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Haggling & Bartering: Our Guide
We have often read, in posts by all kinds of travellers including the most experienced, that they don’t enjoy or feel comfortable with the practice of haggling over prices in bazaars and markets in certain cultures. On one level, we find this really surprising, as we have had great fun doing this in places as disparate as Turkey, Morocco, India, Jordan and even Singapore, and without fail we have enjoyed the whole experience. On the other hand, we think we perhaps do understand what it is that the British in particular don’t like about the practice. So here’s our 5-minute guide to how to enjoy. Firstly, don’t think that you…
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Beautiful Places #4: St Petersburg
The whole point of our visit to St Petersburg was to see a winter city in the depths of winter and therefore to see it as it is meant to be seen. We weren’t disappointed. During our visit temperatures dipped to minus 27, there was heaps of snow on the ground and the river was frozen, but each day was blue sky and wall to wall sunshine: it really couldn’t have been any better. St Petersburg is both beautiful and majestic, and enchanting. The imposing Hermitage with its unbelievably opulent interior; the majesty of the city’s architecture exemplified by the wonderfully named “Church Of Our Lady On Spilled Blood”, easy…
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Photographic Memories #18
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With lockdown incomplete and travel still on hold for a while, we currently have no new adventures to blog; we do though have many such memories… Photo #18: Peace Amongst Madness This photograph is special to us simply because it represents an atypical moment in the crazy city of Marrakech. With its souks buzzing with activity, its streets choked with slow moving traffic and a main square which is amongst the most exciting and lively places in any city on Earth, Marrakech is an onslaught of sight and sound from dawn till…
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Beautiful Places #3: Valbona
Quite some distance before we made it to Valbona, the hair on the back of our neck was starting to stand on end, such was the magnificence of the scenery unfolding around us as we left the major roads and headed northwards towards the Accursed Mountains in northern Albania. The road to Valbona hugs the river as it cuts through the deep gorge, climbing steadily until the canyon opens out to the plateau within which lies the village itself, a village which is both tiny and unassuming, with precious little which you could call civilisation. But its beauty is in its setting. We have visited quite a few mountain village…
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Photographic Memories #17
Photo #17: Cornish Sunset Our last photographic memory featured a sunset, and whilst on that subject we shouldn’t move on without mentioning Cornwall. I have been a regular visitor there for over 40 years now, and still get a feeling of excitement every time we cross the River Tamar and pass the Cornwall boundary sign. Having travelled to many wonderful places around the world, the Camel Estuary, with its heart at Padstow, remains one of our very favourite places on Earth. There’s actually two photos today, in the first you can see the twinkling evening lights of the village of Rock across the estuary dwarfed by the glowing sky, and…
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Harbouring Dreams
As we lose ourselves in reminiscing about previous trips and places visited, 2021 is just starting to take shape and our hopes of resuming our travels are increasing considerably. Our thoughts until recently were that if we make no travel plans until we have each received our dual vaccinations, then we may just be in a position to travel from around the end of July. Developments this week have given further encouragement. I received my first vaccination on Tuesday, Michaela’s is due on Monday, and both of us have appointments for the second dose before the end of May, meaning that allowing the 3-week clearance period after the vaccine would…
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Beautiful Places #2: Puerto Escondido
Those of us fortunate enough to be well travelled regularly have to field the question: “so where is the best place you’ve ever been?” And we all know that it’s an impossible question to answer, you can’t compare a vibrant city with a mountain village, a coastal resort with an ancient palace, or a hedonistic wine region with a spot by the sacred Ganges. However, if pushed for a top five, Puerto Escondido would always be in there, and, moreover, if the question was couched as “where have you been where felt happiest”, we are both very likely to give the same answer. Blessed with a wonderful climate and backed…
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Photographic Memories #16
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With lockdown incomplete and travel still on hold for a while, we currently have no new adventures to blog; we do though have many such memories… Photo #16: Sunset & Reflection Spectacular sunsets are always popular – there are places across the World which attract an army of camera carrying enthusiasts to capture that special moment as the sun goes down and fills the sky with colour. A great many such places are coastal, of course, but this one was different on both levels: not coastal, and, certainly as far as we…
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Travel Stories #1: Bush Routes
“Are you Phil?”. He’d appeared from nowhere in the darkness but his friendly smile was a big relief at such a late hour. The airport at Dar-Es-Salaam is not your standard terminal, with half of the seating area positioned outside of the building and surrounded by concrete, plastic and glass, only a handful of features recognisable as a Terminal. It was somewhere around 2am, we’d disembarked our flight from Istanbul and all other passengers had scattered quickly. Within minutes it was just the two of us milling around the concrete areas, shrouded in deep darkness, the night as silent as the airport itself. I looked at Michaela, the worry in…
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Photographic Memories #15
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With lockdown incomplete and travel still on hold for a while, we currently have no new adventures to blog; we do though have many such memories… Photo #15: New Earth This photograph’s claim to fame is that it is the only place we’ve ever visited where we are looking across land which is younger than we are. Salt pans now dominate the panorama as the new land is put to profitable use, but this land simply didn’t exist until 1971, when the cascading lava of the erupting volcano was cooled by the…
