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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Photographic Memories #9
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With no current prospect of travel even domestically let alone worldwide, we will have no new adventures to blog, but we do have many such memories….. Photo #9: The Lost Tomato Look closely at this photograph and you will spot that Michaela caught the precise moment that a tomato fell from its stacked trailer, and in the moment of the shot it is suspended in mid air just above the ground. Of course, you can’t capture shots like this intentionally, only by coincidence of timing. The original aim of the photo was…
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Photographic Memories #8
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With no current prospect of travel even domestically let alone worldwide, we will have no new adventures to blog, but we do have many such memories….. Photo #8: Desert Life Desert life goes on with the Bedouin minding his camels in the midday sun, the battered truck displaying all the telltale signs of the demands of the unforgiving environment. Some perspective is given to this photograph by the pick up truck in the far distance, dwarfed by its surroundings yet still some way from the mountains beyond. Here, we are out in…
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Photographic Memories #7
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With no current prospect of travel even domestically let alone worldwide, we will have no new adventures to blog, but we do have many such memories….. Photo #7: Morning Light We liked this photo enough to make it the backdrop on our blogsite homepage, mostly for the way it captures the shadows cast across the water by the early morning light. Taken as we walked to our favoured breakfast spot as the town rubbed its eyes, this shot could be almost anywhere yet it comes as a surprise to most to learn…
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Photographic Memories #6
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With no current prospect of travel even domestically let alone worldwide, we will have no new adventures to blog, but we do have many such memories….. Photo #6: Seaweed Farming On rare occasions you look at a photograph you’ve just taken and immediately know it’s special. This photograph is one such, capturing the unique pale blue of the Indian Ocean and the vastness of the tidal reach, as well as the hard and lonely days of the workers. This is Paje on the east coast of Zanzibar, where seaweed cultivation is one…
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Photographic Memories #5
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With no current prospect of travel even domestically let alone worldwide, we will have no new adventures to blog, but we do have many such memories….. Photo #5: Mother Russia What makes this photograph special to us is how it captures the very essence of the way we had pictured Russia probably since childhood: a frozen river, austere architecture, smoke billowing into the morning air from the tall chimneys of factory buildings, it is the Russia of our mind’s eye. This was sunrise in St Petersburg, captured as we made our way…
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Photographic Memories #3
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With no current prospect of travel even domestically let alone worldwide, we will have no new adventures to blog, but we do have many such memories….. Photo #3: The Accursed Mountains One of the great thrills of travel is that wonderful rush of excitement we all feel as we start out on a new journey, whether it’s a train pulling away from a major city, or leaving port on board a ferry, or even setting out on a hike in new territory. This photograph was taken on just such an occasion, as…
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Photographic Memories #2
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With no current prospect of travel even domestically let alone worldwide, we will have no new adventures to blog, but we do have many such memories….. Photo #2: Skies Over Volos This is another photograph which for us captures a memory of a special moment. After splitting our time between the mainland of Greece and a handful of the Sporades islands, we were now heading back on board the ferry from Skopolos to the mainland port of Volos. In the final stretches of the Aegean, a few miles from port, we moved…
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Photographic Memories
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With no current prospect of travel even domestically let alone worldwide, we will have no new adventures to blog, but we do have many such memories….. Photo #1: Market Day, Skoura What makes this photo special for us is in the background, where the road ends and gives way to …. nothing. Beyond this village thronged with farmers and traders gathering for market day loom the Atlas Mountains, and, past there, the Sahara. Skoura lies more or less on the edge of civilisation: beyond here there is precious little for an awful…
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A Different New Year’s Eve
With our travel adventures for 2020 complete, and our plans for 2021 on hold until there’s more clarification around travel restrictions, we have nothing current to write about. We do, however, have a load of stories from past travels, which we hope may be interesting or amusing. Such as this one with seasonal relevance…… Krakow, Poland, December 30th, 2016. It had been a great few days on this winter city break: cold weather, a visit to Auschwitz, evenings in the main square and in Kazimierz, vodka, beer and food. But now it was time to head home and enjoy the new year celebrations in our village pub back home. Our…
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COVID: Living In The Heart Of The Beast
Kent, England, December 22nd, 2020, and a COVID drama is unfolding right on our doorstep. In the last 48 hours over 40 countries have suspended all flights to and from the UK and our nearer neighbours in Europe have closed all other UK transport routes, following discovery of a new variant of COVID here in England. The source of this new variant, which evidently spreads considerably more rapidly than the parent version, is the county of Kent, which is precisely where we live. Not so long ago, the UK Government decreed that any country with an infection rate of over 20 per 100,000 population was a “dangerous” country: now, districts…
