Transport
The mode of transport you use on long distance travelling can really enhance your experience. Train travel in particular has its own excitement – pulling out of a city feels so auspicious, as does arrival by train in a new place. Locally, using the services of local buses, trams and metros will help you get the feel of a place. And so you learn to live like a local, and if you’re lucky, you get to meet people too. Systems can be difficult but people are so often helpful – if it’s confusing, someone will help you out. On longer journeys, the use of public transport gives you the opportunity to study the terrain at leisure, you can watch the world pass by as you move through the different areas. Busy towns give way to open fields; mountains and lakes. Stations too are stimulating places. The manic activity of bus and rail stations is great to be part of. What at first seems chaos soon becomes clear. Just sit back and enjoy.
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Valladolid: Gateway To Wonders But So Much More
We leave the lovely little beach town of Puerto Morelos with a real sense of disappointment, an unshakable feeling that we really missed out here. Not so much that the seaweed invasion spoilt both the beach and the sea – though that was disappointment enough – but more the fact that I couldn’t shake off the bout of “travel tummy” enough to enjoy the town’s splendid bars and restaurants. Being a beach town, this is probably the best collection we’ve seen in Mexico, but regrettably I just wasn’t up to making the most of it. As we walk home on our last night here – a Friday – after eating…
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From Chiapas To The Coast With A Touch Of Tuxtla
Usually the first one we hear is just before 7am, though occasionally we hear an earlier one and sometimes a handful just after midnight. And then at regular intervals throughout the day. We didn’t know what they were at first – somebody shooting rabbits, perhaps, but then, could the louder ones be cannons? They’re sky rockets, of course they are. It turns out that in the provincial towns of Mexico (the pueblas), there is an obsession with buying or making fireworks and then lighting them outside the church. Apparently intended to “amplify” prayers and take them closer to God, these rockets don’t light up the sky or provide colourful shows,…
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Veracruz & Boca del Rio: Baking Sun & Flash Floods
The very word Veracruz conjures up certain visions – romantic, exotic, dynamic – although maybe I’m swayed a bit by the fact that there’s a Santana song bearing the city’s name as its title which is all about falling in love whilst within the city’s conducive ocean setting. Consequently we venture there with a great sense of anticipation, eager to see it for ourselves. As it happens, we are about to be underwhelmed, and the reality is that Veracruz doesn’t quite meet those expectations. A near 6-hour bus journey from Mexico City sounds like it could be a bit of a trial but the ADO bus is extremely comfortable and…
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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…
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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…
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San Francisco #1
Where do we begin, to describe this exciting, unique city. What makes San Francisco what it is? Is it those incredibly steep streets which look like a tarmac roller coaster, is it the streetcars and cable cars we all associate with the views? Is it THAT bridge, is it THAT prison on its isolated island? Is it the amazing things you can do (and we did) here, is it the bars that just make you want to grab a stool and try all the beers? Chinatown? North Beach? Pier 39? Restaurants at the waterfront? Crazy shit like Lombard Street or Haight Ashbury? Or even the way the fog wraps itself…
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Going Large: From Monterey to San Francisco
A few miles south of Monterey across the peninsula lies the celebrated, Clint Eastwood-famed town of Carmel-by-the-Sea, nestling amongst the tall pines and cypress trees and looking out across the Pacific. There’s no mistaking, even at first glance, that this is one seriously wealthy town, as exquisite and well presented as it is possible to imagine. Almost too perfect. The pristine, gleaming main street slopes downhill through the trees to an immaculate white sand beach where the Pacific rollers roar and rumble; on its leafy streets Carmel must surely set a world record for the number of art galleries per square mile. Every garden seems manicured and well stocked, every…
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To The Last Place…On To Djerba Island
“Can I ask you something personal?”, he says from behind his camel dinner, in that way that only an American would just five minutes after introductions, “Do you think the guy who runs our hotel is kinda rude?” Well no, actually, he’s been fine, but, as far as Dennis and his cousin Bonnie are concerned, our maitre d’ seems to have failed to have made a connection. As it turns out, Dennis and Bonnie had spotted something that we hadn’t. In the way that Americans do. Because let’s fast forward now to our departure date, when immediately after breakfast a maid bursts into our room without knocking on the door,…
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Further South: Luxor To Aswan
Luxor is definitely quieter as Saturday morning dawns and heralds the start of the sacred month of Ramadan. We’ve been told several times that the first day of Ramadan is a time for families, as first they fast together, and then later celebrate the passing of the first day with a convivial family meal as soon as the sunset call to prayer sounds. True to form, in the last few moments before sundown, the previously bustling streets of Luxor are akin to those of a ghost town: no tuk-tuks, no taxis, no horses, litter blowing down the market street which yesterday was rammed with people. Then, two hours or so…
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First Days In Cairo
It’s somehow passed us by that BA are no longer providing meals on short haul flights, and it seems a 5-hour flight is classified as short haul. So there’s nothing, and by the time we make Cairo we are living up to our hungry travellers moniker. Cairo isn’t a traffic jam, it’s a complete gridlock, a gridlock of drivers who possess neither patience nor any lane sense and it takes well over an hour to inch and nudge our way from airport to downtown apartment. Dusk arrives on the way, and the air fills with the echoing and haunting call to prayer from the multitude of mosques around the city,…
