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
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Sugar Sugar….Or Not
For a blog site with a name like ours, and being people who go out of our way to enjoy local delicacies and specialities, there is a glaring gap in our commitment to eating our way around the world. It hardly ever occurs to us to eat anything sweet. Neither of us has much of a sweet tooth, and, whether travelling the world or back here in England, we barely ever even look at what desserts are on offer, both of us being of the opinion that anything sweet would just spoil the flavours of the great tasting meal we’ve just eaten. Sometimes though, we can’t help but think we’re…
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Bring Me Sunshine
Our “best case scenario” for most of this year has been that by mid July, travel restrictions would start to be lifted and we just might be able to get away. We are very excited now that such a scenario is becoming reality – so excited in fact that we have booked our flights to get away for the entire summer. As of July we are now 19 months into our retirement, a retirement which was meant to be endless travel seeing as much of the world as possible but which instead has been…well, we all know the end to that sentence. In the end we were travelling for 148…
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Travel Stories: Pedro And The Strange Bed
The bus station was quiet as we alighted in Santa Cruz, no passengers to board our bus, the cafe empty and, most notably, nobody hawking rooms. Close by was a map of the town: there were no hotels marked on it. The tourist information office was, helpfully, closed. Next step in these circumstances is usually to enter a bar and ask if they have rooms available; even if the answer is negative, they will normally have a “cousin” with rooms to let. Except, it seemed, in Santa Cruz, where all such enquiries met with blank faces and that all too recognisable shrug of Spanish shoulders. And so our backpack laden…
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Travel Stories: Under Pressure In Turkey
As I switched on the ignition, dashboard warning lights, instead of fading out after a couple of seconds, stayed shining and winking like an aeroplane cockpit. The first of these said flat tyre. “Not problem, not problem”, said the car hire guy, waving his hands dismissively and pointing me towards the vehicle exit. Even as I walked around studying the four tyres, each with no obvious sign of defect, he continued to bark the same phrase. “Not problem, not problem”. Hire car boss man came over to intervene, helpfully grabbing Google translate on his mobile and pointing to the word “tyre”. I held my palms upwards to show the international…
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This English Summer
As we sit trying to predict the next steps in the complicated and illogical rules on international travel from the UK, this non-starter of an English summer just makes our frustration grow and our sense of isolation increase. First we had the coldest April since 1922 in terms of average minimum temperatures, in fact the third coldest April since records began almost 140 years ago. After a cold dry April we were hit with wet May, during which many areas of the UK experienced considerably more than double the normal May rainfall, and the South East, where we live, was again well below average in terms of daily temperatures. And…
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Should we stay or should we go now?
Anyone who has read the original Catch 22 novel could be forgiven for thinking that Joseph Heller is currently advising the UK Government on its COVID policies in relation to international travel. It’s not only confusing but each time we get to grips with the rules, someone moves the goalposts. Last year, we lost our retirement world travel dream to COVID but salvaged 14 weeks away in Croatia and Turkey in the end. This year, we’ve been thinking all along that we’ll leave it till late June (ie now) and plan a trip starting in July, to wherever we can go. To this end, it seemed reasonably clear that red…
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Hungry for more……
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Just one person from around the world
We have previously shared our experience in Sri Lanka with you but we are now reposting this story as our contribution to Just one person from around the world by Cadyluck Leedy The story of Mangala As we ventured out on our first walk around the village, Mangala was brought forward as the tuk-tuk owner with the best English of the drivers gathered together under the tree, and for our remaining days in Sigiriya he ferried us around, giving us a terrific insight into Sri Lanka and its people which was to develop into a show of Sri Lankan hospitality and friendship and give us plenty of memories which will stay…
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Travel Stories: From The Boudoir To The Bosphorus
“Full”, she said sternly from behind her perspex screen. It was one simple word but its implications were huge and I struggled to take it in. “Full”, she repeated, just a little more sternly than the first time. “No, no”, I pleaded, “we must get to Istanbul tonight. We have to…”.. but the stern woman was just shaking her head and looking past me. We hadn’t considered for a single moment that there wouldn’t be room on the boat – after all, how can a large passenger boat crossing the Sea Of Marmara from Bandirma to Istanbul even get close to full capacity? How can there even be such a…
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Travel Stories: The Nungwi Sunset
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Yet at the time it seemed entirely logical that if we were heading out on to the Indian Ocean to see the renowned magnificent Nungwi sunset, then it would be time for dinner by the time we came back to shore. So it made perfect sense to change out of beachwear and into something more appropriate before we made our way to the boat – got to be the correct decision, right? Wrong. “We’re here for the sunset cruise”, I called to the pre-occupied boat guys, trying to elicit some kind of response. A couple of them looked up so we gravitated towards them. “Where…
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Cornwall Calling
We aren’t yet in a position to organise any foreign trips but with COVID restrictions easing we can at least now travel within the UK and so tomorrow we head off down to Cornwall, where we will be based in Padstow for the next ten days. We are fortunate enough to own a property in Padstow itself, which we rarely get to visit in high season as in normal times it is used as a holiday let to provide some income in our retirement, but this year we are so starved of travel that we’ve snaffled a few weeks for our own use – in fact we will be there…
