Venice inspires devotion and madness. I should know: I went there for a last-minute holiday four years ago and have ended up buying two properties. What is it about this city? I think there are three faces to Venice, and you can’t always be sure which one you’re seeing.

We all know the first face of Venice, the tourist Venice. The images of the Grand Canal, the gondoliers, the Carnival, are clichés that stare at you from paintings and photographs in a million locations. Not just in travel articles and television shows: a restaurant, an art gallery, an engraving on a pub wall – there the Grand Canal, here the Rialto Bridge. Of course I took these image in my head when I first went to Venice. I was not disappointed; they’re not a confection, but real, gloriously, deliriously beautiful views that crowd the city. Add to them the countless art galleries that depend on the visits of tourists and academics, and you have the tourist paradise, a Disneyland digest of European art history – which, as everyone tells you, is a ghost town and an echo of its former glory.

Except that they’re wrong. Yes, the permanent population of Venice may have declined to just a few tens of thousands. But it’s no ghost town: you cannot fail to notice the vibrant daily life of Venetians as they go about their daily business in the city. This is the face of the real, everyday Venice. Venetians haul heavy kegs of beer over bridges. They walk their dogs along the hard pavements of the fondamenta. They chug along canals carrying loads of bricks, mortar, cement, furniture and flowers. And above all they chatter to each other, on the bridges. In this city without cars, there is every chance of bumping into someone you know when you cross a bridge. So why not stay for a chat? In this second Venice, there is a far more obvious sense of community than in any other world city I have known. And being an island, Venice seems to breed a sense of huddle and bemused detachment, among its true-born inhabitants, as they contemplate the follies of the rest of the world. Their geography and way of life is unique. What is the rest of the world up to?

Against the real, everyday Venice I would suggest there is also a third Venice. I can call it the unreal city. It is the historical echo of the kegs of beer, barges, flood plates and all the outward signs of Venice’s contemporary uniqueness. You could call it tradition, but that suggests something dead. There is nothing dead about the cafes and bars where Venice’s peculiar seafood snacks are the everyday accompaniment to an “ombra”, the tradition of an evening glass of wine that goes back hundreds of years. Or the Burano regatta, where a tiny island with a population of just hundreds manages to put forward tens of people willing to practise for months to take place in a traditional rowing race. My favourite is the fish market: hardly known by tourists, this extraordinary riot, slippery mountains of silver and squid, takes place in the heart of the city, just as it has done for hundreds of years, and the housewives flock to it like the seagulls. Unlike many other cities, Venice has ways of life that are not traditions on life support, but which reach back and show the influences of hundreds of years of history in a unique, watery environment.

And then there are the buildings, which hover between the three Venices. The first time I went to the city, I assumed that if you were to pan the camera just a few degrees to the left from the tourist cliché shot, you’d find the necklace of ugly concrete that has blighted every other beautiful city from Cambridge to Bruges. Not so. Venice is composed of almost nothing but tall, elegant palazzos, strange seaside workmen’s cottages, and nineteenth-century apartment blocks. I have joked that the tourist books should create a walking tour that takes you round the five or six ugly buildings in the city, since they are its special rarity, much more remarkable than any palazzo.

These buildings clearly do much to present the tourist face of Venice. They house the art, they form the backdrop, and many of them are hotels. They are also the everyday real Venice, as the Venetians live in them, busily hammering away, painting, improving … and propping the more rickety ones up. And, especially at night, as their solitary shining lights are reflected in the misty or moonlit canals, the tall, narrow renaissance buildings are definitely the soul of this unreal city, whose past lives cheek by jowl with the present.

If you’re going to Venice, here are my recommendations for places to see the three faces of the city:

Tourist Venice: shy clear of St Mark’s (except on a summer’s evening, when the string quartets are playing), and instead of climbing its Campanile, climb that of San Giorgio Maggiore, looking out across the most famous view in the world from the opposite side of the St Marks basin. If you think a gondola ride sounds a bit too tacky and costly, take a traghetto, working gondolas that take you across the Grand Canal at points distant from bridges, all for the princely sum of 40 cents.

Real, everyday Venice: if you really want to see the nitty-gritty of how everything moves around the city, stand on the Guglie bridge between 08.30 and 09.30 on any weekday morning. You’ll see the commuters striding in, the huddled groups gossiping on the fondamenta di Cannaregio, and the barges will chug busily beneath you carrying everything the city needs to eat, drink and be merry.

For the unreal Venice, with history poking through the veil: the fish market runs from Tuesday to Saturday mornings at the Rialto, just inside San Polo. It’s likely to be winding down at 12 noon, at its peak between 9 and 10.30. Take an ombra (glass of wine) at the Cantine del Vino Shiavi at 992 Fondamenta Priuli, Dorsoduro, where the glorious, slow-moving days of la Serenissima (the Most Serene City) are still visible in this atmospheric cavern of fine wines and wonderful appetizers. The Burano regatta takes place on the third Sunday of every September and is a much more low-key affair than the Regatta Storica of the main city. Watch the young Buranese teenagers fooling around in their motorboats to impress the girls … For moonlit walks, try the calmness of Fondamenta della Sensa in Cannaregio, as you make your way to the lesser-known church of Madonna dell’Orto.

Jonathan’s two homes in Venice are available for holiday rental: see www.visitvenice.co.uk

NM-ftv invites applications from interested individuals or professionals with experience of creative writing, multimedia, film making, direction, sound, camera, set design, story telling journalism, anthropology or any other art form who are interested in living and working in Pakistan for a short period: from 2 weeks to six months.

We invite any filmmaker, multimedia designer/artist, script writer, anthropologist, musician, poet, cameraman, sound expert etc to travel to Pakistan with a specific idea in his/her mind to produce a film /multimedia project on culture, environment and social development. NM-ftv will provide the basic facility of living, and equipment for filming (pre-production and post-production) and machines for multimedia productions.

In return NM-ftv will expect from the guest professional or participant to contribute the same amount of time to NM-ftv students that he spent on filming or other creative project. NM-ftv will also be the partner in that proposed project.

This is a good opportunity to experience a different culture and to explore the mystery land of Pakistan where we have variety of weathers, large deserts to highest peaks of the world like K-2. (Pakistan has 42 highest peaks of the world out of 50 in Himalaya and Karakoram mountain ranges.)

Please see www.nmftv.edu.pk for the film school details. NM-ftv is the first film school based at Lahore-Pakistan and it is a project of Gandhara Foundation Pakistan (a non-governmental organisation, visit www.gandhara.org)

Submitted by Frank from the US.

Actual comments from US travel agents:

I had someone ask for an aisle seat so their hair wouldn't get messed up from being near the window.

A client called in inquiring about a package to Hawaii. After going over all the cost info, she asked, “Would it be cheaper to fly to California and then take the train to Hawaii?”

I got a call from a woman who wanted to go to Cape Town. I started to explain the length of the flight and the passport information when she interrupted me with “I'm not trying to make you look stupid, but Cape Town is in Massachusetts. “Without trying to make her look like the stupid one, I calmly explained, “Cape Cod is in Massachusetts, Cape Town is in Africa.” Her response?… click.

A man called, furious about a Florida package we did. I asked what was wrong with the vacation in Orlando. He said he was expecting an ocean-view room. I tried to explain that is not possible, since Orlando is in the middle of the state. He replied, “Don't lie to me. I looked on the map and Florida is a very thin state.”

I got a call from a man who asked, “Is it possible to see England from Canada?” I said, “No.” He said, “But they look so close on the map.”

Another man called and asked if he could rent a car in Dallas. When I pulled up the reservation, I noticed he had a 1-hour layover in Dallas. When I asked him why he wanted to rent a car, he said, “I heard Dallas was a big airport, and I need a car to drive between the gates to save time.”

A nice lady just called. She needed to know how it was possible that her flight from Detroit left at 8:20am and got into Chicago at 8:33am. I tried to explain that Michigan was an hour ahead of Illinois, but she could not understand the concept of time zones. Finally, I told her the plane went very fast, and she bought that!

U. S. Soldiers Home Mac: during a century of travel (well 78 years!) both in and out of service I have travelled to over 150 countries (I count both North and South Dakota as countries) and for some reason have jotted signs and happenings that I thought funny at the time (and now wonder why!) So here is the perfect opportunity to share some of my anecdotes.

Here at the soldier’s home, we have just had some visitors from London’s Royal Chelsea Hospital. Wonderful people: an officer and his wife and four residents in their signature bright red coats. One time when I was in England I went out on my own to the Royal Chelsea Hospital and spent a few hours.

One of the members told me that Nell Gwynn, the mistress of King Charles II saw some war veterans searching for food so she proposed to king Charles that he build a shelter for them. He jokingly said he would build one the size of her handkerchief. She then proceeded to unravel her handkerchief by pulling out the threads from it to make a big circle for the size of first home for the soldiers.

Maybe a tall tale but I think we here at our retired military home should toast Nell anyway as we got ideas for our home from England. The person that told me this said that he thought they should have a statue on their grounds of Nell in gratitude. Maybe we should have one here too as our retired military home was copied after England’s.

When I visited the London soldier’s home, it seemed to me that the iron fence around the grounds even looked like ours or ours theirs. The top position in our home was Governor (like England) until a few years ago when it was changed to title of Director. We have garden plots just like the ones in the UK.

If you would like to contact Mac, he is happy to answer any questions even if some of his information may be a little out of date. Mac can be e-mailed at: macsan400@yahoo.com

Last July's trek over the 5600-meter (18,300 foot) high Parang La pass from Spiti, a remote high-altitude Tibetan Buddhist region in the north Indian State of Himachal Pradesh, to the vast, electric blue Tso Moriri lake on the high Changtang Plateau in Western Ladakh was a trip that we are all still raving about.

The scenery is spectacular and the wildlife and meetings with the nomads who inhabit this area are unforgettable. It was the perfect trek–just long enough to get into it and begin to feel that body and mind have been transformed (nine days including two rest days). It was a group from Switzerland that joined us. We'll be leading this 21-day trip again next July (2003), and we're already looking forward to it. The drive into the Himalayas follows a stunning route that really shows off the grandeur and extent of these mountains and valleys. We toured, while at the same time acclimatizing to the altitude, in Kullu, Lahaul and Spiti, not far from Tibet and very much like it, before actually starting the walk.

In the lush, heavily forested Kullu Valley at the foot of the Great Himalayan Range we visited ancient temples, the bazaar town of Manali, and Naggar, the valley's ancient capital and home to the Roerich Gallery. Nikolai Roerich, philosopher, mystic, occultist and painter, who was, strangely enough, responsible for getting the pyramid with the eye put on the US one dollar bill, was so taken with the beauty of this valley that he made Naggar his home and painted splendid scenes of the mountains. We walked through the impressive forest around Naggar to start stretching our legs and lungs.

We drove over the mighty 14,000-foot Rohtang Pass into Lahaul, a land of mountains, glaciers and mighty waterfalls. We were now in the heart of the Himalayas. We crossed the Kunzum Pass and stopped at the top to look at the chortens (Buddhist reliquary mounds) and Hindu temples, the area strung with a multitude of, colorful, fluttering prayer flags, and of course to admire the views. As we drove down the pass into Spiti a herd of yaks came storming down the mountainside looking like big dogs at play. What a sight! In Spiti we toured villages and dramatically perched monasteries, repositories of Tibetan art and sculpture, with lively populations of traditional people and maroon-robed lamas. It's a magnificent region, the place where the Indian subcontinent first made contact with the Asian mainland in that long-ago collision of continents that created the Himalayas.

On the morning the trek began our horses and crew assembled below our hotel and loaded the supplies, gear and tents (dining and lounge tent, kitchen tent and sleeping tents) while we started walking, carrying only our small daypacks. It took us about 4 hours to reach our first camp with a stop for lunch on the way. After reaching camp we had steaming bowls of noodle soup and tea and biscuits prepared by Sonam, our ever-smiling cook, and we began to take in this amazing place. What a spot it was: nestled in a bowl of mountains with gorgeous peaks in every direction and low growing shrubs covered in yellow flowers (caragana brevifolia). We spent a rest day there to acclimatize and get into being in the high mountains. Some of us did a walk to a spot on the edge of a cliff over a river valley from where we had a view of the Parang La pass.

But it would be another two days of steep walking before we'd cross it. The pass is 18,300 feet high, so even though we started walking high in Spiti, at about 16,000 feet, we still had altitude to gain. These paths are made for walking, for they are used by nomads, shepherds and traders from Tibet, so even though we were gaining altitude the going was not that difficult, no big steps or leaps, though some of the grades were fairly steep. Our legs and lungs were getting a really good stretch now. It felt as though we were on another planet and all thoughts of the “real world” were far away. We just concentrated on where we were, drinking in the sublime beauty of it all.

This trek has everything: the Parang La pass with great views in every direction, an easy walk over a glacier on the other side, then three days of great, full-stride, nearly level walking through a valley with hallucinogenic formations, two river crossings, which were good fun as we all held hands and waded through the knee-deep water, and finally, the lake, Tso Moriri-amazing to come upon such a huge lake in these high mountains-truly awesome. Surrounded by “soft” cream-coloured hills-a dramatic contrast to the rugged, jagged mountain scenery we had been walking through-and meadows where Changpas (nomadic shepherds) graze their flocks of pashmina goats and yaks, Tso Moriri is a vast expanse of azure water, a blue that is other-worldly, truly electrifying.

The colour of the lake changes throughout the day depending on the light. And at times parts of it seem to disappear as if “captured” by the reflections of the tan peaks behind it. On the 9-day trek we saw herds of yak, marmots, kiang (wild horses), wild goats, bar-headed geese-mothers and fathers bobbing on the lake with their goslings-lammergeiers (gigantic vultures), and the nomads living in their yak hair tents. And the wildflowers! The Swiss were amazed to see edelweiss growing in such profusion. After a rest day at the lake and a climb up on the ridges behind it for great views, we walked up the lakeshore to the village of Karzok, one of those frontier villages that looks as if it's at the end of the world. And then the drive to Leh, capital of Ladakh, India's “little Tibet,” with its fascinating bazaars and palace, a mini-Potala, and the world's highest polo field.

Flying back to Delhi, where the trip began, the Himalayan ranges spread out below us. We toured Old and New Delhi, appreciated the architecture and urban design of the British Raj, visited colorful temples, markets, beautiful parks and the Qutab Minar, Asia's tallest ancient minaret. We rode through Old Delhi in bicycle rickshaws and wandered the narrow, winding lanes of its colorful bazaars. Martin and Carol Noval have been living in India for more than twenty years and organize and lead several special cultural tours and treks a year for small groups. They'll be doing this trek again next summer; it's one of their favourites. If you would like to get in touch, email them at tripsintoindia@usa.net and check their website (www.tripsintoindia.com).