Archive for the 'Travel' Category
Scotland has always been a top destination for tourism with so much history and wonderful countryside. Edinburgh has also become a top stag and hen night destination with loads to do close by. Some of the top activities include White Water Rafting, Paintballing and Go Karting.
Edinburgh as a city has s much going for it with Scotland’s number on tourist attraction located bang in the middle of the city, Edinburgh Castle. The Royal mile runs directly from it to Holyrood Palace and is a thriving road packed full of tourists in the Summer months.
The Highlands of Scotland are well worth a trip with many bus tours and and day coach tours leaving from all the major cities in Scotland.
Edinburgh has some of the best cityscapes in the world, making it perfect for a short break. There is plenty to see and do with the perfect balance between all things traditional and contemporary.
Discover top class museums and galleries, take a tour on an open-top bus or even visit the city’s own zoo. From the world famous Festivals to fantastic restaurants and bars, not to mention fabulous shopping, you’ll be spoilt for choice.
San Diego is a great place to visit with its many places of interest. The two most popular Theme park attractions are the San Diego Zoo and Marine World. It also offers many parks. Balboa Park has many different museums and is walking distance to the zoo. If you are looking for a golf vacation San Diego is home to some of the highest top rated golf courses in the world.
San Diego has many different types of hotels to stay in. One popular alterative is vacation rentals . Many travelers that are looking for a beach experience are choosing to stay in San Diego vacation rentals in beach communities like Mission Beach, La Jolla, Ocean Beach, and Solana Beach. San Diego has what ever type of accommodation you are looking for.
San Diego is also home to some of the best shopping and finest dining California has to offer. Downtown is also known for its night life as well. If you are looking for a vacation that has a little bit of everything, San Diego should be at the top of your list.
Elegance, Bright Sunshine, Pleasantly cool weather, an amazing atmosphere, are all just a few of the various characteristics the town of
If Essaouira is generally acclaimed as one of the most enchanting spots along Morocco’s Atlantic coast, it owes this position to a temperate climate which hardly varies from one month to the next, to the welcome and warmth offered by its inhabitants, to its inheritance of treasures both architectural and cultural and, more than all of these perhaps, to the unique atmosphere which rules its graceful streets, where fishermen, locals, tourists both Moroccan and European, merchants, craftsmen, musicians, and artists of all kinds come to share their work, their perspectives and their friendship as they have now for hundreds of years.
or some time now Essaouira has been experiencing a boom in tourism, aided by regular flights from major destinations around the world. Essaouira is developing fast, while carefully maintaining the combination of reflective beauty and youthful energy which draw people back to our town again and again
Essaouira possesses a classical European ‘Grand Place,’ beautifully preserved ramparts and naval fortifications, one of the finest remaining fortified ports in the world, and numerous monuments of historical interest left by figures ranging from sixteenth-century Portugese explorers right up to Orson Welles and Jimmy Hendrix. Its architecture is both harmonous and yet varied, exposing at different times its French, Portugese, and Berber heritages. Mixing historic buildings with award-winning twentieth century designs lining its long, serene boardwalk, Essaouira is, like Morocco itself, a study in contrasts — its impressive ramparts and cannon-studded walls enclosing tranquil winding streets, the bustle of the souks giving way to the crumbling grandeur of the ancient Mellah, mosques nestled next to churches and synagogues; and just minutes from the crash of ocean waves one finds the many great riads, their tranquil courtyards and soaring atriums restored to the golden age of Moroccan tilework and woodcraft, offering hospitality once again in the purest Moroccan tradition.
Still, it’s easy to feel a tinge of resentment toward the place—so astonishingly blessed is it by climate and geography (that harbor! those beaches!). It is the homecoming queen of travel destinations, topping Travel + Leisure’s World’s Best Cities poll for eight of the past 11 years. So when I say that Sydney also happens to have, dish for dish, the finest Asian food on the planet, I realize I’m adding to a long litany of hyperbole. But it’s true. No Asian city—not Hong Kong, not Bangkok, not even Singapore—offers such assured cooking across the board, or such a wide range of cuisines: Thai, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Korean, Japanese, Cantonese, Sichuan, Taiwanese, Lao, Filipino, Cambodian, Burmese.
Why? Immigrants from East and Southeast Asia have formed a major demographic in Australia for more than a century. Because of this extensive shared history, even non-Asians here have an easy familiarity with Asian cooking: Australians under 35 probably grew up not just on Vegemite sandwiches but also on curries and pad kee mao. “My kids’ school cafeteria actually serves sushi and Vietnamese rice-paper wraps. And even in suburban kitchens, the wok is as indispensable as the barbie,” says Joanna Savill, a Sydney-based food writer and host of the TV series The Food Lovers’ Guide to Australia. She compares the role of Asian cuisine here to that of Indian food in the U.K. or Mexican in the western United States; Tex-Mex and Anglo-Indian cooking, however, are blandified approximations, while Australia’s Asian food is usually the real deal.
Furthermore, the ingredients are superb. Sydney’s cooks have access to fabulously fresh, often organic, produce. Australian beef, lamb, and Bangalow pork are deservedly renowned, which is why the best kitchens in Asia import their meat from here. So too is the fish and seafood selection, the bulk of it sold through the Sydney Fish Market—the world’s second-largest, after Tokyo’s.
For travelers leery of experimenting at Bangkok street stalls or Singapore hawker centers (too bad, since in Asia the down-and-dirty joints serve the tastiest food), Sydney’s eateries present a welcoming environment without the customary trade-off in authenticity. English-speaking waitstaff are an added bonus. A good portion of my adult life has been spent eating my way around the East, yet I’ve never found ayam goreng (Balinese fried chicken) or cha gio (Vietnamese spring rolls) to compare with those I discovered in Sydney.
Actually, that’s not true. My Aussie friend Michael, a former Sydneysider now living in New York, prepares both dishes just as well. He also makes a fabulous Malaysian laksa and knockout soup dumplings. Unlike every other resident of Manhattan, Michael has never once ordered Chinese or Thai takeout—he knows he can do a far better job himself. Besides, Sydney spoiled him for Asian food. Michael, then, becomes a natural companion for my Sydney culinary adventure, during which he serves as my guide and occasional translator. (Did I mention he speaks a bit of Cantonese, Japanese, and Thai?)
We arrive in the final, glowing burst of Australian spring, just as the jacarandas are dropping their petals to form bright pools of lavender on the streets. For the next 14 days, we will eat Asian food for every meal—high-end, casual, and everything in between.
The dance floor is packed at the tango hall Confitería Ideal for one of Buenos Aires’s all-night milongas. In the harsh light of grimy Victorian chandeliers, gray-haired gentlemen work the floor, steering women wearing the kind of T-strap shoes seen on 1930’s Hollywood chorines. Everyone is pressed hip to hip, cheek to cheek, breast to chest—matter-of-fact pairings that speak of decades of waking up in the same bed and quick kisses at the door. Couples at rickety tables puff cigarettes and chat; only a few are dressed up, one of these a matron with a bleached-blond bouffant who keeps adjusting her black net gloves. Except for the whine of the bandonion, which looks like a pint-sized accordion with buttons instead of keys, it could be a Masonic lodge in the American Midwest. The same story is played out all over town: Saturday night, slow tango dancing, nobody heading home until dawn.
But as I stand in a corner, nursing a bottle of Quilmes beer, I start to notice younger faces flitting through the crowd. A trio of beaming girls barely out of their teens go through the tango motions, one after the next, with a courtly instructor old enough to be their grandfather. One cool couple is hotdogging like Ideal is their ticket to Broadway—she’s an Uma Thurman blonde with elegant footwork and a beauty-queen smile; he’s surfer-dude handsome. And in the band behind them all, amid the lineup of rumpled veteran musicians, the bandonion player has the clean-cut good looks and bespoke suit of a newly minted investment banker. Actually, he was one. I later learn that a year ago he shocked his coworkers at Goldman Sachs by resigning and announcing that he was heading back to his hometown to learn to play his grandparents’ music. In New York, he advised investors; in Buenos Aires, the long-troubled capital of an equally troubled country, he found something else to invest in—his own culture, his own identity.
No matter where I go in the city, from the traditional dance halls to the recently opened nightclubs, I keep recalling the question that the angry young narrator Che asked in the Lloyd Webber and Rice musical Evita: “What’s new, Buenos Aires?” Judging by the looks of things now, the answer is simple: what’s new is youth, vigor, and a fresh sense of self-awareness that has nothing to do with the Europe-yearning of past generations and everything to do with a recently discovered national pride. At Mark’s, a popular Palermo Soho sandwich bar, all raw brick and sheets of glass, I sip café con leche and listen as Ramiro López Serrot, who co-owns a fashion boutique just up the street with his wife, marvels at how much he and his fellow thirtysomethings have evolved in just a few years. While rising to meet the drastic economic challenges of a seemingly endless recession, the current generation has come to a realization that they are further away from their European roots than their parents ever were. “My father’s family is Spanish, my mother’s family is French Basque, and everybody in that era looked to Europe for guidance on everything,” says López Serrot. “For the first time in my life, I feel like an Argentinean.”
The creator of the world’s most expensive olive oil is standing in a dusty parking lot beside Tuscany’s autostrada, hurling glass bottles against a concrete wall. Thwuck…doink. 
Thwuck…doink. Remarkably, not one breaks. “See?” Armando Manni says proudly. “I had these made specially in the Veneto—the bottle is a half-inch thick. The manufacturer thought I was crazy.”
Crazy is certainly one way to describe Manni, an Italian film director who happened upon an unexpected second career in 1997. “When my son, Lorenzo, was born, I wanted to give him the healthiest food I could find,” he says. Immersing himself in research, Manni realized that what manufacturers call extra-virgin olive oil is often of an inferior grade, compromised by exposure to sunlight and oxygen long before it’s consumed. With the help of scientists, Manni was able to bottle a “live” oil, which he claims contains more cancer-fighting agents. He keeps his product from oxidizing by topping it off with nitrogen; the bottle’s thick black glass protects it from sunlight. Portions are small (only 3.4 ounces) so the oil stays fresh from start to quick finish, and each comes marked with a vintage and a “best before” date. Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Charlie Trotter, Michel Troisgros, and Thomas Keller are a few of Manni’s devoted clients, each happy to pay $7 an ounce for this ethereal liquid gold.
Brimming with passion and possessed of impeccable taste, Manni embodies the term gusto, in both senses. (In his Comme des Garçons suede jacket and handmade leather boots, he also looks uncannily like Robert De Niro.) The Rome native—who spends half his time in Tuscany, where his olives are grown—recently opened his black book and took me on a tour of the Italian countryside. We tracked down vintners, cheesemakers, and salumai who share Manni’s intense enthusiasm and rigorous devotion to craft, as well as family-owned restaurants that still do things the old-fashioned way. The culinary treasure trail starts here.
“So, what’s new in Bangkok?” I ask my friend Rungsima Kasikranund during a recent visit to Thailand’s capital. “Spas, Latin dancing, and coffee bars,” she replies offhandedly, as if to preclude any tiresome questions about good places for pad thai or upcoming temple festivals. Her answer—as well as her chic black outfit and the minimalist café in which we’re sitting—tells me that Bangkok is, if not yet hip, then certainly on the cusp of hip.
A hip Bangkok would be only the latest in a series of reincarnations this Buddhist city has undergone in the space of a few decades. Over the last 30 years, it has tripled in population and metamorphosed from a drowsy Asian backwater (quite literally: only a few feet above sea level, it’s often flooded in monsoon season) to a densely populated, plugged-in metropolis.
The Vietnam War was responsible for Bangkok’s most notorious rebirth—as a city of pleasure for the American soldiers who poured in looking for R&R. Backpackers followed, then tour groups and high-end travelers. I started visiting in the mid-1980’s, in time to witness Bangkok’s next, decidedly tonier, incarnation, when Thailand was one of Asia’s economic “tigers” and the expanding middle class suddenly had money to burn. The Oriental hotel opened a spa that set a new gold standard for pampering. And Ed Tuttle, who designed the Amanpuri and Amandari resorts (in Phuket and Bali, respectively), created the fabulous Sukhothai hotel in 1991—still my favorite place to stay.
But my enthusiasm for the city waned in direct correlation to its booming economy. Newspapers reported that the number of cars on Bangkok’s overburdened roads was growing by nearly 500 a day. A friend told me she once abandoned her car on a gridlocked street to go off to dinner and returned an hour later only to find that traffic hadn’t budged. The glut of construction projects made the congestion and air pollution even worse. Headlines told of government scandals, of Buddhist monks accused of sexual and financial improprieties, of the growing AIDS epidemic. In 1991, I sat out a military coup in a hotel coffee shop, sipping Singha beer while tanks rolled down the street. A few years later, I got caught in a late monsoon, and had to wade through streets flooded with filthy water. Back at my hotel, I threw out my shoes and vowed never to return to Bangkok.
A few months later the Thai economy collapsed and the baht lost almost half its value against the dollar. And Bangkok was reborn, gradually, yet again, as a poorer but gentler city—one that I’ve now come back to rediscover.
The café where Rungsima has asked me to meet her is the latest outpost in the Greyhound chain, itself a spin-off of a popular local fashion line of the same name. Right now, it is the coolest place to hang out in Bangkok, and the perfect place for her to show off her city to a New York journalist. Rungsima, the editor-in-chief of the Thai edition of Elle Decor, was born in Bangkok but educated abroad, and is well-traveled and well-connected. Greyhound’s cappuccinos are good, its menu is an Asian-Western fusion, and its clientele a mix of stylish shoppers and twentysomethings clutching cell phones and sporting creative hairdos. A tongue-in-cheek sign on the wall proclaims it a NO BULLSHITTING NO BACKSTABBING NO GOSSIPING NO SMOKING AREA.
Three Roman Hideaways
Location
A four-story palazzo at the corner of Via Bocca di Leone and the storied Via Condotti, above the Ferragamo flagship store. Portrait Suites is part of the Lungarno Hotels group, owned by the Ferragamo family.
First Impressions
A smiling concierge posted at the discreet street-level entrance whisks guests up to a second-floor reception lounge, where an equally amiable duty manager checks them in. Refreshments are proffered while documents are processed; an Italian couple on their second stay laughed incredulously when the concierge greeted them by name and added, “Cappuccino for you, sir, and a chilled apple juice for you, madam, if I remember correctly?” The interiors, by house designer Michele Bönan, are chic and sexy in extremis: heathered ice-blue flannel chairs and headboards echo the silver-blue silk curtains, lined in a vermilion satin printed with the Ferragamo logo. Walls are black-stained French oak; framed photos and sketches from the Ferragamos’ private collection line the staircase. The roof terrace is all teak furniture and Zen-style potted grasses—a perfect foil for the dizzying Baroque splendor it overlooks. (It’s also the only public space in the hotel for lolling about; there’s no lobby or lounge, and breakfast is served in-suite.)
Rooms
All 14 have walk-in closets and fully stocked kitchenettes (espresso machines; bone china; Boffi fridges packed with milk, juice, Sicilian cookies, and wine). In the bathrooms, mirror-lined swing doors separate the toilet and bidet from the sink and shower area; slate-gray pure marble floors invite barefoot traipsing. A standard double somehow has space for a small sitting area, a three-way standing mirror, a little desk, and a 42-inch wall-hung plasma TV.
Sore Spot
The room’s stock starts to slide after the third or fourth time one has rolled into the crack between two twin mattresses masquerading as a king-size bed. It’s 2007; surely these are available in Italy by now?
Trump Cards
Six-star turndown service, with classical music on the Tivoli sound system, his-and-hers slippers, a cashmere blanket laid at the end of the bed, a breakfast menu next to the phone, and a plate of biscotti from Moriondo & Gariglio. And the staff: knowledgeable, fast, and friendly without being overfamiliar or obsequious.