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Travellers' ChecksPalace Hotel Tokyo’s cherry blossom package offers private tour of city in bloom

Elsewhere, Banyan Tree Hotels & Resorts opens the first Asian-branded resort in Cuba, the Dhawa Cayo Santa Maria. Plus a great deal to Ho Chi Minh City from Charlotte Travel

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Published: 1:15pm, 20 Jan 2017Updated: 2:35pm, 20 Jan 2017

IN THE PINK The upmarket Palace Hotel Tokyo, situated just across the moat from the Imperial Palace gardens, is selling a two-night Blossoming Tokyo package, which anticipates the coming cherry blossom season with the promise of a private, chauffeur-driven tour to some of the best viewing sites in the capital, a seasonal lunch, a bottle of exclusive house sake and more.

The package will be offered from March 1 to May 31 but, as the hotel notes in the small print, “Palace Hotel Tokyo cannot be held responsible for guaranteeing optimal dates for sakura viewing as they vary from year to year.” Keep an eye on www.kyuhoshi.com/japan-cherry-blossom-forecast for the 2017 forecast, which has not yet been released, or book late March/early April and hope for the best. Rates start from 212,000 yen (HK$14,300) for a deluxe with balcony room, double occupancy. See en.palacehoteltokyo.com for full details.

DARK PASSAGES Hurtling headlong through the foreign darkness, beneath a frantic swirl of steam, no mode of transport stirs feelings of romance, mystery and adventure quite like the night train. Starting with Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938) and Carol Reed’s Night Train to Munich (1940), night trains have long been a successful milieu for filmmakers.

Numerous night-train novels, too, have been written, by the likes of Graham Greene, Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon and Maurice Dekobra, who got the first fictional Orient Express under steam with the bestselling Madonna of the Sleeping Cars, which was published in 1925 (and adapted for the cinema in 1928 and 1955).