Exotic locations
October 23rd, 2009 at 01:34pm
Under Exotic locations+ family vacations
Greece is steeped in ancient history, and the archipelago of Santorini is no exception. The site of Akrotiri is still being excavated, revealing the lives of the inhabitants of this once great trading center of the ancient world.
A feature of the area is the different colored beaches: the red beach, the white beach, the black beach and so on. The water which laps against the darker colored beaches is apparently significantly warmer than on the lighter ones, because dark colors hold the heat while white and other pale colors reflect it.
The buildings are almost uniformly white in color, for the same reason. Temperatures in the area range from 25-32ºC (77-90ºF) in the summer months of June to September, and rarely fall below 10ºC (50ºF) even in the coldest months of the year.
If you are interested in the legends of Atlantis, Santorini is one of the most likely origins of the story. There was a huge volcanic eruption here around 1500 BCE, destroying the city of Thera and possibly causing a tsunami which devastated the island of Crete, leaving the Minoan civilization in tatters.
Santorini is served by Santorini (Thira) National Airport. Flights are available from Athens and Oslo all year round, and other places during the holiday season.
Technorati Tags: greece vacation, santorini vacation
By admin
August 27th, 2009 at 10:57pm
Under Adventure+ Exotic locations
People lured to stay in the UK by talk of a ‘barbecue summer’ this year may now be ruingtheir decision and considering a winter holiday instead. The Adventure Company has some fantastic winter trip ideas to suit all budgets and requirements.
“Winter is a great time to travel since most people will have extra time off work and school,” comments marketing manager James Ingham. “We would recommend booking early, however, since flight demand around Christmas is high and prices sky rocket on last minute bookings.”
Below is a small selection of affordable winter holidays with The Adventure Company.
Best for snow lovers: High Peaks Snowshoeing in Bulgaria
For one of the best value winter trips, head to the snowy mountains of Bulgaria for a winter trekking holiday – on snowshoes. This week-long adventure explores the dramatic snow-clad forests, peaks and valleys of the Rila Mountains. Daily hikes of four to five hours take walkers to sights including the 70m Skakavitza waterfall, which is often frozen solid in the winter; the historic Rila monastery; Mount Maliovitza; and the celebrated Seven Lakes area.
Departures are available between December and March with prices starting from £569 plus €125 per person local payment. Prices include flights, transportation, accommodation, activities as per the itinerary, the services of a local guide, plus most meals (seven breakfasts, five lunches and six dinners).
For full trip details, see High Peaks Snowshoeing in Bulgaria
For travellers wanting a family winter adventure, head to the Rhodope Mountains on the Bulgarian Winter Experience, to enjoy cross country skiing, snowshoeing animal tracking and star gazing
Best for sun-seekers: Felucca Adventure in Egypt
Egypt is one of the closest destinations to the UK for winter sun, also offering great value on the ground. A two-day Felucca cruise along the Nile is one of the trip’s highlights, with train, horse-drawn carriage and donkeys being amongst the other forms of transport use, all helping immerse travellers in to the Egyptian way of life. The 10-day trip includes all of Egypt’s iconic sights, including the pyramids, the Sphinx, Aswan, the Valley of the Kings, the temples at Luxor, plus Cairo, where there is free time to explore and test haggling skills at the bazaars.
Winter departures for the Felucca Adventure start from £749 plus £75 local payment per person. Prices include flights, transportation, accommodation, activities as per the itinerary, the services of a local guide, plus some meals (nine breakfasts, two lunches and two dinners).
For full trip details, see Felucca Adventure in Egypt
A family version of this trip, Feluccas and Pharaohs, is also available
Best for culture vultures: Salsa Cubana in Cuba
Latin America meets the Caribbean in Cuba and this trip combines fascinating culture and history with stunning scenery and tropical beaches. With warm temperatures on hand to cheer up your winter blues, Cuba is the perfect destination if you wish to escape the winter weather in the UK. The adventure starts in Havana with classic American cars, echoes of Hemingway and the sound of salsa beats drifting in the streets. Elsewhere on the 16-day trip, travellers will walk through the tobacco fields of Viñales, explore the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Trinidad, visit colonial towns and relax on the beaches at Baracoa.
Salsa Cubana is available year-round but December to April are good months to travel – after the hurricane season and before the scorching summer. Prices for this winter start from £1,499 plus £155 local payment per person. Prices include flights, transportation, B&B accommodation, activities as per the itinerary and the services of a local guide.
For full trip details, see Salsa Cubana in Cuba
Families can enjoy a slightly more condensed tour on the Viva Cuba! trip
Technorati Tags: aswan, bulgaria holiday, bulgaria winter holiday, cairo holiday, cuba holiday, egypt holiday, egyptian pyramids, felucca cruise, mount maliovitza, nile cruise, rhodope mountains, rila monastery, rila mountains, seven lakes, skakavitza waterfall, the balley of the kings, the sphinx, the temples at luxor, winter adventure holidays
By admin
March 4th, 2009 at 07:42pm
Under Exotic locations
Mongolia – At The Edge Of The World – Fascinating And Wild
Oelgiy is a sleepy provincial capital at the farthest west of Mongolia – a vast country which has only 2.9 million inhabitants. It’s 1800 km away from the real capital, Ulan Bator, and somewhat cut off through the fantastic Altai mountain chain.
So Oelgiy is populated mostly by kasac nomads, who came here 140 years ago in search of new grassland for their herds. And it’s amazing how people are clinging to their tradition. Although most people in Oelgiy are now living in stone houses, they like to put up their yurts in the courtyard in summer – or they move to the outskirts of the city with them.
In one of the distant outskirts of Oelgiy lives Aidos Schabdanuly with wife and daughters on 25m2 in his “Ger”- (yurt). Inside this small space, beds and all household articles are well organized and a small stove fed with dried cow-dung makes the cool evenings cosy and warm (never mind the stink – I suppose they are used to it).But the modern nomad household sports a solar power station plus a satellite antenna for TV channels from all over the world.
While the daughters are sending one SMS after another – like all teenagers seem to do these days – their father sits in the entrance and gazes into the distance. He is worried – as in socialistic times you knew you could get a small pension when you grew old, today – you don’t even find the meanest jobs. Those are only to be found in the city – 5 days of journey away.And higher education for the girls is just too expensive…; but there is hope, as more and more tourists are using Oelgiy as their starting point for trekking and jeep tours through the wilderness of the Mongolian west. They buy food stocks and petrol, before they start off into the wilderness completely devoid of human life.
We squash into an old UAZ jeep and target Altan Z”gz, around 100km distance from Oelgiy. In Summer, this is the favourite “party” place for many nomad families where they gather to celebrate the Mongolian Naadam Festival. On the 3 hour drive we go through broad valleys of the high mountain region with glaciers on top – a spectacular view – past wild rivers. Now and then we see some yurts standing in the middle of nowhere. No vegetation covers the mountains – a strange sight for someone coming from the European Alps. Grass in the valley is nice and green and the air smells just great, crisp and clean.
At the Naadam festival, horse riding and wrestling are the main disciplines. Since there are no weight classes – like in boxing or wrestling sports here, the winner is obvious: it’s the one with the most fat – or the heaviest, anyway. It is a nice sport and a lot of fun – for us – but naturally, the locals take this deadly serious. The riding competition is spectacular – but you can hardly see much for all the dust.
We get a good explanation for this, too: “We are dependent on the extremes of nature here. All we do is try to enlarge our herds of yaks, sheep, goats, horses and camels.” And it’s not an easy life. The older ones clearly understand why many of the young ones go to the city in search of luck, or are leaving Kasakhstan altogether.
But many of them come back again, too. They are homesick for the wilderness and the freedom of life here. “We nomads, we need our freedom!”
Our friend from Moscow, with whom we have made this trip, had actually planned a guided tour into the Altai mountains with us, from one nomad place to the other, where we would sleep in “guest” yurts, which are somehow adapted to Western tourists – with a broad bed, a settee and a washbasin, (I did not enquire the toilet question) and there is even something like a yurt restaurant, where they serve a kind of goulash made of horsemeat, which you eat with your hands. This comes with Kumys – or salted and buttered tea with milk – great when you are thirsty – and we would have made the entire trip on horseback together with our guides and some extra horses for the luggage.
Unfortunately, I had a bad car crash the previous year with lots of broken bones and would not be fit enough for such an adventure. But – having come here for this mini-excursion, I can see how lovely this would have been. And fancy how much weight I would have lost – with all the excersice and the kind of food, where you only eat just enough so as to not to die of starvation – just like you always should in normal life!
Well, there’s always another time! And since Kasakh people are extremely supersticious, they dip their finger into every drink they take, and flick it in all 4 directions of the sky to the Gods, in order to thank them for their gift. An old woman read in the tea-leaves in her cup that I’ll return – for sure! Some ghosts are sure good for business….she told me some other things that were rather eerie, but this is indeed a travel secret I shall not reveal here!
If you enjoyed this article, feel free to read many more eerie travel secrets on the authors blog: http:www.eerietravelsecrets.com where you’ll also find out how to save 85% on luxury travel resorts and up to 67% on international flights.
Technorati Tags: adventure luxury travel, eco tour, eerie travel secrets, global resorts network, GRN, historic trips, historical trips, historical vacation, horseback riding in Mongolia, life of the mongolian nomads, make money online, make money travelling, mountain tour in Altai mountains, Western Mongolia
By SK
January 12th, 2009 at 07:56pm
Under Exotic locations
When I worked as export manager for a world renowned company, I traveled extensively and had friends all over the world. I also kept a diary, as this profession makes you a bit of a loner.
So I remember clearly that around 1980 I sat with my friend Claire in Los Angeles; she was an editor at a publishing company, and we were exchanging news about our jobs and private life. She told me they had just prepared a special summer issue about travel and reviewed 28 tales – all interesting travel stories – and each one of them had been written by a man.
Which brought her to the idea: “Why don’t YOU write a travel story? You travel all the time, see so many places, meet so many people and often get to look into their private life as well? You go shopping with these women, you look what they are cooking, how they manage money and rear their children, what they are dreaming about.”
Of course I just gave her a laugh – as if I did not have enough to do with my demanding job!
Today, I intend to follow her advice to a certain extent and write my travel blog.
You’ll not hear so much about how dangerous it is to travel as a woman in what is predominantly a man’s world. Speaking about that – these dangerous elements have infiltrated our country and cultures in the last 25 years to such an extent, that it’s just as dangerous at home (Austria) as anywhere else.
Our foreign minister is saying that Austria should actually take in 300 prisoners from Guantanamo, as they cannot go home, where they would be convicted – put into prison or worse – suffer the death sentence. As if we did not have enough destitute people already, living in very sorry circumstances!!
However, speaking about traveling and women, I’ll never forget my mother, born 1912, whose greatest wish was to travel to Paris one day.
While I studied in Geneva I invited her many times to come and see me – we could always go to Paris together. The years flew by – she did not come. She was scared of planes, and she was scared someone would rob her of all her belongings while she slept. Would she come by train? Driving was out of the question. So after 3-5 years I finally got my diploma in the shortest time possible.
When I came home, instead of being pleased, she told me how disappointed she was, as she had just now persuaded my father to visit me and continue up to Paris with her, and fulfil her lifelong dream! When I said, they could just go ahead and do the trip without seeing me in Geneva, she said – no, they would not. And just WHY- I asked? Well, she’d never have the nerve to suggest such an egoistic wish to my father and spend money on such a useless fancy.
Now, believe me, this was just the same attitude I found so often with my friends in India and China. Women, well carrying their weight in life and earning good money, would not dare to utter wishes to their husband that were utterly selfish, just like my mother.
She legally owned 50% of the mutual business and could have just taken the money to do whatever she pleased, but would never have dreamt of doing so.
However, after my dad passed away, I persuaded her to join me for three weeks in Thailand. I had rented a pretty little wooden bungalow with a huge veranda and garden right next to the beach and a maid to do the shopping and cooking, and had engaged a “doctor” to look after my mother and order her treatments and massages to keep her busy.
We had to take a tuk-tuk from the bus-terminal to our bungalow and sit in the back – and Mom was absolutely scared stiff, holding on to the wooden bench for dear life. So I said, “Mom, when you were small, you used to travel in horse carriages like this – not so?” She started laughing out loud, and from that moment on began to enjoy herself.
When I came back from work the second day and she had been alone in the bungalow, she told me that she watched the poor woman who worked for us and how hot it was and it was just a shame. I just told her – “Mum, nobody bothered about you, when you were working in the business 18 hours a week all through summer? Now it’s your turn to relax and look after your health and wellbeing. This maid will also get her chance one day – when her son invites her somewhere nice.”
Luckily she made friends with a nice gentleman from Germany and a family from Southern Tyrol, and from then onwards it was wonderful. She went shopping every evening, she was craving to try new restaurants all the time, and although she was a poor swimmer, dared to go into the sea by herself - as long as there were people around.
I still have the recipes she collected during that trip and gained by painfully interviewing everybody and shamelessly using the translation skills of me, my friends and hotel employees, as she spoke no English!
She visited shrines and pagodas and sat there in the cool shade and scented air. She’d tell me, she could think so nicely there – about all things – hold conversations with ghosts from the past, and she’d also pray for everybody, “and it’s so much easier here than in our Church at home.”
So all during my travels in Third World countries, and to this day - while I am musing about women and their different role in their respective society – young women – I just keep reminding myself of my mother.
It’s not all that long ago that women in the heart of Europe were just the same. They kept their secrets to themselves, not daring to utter a selfish wish that did not hold a family benefit (often that of the children) as a hidden backing.
Did she ever write her thoughts down? Not that I know of. In fact, not too many women ever write about their lives or travel experiences. Apart from those Victorian lady travelers – rich and eccentric women, courageous, often childless, who traveled the Himalayas and rode on camels through African deserts.
We find but a few exceptions of that rule after the First World War, like Mrs. R. West and M. McCarthy. It seems that the belief was that, if you were not a pilot or soldier or a member of the occupying forces in India etc. – in short, if you were just a woman – your experiences just didn’t count, unless (here we go again) they are dealing with love and crime – both is better, of course. You don’t hit the newspaper with a simple story of being mugged on the street. If you are not dead, it’s not worth mentioning.
Personally, I hope this is going to change. Or have you actually seen Thai recipes brought back by a British Colonel? Would he tell us a story about sitting in a Pagoda and letting the ghosts pass by in a trance? Surely not, he would not enter such a place to begin with.
The author, B.J. Vetter, has been trading in Forex for the last 15 years and with varying success at the utmost beginning. It was only when she joined forces with a real expert – friend Peter - and learning through him to use eyes and ears properly, traded into huge profits.
Read here how it’s going lately in detail. She also publishes a travel blog. Should you consider entering forex trading with the help of software, go and get it at the bonus link right here.
Technorati Tags: adventure luxury travel, eco tour, eerie travel secrets, historic trips, historical trips, historical vacation
By SK
December 23rd, 2008 at 03:53pm
Under Attractions+ Exotic locations
<img src=”/gfx/OsakaCastle.jpg” width=”150″ style=”float:right;margin-left:5px;margin-bottom:5px” alt=”Osaka Castle” title=”Osaka Castle” />Located at the mouth of the Yodo River where it empties in to Osaka Bay, the city of Osaka is an amazing city, full of culture and history. One of the oldest cities in the world, Osaka can trace its roots back to as far as 700BC, before the rise of Rome or other western centres of power.
As the capitol of the Osaka Prefecture, nestled in the Kansai region of the main island of Honshu, Osaka has long enjoyed a position of privilege and power derived from its sheltered position in the bay at the mouth of a major trade river.
As capitol of the Japanese Empire several times during the various ages, including the Asuka, Nara, Heian and Edo periods, it has a cultural flavour that runs deeper than any other does. Historically the economic capitol of Japan, Osaka has the second largest population of any Japanese City, with seventeen million people in the area encompassing Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe.
It is a unique distinction that Osaka has the highest amount of nighttime residents, that is, residents who work and live during the night rather than during the day, to Tokyo. Some 2.6 million people live and work by the moon, resulting in a massive collection of stores, restaurants and other services that are open twenty-four hours a day.
“The 808 bridges of Osaka” is a common phrase used to express awe and wonder in Japan, a proverbial statement. 808 is a number that is used by the Japanese to symbolize the idea of ‘too large to count’. Osaka is crossed by a massive number of waterways, from irrigation canals, to navigable rivers and access feeders. This necessitates an equally massive number of bridges and crossings, each bridge with a specific and unique name that often lends itself to the surrounding area. While some of the waterways, for example, the Nagahori canal, are now filled in, the bridges remain as part of this deep cultural history.
As one might expect, the city of Osaka, due to its commercial nature, day and night time culture and deep history, is considered to be Japan’s national kitchen, the gourmet centre of the food-conscious Japanese. In Osaka, you can find any number of restaurants catering to cuisines both exotic and more mundane, from American burgers and fries to French foie gras to Indian curries and even Mexican moles.
One of the more interesting restaurants is Osaka ‘s Dotonbori Street. This is a very popular buffet style restaurant where the customers cook the food for themselves. A large pot of boiling water is placed in the middle of a group’s table and then two large trays are delivered to the table, one of meat and soy-tofu and the other of vegetables. The meats are thinly sliced, allowing them to cook fast without losing flavor or juice. It is popular with families both for its low price and the fun of cooking with your chopsticks.
For more information on Osaka, visit http://www.blogosaka.com and http://www.osakamicroblog.com
Technorati Tags: eating in osaka, osaka attractions, osaka japan, things to see in osaka, what to do in osaka
By John Parks
Next Posts
Previous Posts
