Just snorkelling. Because when you can swim with turtles and manta rays, and you’re travelling long term anyway, why spend the extra bucks on scuba?

Even if you never snorkel, you’ll love Pulau Derawan. It’s a beautifully serene place, with no electricity during daylight hours, the calm shattered only by the children letting off Ramadan firecrackers in the main street.

If you can call this a main street, that is.

We stayed with Arish and Mama Riina at Losmen Danakan. For $22 a day, the pair of us, including doughnuts for breakfast, endless coffee and tea, countless variations of fresh fish, rice and veggies for lunch and dinner, and the turtles swimming below us.

Now, to be honest, the reef off Derawan is a little patchy, still recovering from decades of dynamite and cyanide fishing. It’s the sea grass which draws the turtles, from as far away as Australia and Thailand.

Like eels, turtles will always return, when their laying time comes, to the distant place where they were hatched, long decades ago, but feed wherever necessity takes them in the meantime.

Here are some, one big male almost two metres long, grazing like marine cows and snapping at jellyfish, surprisingly agile, almost delicate as they move.

Just off the dock, also, are more classically beautiful sights. Giant clams, rich blue lips pulsing like a Georgia O’Keeffe underwater flower.

Predatory, poisonous lionfish lurk by stripy swarms of fish, and blue sea stars progress slowly across damaged coral.

And at the night high tide, particularly around the full moon, these same turtles, so gracious and fluid in the water, lumber up on land, leaving tank tracks behind them, power through the sand, protrude a tube and lay a hundred eggs or more.

One of the most wonderful things about Pulau Derawan? You don’t need to arrange your chance to view the turtles. You don’t need to pay guides, or stay up all night. You simply wander down main street, cut across the volleyball court, and see if any turtles have swum in on the tide.

It’s harder work than just laying, though. Wouldn’t it always be?

We watched a turtle, maybe eighty years old, maybe more, dig her nest, lay her eggs, and power backwards with her front flippers to cover them completely in sand. By the end of her labour she was alternating between sighs and deep, gasping breaths.

My heart bled. At least until the guys from the conservation project dug a hole to remove the eggs while the turtle, her evolutionary work done, lay oblivious on the sands then lumbered back to the sea. All anthropomorphism replaced with a strange awe at nature and her complex works.

Or, as Z put it, “She’s just going to ABANDON those eggs, is she? Poor baby turtles…”

Z, who isn’t (as we say in the UK) “backward about coming forward”, “volunteered” to take the, erm, orphaned eggs from their cool sand tunnel to the hatchery and stash them away from predators.

Now, he’d met some week-old turtles earlier in our stay, with his new friend Pablo.

If they were girls, they’d be back to lay their eggs in fifty years from now. But they’re guys. Z checked.

And so we’ll never know whether they survived the sharks, the cormorants and the eagles, which kill more than one in a thousand baby turtles in the wild, and lived to tell the tale.

But we do know that these are some of the most amazing creatures on the planet.

How to Get to Pulau Derawan

Pulau Derawan is accessible by a short speedboat ride from Tanjung Batu on the coast of Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo: boats cost from 100,000 rupiah one-way, depending on your negotiation skills. The nearest city to Tanjung Batu is Berau — the ride in a kijang (shared 4WD taxi) takes around 2.5 hours and costs from 50,000 rupiah per person. Sriwijaya, Trigana and Batavia fly to Berau, with most flights from Balikpapan. If you’ve crossed from Malaysian Borneo, there are regular boats from Tarakan to Berau.

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It’s an implausible landscape to Western eyes: classic limestone karst territory, where tectonic pressures coupled with groundwater erosion carve surrealist sculptures out of the land, and the monsoon climate clothes them in forests of deepest green.

Yesterday, we hired bikes to explore the island, winding south coast to north coast, then looping around the west coast. And it’s a moot point whether Z, having been driven by his dad, will ever get on a motorbike with me again.

It’s an incredible ride. Winding around and between these Dali-esque rock formations, which open out into dramatic bays where cormorants swoop low over the South China Sea to gulp down their invisible prey, tranquil plains, where farmers in what Graham Greene so memorably described as limpet hats cultivate rice, papaya, crabs and fish and long causeways extend dizzyingly over mangrove flats.

The nine-year-old, for some reason, didn’t fancy playing videographer, but here’s a little video of him riding pillion with his dad:

We stopped off at the Hospital Caves en route, like the Cu Chi Tunnels and the Ho Chi Minh Trail a tribute to Vietnamese engineering. They were built in 1965 when the first American bombs began to fall on Cat Ba island.

This is the view from the back door:

The complex is gobsmacking. It’s an entire, three-storey military hospital, built from concrete and proof against god knows what tonnage of TNT and napalm, created within natural limestone caves.

Here’s Z relaxing in one of the bathrooms:

Camouflaged entirely naturally, slotting seamlessly into the landscape, there are meeting rooms, wards, a swimming pool and a natural assault course to rehabilitate the long-term wounded, plus a propaganda cinema on the third floor.

Ah yes. The landscape.

Clearly, when it comes to landscape (in particular, the dazzling karst vistas of South-East Asia) our son has been thoroughly spoilt.

After long stretches of causeway, the northern road comes to a random full stop, some way out over the sea. Just, in fact, as it looks on the map, like the prelude to the “flying car” moment in countless movie car chases, except with a pier in place of a road bridge.

“What are we doing here?” Z asks.

“We came for the drive,” says his dad.

“You mean,” Z replies, slightly disbelieving. “You mean we came ALL THIS WAY from the beach just to look at a view? We drove ALL THE WAY around the WHOLE island, just for the fun of the drive?”

“Yep, son,” says his dad. “That’s about the size of it.”

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