Ultimate Vacation Spots

posted by Travel Cat on Mar 29

I have seen dolphins off the coasts of the UK many times, but they were never ‘planned’ sightings. By this I mean that I just happened to be looking out over the sea wherever I was and there they were - particularly at Brighton around the piers on the south coast of England.

In addition, while I was in the area, had paid a visit to see Fungi, the dolphin who lives in Dingle bay, just off the south-west tip of The Republic of Ireland. And it’s always amazing, even if you just about see a fin.

But I wanted to do it properly this time, I wanted to search for wild dolphins and whales in UK waters, rather than just catch a glimpse. I began researching the most likely places to see resident dolphin populations and the best time of year to see whales breaching, etc, and then go on a vacation specifically for this.

How To Do It
Now, you can either do this off the coast or you can hire boats, either yourself or as part of a guided tour - the latter being closer to them and more likely of a sighting, so I wanted to look at a combination of both. I’m not too keen on the sea myself - and it’s so cold in the UK - so if I can see them from dry land, I would prefer it. Below are the some places I found for both types of sightings and what species you might see, starting with the southern-most locations (as they are that bit warmer):

Around Lands End - Cornwall: Bottle-nose dolphins are very common here, but it’s also possible to see sperm whales off to the west, but they tend to stay away from the rocky shore.

Around Cardigan Bay - Wales: Common porpoises and minke whale are frequently seen in these waters, along with the long-finned pilot whale out at sea.

West coast of Scotland: It is possible to sea orca here (killer whales) between the mainland and the Hebrides, along with minke whales and common porpoises. Slightly more to the south you may catch a glimpse of sperm whales and pilot whales.

East coast of Scotland: Moray Firth is well known for it’s dolphin populations including bottle-nose, white-beaked and common porpoises. Slightly south of here at sea, you may find minke and ling-finned pilot whales.

Northern Scotland and the Shetland Isles: Orca and Risso’s dolphin are common here, as well as some others found elsewhere in Scotland, and around the Orkney’s a sighting from land of orcas is becoming more frequent.

Further Tips
It would be worthwhile watching or studying pictures of breaching whales and dolphins before you go you you are aware of what you are likely to see, as without a guide you are on your own. Make yourself familiar with their activities, like dolphins ‘bow riding’ at the front of a passing boat, to maximise your chances of seeing them. Which species will be alone and which will be in groups? What shape are their dorsal fins? Are there any other aquatic species I could mistake them for?

It goes without saying to take some binoculars and a water-proof jacket!

posted by Travel Cat on Mar 28

Panama’s Pacific coast line is perfect for surfing, but the northern Caribbean coast also has some favoured spots - and is probably warmer water! Early travellers found these perfect locations and kept returning time after time, passing on the word to others for generations who you can find surfing off Chirique, Panama.

There are now a whole lot of people wanting to come to Panama to learn to surf, and due to the rise in demand for these Panamanian waves, a small industry has appeared to take care of hoards of feisty arrivals. As a result there are now many areas along the pacific coast and one well known Caribbean resort where you can lodge safely and cheaply and learn to surf or improve your existing skills!

They are called ’surf camps’ and are available all over the world, but there are a lot of people asking me about surfing camps in Panama. So, what I’ve done is selected 3 of these well known surf camps in Panama that offer a good deal, and have detailed them below for you.

Bocas Surf School - Bocas del Toro - Caribbean Coast
Price: $89/£45 for 1 day up to $369/£185 for 5 days tuition.

This surf camp offers daytime lessons only for both new surfers and experienced and can either be for 1,3 or 5 days. It includes some equipment and several boat rides around the area. It doesn’t include accommodation or food, but the area is well developed with many local hotels to choose from (around $6/£3 to $60/£30 pppn) and nearly all residents speak English here, you’ll find them trying to sell you equipment from surf board racks and accessories as well.  You can even take your non-surfing friend along with you!

Panama Surf Camp - Morro Negrito - Pacific Coast
Price: $650/£325 per person per week inclusive.

This surf camp is based on 2 islands off the coast of the Chiquiri province.  It offers full week long surfing packages for all abilities, and includes pick up from the airport, all accommodation and 3 meals a day as part of the package. They also offer a whole host of other activities from horseback riding to spear fishing payable as extras. 

Punta Brava Lodge - Santa Catalina - Pacific Coast
Price: from $625/£312 based on 3 or more sharing to $1150/£575 for singles

This lodge offers excellent surfing tuition on one of Panama’s best beaches. The price includes airport transfers, 3 meals a day and accommodation for 7 nights, as well as offering fishing and diving around the area off of their boats.  Their website shows some great photos of the accommodation - it looks amazing!

I haven’t tried any of these myself, but if you do - or you have already - let me know about your favourite and let other readers know of any different surf camps in Panama, or elsewhere that you would recommend.

Finally, with the budget for staying in Panama is only around $20-$30/£10-£15 per day, so why not stay after surf camp and enjoy everything else Panama has to offer - you don’t need a visa if travelling from the US, Canada or the UK, you just need your passport and your sense of adventure…..

posted by Travel Cat on Mar 26

Hello again, here is an update as promised. We are getting more excited and have made some progress - but still haven’t really got the whole thing organised. We aren’t stressing though, as these things always come together in the end!

We still only have the flight booked, but we have come across a few things in the finer planning that have resulted in a slight change of plans from the original and have held up reserving anywhere with cash!

Accommodation - It seems as though the facilities being offered at different locations in Costa Rica vary greatly, (as does the cost) but we need some essentials that we can’t do without:

1) We want our own private bathroom and there will be no exceptions here.
2) We need 24hr Internet access either in the resort (ideally) or VERY close by.
3) We need a locker or safe available exclusively to us.
4) We need food included or access to 24hr kitchen facilities.

Ideally, we don’t want to pay more than $40/£20 a night for a double - preferably less!!

These don’t appear to be too great an ambition based on what we have been reading online, but many websites do not clarify these details clearly enough so we are having to email them individually for questions. We have already had some negative answers - all politely put, but never-the-less not suitable for our needs.

Location - It would seem that our hope of getting to Puntarenas is nil now, as the accommodation we have found is just not good enough for us in terms of security or internet access. It is also a lot more expensive than elsewhere in Coast Rica. Added to this the transport there is proving difficult:

a) Bus: We can catch the tourist buses from the north down to the south which take at least 10 hours - but they only go so far. To get to the area we want means having to then hire a car for the remainder of the journey, adding another hour or two to the journey time, plus doubling the price. Basically 2 full days used up getting there and back. And a lot of money spent.

b) Plane: $400/£200 EACH.

Needless to say, we are scrubbing this location off our list and looking for another.

Sights - Based on the things we really want to see or experience, we balanced up the remaining locations and totalled up places we wanted to see and things we wanted to do around each area. This showed a slightly more skewed result than we had originally thought, with one place only having a few days worth of things to do and at a higher accommodation and travel cost and another with bucket loads of things to do and which was cheaper and nearer!

So the new schedule is looking more like the below with the original plan in brackets after. I’ve also changed the ‘days’ to ‘nights’ as this is easier to work out:

San Jose - 1 night
Monteverde Region - 15 nights  (Monteverde Region - 10 days)
Arenal Volcano Area - 4 nights  (Arenal Volcano Area - 4 days)
Las Canas Area - 4 nights (Peninsula de Nicoya - 4 days)
Nicoya Town Area - 4 nights (Puntarenas Region - 10 days)
San Jose - 1 night

That’s now 29 nights (as I worked out too many days in the original plan). We will still lose about 24 hours travelling between the locations in total over the month, but we will get to see everything along the way.

Extra Things - We are also now planning a few days where we just relax as well. Originally we were so excited about everything we could do in Costa Rica, that we hadn’t thought we could just stop for a day or two and soak up the place, maybe just walk around the town and find a nice place to sit and read or something - so this has now been factored in at the cheapest location obviously!

Also, we are starting to look at the New York stop-over as an extra part of the holiday. We have 4 hours on the way there, plus 4 on the way back, so after passport control and the time it takes to check back in - that leaves us about 5/6 hours to see everything of importance to us there. We will no doubt look at a written guide for the city and try to find one of those ‘discover New York in just 4 hours’ or something packs, so we can zip to the main places without getting caught up in Macy’s or somewhere pointless.

Next Steps - Now we need to actually try to book the hotels and hope that they have rooms for when we need them, otherwise we will have to start compromising, and that’s never nice!

We also need to consider how we are getting to the airport and back. The departure flight is early o’clock from Gatwick airport and the return flight lands at even earlier o’clock at Heathrow airport. This broken return will take some research on different transport combinations, so it needs to get done asap. It’s not a simple park the car in one place, as we are going to land somewhere else!

Well, back on the Internet I go!

Cat

posted by Travel Cat on Mar 24

Here’s a little story of what I did with my 7 hours stopover in Atlanta, Georgia.

Basically, I was flying from South America with a group of 6 people - on route to the UK - and the flight went via Atlanta where we had to wait some time before our connecting flight. Why waste the transit time sitting in the airport we thought - lets go investigate.

As we were transit passengers, we just checked our hold luggage straight back in after collecting it from reclaim, and headed outside. It took us about 30 minutes in total to get off the plane and out into

the street as we had had to get on a local tube for a handful of stops.

We had a mini meeting and worked out that we had to be back to check in one hour before the flight, so we had 5 and a half hours to fill here - we headed for the nearest mall grabbing a coffee on the way!

Luckily it was quite early, so the mall was reasonably quiet as we entered and tried to find our way around. The couple from our group said they would spend the time alone, so we were down to 4 - then we saw the sign for the movie theatre…….

There was only the new Texas ChainSaw Massacre film showing in the next few minutes, so that was the one we watched! Bearing in mind this was around 11am it wasn’t our preferred choice - but time was against us and it was an easy way to pass the time.

So, shocked out of our skins 2 hours later, we emerged from the movies a bit paler than we went in! There was almost a hush across the group as we hit the sunlight again, before we remembered where we were: 2hours 15minutes remaining.

The only man amongst us said that he fancied a new pair of trainers while he was here and one of the girls said she wanted to look at some scents (?) so we split up - arranging to meet at the big restaurant we had seen at the entrance to the mall in just under 2 hours.

I had started to get a bit of a cold by now (great!) so I was on the look out for a drugstore. I made the mistake of walking into the entrance lobby of a department store and was imediately doused in scent spray from the over-zealous sales assistants and promptly started sneezing continually until I was well away from there! Great sales technique ladies - scare people away from the entrance to your store!!!

So with shrunken watering eyes I kept looking until I finally located a drug store tucked away in a corner and started reading labels. We had a long flight ahead of us and if I had a cold, I wanted something to send me to sleep - I needed ‘drowsy’ in big letters on the packet!

Failing to find one, I asked the assistant for ‘drowsy’ and she told me in no uncertain terms that ‘NOTHING’ she sold would make me drowsy - ‘why would I want that?’ Obviously she thinks everyone wants to stay wide awake when they are ill???

I brought something non-drowsey anyway - and plenty of tissues, then headed to the restaurant a bit early. I sat myself down at a table for 4 much to the annoyance of the staff and ordered a lovely chicken fillet with curly fries and BBQ sauce to cheer myself up.

The others all arrived one at a time with bags of new products and ordered something themselves and we chatted away about anything really while we ate.

Then, time was up and we had to head back to the airport.

Looking back it would have been great to have researched it more thoroughly, and since I have another long stop-over coming up with my family this time, I found an Internet sight showing trusted tours and attractions for Atlanta and other US cities to help us make more use of the time while we are there.

So if you want family vacation ideas for your next stopover or longer vacation - like theme parks or a Metropolitan Museum of Art, why don’t you check out their site, and sign up for their newsletter like I did - so they do the hard work of finding places for you…….

posted by Travel Cat on Mar 24

Ever fancied something just a tiny bit different from the normal holiday, an ultimate vacation of sorts?

How about heading off with just a month long train ticket and no set plans?

Sound like your kind of thing? Then maybe a trip round Europe with just a guidebook and your backpack is what you need to be doing for your next holiday!

You don’t even need to plan anything if you don’t want to. If you have long enough (at least a month), and would rather glide around this continent more like a local than a hurried tourist, you can just head off with a rough plan of countries to visit and soak it all up at your own pace, floating around each country between cities and villages - or nightlife to nightlife! As long as you have enough time to get back to your airport, enjoy yourself.

But, if you want to make the most of it and are more pushed for time, then planning is essential.

How long have you got? - Decide how long you can go away for as this will have a direct impact on what you can see while travelling. Yes, you can get from London to Madrid on the train in less than 12 hours, but you won’t get to see much on the way and it’s a nearly whole day’s sunshine wasted!

If you only have a week, then you will need to either be very restrictive with the area of the continent you travel to (i.e all the countries close together), or you will need to travel at the speed of light to see your favourites.

Basically in a week you will only get to enjoy about 3 cities with a couple of nights in each one. I did get to see 4 countries in less than a week one time, but only really got a ‘feel’ for 2 of them.

In two weeks, you can travel further afield, and may well stay in around 7 cities depending on where you start and finish from. And in a month you could have hit about 17 or more countries!

Where do you want to go? - Don’t worry about routes yet, leave the train timetables well alone - just get your vacation guides and start reading!

List places you would like to see or the festivals you want to attend in the order you come across them; the cities, landmarks, museums and castles, etc. Write them next to the country they are in and mark each with either a ‘definately’ or just a ‘maybe’, then the fun begins….

Now get yourself a basic map of Europe with just the countries showing and 2 colors of pins, stickers or whatever you want to use as markers - one color for ‘definately’ and the other for ‘maybe’. Then get going with them - putting one sticker for each thing on your list onto your map, nice and spread out. Soon you will start to see which countries are coming out on top!

When completed you will be able to write off any countries with only a few maybe’s in them, and start focusing on the countries with the most definitely’s.

Choosing a route - Now you have places to see organised, you can start looking at your route. How many days will it take to see all the places without including the journey times? Are the places too far apart? Have you picked too many things to do?

The only way to find out is to start looking at a rough pathway through your dots, aiming for the definitely’s at first, then look at the one’s out the way and see if they are worth missing. Keep arguing with yourself over what you really want and what can be avoided for a better or smoother journey. The last thing you want to worry about when travelling is keeping a tight schedule where missing a train causes all sorts of timetable changes. You are supposed to be enjoying yourself!

Only when you have less things you ‘definately’ need to see than the number of days you are travelling for, can you stop. You have now got your trip round Europe. By all means keep a few as ’spares’ in-case of bad weather or train delays, or you could just sit with the locals enjoying something impromptu like a game of chess or taking photos of the buildings instead!