Maps of the World

Maps have always fascinated me - I can stand staring at them for hours. Or at least, minutes. Whether it’s a small map of the area, or something covering the whole globe. There’s a few in particular that stand out as interesting, partly for their political background, and others for their technical [...]

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Transport in Cuba

Transport anywhere in what can be considered a third world country is quite a challenge to anyone used to online booking of easyJet flights. But… if you’ve arrived with Western wealth then it’s never going to be all that bad either. I mean for sure, your chances of arriving on time are little [...]

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First Impressions in Cuba

If you fly with First Choice on their Cuba West Traveller scheme they give you your first night’s accomodation free. The idea, we think, is that in Cuba you can’t just turn up as a typical itinerant and expect to wander about. Of course, that’s exactly what you can do… You just need [...]

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Liverpool Airport (Speke)

Liverpool has one of those small airports that’s done rather well over the past decade. A rise in air travel has been good for many airports, yet Liverpool’s Speke airport (now known as Liverpool John Lennon Airport) has done especially well.
Why? Because first of all they worked well with easyJet - with a [...]

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Rocking in Paris

I spend… oooh, lots of time in Paris. Yet I’ve never actually quite got round to writing about it on this site.
Why not? Good question. Perhaps because it’s a little personal. I’ve lived there, loved there, and so on. To talk about it in depth may reveal me more to [...]

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Italy - Lucky in Lucca, and more….

I’m now back from a couple of weeks touring in Italy. Shattered, and surprised at my lack of internet access. It simply wasn’t an easy thing to sort out in some places, and I didn’t have my usual phone as it’s broken, so I was relying on an old mobile for access.
I’m struggling, [...]

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Gin Tonic in Lima Central

It was Douglas Adams that suggested that wherever you are in the universe, asking for something that sounds like “Gin and Tonic” will usually give you the same drink. Of course I’ve only been able to test this theory on Earth, but so far it had proven unbreakable. So in a non touristy [...]

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Peruvian Food

Peruvian food can be quite easily categorised into the following sections:
Salty and meaty.
Egg based.
Dangerous.
Salty and fishy.
Scary.
Salty and vegetarian.
Touristic.
Lomo Saltado is one of the classic dishes - fried and salted beef, served in a big pile with gravy, vegetables and chips - all mixed together. There may be some salad on the side.
Dangerous food can [...]

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Machu Picchu

This place is the jewel in the South American tourist crown. An abandoned town at the top of a mountain that never got destroyed by the colonials - partly it seems because it just wasn’t all that important and a lot because of its rather inaccesible location.
I won’t bore on about the history of [...]

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Safety when travelling

A lot of travellers worry about being robbed, kidnapped, raped, or jailed for trumped up drugs charges.
But they get on a knackered bus, driven by a coca leaf chewing driver for 12hrs at a stretch, along the most dangerous roads in the world, without a second thought. I´m pretty certain more travellers die in [...]

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