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I was surprised that we made a stop in the DRC en route from Nairobi to Ndola. I would want to avoid that on a future trip but it wasn’t a problem on this occasion. Loved the App for doing check in and being able to see all flights in one place. Many thanks for all of your help. Will definitely use DialAFlight again.
Everything went well. With your company I always travel with peace of mind that if things do not go well I have you to help - as has happened before. Thank you, you will always be my travel partner.
BA's holding area for passengers needing assistance must be upgraded and must be made rodent free. it was quite disturbing seeing rodents running around on the floor and under the furnishing. No bottled water was provided while passengers waited in the holding area, when the flight was delayed.
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Wonderful trouble-free holiday arranged by Sarah. We have used your company many times and will continue to use you.
Thank you Glen - everything ran smoothly
All went well. We were kept informed and there were no problems
Only suggestion is to have a WhatsApp or chat to communicate with DialAFlight especially during out of office hours in case client has no roaming access.
Not sure we would opt to fly with Qatar again - not what it used to be. It just didn’t have that professional / customer service edge over other airlines that it used to. DialAFlight 10/10 as always!
Really good communication from arranging the trip to completion
Great service from Donovan as per usual
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We trust DialAFlight always - and staff so friendly polite and efficient - well done
Amazing holiday to South Africa and the service from DialAFlight was first class. Flights and hotel were perfect.
It would have been very helpful to have had the literature given at the "meet & greet" on arrival in Windhoek a month before departure to familiarise with routes between accommodation.
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Always use DAF - have done for 20 years - that says how pleased we are.
Alfie was an amazing holiday organiser. Very helpful and found me the best venues. I really enjoyed my holiday.
I was very happy with the service provided by DialAFlight and would recommend them to family and friends
Kieran and team are amazing
Everything went smoothly and to plan. Another excellent trip thanks to DialAFlight
Good to include baggage allowance in the DialAFlight app rather than a link to the airline site…particularly for smaller airlines where this info isn’t easy to access nor correlate with the flight booked
We're mountain biking at 12,500ft in the Andes, past dusty pueblos, along dirt tracks through the fields of red earth that give Peru's Sacred Valley its name. Sacred because of its fertility and ability to support the finest, fattest corn and a mind boggling 2,800 types of potato.
The going has been unusually tough; the air up here is thin, but the stupendous ring of jagged crags and the coca toffees we've been chewing seem to have got us to the top of the world.
As we descend, heading towards the sunken terraces of Moray, one of the 3,000 archaeological Inca sites that litter the valley, we stop for a breather at a field of what could be red-hot pokers. The crop has floppy burnt-orange heads and bright-pink stalks, like the legs of flamingos.
'Quinoa!' says our guide Juan Carlos, beaming with pride. 'It's famous now, no?' Indeed, it is. Not so long ago, only health-food nuts would have known about this tiny Peruvian grain; today, sales of quinoa have rocketed. You'll find it everywhere, a high-protein superfood.
There are 300 varieties of quinoa grown here (including a bright red variety that turns your tongue scarlet), but it's only one in a line-up of indigenous Peruvian ingredients taking the culinary world by storm.
Some are familiar - amaranth, acai - others relative newcomers to our plates, but you'll be hearing more of them soon: maca, lucuma, camu camu, cocona, yakon and huacatay, a black mint traditionally served with pork crackling.
Many can't be found anywhere else, and now there are direct flights to Lima from Britain, they're within reach of the new breed of traveller who will cross half the world for a decent lunch.
Any foodie tour starts in Lima, Peru's vast capital sprawling some 60 miles along the Pacific coast. These days, Lima is a cosmopolitan hot spot where beautiful people drink Pisco cocktails at colonial-era bars such as Ayahuasca, or take yoga classes on the terrace of the spanking new Hotel B in the Barranco, before swinging over to celebrity photographer Mario Testino's gallery in Miraflores.
Testino is a god here, but if you ask for the name of other famous Peruvians, it's the chefs' names that crop up – Gaston Acurio (the granddaddy of them all, 'he's treated like the Pope'), Pedro Miguel Schiaffino at Malabar, Virgilio Martinez at Central. These men are Lima's rock 'n' roll royalty.
But it's not just the high-end new wave restaurants of Lima that draw in the gastronomic tourists – it's the thousands of humble family-run picanterias, the bodegas serving sashimi-style tiradito and ceviche, marinated in a kicky 'tiger's milk' of lime and chilli. It's the street-food carts serving anticuchos meat skewers slathered in garlicky sauce, the stuffed rocoto chillis, and the Pisco bars on every corner.
I stayed at the Westin, a shiny tower of a hotel, its chef a superstar and its breakfast bar serving every superfood under the sun, from inca berries to bee pollen.
Cuzco, Peru's ancient capital high in the Andes and an hour's flight from Lima, is where you find some of the country's most exciting chefs.
Many of the dishes now gracing the refined tables here originate from pre-Inca times. You can see recognisable ingredients painted on the ancient ceramics housed at the unmissable Larco Museum in Lima; while in the 17th-century Andean Baroque painting of The Last Supper in Cuzco's marvellously gaudy cathedral, Christ and the Apostles are all set to tuck into a dish of roasted guinea pig.
Between meals, we visit Cuzco's Coricancha Sun Temple, an amalgam of sacred Inca architecture overlaid with grand courtyards from the Spanish colonial era. Many of the exquisite restaurants and hotels are built within Inca walls.
At the Palacio del Inka hotel, we're served coca tea, a traditional remedy for altitude sickness, and rest our backs against the longest original Inca wall in the country.
This is the story here: a marriage of the historic and the sophisticated buzz of the new.
Back in Lima, I meet British-Peruvian chef Martin Morales, the man behind London's acclaimed restaurants Ceviche and Andina.
'We're a nation obsessed with food,' he shrugs. 'But there's real soul here, too. This (he points to transparent slivers of river trout tiratador and melting cubes of ceviche) is soul food. You can get amazing dishes from a hole in the wall on a back street.' Like everyone I meet in Peru, Morales is full of pride in his nation's culinary endeavour.
'Look,' he says as we leave El Mercado, 'there's history in every dish, the result of 7,000 years of cooking, and we're only scratching the surface.'
Expect a lot more from Peru on a plate near you soon – though the coca tea, I suspect, is unlikely ever to make it through Customs.
First published in the Daily Mail - September 2016
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