Independent travel
Independent travel gives you the freedom to move on when you are ready and not tied to a single hotel. Its fun fending for yourself and finding accommodation when you arrive at a new destination. It enables you to travel off the beaten track and away from the crowds, it is a liberating kind of travel. Mingling with the locals, eating their food, learning about their culture is an important part of travel. Travelling independently ensures that your money goes directly into the local economy and not to national or international businesses. The easiest way to experience independent travel is in Greek Islands where it is easy to travel between Islands
-
Breakfast With Peacocks, Coca-Cola Burps & Drinking Pox: Tales From San Cristobal
Emerging somewhat bleary eyed from the overnight bus journey – although we both slept better than we thought we would – and blinking in the morning sun, the crisp freshness of the mountain air strikes us immediately. After several stays in humid locations over the last few weeks, culminating in the cloying air of Palenque, it feels like a completely different climate here. We are some 2,100 metres higher above sea level than we were in Palenque and it is instantly noticeably different. This is San Cristobal de las Casas, where evenings will be chilly and, if all goes according to plan, virtually the last point at which we feel…
-
Mexico By Bus: Veracruz-Villahermosa-Palenque
Order a drink called “lechero”. Your waiter will deliver a tall glass with a generous measure of espresso coffee in the bottom. What you must do next is tap loudly on the glass with your spoon, and immediately a different, immaculately uniformed waiter will dash to your table armed with pots filled with hot milk, and flamboyantly pour it into your coffee from a great height, theatrically stopping just as your glass reaches the brim full point. Welcome to Gran Cafe de la Parroquia, Veracruz, established in 1808 and apparently serving their lechero in this extrovert style for over 200 years. We’d read about it before we arrived here and,…
-
Mexico City: CDMX #2
Delicious smells from the city’s bakeries fill the air before we’re properly awake. Another day dawns and it’s once again time to climb on to the speeding merry-go-round which is Mexico City, there’s still so much more to see and do. Hernan Cortes and his cohorts may have taken the 16th century equivalent of a bulldozer to ancient history, but at least the period of Spanish occupation saw the construction of a majestic and beautiful city in its place; you only have to see the Palacio de Belles Artes, the Casa Ajuelos, the churches, even the Post Office, to love the grand architecture of this giant city. Yes, even the…
-
Mexico City: CDMX #1
It’s fascinating how the sounds of a city can be a part of defining its character, it can be a charm or a challenge, a boon or a burden. Earlier this year we were in Cairo, where the constant ear battering of traffic noise and raised voices soon becomes tiresome. Mexico City, in contrast, though just as loud and just as constant, has a soundtrack which is for the most part one of carnival and music. Chatter and laughter fills the streets, music drifts upward from every corner. It’s the sound of fiesta rather than frustration, joy rather than jams, an immediately exciting and enticing environment where the wall of…
-
Hola Guadalajara. Olé! Tequila!
Now and again something inside the grey-white cloud flickers like a fluorescent lamp behind a curtain, then a streak of lightning shoots sideways across the sky. A vertical bolt flashes directly to the ground. With eastward movement and night time approaching, there is a point where, from the aeroplane window, the orange sunset is reflected in clouds, yet the darkness of dusk is clearly visible further east beyond the colour. As we near Guadalajara, the thunder storm, at roughly the same altitude as the plane, just adds to this unusual scene. A few delays en route means a late arrival, so it’s morning before we get our first chance to…
-
The Grandest Of Canyons
It’s only ten days since we crossed off a bucket list item with the seaplane flight over San Francisco, and now here we are boarding our first ever helicopter with pen metaphorically poised to cross off another. Is there conceivably a better place to do this than here at the Grand Canyon? A brief walk to the Bright Angel trailhead on the day of our arrival has given us our first glimpses of this wonder of the world, so our excitement levels as we receive our safety briefings are absolutely off the scale. There’s a short delay to check the craft – a bird has hit the windshield on its…
-
A Ghost Town, Route 66 And Rock ‘n’ Roll: Yosemite-Barstow-Arizona
It’s not hard to work out why we chose the town of Barstow, and the Route 66 Motel, as our overnight stay on our longest drive of this trip. A Route 66 town? Route 66 Motel? Classic cars preserved in the motel grounds…why wouldn’t you?? The route from Yosemite to Barstow is ridiculously diverse: first the mountains of Yosemite, then the richly verdant fruit farm regions, then the flatlands as the world becomes more and more spartan. Once past Bakersfield, Spanish language signs reappear, something we didn’t see to the same extent in Northern California but are commonplace down here. Over the mountains we go, dropping next into the Mojave…
-
This Is Yosemite
So many people had told us that Yosemite was fabulous long before we came here, and just about everyone whose advice we sought before planning our California adventure checked that we’d included Yosemite on our itinerary. Then, the guy in the Santana T-shirt at Downtown Joe’s in Napa said that we will never forget seeing Half Dome for the first time. None of this was a case of over selling; in fact, no amount of pre-warning can really prepare you for the unbridled joy of Yosemite. Even before we enter the Park, the drive from our base at “the Bug” to the Park gates is absolutely stunning, following the River…
-
From City To Wine Country And On To The Hills
With the delights of San Francisco behind us, we drive into the town of Napa just before lunchtime on that most significant of American days, the fourth of July. Stars and stripes are very much in evidence, bunting and banners adorn the streets and there is a sense of anticipation in the air. The River Napa which flows swiftly through the town and runs directly into San Francisco Bay, once supported heavy industry here, until alternative forms of transport took away its water borne advantages and Napa and its neighbours suffered a downturn. What followed later wasn’t quite the Gold Rush of 1849 but you could conceivably call it the…
-
San Francisco #2
For those of us of a certain age, the very words “San Francisco” evoke memories of 1960s music, flower power, the hippy generation and the 1967 summer of love. That entire movement, if movement is the right word, may have been synonymous with the wider city, but it was actually centred around the district of Haight Ashbury, just over a mile west of downtown. A district which was hit hard by the Depression and fell into decline during the 1950s slowly became a haven for the hippy counterculture during the 60s due in the main to the availability of cheap rental accommodation in a downbeat and under populated neighbourhood. Within…
