Danielle Demetriou

4 weeks ago | telegraph.co.uk | Michelle Jana Chan |Danielle Demetriou |Maia Roston

No longer a 'dumping ground', travellers can now live in comparative luxury on this iconic hikeI'd always been puzzled by the idea of trying to reach the bottom of a mountain, rather than the top. Yet Everest Base Camp seduces thousands each year. On a mission to understand why, I set out from Lukla. At 2,860m, Lukla is the legendary gateway for trekkers and climbers heading off to sight - and sometimes summit - the highest Himalayan peaks.

1 month ago | design-anthology.com | Danielle Demetriou

At Issey Miyake Ginza | Cube in Tokyo, the experience begins outside: the white facade is punctuated by vivid green imagery of butterbur and poetic abstractions of whispering bamboo groves and water flowing over river pebbles by writer Yuko Tanaka. Inside, the heart of the space is wrapped in a spiral of textile in softly gradated shades of black, an unfinished fabric called hogushi gasuri. Light passes through its loose weave, the fabric gently swaying like underwater seaweed.

1 month ago | telegraph.co.uk | Poonam Binayak |Danielle Demetriou |Maia Roston |Thomas O'Malley

From salt deserts and jungle shrines to tribal villages and high-altitude moonscapes, there's a wilder India out thereOnce, I watched a full moon rise over an empty salt desert. The air was still. The earth glowed silver. There were no selfie-taking tourists, no tour groups, no ticket booths, no glossy brochures. Just silence, and space, and something ancient I couldn't name. Moments like this are why it puzzles me when foreign travellers come all this way only to stick to the well-trodden path.

1 month ago | yahoo.com | Danielle Demetriou

It’s morning rush hour in Shibuya station. Trains pause at a tangle of platforms inside the central Tokyo hub – all punctual to the minute, impossibly clean and heaving with a steady flow of office workers. But Japanese trains are not just litter-free and on-time. Stepping (or squeezing) on board reveals another unique quality: despite the mass of humanity crammed into a confined space, carriages are calmly steeped in silence.

1 month ago | telegraph.co.uk | Danielle Demetriou |Maia Roston |Thomas O'Malley |Clare Macnaughton

On the very rare occasions I spy someone on their phone on a train, it is clearly some kind of an emergency (or a senior boss who cannot be ignored) - typically their head is apologetically bowed, one hand over their mouth, as they quietly whisper, as far away from other passengers as possible. As a former Londoner raising two daughters in Japan - first in central Tokyo, now in Kyoto - embracing silence hasn't always come easily to me, even after close to 18 years.