The Amateur Traveler talks to Debbie from http://DeliciousBaby.com about traveling (internationally) with small kids: why not just stay home, how to cope with the airport and long flights, and destinations that are great for kids.

News

Japanese Voted The Best Tourists

Show Notes

click here to download (mp3)
click here to download (iTunes enhanced)
Read the rest of this entry »

Saturday, July 8th
Time to say hello to Vieques again after a nine year absence. We drove from San Juan to the Fajardo ferry terminal and parked in the long term parking ($40 for a week). We bought our tickets ($2 each) and waited for the ferry to arrive. Prior to boarding everyone lines up in a fairly disorganized queue at a metal gate. When the gate opens it’s everyone for themselves and a rush to board. However, I’d expected this and told my kids this short term discomfort would soon be forgotten. If you expect the ferry to be like this you’ll deal with it OK. If you like airport style comfort, just pay the extra and fly. Once on the ferry everything is fine, it’s fairly new and well air-conditioned to the point of being actually quite cold. The ferry ride takes around an hour and then you disembark much the way you embarked. After the ferry docked Penny from the Seagate picked us up at the harbor & took us to the hotel. We stayed at the Seagate (787 741 4661) on our last trip and had a fabulous time and when we decided to return to Vieques the Seagate was our only option. It’s a nice perk that they’ll pick you up from the terminal so that you don’t have to deal with renting a taxi for what is only a pretty short ride to the hotel in Isabel Segunda. It’s set high up on the hill behind the Fort (El Fortin Conde de Mirasol) and offers 6 apartment style accommodations plus some additional houses & properties on the ground. It’s very down to earth and you feel at home the moment you arrive. The grounds are lush with tropical vegetation and you almost feel like you’re in El Yunque. Note – this is not your 5 star bells & whistle sterile casino style spa resort. If you like that try the Martineau and good luck to you. If you are less pretentious, like discovering the real island feel and like more down to earth surroundings the Seagate is for you. We love it and will not stay anywhere else.
Read the rest of this entry »

In Kuwait there is no such thing a a fender bender, every wreck is spectacular.  I have seen all kinds of traffic in my travels but nothing compares to the drivers in Kuwait.  Every highway is a NASCAR experience.  The posted speed limit is 120km/h but that, like the lanes painted on the roads are merely a suggestion.  In our daily travels we always saw wild accidents and just plain crazy things like a camel in the back of a small pickup truck.  One night we came upon a five car wreck that was blocking all lanes of the five lane highway.  The Kuwait police did not let traffic stop, they just simply cut a wide gap into the fence and directed all of the traffic out into the desert. We were in out Pajaro driving cross country between a Jaguar and a Benz.

Kuwait City International Airport is another place that is very different than what you might expect.  There are three coffee shops (two are Starbucks), a very good cigar store  a Fuddruckers and a Harley Davidson dealership all in the terminal.  If you like people watching at an airport in the United States you would be fascinated with it at KCIA.  Looking at the people coming through customs and trying to figure out if where they have come from or if they have ever been to Kuwait before.  On one of our trips to meet someone at KCIA we witnesses the return of the Kuwait National Football (Soccer)team returning from a major victory in some other country and it really looked like a wild production for an American Baseball team returning from the playoffs.  There we TV cameras and people cheering.  It was witnessing things like this that showed us that the Kuwait people are not much different than us.  Sure you cannot get a bacon cheeseburger at the local McDonald’s or Burger King but everyone I talked to was friendly and helpful. 

Oh and I recommend the Yum Yum Tree restaurant in the airport.  Good food and much cheaper than the American chain restaurants that are there.   

Krakow is, perhaps, the essential city for tourists in Poland. It claims the first cafe in the world, the largest old town square in Europe and the old town itself is surrounded by lovely parks. There are two big day trips out of Krakow: To the Wieliczka Salt Mines and to the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp. Organised tours are available for both, most around 100zl. In this post, Craig Martin is going to show the slightly more adventurous travellers how to visit Auschwitz for less than half of that. Read the rest of this entry »

The Ggantija temples on Malta are a little-known gem: the world’s oldest standing stone structures, built 500 years before the pyramids were a spark in a Pharoah’s eye. There isn’t much infrastructure; just a ticket booth and a standalone audioguide. We only had a couple of problems on our first visit: one was the car rally that stopped any buses running, leaving us with a choice between staying overnight or walking through farms back to the capital. The second was the amount of other tourists clutching their Lonely Planet guidebooks. Read the rest of this entry »

Read part one here

Travelling through Austria at the moment seems like a life-sized art experiment. Spring rains followed by unseasonable sunshine and heat have brought a deep vibrancy to the trees: greens, browns and yellows sit sharply against each other, especially contrasted with the occasional tree covered in pastel-pink blooms. Lush green fields are interspersed with light-brown patches of dirt where finances or crop management have stopped farmers planting. Every now and again, however, one comes across a field of rapeseed, looking like God decided to draw highlighter-yellow lines across creation.

Easy transport connections and cheap hostels mean most budget travellers are drawn from city to city but, like most of Europe, the “Europe we came to see” is in the towns. Last week we looked at Austria’s cities, so in this post I’ll discuss the Mostviertel, Styria and Neusiedl am See before giving some first-hand tips for getting into, around, and out of Austria. Summer’s coming and the ski season is drawing to an end, however there’s still plenty to do outside of Austria’s main draws. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Camera Advice: First you need a film or digital camera, or a video camera that does stills (or dare I say a camera phone, which are actually getting much better). Two great resources for reviews on digital cameras are www.imaging-resource.com and www.dpreview.com. Digital SLRs (Single Lens Reflex Cameras) are more affordable than ever, and many are available for under $1000 including a zoom lens.
2. Bring extra batteries: One of the things that can put a damper on your day is to arrive at the summit of Haleakala in Maui or Mt Fuji and have no batteries left. I recommend having one or two spare batteries for all the cameras you own. Also, if you have two cameras, I recommend buying cameras that use the same batteries if possible.
3. Bring extra media cards and use the same format card between cameras. Many still cameras and video cameras use the SD card format and by using the same format, you can share cards between two cameras.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Amateur Traveler talks to professional photographer Andrew Darlow about tips for travel photography. Andrew has been a professional photographer for 15 years and has lived in Japan and Europe as well as the U.S. He is the host of the Imaging Buffet podcast. He is also the author of the new book “301 Inkjet Tips and Techniques: An Essential Printing Resource for Photographers”.

News

Skybus, the newest budget airline
British Airways battles Virgin Atlantic by editing Richard Branson out of inflight movies

A New Airline Seat Configuration?

Show Notes

some of Andrew’s Photos
The Imaging Buffet
Read the rest of this entry »

It’s the simple familiar things that one sometimes misses; things you don’t think twice about but you expect to see, to have, to use more than twice a day. Things like a cup of coffee.

It’s easy for me; espresso is as near to an international world as possible, but for Linda things aren’t so clear-cut. She drinks - in Kiwi parlance - a long black. A single shot of coffee topped up with two thirds hot water. Try explaining that in a language of your choice. Grofl espresso doesn’t quite do it, neither does Americano in many places. In fact, it’s near impossible to find, especially given that the concept doesn’t exist in many coffee drinking countries.

I don’t really eat breakfast either, that cup of coffee keeps me going until midday at least, but on those days that the urge to eat strikes…let’s just say a South Pacific breakfast doesn’t include cuts of cold meat or dripping after the Austrian fashion. Or marble sponge cake as I was offered in Greece. Needless to say an English breakfast contains enough cholesterol to stop an elephant dead in it’s tracks and a hot curry doesn’t appeal at 7am.

Read the rest of this entry »

Continuing from last month’s post, Luggage: A Simple Choice?, this week I’m going to look at how to pack smarter and lighter.

Imagine a week in Corfu on a cheap package deal from Malta at the start of Summer. How much would you pack? As we stood in the check-in queue with our 15 litre daypacks we thought we must be in the wrong line. One couple had hand baggage plus three suitcases, two of which were larger than the seven year old in front of us! You can bet they paid their ticket price again in excess weight costs.

There are so many advantages to a light, one bag mentality — and not only the blessing of less weight to carry and less things to lose. Budget airlines are making their baggage allowances smaller and smaller, cashing in on excess weight charges. New carry-on laws make flying without checked luggage seem like a dream, but one day it’ll be possible again.

Read the rest of this entry »