SideStep searches more than 150 websites to find some of the best travel deals the internet has to offer. The app features a comprehensive search list customizable down to the type of currency you prefer to see prices in -- Want to pay in the Ugandan Shilling? You got it.
Our favorite feature on SideStep is the application's ability to link everything together. When you specify that you're going to be landing in
If you truly want to get the feel for a city, you need to get a taste of the city first.
"You don't really understand a place unless you've eaten its specialties. It's what they pour their hearts into. It's where their pride lies, and it's one of the greatest delights of travel," said Pauline Frommer, creator of the Pauline Frommer travel guides.
Take a look at some tips from Frommer and other experienced travelers on how to make sure eating like a local is a piece of cake.
Before you venture to a
"Why eat seafood if you are in the middle of a desert? It is important to know what that area of the world is known for," said Zay Harding, a host of the travel TV show "Globe Trekker."
Once you familiarize yourself with the area's specialties, you can start making some concrete plans. You don't need to pick out restaurants just yet, but you'll want to get an idea of the types of places you should be targeting.
"Take some simple time ahead and actually map out your trip and plan out your trip. Get online and do the research to find the places so that you don't find yourself stuck at the hotel asking the question, 'OK, what do I want to eat tonight? Where do I want to go?'" said Jeremy Reed, a content editor for CitySearch.com.
Make a list of several spots you might want to check out, but don't get locked in on any particular place just yet.
You need to check in with the right sources when scoping out potential restaurants.
"Never ask the concierge where to eat at your hotel because they often get kickbacks, and they'll send you somewhere very touristy. In fact, you should probably not ask anybody who works at your hotel," advised Frommer.
Instead, get outside the tourism industry. When you are looking for the best local restaurants, stick with asking the locals.
"Ask, ask, ask," Harding said. "Always ask the locals. Get lots of opinions so that way you have lots to choose from."
Harding recommended targeting your questions. If are looking for a really nice restaurant, ask someone who is dressed up. If you want to try some cheap eats, don't ask the man in the tuxedo. College students always know where to find the best deals in town.
Ask around, get your options, but don't commit yet.
"The neat thing about restaurants is that you can window shop. You don't always have to just stay and get stuck in something," Harding said.
Try to find places with a personal touch, then go inside and ask to see the menu. If it doesn't look like the restaurant is serving what your after, go somewhere else. When traveling, you have limited meals, so don't waste one on a restaurant that doesn't measure up.
Read more.Calcutta Web has a series of good street maps of the city available online:
· North Central Calcutta (Entali to Bagbazar)
· South Calcutta (Tollygunge to Park Street)
· South Calcutta (Garia to Jodhpur Park)
· Far South Calcutta (the Jadavpur area)
· Far South Calcutta (Behala, Thakurpukur)
· East Calcutta (Kasba, Tiljala, Kankurgachi)
· Howrah
Some other good maps of the various West Bengal District:
· Bankura
· Birbhum
· Hoogli
· Howrah
· Maldah
· Nadia
· Purulia
Which is the best place for Team India to hide?
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For the first-time visitor to India, the sheer vastness of the country — more than a million square miles — all but defeats the romantic notion of seeing all that this place has to offer in anything approaching the usual time frame of a normal vacation. Retirees no longer punching the clock, college students who want to take a couple of semesters off, backpackers on a global journey of exploration: these are the kinds of travelers that But what about the rest of us who are limited to one or two weeks of vacation a year? Is
In a word, no. Even sampling the tiniest geographical crumb of
Quite rightly, no one wants to miss the Taj Mahal, especially on a first visit, so our suggested route pivots around that Platonic ideal of tourist attractions. Spending a couple of days first in the nearby capital of New Delhi — a strange patchwork of imperial Mughal monuments, bustling urban villages, leafy British Raj-era avenues and expanding middle-class housing colonies — is bound to give you a good taste of urban
Rajasthan? That fascinating, tourist-infested merry-go-round has been deliberately omitted, though it is a place worth coming back to when you have time to explore its less overdeveloped pockets. The hiking trails of the Himalayas and the beaches of Goa? Next time.
Start your trip in
The gardens are convenient to sites like Humayun's Tomb, a serene, enormous red sandstone monument dedicated to the second of
Other interesting old monuments — the Kalan Masjid, Khan-i-Khanan's Tomb — are scattered about the surrounding neighborhoods, some primarily used as giant, priceless wickets for informal cricket matches. From Humayun's Tomb, a mad scamper across busy
Spend enough time watching the crowds flit around the chandeliered, prettily painted shrine, and sooner or later a small troupe of qawwali singers will shuffle into the marble courtyard. A crowd gathers around as they sit cross-legged with harmoniums and tablas, using their hands to almost physically fling their rhythmic, ever-escalating hymns through the shrine's open doorway. If the mood strikes, you are welcome to rise up and whirl like a dervish with arms outstretched in ecstasy.
The crowded, narrow lanes of the neighborhood surrounding the shrine are only a warm-up for a visit to Shahjahanabad, the walled city built by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan in the 17th century and now usually called Old Delhi, though it is by no means the oldest part of the city. The obvious sights include the beautiful Jama Masjid, reputedly
But aimlessly exploring the walled city's monstrously corroded grandeur is much more fun. Bazaars are often devoted to a single trade, thus a street given over to shops selling wedding stationery abuts another swimming in oily motor parts.
Much of Old Delhi life goes on unabashedly out in the open. Young men get facials in open-fronted male beauty parlors, or you might spot a gaggle of children getting bucket-washed in the courtyard of a haveli, a once-grand mansion sunk into decay. Some kind of encounter with goats is virtually guaranteed, many of them dressed attractively in ladies' sweaters during the winter. None of them seem even remotely alarmed at the sight of stalls piled high with severed goats' heads.
It pays to be friendly to any sweaty, orange-glowing man you see perched over the fire-filled manhole of a bakery's tandoori oven. He may reach in and fish out a free naan for you, carefully trying to avoid burning yet another scar into his forearm. Even the most nervous of street-food eaters should try the fresh-baked sweet potato, dusted with some delicious species of sneezing powder.
You can lead a child to art but you'll have a terrible time trying to make him go inside. Not all the blandishments of a modern art gallery - shops, café and interactive displays that mean you don't even have to look at the damn pictures - will work if you have a pair of philistines like mine. Certainly not when you're in
We were just turning into Rue de l'Etuve when I spotted something odd on the exposed gable end of a house. It was two men and a dog coming down a fire escape. "That's Tintin! " said John. And, indeed, it was. A life-sized Tintin, Captain Haddock and Snowy, all making their way down a two-dimensional fire escape that had been painted on to the side of the house.
Turning into Rue du Marché au Charbon, we saw another one. Not Tintin this time but a Richard Hannay-type character guarding a heroine in hat and gloves, painted on to the gable end of a bar. Strangely, the street behind our moustachioed cartoon hero in the mural was the exact same street that we were looking down now - but as it might have appeared 100 years ago. We were in effect looking at the same view twice, once in reality and once in a cartoon.
Across the road there was another huge mural. Down the side of a café someone had painted an aerial view of the road we were standing in with a cheerful character I recognised as "Broussaille", crossing it in the company of his girlfriend. In the background of the mural we could see the very building we were looking at now. It, too, had a mural painted on the wall above the cafe. For a moment I almost expected to see us standing in the cartoon staring up at the cartoon.
From the creators of the $25,000 dinner, there's another pricey gourmet feast on the horizon.
Wealthy foodies can mark their calendars for Dec. 12, 2008, when top chefs from around the world will be flown to
This dinner will be a bargain, at least compared to the one in
The price for dining beside the pyramids has not yet been set, but it will cost less than $10,000 per person, said Ohri, the managing director of Bangkok's luxury Lebua hotel, the event planner behind the dinners that are boldly titled "Epicurean Masters of the World."
Though cheaper, the upcoming feast is intended to be even grander than its predecessor.
"It will still be for millionaires, but this dinner will be for a lot of millionaires," Ohri told The Associated Press.
Some 500 tickets will be sold for the dinner to be cooked by 30 3-star Michelin chefs.
About a third of the chefs already have confirmed their attendance; each chef will prepare a meal for roughly 17 diners.
Sun, sand and sea, a thousand ‘Robinson Crusoe’ islands, massive lagoons with different depths and infinite shades of blue and turquoise, dazzling underwater coral gardens; a perfect natural combination for the ideal tropical holiday destination. However, there is more to the
Male would certainly count as one of the smallest capitals in the world in terms of its physical size. Different from any other island in the country, Male is a city of high-rise buildings and paved roads. While the government offices are located in one area, the main streets are lined with shops and offices. In the old bazaar area which still houses the country’s hub of wholesale and retail trade, the lanes are so narrow that a single vehicle would find it difficult to navigate through, especially with its throngs of busy people.
The
Did you know that
If a wildlife enthusiast dies and goes to heaven, she would find herself in
I was in Johannesburg for a workshop and there was a lot to see and do in that city—the new Constitutional Court built on the site of the notorious Fort Prison complex and the township of Soweto being two major shrines for visitors paying their respects to a vibrant post-apartheid society. But Kruger beckoned. So I took the short flight out to Nelspruit and, an hour-long taxi ride later, was on safari in the bushveld.
I went on hikes at dawn with armed rangers and bird-watched on my own around my rustic thatched-roof bungalow at Berg-en-Dal camp (this version of ‘rustic’ included a fully equipped kitchen, running hot water and air-conditioning). But the classic safari trip has to be done in a jeep, bowling along dirt tracks in search of megafauna. While animals get uneasy when they see humans, they don’t mind motor vehicles because they appear like large harmless animals. Or so the guides tell us tourists. And if one’s project is to see Kruger’s Big Five: the lion, elephant, Cape buffalo, cheetah and rhino in the space of a single day, the safari ride is highly recommended.
I made sure to arrive early at our pick-up spot and got the best front seat in the open-air van. The driver John Mahumane doubled up as our guide. The van filled up and by five o’clock we were off through the rolling expanse of 20,000 sq km of grassland and scrub forest. First off, a warthog! It stood stumpily by the roadside, endearingly ugly with its short tusks curving around its snout. The sky was overcast and the air cool; it felt like it might rain. I was a bit anxious that we wouldn’t see much in the dimmer light, but the warthog was a good omen. We soon spotted a male giraffe munching leaves close by. Tiny red-billed oxpeckers hopped up and down its body, pecking at insects and mites, a crew of personal attendants doing a very thorough grooming job.
A herd of about 40 impala grazed a little further, their skin a gorgeous golden, hind quarters and ears crisply marked in black, elegant spiralled horns and impossibly slender legs. Some looked up at us and sprang vertically into the air before leaping away with balletic grace. Lovely. A flock of helmeted guinea fowl with bizarre blue and yellow heads scuttled into the roadside brush, eager to get under cover and out of our sight.
We drove a longish stretch without anything exciting coming into view. I kept my eyes peeled but there was nothing, just green scrub forest speeding past. All except the glimpse of a white rhinoceros which, given the distance and intervening vegetation, could just as easily have been a bhains. There hadn’t been an ooh moment for a while, so John got onto his radio and consulted with other jeep drivers.
Soon enough, we reversed and raced off in a different direction, gliding to a halt near a giant marula tree. And there, sprawled out in plain view on a low branch, was a large male leopard. His sleekly muscled body oozed power. He raised his head to give us a look of bored disdain, and then rested it on his paws to doze, tail hanging languidly. Wonderful.
We were doubly lucky. Heading back after our fill of admiring gazes and photography, we came across another leopard, similarly stretched out on the low branch of another marula tree! It was smaller and more intent on keeping an eye on the herd of impala grazing further away. Daylight was fading and when John shone a bright spotlight on the leopard, its eyes gleamed red. As we drove on through the darkness, another rich vein came into view.
Countless nightjars were abroad, sitting on the roads because the warmer air there attracts insects that get snared in their whiskers (our guide was very knowledgeable). Many lapwing-like spotted dikkop (a.k.a. thick-knees—nice name isn’t it?) took off in startled flight at our approach. We saw three scrub hares, poor pink-eared things desperately hopping to get away from the onrushing lights and sounds of the van. In a nice symmetry, we also saw a tortoise going plod-plod along the road.
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We don't always know what we think we know... Read on, and see if this page can bust a few myths for you.
Not unless the deal specifically says so. "Kids Free" deals are great, but read the verbiage carefully! The words you most want to see are "Kids Fly Free, Stay Free, Eat Free, and Play Free." It's a rare deal that "frees" it all!
Note too that -- unless you're at an all-inclusive-- "Kids Eat Free" promotions typically restrict the free munching to "eating from the kids' menu, when accompanied with a paying adult."
· Read more about Kids Free promotions
They might; but not necessarily. The fare-search functions at such travel sites are very powerful but they don't search all airlines. One notable omission is Southwest Airlines, which is particularly of interest to families because of (a) low fares, and (b) routes and packages to popular destinations such as Disney World. Flights and vacations must be bought directly from Southwest.
Mapquest --or other online driving directions -- may state that you can drive from A to B in that time, but Mapquest's calculator isn't driving with live kids in the backseat. Add in snack stops, bathroom stops, and general "just gotta get out of the car and move around stops"-- you need to allow much more time to arrive at your destination.
YMMV (your mileage may vary), but as a rule of thumb: add one hour for each two hours of the trip. (See tips about Car Trips with Kids.)
Staying home is "hard" too! I.e., babies need constant care and attention. So why not cash in your Travel Baby Bonus: in many cultures, people will be 10 times more friendly if you have a kidlet. Yes there are logistics… all that gear and stuff; but strollers are portable, and some can do double-duty as car-seats, mobile cradle for afternoon-naps, and beast-of-burden for your diaper bag and shopping purchases. Meanwhile, house-swaps and condo rentals can provide kitchen, laundry, etc.
West-coasters often think this. Uh-uh. It's true that both have
Total area is the size of
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Afrinat International Airline offers regional services to
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· Air Seychelles the national airline offers flights to Frankfurt,
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