World Travel Market Delights

Jimmy Choo, OBE,whose shoes send emotional girls into screams of delight, is the smartly dressed unassuming, smiling ambassador for Malaysia, I met him on the stand where he revealed that his shoes which are sold in London and Malaysia are manufactured in Italy. Malaysia has cheap flights, like Thailand, and another attraction of flying to the Far East is that you can combine trips to Malaysia and Indonesia as the two countries are doing co-operative marketing.

Another surprise to me was that visitors from countries such as Indonesia visit Israel and in co-operative marketing are that Israel, Jordan and Egypt have found that visitors to the area like to travel in groups so that a group visa makes travel simple and they add excursions to neighbouring countries. More co-operative tourism talk involves North and South Cyprus.

Food and drink are of interest to everybody at The World Travel Market which this year, 2009, is full or worthy projects about green tourism in 2010, but the average tourist on a holiday, not a mission, is more interested in getting good food, and whether you stay in a five star hotel or a bed and breakfast (both apparently available in Serbia - which has a delightful logo of its name with the B turned sideways into a heart. My photographer Trevor cannot drink alcohol because of the drugs he is taking, but he is an espresso coffee enthusiast as well as a chocoholic, so he and I were more interested in the most accessible chocolate delights for the British tourists which are in Bruges in Belgium, at the factory tour. On the Belgian stand we watched the chocolate expert making white chocolates with strawberry centres, milk chocolates with chocolate centres and dark chocolates with nutty centres. Divine. He told us that Belgian chocolates must by law be made entirely from chocolate so that they have cocoa butter in them. He showed us the yellow cocoa butter - which is apparently an ingredient in the better lipsticks.

In Bruges you can also visit a potato chip factory and the same company runs a museum about lamps. If you do all three museums tours there is a reduction on the price. The chocolate tour factory is open to visitors all year including Sundays except for one week in early January.

Trevor said another chocolate favourite, almost as good - I thought it was even better - and a new taste, was the pistaccio nut filling of the chocolates on an Egyptian stand.I'd heard of American chocolates. everybody knows English chocolates by Cadbury's, Belgian chocolates, Swiss chocolates, but Egyptian chocolates - recommend it.