Viator Travel Blog

You may have suffered from the stereotypical mis-perception that Belgium is not the most interesting of places, and that Brussels has nothing much going on beyond the European Parliament and museums filled with Old Flemish masters. Well, like me, you’d be wrong. (I’m tempted not to tell you any of this, as Brussels is the best-kept secret I know.)

China seems to be behind us as we pull into Erlian, to cross the border into Mongolia. Already we’ve seen the landscape growing drier and stations have lost their grim institutional look. Actually crossing the border is a formality. Customs officials snatch up our passports and give us no idea of when we’ll see them again. We begin the long slow wait for the gauges to change.

Hong Kong reminds me of urban landscapes from cyberpunk novels. It’s all grime and glitz with narrow, twisting alleyways the color of sepia, mile-high concrete block buildings, and mirrored office towers, all bursting from a motley skyline of a billion neon signs. It’s eclectic, fast paced, stylish and modern –- but even so, there are plenty of places to find peace, quiet, and zen in a city park, temple, or monastery.

We’re not going to catch the train out of Beijing. Our first leg of the Trans-Mongolian train and the cab doesn’t seem to be going fast enough to get us to Beijing West Train Station. It’s about 10 minutes before departure and I’m trying to communicate with my scraps of Mandarin – and frantic pointing – that we need to go faster. The cab driver takes this has a critique of his music and switches from the hip hop station to some fluffy Canto-pop. Actually, the determined rhymes and driving beats of Eminem suited the mood better.

Standing in the middle of Muir Woods it’s a little hard to believe that San Francisco — and I mean downtown San Francisco — is just 20 minutes away, over the Golden Gate bridge. It’s so eerily quiet in this stand of old-growth redwood trees, you may as well be a thousand miles from civilization. That’s probably why people find it attractive; like standing on a beach with raging surf, the force of nature here is overwhelming, and all your concerns and worries are quickly put into context.

We will Twitter a few times a day when we have a travel deal worth promoting, a thought worth sharing (99.9% guarnteed to be travel-related, don’t worry). We’ll also start offering Twitter-only promotion codes. So if you want to have a bit of fun and save a few bucks on a Viator tour, follow us on Twitter and be ready when we send out a Twitter-only promotion code.

It started with a school movie, the 16mm kind they used to play on rattling projectors, with strips of amber film flap-flap-flapping at the ends of their reels. The great moai heads gazed out over a barren Easter Island landscape, as close to the middle of nowhere as you were ever likely to get. Why had the island’s past inhabitants toppled their own monoliths? Why were scientists and linguists unable to translate the petroglyphs carved into stones? Were stories of the ‘makemake’ birdman cult true?

I am noticing a strange trend in my travels over the past year. I end up in places turning 400. Are a lot of places celebrating 400 years? Probably not. Nor do I seek out the big birthday celebrations. And yet last summer I found myself in Quebec City for its 400th anniversary. This winter, [...]

“You can’t come to Cornwall without having at least one cream tea. And one again tomorrow. And one again on Wednesday.”

I turned quickly but this obvious expert had put the scone into her mouth before I had time to find the answer to a question haunting me all afternoon: jam first or cream?

I was in Cornwall, England, in the small ex-fishing village of St Ives, now popular for beach holidays (and voted Best Seaside Town in 2007 by The Guardian newspaper!) Tiny white houses with blue trim crowd the narrow, winding streets and everything has a seaside theme. Along the beachfront, all the shops sell buckets and spades, fried chips and postcards. Old men lean on the stone wall gazing out over the sea they used to fish.

There are moments like these when I reflect and realize that, in my frequent refuge to the Australian Outback vernacular, I neglect to render the landscapes wrought asunder by the tyre tracks of my mighty 4WD. I go, I see, I gape. And aloft as I am on the edge of broad expanses of beautiful Nothingness on the edge of Western Australia’s mighty Kimberleys, I could spare an adjective or two for the vista stretched out before me.