Viator Travel Blog
Viator's staff are dedicated and passionate travellers. On the Viator Blog, they share their experiences as they take in new sights and sounds across the world.
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I was Kidnapped in Morocco
Do I remember my first visit to Morocco?
Let me put it this way — do you remember the first time you were run over by a bus? Dropped from a plane without a parachute? Locked in a room with a poisonous snake?
Yeah. I remember my first trip to Morocco.
Boab Trees (funny things), Western Australians (even funnier)
So, roll down the invisible hill again, straight outta Darwin, to Katherine. Or just get straight Outta Katherine if you’re already there already. Like you didn’t know to (get Outta Katherine, that is). Head west, which means south, but those people got it all upside down already, because this time it’s Western Australia that you have in your sights, which is of course West, but the road from the Katherinites perspective somehow departs from Katherine South. Go West - where the big brown land gets bigger and browner and like a gameshow in the outback the rising escarpments say “Come on Down”.
So get set for adventure, boab trees (you’ll like this one) and the best weird post-Brutalist sculptures on any roadside ever. Anywhere. Guaranteed.
East Coast Australia with Kid, Part 6
Unbelievable. The pool in the backyard is out of bounds! Broken filter; broken dreams! For my wife, it represents one of life’s most crushing moments. I’m slightly disappointed. Seamus, who isn’t yet two years old, doesn’t seem to mind at all.
Still, the weather in Brisbane is great; on the border of spring and summer this really is one of the most perfect places to be. And the local Newmarket Pool is absolutely fabulous (and makes the missus a bit happier too!). It’s like an aquatic version of Mr Wonka’s chocolate factory with lots of water slides, giant colourful mushroom-shaped fountains, shaded wading pools and clear, cool water.
The Disillusioned Dubliner: Saved by a Culchie Woman
Last Saturday — a cold, dark, late-autumn afternoon here in Dublin — Katie Lincoln (who doesn’t have enough interest in Premier League soccer to actually hate it) suddenly nudged me on the sofa. Mid-game of course.
“Lets go for a walk.”
Five words usually guaranteed to bring out the childish bugbear in old Disillusioned. But I suddenly remembered that when it comes to worthwhile adventures, Katie Lincoln has this unfathomable habit of always being right. Anyway, I had a blog to write and needed something else to complain about in dear, dirty Dublin.
Don George in Kenya & Tanzania
MAASAI MARA NATIONAL RESERVE – Nighttime at Bateleur Tented Camp, just outside Maasai Mara National Reserve in western Kenya, near the Tanzanian border.
I’ve just returned to my tented, bush-surrounded camp cabin after a spectacular dinner on Bateleur’s open-air dining verandah: coconut carrot soup; a salad of pumpkin, beetroot, and rocket with walnuts; grilled Indian Ocean prawns with stir-fried onions, potato, spinach and corn; and a mousse-like chocolate pate with passionfruit sauce.
Eating such sophisticated, elegantly prepared cuisine on a full setting of china, silverware and crystal, choreographed with gracious, efficient service, it’s hard to believe that a couple of hours earlier we were scrambling, scraping, banging and bouncing over the Mara Plains – but that’s one of the fundamental joys of this journey, which combines long and rigorous drives into the bush with exquisite comforts back at the camp.
Tourist Confusing Sunsets in Alice Springs
The full moon is bigger in the desert. At least that’s what the denizens of open spaces say, those lucky enough to be spared the daily fluctuations of coastal climes. In the desert the full moon is bigger.
The moon in Alice Springs ascends from behind the MacDonnell Ranges that line and ring the town. And the moon is indeed big – a luminous orange orb that can entrance an eye for those first few minutes of movement in evening sky. The spattered scatterings of the Milky Way draw back at its grasp of nights’ undraped velvet curtain, like the skirts of the hills pulled up to the heavens.
Just beyond the ranges that hem this odd desert oasis, through the Heavitree Gap that opens for the road to the “south” (as in, everywhere else that isn’t north of Australia’s arid centre) and out by the road to the airport, nestles a dirt road that is oft un-driven by the passing hordes. An ideal hard-yakka sojourn far from the madding, backpacking, rubber-necking crowds. Well, most of the crowd without luxury 4WDs, as we discovered.
Squatting in Amsterdam
Amsterdam is famous worldwide for its liberal attitudes. Amongst its residents, it is more known for its shortage of housing. In the past decades, this problem has been solved by squatting. Nearly everyone I met in Amsterdam lives, or had once lived, in a squat. But with the social and political climate of the city changing, the attitude to squatting is also changing; to the disgust of some people, there is now an Anti-Squat movement. I have always seen squatting as having outsider connotations – the bucking of an unfair system, a political statement, cockroaches and blocked toilets, dodging the police. But in Amsterdam it’s different. People live in squats for years, they are homes, their occupants legally registered with the government and paying the local version of council tax.
The Dubliner: Searching for Meaning at 2am
Temple Bar, Part 2: Saturday at 2am (well, let’s call it 1am)
Ubi sunt nunc gloria Babylonia? Where now the glories of Babylon?
My best days are clearly behind me. I had it all planned, I’d have a few pints in ‘The Swan’ - a classy old Dublin pub with a weird mixture of inner city regulars and med students from the nearby college – then I’d go home, watch a late night movie, stay up until 2am before heading out on my tour of the dreaded Temple Bar in the full glory of its early morning revelry.
That’s been the plan for three weeks now, but on last two weekends I flaked and found myself in bed by 11pm. Secretly, I think, I was a little afraid (after all, no sane Dubliner over the age of 18 goes near Temple Bar after 9 o’clock).
Don George in Africa, Part 3
On our second bay in the bush, as dawn is just beginning to light the world outside my tented room, I hear a shuffle of feet and then “Jambo! Your tea, sir.” One of the Maasai staffers at places a tray with a pitcher of tea, heated milk, sugar, a china cup and saucer, a spoon and two biscuits on my veranda. I throw on my clothes, down a quick cup of tea, and hustle up to the main lodge, where our safari van awaits.
Lewela, our safari director, greets us with a broad smile. “Are you ready to see some wildlife?”
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