Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

It’s been a long, long time since I was in New York and so it’s time that I was starting to consider it for a future trip once again.

Funnily enough a flight to New York these days costs much the same as it did when I went the last time way back in the 1980s and, if you’re careful, you can even get it cheaper than it was then! Not only that, but with the dollar being so low (or is it the pound so high?), even the hotels are pretty much at the same prices so overall the holiday would easily come out well below the price from 20 years back.

The city has changed a lot over that time. For one thing the Statue of Liberty isn’t shrouded in scaffolding as it was when I was there, the Twin Towers aren’t there any more and I gather that the city has been cleaned up considerably too thanks to a series of zero tolerance programmes over the intervening years.

Shopping is a “big thing” in any New York trip of course. Sadly, they still don’t actually do breakfast at Tiffany’s but it’s a beautiful store to wander around and whilst there’s an awful lot of stuff there at serious prices there are also many items that you can pick up at very sensible prices. Aside from there, you shouldn’t miss the likes of Macy’s.

Given the prices of both flights and hotels, it’s definitely a great time to be considering a trip to New York.

We had a lovely day out at Tollymore forest park at the weekend (or “on the weekend” as Wendy says: is that an Australian thing?) and managed to get round almost all of one of the longer walks that they have marked out. Actually, as it turned out we could easily have it round the whole walk but we the legs of the little guys were wearing out and we didn’t know just how little farther we needed to go to reach the turn around point.

With turning round though we had the benefit of seeing one of the true posers of the hiking fraternity. This guy was jogging off with a backpack on his back and another on his front and looked suitably impressive as he set off. Our turn around made it obvious that he was just trying to impress as he was back in about 20 minutes!

So don’t let the fully equipped guys put you off getting some exercise over the Easter break: our four year old managed a lot more distance than he did before his legs started to run out.

South Africa has been out of the question as a vacation destination for a long time but has quietly been getting promoted as a destination for a while now so there’s quite a lot of moderately underused tourist infrastructure.

The country itself is vast and with an equally wide range of attractions so you’d need to be selective. Many of you will still be considering it as a safari type destination but there are major cities dotted around the country each with their own attractions and, of course, there are untold numbers of beaches around the coastline.

So great are the number of attractions that it’s one of those places that you should pencil in for repeat visits over the years. If nothing else, flights to South Africa will be sure to drop in price as the number of tourists grows.

Photo copyright South African Tourism

Whilst it might seem obvious that the most expensive ferry is definitely the dearest option, in our case it turns out that the most expensive ferry route forms part of the cheapest and quickest route for us.

Ordinarily we’d have driven from here to Calais, took the ferry to Dover, drove up England then over Scotland and finally took the ferry from Stranraer to Larne. Considering just the non-France bit that’s £60 for the Dover ferry, probably £50 for petrol, another £50 for a hotel (possibly two) and £170 for the Larne ferry ie around £330 or perhaps £380.

However, the Le Havre to Rosslare ferry costs £250 and effectively includes that hotel as it’s an overnight trip. Thus whilst we’d have been driving up England instead we’ll be on the ferry and leaving two days later will arrive just one day later and a good deal more rested too.

Not a massive one but a jump nonetheless.

Chances are that it’s down to one of the oddities of the recession. Most of our internet income comes via the stable of accommodation listings sites that we run. Since holiday accommodation falls in the category of discretionary expenditure you’d think that this income would go down quite sharply during a recession. So it did initially, but the accommodation owners read the news too and have realised that their income should be dropping. This in turn means that they start advertising more which initially showed up in increased numbers of new entries on the sites and now seems to have started to show up in increased adsense revenue.

Definitely peculiar effects, but the question is what’ll happen during the rest of the year?