Alternative Boden Catalogue

Greetings all

I know this is not related to travel, but I couldn't resist it. A chance to ridicule the Bodenites of Dulwich. My all-time favourite blogger, Dulwich Mum, has devised the 'Alternative Boden Catalogue' and here is my entry. Enjoy!

The Boden Teenager:

India is eighteen and a student at Falmouth University. Her student loan does not stretch to the purchase of many new clothes but luckily her parents, back home in Dulwich, send her monthly care packages filled with lots of Boden goodies. India is a good girl, you see.

India wears bluestocking pea coat in 'debating society' blue, nautical stripe 'no-one likes a slut, dear' t-shirt in barf green, and wholesome not-so-skinny jeans.

Favourite things: Mephedrone, ChatRoulette and sleeping in ditches.

Football....

For the last two weeks, World Cup fever has taken over London. The St George's crosses have been decorating everything and it has been rare to be able to walk down any city street without hearing the sounds of the dreaded vuvuzelas all around. Today I went with my friends to one of our local Dulwich pubs to watch quite possibly the most depressing match of the entire tournament so far. Of course, Germany were the better team and deserved to win, but this was little consolation to my red-and-white painted fellow drinkers.

I started thinking that perhaps now England have been knocked out, their supporters could turn their support to another team and continue their interest in the competition. Perhaps a team which there's a family connection to, or a favourite holiday destination, or even anybody Germany happens to be playing. To get out of the King's Head and the Red Lion and experience some of the bars in London championing the other teams. Time Out recently ran a spectacular article of where to watch the World Cup in London if you aren't an England supporter, and I for one am going to try to get out there and experience some of these establishments for myself.

Support PARAGUAY at Nueva Costa Dorada tapas bar and restaurant, just off Oxford Street (tube: Tottenham Court Road).

Support JAPAN at The Crane and Tortoise Japanese cafe/bar on the Grays Inn Road (tube: Chancery Lane/Farringdon).

Support SPAIN at Camino bar in Kings Cross (tube: Kings Cross St Pancras).

Support PORTUGAL at Bar Estrela in Stockwell (tube: Vauxhall).

Support URUGUAY at the Zoo Bar and Club in Soho (tube: Leicester Square).

Support GHANA at the Gold Coast Bar in Brixton (tube: Brixton).

Support GERMANY at The Jolly Gardener in Vauxhall (tube: Vauxhall).

P.S. I will be supporting my beloved Japan. GO JAPAN!!

Expect less football related posts soon!

Sevilla...coming soon

Well hello strangers. Before I start writing I just would like to say thank you for all of the feedback you have given me over the past couple of weeks with regards to this blog. It makes me really happy that so many of you have enjoyed reading it!

So I have to confess that I actually returned from Seville a week ago and still have not blogged about it. However, in my defence this has been one of the busiest weeks in history. I got home from the airport in the middle of the night, so much of the weekend was spent sleeping, unpacking, washing suncream-coated clothes and catching up with my boyfriend who is so often neglected when it comes to my travelling (sorry love). Then on Monday I started working again for the BFI, which although is great fun is synonymous with 'chaos', so I have been a very busy girl. This weekend I have three (count 'em - THREE) lots of birthday celebrations to attend - tonight for my favourite-est travel buddy, Miss Samantha Garland; tomorrow for my neglected boyfriend; and Sunday for the son of my neighbours. Monday is a bank holiday (hooray!) so I intend to spend the day converting all of my Seville notes into something publishable, and hopefully saleable.

Anyway, enough about my social life. This weekend, as well as writing articles I am also going to write up my blog about my trip. Obviously much needs to be reserved for the articles, so it will take me a while to choose what will be going in the blog and what will be sent to potential publications. Just wanted to let you all know that I absolutely have not forgotten! In the meantime, there are some pictures on my Facebook page. Have a look through those and I will be with you very shortly.

Counting...

So today has been pretty much excitement and stress all rolled into one. Whilst aimlessly surfing the internet last night the dreaded words 'Ash Cloud' kept cropping up on my screen, and when I further investigated this BAA confirmed that ash from that pesky Icelandic volcano had indeed closed some UK airports. Damn. However, I have been checking both BAA and Ryanair throughout the day and it seems that Stansted isn't really affected. There are still nine hours until I have to leave for the airport, so a lot can change, so I am keeping my fingers firmly crossed that I will make it to Spain after all.

Today Sam came over and we ate pasta on my balcony and looked for planes. We even cheered as a BA jet flew overhead. It's nice to have a friend who is as much of a travel junkie as you are and understands the anxiety. Afterwards we wandered up to Peckham so I could buy a selection of toiletries which will not exceed the 100ml hand baggage limit.

And just as soon as I'm about to leave the country the weather picks up. Typical. I missed the entire of the 'British Summer' last year while in South East Asia. Caught two days of sun before I left and had two days when I got back.

Almost Here...

Good evening all. Firstly, here comes yet another profound apology for my lack of blogging of late. I can only blame the exams which completely took over the last two weeks of my life. Thursday was my last exam of the year and my fellow students and I breathed a collective sigh of relief that a very difficult year was indeed over and we could get back to some kind of normality. The kind of life that doesn't involve spending the entire night high on pro-plus reading history books or nursing migraines or cursing oneself for missing morning lectures due to hangovers. I can now blog some more and travel some more and sleep a little easier.

The most exciting piece of news I have to report is that my Seville trip has finally come around. My flight leaves at 7am on Tuesday morning and tomorrow has to be spent packing and planning. I have guidebooks to read and outfits planned, articles in mind and many tapas bar recommendations. I just have to make sure that I don't miss the plane. I'm not trying to brag or depress any of my dear readers, but here's how the weather is looking there for the next few days:

OK, so maybe I am bragging a little. But the cold and dreary winter here has been so completely depressing that I feel as though I can a little. Sorry.

Also, Ollie's parents came by today bringing gifts from their recent trip. They spent three weeks in Australia visiting friends and bought us a beautiful little china travel tea-set from their stopover in Hong Kong.

I think pottery from Asia is one of my favourite things ever.

Top Travel Thursday

I've scoped out some top travel deals for you all, just in case the outcome of the election is not what you hoped for and want to escape the UK:

Lufthansa are offering two-for-one flights from London Heathrow to Milan from £79.00 including taxes, fees and charges. Find out more info on their website.

Intrepid Travel offer a 20% discount on trips departing soon. There is a long list on the special promotions section of their webpage, but here are some highlights:

• 20% off the Southern Highlights tour (14 days) from Cape Town to Windhoek departing between 10 June and 10 July. Now £1784 (was £2230)
• 20% off the Hanoi to Hong Kong tour (15 days) departing 23 May. Now £684 (was £855)
• 20% off the Rio to Buenos Aires Unplugged tour (17 days) departing 14 June and 12 July. Now £956 (was £1195)

There is also still time left to take advantage of the lastminute.com 48 Hour Holiday Sale which includes 5* Gambia for £599, 3* Kenya for £339 and 4* Italy for £549.

My escape to Seville is coming along as planned although I seem to be permanently buried under travel publications in the name of research. The price of worldwide flights could currently be my specialist subject on Mastermind should I ever wind up in the black chair...

Blog-o-rama

Just a quick mention, my blog has been featured on the Goldsmiths University blog page designed to give new students an insight into living in London and studying at Goldsmiths. If you have some time, be sure to check out some of the other blogs on this page. I've had a look myself and they're ace. Thanks!

http://www.gold.ac.uk/student/blogs/

BK

Being the complete travel geek that I am, I can reel off on demand a list of the countries on the Foreign Consulate Office's "Don't Go" list. I also know where they are in order to not waste time gazing at them on my map-of-the-world shower curtain. (Don't joke, this is where much of my travel inspiration comes from). I have, as yet, no desire to visit any of the countries on this list, excpeting possibly Yemen, but was sad to see that Thailand had made an appearance due to the volatile political situation in the country.

The FCO's advice is as follows:

We advise against all but essential travel to the whole of Thailand due to the increasingly volatile and tense political situation. Violent incidents of an unpredictable nature are occurring in many parts of Thailand. On 28 April there were serious clashes between troops and anti-government protestors as they travelled towards Talad Thai in Pathumthani province (close to Bangkok’s second airport, Don Muang). One soldier was killed and at least ten people were injured. In the early hours of 27 April, substantial numbers of troops deployed in Central Bangkok. On 26/27 April there were at least eight incidents in various parts of Thailand involving protestors setting up barricades, in some instances leading to clashes with the security forces. In the last week, protests and violent incidents have taken place in other parts of Thailand including popular tourist destinations such as Pattaya, Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Ayuthaya and other locations.

I visited Bangkok last summer at the end of a month-long trip to South East Asia with my friends Sam, Jen and Nicola. Some government protests had taken place prior to our arrival, including the siege of Suvarnabhumi airport, but by then the situation had calmed down (although my Mother, still haunted by news pictures of a burning bus on a Bangkok street some months before, barely slept while I was in the city). On one day, the concierge at our hotel advised us not to go to a certain part of town where anti-government sentiments were high, and on another our tuk-tuk drove past a group of protesters, although this demonstration appeared to be peaceful. Bangkok happened to be my least favourite city on our South East Asia journey for reasons I find it difficult to describe. I guess it just didn't have the charm of the places we visited in Vietnam and Cambodia. I just didn't like the vibe there and am not sure if the underlying discontent among the people was a factor in this or not. Although it was momentarily suppressed, you could still sense it.

Thailand's recent status as a no-go zone will inevitably have effects on the travel of South East Asia. Bangkok is considered to be the gateway to the region due to both the abundance of overground routes departing from it daily and its well-connected airport. Many of the people we met, like ourselves, began or ended their travels in Bangkok for this very reason. Of course, it is possible to explore South East Asia and avoid Thailand, but it could be argued that in doing this, you deny yourself part of the experience. Although Bangkok was not for me, I would never dissuade anybody else from visiting it as it is one of those places which has to be seen. I plan to get back there one day but for the sole purpose of using it as a base to explore the rest of Thailand. It looks as though these plans will need to be put on hold, at least for the time being.

Some happy memories in Bangkok with Jen and Sam:

By the way, you can buy map-of-the-world shower curtains from Habitat for £22.00 here

Seville...Here I Come.

This week I have been struck down with the cold from hell. So this has resulted in me spending most of last week and much of today on my couch, under a blanket reading an abundance of travel literature. The only time I have managed to get out and do anything vaguely social in the past week was last night when I took Ollie and my brother Mike to the amazing Tay Do Cafe in Shoreditch for a big Vietnamese dinner. Neither of them have been to Vietnam and my brother is a notoriously fussy eater, but luckily they enjoyed it very much. It's not quite the little place on the corner in the Hanoi Old Quarter that sold vegetable fried noodles and pints of Hanoi beer for 35,000 dong, but it's as close as you can probably get in London.

In other news, following a severely long travel drought I have finally reacquainted myself with the excited feeling I get when a flight e-ticket pops up in my inbox. I've been deliberating where to travel to for my first travel writing assignment and have been mainly looking at Eastern European destinations such as Budapest and Bratislava. Then Ryanair decided to throw me a curve-ball when they started offering cheap trips to Seville and my weakness for tapas and Moorish architecture caused me to cave spectacularly and book myself a ticket.

So Seville it is. And I am SO excited!

Busy Busy Busy

OK, so I'm a bad blogger - but in my defence I have a mountain of work to do and a fifteen year old brother on his work experience to pick up after, so I have been a busy girl. I am only able to devote these precious minutes to writing my blog as I am currently full of cold, under a blanket on the sofa waiting for a phonecall which is preventing me from finishing my dreaded essays. The essays are due in on Thursday and then I have two exams on the 12th and 13th May. By the evening of the 13th May I will be a free(ish) woman for the summer and I was pleased to discover that the-sister-I-never-had, Claire, is coming to London to stay with me, help me to celebrate my freedom and tell me all about her trip to Iceland. The last couple of weeks have been crazy to say the least and I have been frequenting the BAA website more than Facebook and Twitter combined to get the latest updates on whether flights would be leaving the UK in time for Ollie's trip to Berlin. Luckily, he made it there without a hitch and enjoyed a great stag weekend with seven of his friends. The highlight of the weekend apparently was a sightseeing tour of the city on a vehicle which was strange hybrid between a bike and a bar. Sounds like typical stag high-jinks to me but if you, like these guys, like to see your historical states through an alcohol-induced haze, you can check it out here.

Another great incentive to get through the next couple of study-crazy weeks is the knowledge that with freedom comes travel. It has been far too long for me and I am incredibly excited about my next trip. This will be my first attempt at proper travel writing and my intention is to fly myself out to a European city for a couple of days and see if I can create something from it. At the moment, I am still in the stage of loosely checking destinations so will update on which I have chosen. At the moment the main contenders are Budapest and Bratislava.

Sadly, I now have to return to my dissertations, so expect no posts from me until after 29th.

Ashes to Ashes

Well, that was Thursday and it's now Sunday and still no planes have taken off from or landed in the UK. Thousands of people are either stranded or awaiting news about whether they will indeed be able to take their impending trip. London is a very odd place to be at the moment - eerily quiet with no planes in the sky and a fine covering of volcanic ash on car windscreens. Even the air feels dusty and after a short walk through central London today my skin felt as though I had been to the beach. With nobody coming in from overseas, it is strangely quiet except for the enormous queues still lingering outside of St Pancras Station and the Eurolines desk at Victoria, despite passengers being told that the services are fully booked.

I never thought that anything other than my financial woes would prevent me from travelling and now even if I had the money to go anywhere I would not have the means to.

Just to update: It seems that all flights to and from the UK are suspended until at least 7am tomorrow morning. Some say that the disruptions will continue for another couple of weeks. I sincerely hope not as Ollie needs to get to Berlin and Claire needs to get to Reykjavik - both on Friday. I guess we're just all going to have to sit tight and wait for the dust to settle.

One Hot Piece of Ash

Iceland has been hit by the second eruption in less than a month in the Eyjafjallajoekull region. This has caused a cloud of volcanic ash which has succeeded in cutting off most of the UK's airports. This is a safety precaution as it is believed tiny particles of rock in the cloud have the potential to shut down aircraft engines. All flights to and from Scotland have been suspended with flights from London airports following suit at around lunchtime.

BAA issued the following statement:

Following advice from the Met Office, the National Air Traffic Service (NATS) has introduced restrictions to UK air space this morning as a result of volcanic ash drifting to the UK from Iceland. These measures currently affect Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow airports which are closed but may also affect other parts of the UK later today. Passengers intending to fly today are asked to contact their airline for further information and should expect disruption in the coming hours. Updates will be issued throughout the morning.

Read the full BBC report here.

Going Crazy at Home

Like many other students, my life in April and May consists of little more than writing essays and revising for exams. Except for last year when I took off to Sorrento for a week with Ollie's family and shamefully neglected my work in favour of walking around roman ruins and drinking prosecco at The Foreigners' Club. This year I am not so lucky and my wanderlust is at an all-time high. It takes all of my self control not to spend my precious study time researching trips online and in back-issues of travel magazines. The essays and exams are also largely responsible for the recent neglect of this blog, and today I received an email from the marketing department at Goldsmiths to inform me that it has been chosen as one of the featured blogs on their website, so I need to buck my ideas up a little...

The blogs are chosen to give new students a cross-section of 'student life' and I started thinking about how travel fits into this. Of course, most of the new students will have done some travelling already - with parents, friends or on the increasingly popular gap year - but there are more and more opportunities for travel during the three years of study. Of course, I'm not claiming that the meagre student loan and grant will stretch to a three-week, fully-guided safari in Botswana, but with a little imagination and a lot of research, affordable trips can be taken during the breaks from study. In my first summer vacation I visited Japan with two friends, in my second I backpacked through South East Asia and am currently planning a trip to Canada for my third, as well as going on short breaks to the USA, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and France.

This is the time of year when students begin to start making plans for their summer and there are lots of wonderful trips out there which can fit in to the summer vacation and be done on a budget. I am off to research these now and will be posting them in the next few days. I just have to resist the urge to book any of them. Especially since I am dreaming of Beirut and the furthest I have ventured in the last few days is Brixton.

Travel Addicts

To celebrate the bank holiday weekend, last night Ollie and I invited over some friends for fish pie, loud music and drunkenness. As nobody had to get up for work the following day, it seemed like a perfect opportunity - especially considering I was now able to drink following my abstinence during lent. As with many nights at our place, the conversation inevitably turns to travelling - past and future, and I realised that everybody was about to take some amazing trips. John and Heather had just booked a two-week tour of Italy including Venice, Florence, Rome and Pompeii; Dan and Lucy were off to Paris; Matt was on his way to Toronto for some wedding planning; Kate was taking a sabbatical from work to do the Trans-Siberian Railway and Ollie will be soon flying out to Berlin for a stag party. Perhaps it's just that I have travel-mad friends, but it seems that everybody is jetting off somewhere at the moment.

Every day I receive an inbox full of travel newsletters advertising wonderful trips and I find it incredibly hard to resist them. London has been grey and dismal for about six months (excepting the one sunny week we had) and booking a trip an exotic destination seems to be the best tonic for overcoming the inevitable seasonal affective disorder which accompanies the bad weather. When walking down a very soggy Lordship Lane yesterday, the thought of soon being in a spa in Budapest somehow made me feel so much better. With so much temptation in front of you to get away from it all, is it entirely surprising that people so easily succumb? Are we all becoming travel addicts, or are we simply using travel as an excuse to escape the bad weather, the recession and the limited job options of the city we once all so determinedly aspired to live in? Of course, the two week trip out to the sun has been de rigueur since the airline boom of the mid-twentieth century, but it now seems that package holidays are no longer enough to satisfy our travel needs and that the world of travel is evolving beyond this trend and looking further afield.

I'm a huge fan of travelling independently and, despite the time needed to study guidebooks, timetables and hostel reviews, would recommend it to anybody as it is much cheaper and much more flexible. However, I am currently much too short of time to give you suggested itineraries now, so if you are feeling inspired by any of the destinations my friends are travelling to, here are some organised trips that may be of interest to you. Enjoy.

Italy

Explore run a trip called Best of Italy, which is an 11 day tour encompassing the sights of Venice and Florence; a full day tour of Pisa to see the famous leaning tower then on to see the beautiful scenery and medieval architecture of Siena and Gimignano in the Tuscan region; time to explore Rome, the Eternal City, before finally heading south to the Amalfi Coast to take in Sorrento, Pompeii and the stunning island of Capri.

This tour costs £1,676 (£1,870 including flights) and has various departures throughout April and September. Travellers use local transport including buses and trains and accommodation is in hotels, with two nights in a traditional Tuscan farmhouse.

More information about this trip can be found here.

Paris

Eurostar are currently offering City Break deals to Paris from £109 per person. This includes return travel from London St Pancras to Paris Gare du Nord and one night in a selection of Paris hotels (based on two sharing). Whilst in Paris you can also take advantage of the Eurostar Culture Connect, which allows Eurostar travellers 2-for-1 entry at various Paris attractions, just by showing their Eurostar ticket. Attractions participating in the scheme include Le Musee de Quai Branly, le Jeu de Paume, le Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, la Cite de la Musique and les Galleries Nationale de Grand Palais.

More information about this trip can be found here.

Toronto

Trek America's Northeastern BLT tour is a nine-day trip through the best of North-Eastern USA and Canada. The tour begins in New York before heading to Toronto for a tour of the city and a trip out to Niagara Falls; heading to Montreal and then to Stowe for some hiking and a trip to the Ben and Jerry's ice cream factory; before travelling back into the USA and exploring historic Boston before returning to New York for a final blow out.

This tour costs from £769 (excluding flights) and has various departures throughout the year. All transportation is via a private vehicle and accommodation is largely on a hostel/multi-share basis. Private departures are available.

More information about this trip can be found here.

Trans-Siberian Railway

There are many tour operators offering trips on this iconic route, however the best way to undertake this trip is to plan your own through with the help of The Man in Seat 61, an amazing website with a wealth of information on international train travel. This website includes all of the information you will need about everything from departure times, ticket prices and stop-off destinations as well as pictures of the cabins and even a guide to life on board the train. An excellent resource for anybody considering this epic journey.

If you would prefer to avoid the research involved with travelling independently, you will be able to undertake organised tours with Responsible Travel, Intrepid Travel and On The Go Tours to name but a few.

Berlin

Many tour operators are now offering guided city tours of Berlin by bike. Fat Tire Bike Tours offer four different tours including the All-in-One City Bike Tour, the Third Reich Nazi Bike Tour, the Berlin Wall and Cold War Bike Tour, and the Potsdam Bike Tour. Prices start from EUR20 for adults and EUR18 for Students including bicycle hire. The city is large and very flat, so on two-wheels is a great perspective from which to see it.

More information about the bicycle tours are available here.

Fly to Berlin low-cost with Air Berlin, departing from London Stanstead and Manchester airports. Flights from £29 one way. Good value hostel accommodation can also be found at St Christopher's Berlin, a clean, fun, centrally-located hostel with free breakfast and a cheap on-site bar. Dorm beds from EUR12 per night.

Rain and Shame

Last week, London had a short burst of sunshine which almost made me forget my itchy feet and begin to enjoy all of the wonderful things to do in my own city. I went for long walks, sat on my balcony drinking coffee and watching Dulwich street traffic, went to the Imperial War Museum with my friend Heather and several markets with Ollie. However, the duration of good weather in London is, on average, a mere seven days and now not only is the city back to its grey and dismal self, I am too. This week I have undertaken very few outdoor activities beyond walking to the bus stop and my wanderlust has returned with a vengeance.

So I have been very proactive in researching my trip to Budapest to write about the benefits of thermal baths (some might suggest this is a thinly-veiled excuse to spend a weekend in various spas - although I assure you, it is in the name of WORK). I have also been reading The Rough Guide to South America on a Budget which I finally received in the post from the lovely people at Responsible Travel and have become incredibly fascinated by Ecuador. The South America trip is far, far in the future but I am going to try and book the Budapest trip for early June - after Ollie's birthday and before Sam's trip to Greece.

Another thing that caught my attention this week was a story I read in the Independent on Sunday travel section. A gay couple were turned away from The Swiss B&B in Cookham, Berkshire by a Christian owner who claimed that it was against her convictions for two men to share a bed. It is unbelievable that this kind of bigotry still exists in 21st century Britain. Travelling can be problematic for openly gay couples in other parts of the world, especially in countries that have high levels of religious conservatism, however in our diverse society it is not only unacceptable to discriminate in this way but illegal. The Equality Act 2006 outlaws discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in goods and services in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It is important that the tourist industry - from multinational corporations to small, independent businesses be made aware of this law and prevent this kind of discrimination happening in the future.

Gap Yah!

I saw this video on the Dulwich Mum blog this afternoon and cannot stop watching it. I always come across one or two of these on my travels. A perfect example of this is a student from Kings College on his gap year I met in a bar in Osaka who spent an hour telling me - in startling detail - about his volunteer project, reprimanded me for choosing a day out at Universal Studios Japan over yet another temple, and even told me that as a Goldsmiths student I was intellectually inferior to him. What a guy.

Volcano Tourism

On Saturday a volcano erupted in Southern Iceland and already tour companies are running excursion and night-time bus trips to the site of the eruption. Discover the World are running the Eyjafjallajokull Volcano Eruption Special, a three night trip for £471 based in Reykjavik and offering excursions out to the volcano. Travellers can either take a flight to watch the volcanic activity from the air or watch from a safe distance on the ground.

This is an example of how the travel industry is quickly reacting to natural occurrences and creating specialised tours to allow travellers to see first hand an event that happens so infrequently it may only be once in their lifetime. It is incredibly tempting - I have always wanted to go to Iceland and it would be amazing to see an erupting volcano. My experiences of volcanoes so far are limited to walking around a dormant crater on the island of Nisyros in Greece and seeing the world's most famous example of the dangers volcanoes pose in Pompeii. I just wish that I was able to keep money in my account to spontaneously embark on these adventures. A kind of eruption emergency fund or something like that.

Free Things

So, a couple of months ago Sam and I went to the Destinations Travel Show at Earls Court courtesy of the free tickets I was given by Wanderlust magazine. I sat through (and tried to predict the outcome of) the Wanderlust Travel Awards, had my desire to go to South America reignited through a Dragoman presentation on board one of their gargantuan trucks and had various little tastes of alcohol at the toffee vodka and Chilean wine stands. Despite the wealth of information and food for thought gained from these shows, just about every exhibition offers some form of competition. Now, I am a BIG fan of travel competitions and enter about every single one I find. Hell, I even thought I was being super professional by taking a pen along to the show with me until I saw some crazy middle-aged people carrying sheets of labels with their details pre-printed on them! I couldn't figure out whether I should admire their commitment or their laziness.

So after spending an entire day repeatedly writing my name, e-mail address and contact telephone number I am still waiting to be contacted about my free trip to India, Iceland, Indonesia or anywhere else. I did, however, win a free Rough Guide from Responsible Travel (who offer some really great trips by the way, including a yurt holiday in Portugal). I chose The Rough Guide to South America on a Budget so that I can start thinking about my 2012 adventure in advance. I already have a huge collection of guidebooks for this year's destinations and the Trans Siberian Railway trip I plan to do next year. This week I have been reading about Ecuador (Quito will be my starting point) and the amazing side trips which can be taken to the Galapagos Islands and into the Ecuadorian jungle. Even though I am planning, as my guidebook states, 'on a budget', I am still going to need a huge chunk of cash to go with and some lucky competition wins to keep me wayfaring in the meantime!!

Fallsview

The 'Happy Dance' is out once again, despite me having to spend the day at home due to a ridiculous bout of asthma (I gave up smoking as well - the travesty). I have just got off of the phone from my wonderful Mother who has arranged for us to stay at the Hilton Niagara Falls Fallsview for our forthcoming trip!!

I'm usually a hostel and homestay kind of a girl, so it will be nice to experience the life of a luxury traveller for a change! I am so excited about that pool!

Siberia, Simon Reeve and Syrup

This week has mainly been spent doing further research for my Canadian trip, but before I go into that, I have been getting excited about a few other travel-related things this week.

Firstly, I discovered that Google Maps have produced a virtual journey on the Moscow to Vladivostock Trans-Siberian Railway.

I posted the video on here earlier, but on reviewing the post I discovered that the experience of the video is much more superior if you watch it directly from the Google Maps page here.

This discovery resulted in Sam and I spending about an hour in front of her computer looking at all of the different sections of the journey, playing the audio options and doing the 'happy dance', which is both an air-punching dance we invented in Vietnam to express joyous things and the cause of much eye-rolling amongst our friends. The cyber-journey provided by Google Maps is not the London to Beijing route which we are planning to embark on in August/September 2011, but it is still incredibly exciting to see moving images of Baikal and the Volga River instead of the still pictures in my countless guide books. I am going to be writing about this trip extensively in the future, so will not go into too many details at this stage!

There has also been talk amongst my friends about a little trip to Budapest in early summer once essay deadlines and exams are over. This is a really loose plan at the moment as we all seem to be over-committed in May/June, but hope to compare our schedules and find four or five days to take this trip. This will be the perfect remedy to four months of hard work and staying at home: strolling down the Danube, looking at beautiful buildings, soaking in Turkish baths and drinking wine. If I'm feeling particularly flush and have enough time I may even look into travelling there by train on the advice of my favourite website, The Man in Seat 61.

Finally, this week begins the showing on BBC2 of Simon Reeve's latest adventure Tropic of Cancer. Unfortunately I was called away from the television with an important phone call about ten minutes into the show so was unable to watch it in its entirety, so am going to make some time in the next couple of days to watch it on iPlayer with no distractions!

Aside from these lovely things, I have also been planning for Canada. As well as going for the wedding and the vacation, I am hoping to do some writing whilst there. I have thought of a few ideas for place-specific pieces, but also like the idea of writing something with a food or wine focus. I have always been fascinated by the role of food and eating within other cultures and on my various travels have tried to get out of the tourist-orientated restaurants as much as possible to eat amongst local people. I have also found that the food-related experiences I have had have been among the most enjoyable and memorable, for example eating breakfast with Buddhist monks in Koyasan, Japan or being taught to cook a Khmer Amok in a restaurant in Siem Reap, Cambodia. So with this in mind, I have been trawling through websites looking for the 'authentic' Canadian cuisine and how I can somehow become involved in this.

Through the very limited research I have done thus far, I have found that the majority of Canadian cuisine is largely based on British and French cuisine (which I have already experienced quite a bit of!) and some interesting traditional dishes such as poutine, ginger beef and flipper pie which are most definitely not vegetarian-friendly!! Ollie, who cannot help but read over my shoulder when I am researching such things, became very excited about being reminded of the high quality of seafood in Canada and started reeling off a list of what he was going to eat once he arrived. I, on the other hand realised, much to my delight, that the traditional Canadian foodstuff I would probably be focusing upon is maple syrup. So am currently researching the processes of making this glorious nectar to see if I can get some first-hand experience. May have to call upon the Torontonians for advice once again.

Canada Flights: Booked

As soon as I emerged on to English soil from the Eurotunnel, I began to dream about where my next adventure would take me. I had just spent a little four-day New Years' break in Bruges, Eindhoven and Amsterdam with Ollie and six of my good friends; Sam, Mike, Laura, Deric, Sisi and Fabio and had a wonderful time, but my problem is that as soon as one trip ends, I immediately want to embark on another. Unfortunately I have been suffering my own little financial crisis since the beginning of February and international travel has taken a bit of a backseat to food, bus fares and books, and so on and so forth. So, you can imagine my excitement when yesterday I pressed the 'Confirm Your Flights' button on the Swiss Air website and in return received two shiny e-tickets for return flights to Toronto.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the main purpose of this trip is to attend the wedding of two of my good friends however, Ollie and I also decided that as we were travelling that far, it would be silly not to take advantage of what Ontario has to offer. So I can currently be found on the red couch, surrounded by back issues of travel magazines, with a million windows open on my Macbook on travel advice and must-see landmarks, drinking copious amounts of tea. Into the small hours of this morning, we were awake discussing what we would like to see and the initial list is:

• Get to the top of the CN Tower (didn't do it last time)
• Art galleries and museums of Toronto - need some advice on which are the best to see
• Niagara (of course)
• Also possibly the Niagara Wine Tour
• Cooking course in Toronto (need to find some vegetarian-friendly Canadian specialties)
• Bruce Peninsula National Park
• Perhaps any other areas of natural beauty that are not too far out of the City
• Would also like to catch a major sporting event, again - advice needed please

Over the coming weeks I intend to find some time to research these further and post any findings here. This may also be useful for anybody planning on visiting Ontario in the future. Also, if anybody has any recommendations which I haven't covered, I would be incredibly grateful if you could post them in the comments section or e-mail them to me at gemma.gannon@googlemail.com.

Niagara

"Why should the Falls drag me down here at 5 o'clock in the morning? To show me how big they are and how small I am? To remind me that they can get along without any help? All right, so they've proved it. They've had ten thousand years to get independent. What's so wonderful about that? I suppose I could too, only it might take a little more time."

When at home, one of my favourite ways to spend an afternoon is curled up on my red couch with a box of my favourite Hope and Greenwood chocolates, watching an old film. This morning Ollie and I embarked upon a four mile walk around the East End of London, so by this afternoon we were craving some time to relax, get out the chocolates and watch Niagara. I am a real sucker for classic movies, particularly Marilyn Monroe movies but today it was especially relevant to watch as we are in the process of planning our forthcoming trip to Ontario.

Niagara is an old 1950's film noir about a bitter husband (Joseph Cotten), his unfaithful wife (Monroe) and a pair of honeymooners (Max Showalter and Jean Peters) who get caught in their web of lies and scheming behaviour. When this behaviour culminates in murder, events lead to a dramatic ending on the edge of the Falls. The film is shot mainly around horseshoe falls, shows many of the possible viewing points from the Canadian side and the rainbow-coloured night-time light show. The film was also responsible for the rise in the number of newlyweds honeymooning at the halls after its 1953 release.

I have visited Canada once before, but was not lucky enough to see the falls. I flew out with my friend Adrienne (who is, incidentally, Canadian) to see our boyfriends on one of their Stateside tours. Our time on the tour was to take us from Boston, on to Montreal, then to Toronto and finally to Detroit. The reason for us joining this part of the tour was that it incorporated Ollie's 24th birthday and allowed Adrienne to make a visit to her hometown. We were in Montreal less than twenty-four hours - just enough time to take in the Latin Quarter and a few bars. Luckily, we had a couple of days in Toronto. Ollie and I arrived and went straight for a quiet birthday lunch in 7 West and a stroll down Yonge Street, before heading back to Adrienne's native Greektown for dinner at Mezes with the band, crew and anybody else who wanted to join us. The following day we intended to go to the observation deck on the CN Tower, but it was unusually foggy so instead we took a short ferry across to Toronto Island to walk around, eat ice cream and admire the Toronto skyline.

Despite this being a short visit, I found that there was something about Toronto that I really liked. It was metropolitan, but not as crazy as New York. It was creative, but not in the air-kissing LA kind of way. Something about its understated energy just made me feel at home. This is why I am delighted to be going back there again this summer for the wedding of Adrienne and Matt. This time, however, it will not be such a short visit as Ollie and I are planning to spend between two and three weeks there. As well as the stag and hen parties (bachelor and bachelorette to our Canadian friends) and the wedding which will be taking place in the beautiful Prince Edward County, we intend to embark on a more thorough exploration of Ontario including, among other places, Niagara Falls. OK, some believe it has become nothing more than a tacky tourist destination but the fact remains that it is still a beautiful example of Mother Nature and no amount of casinos, boat tours or chain restaurants can detract from it being one of the most spectacular natural sights in the world (aside from this, tack is my guilty pleasure - Vegas, anyone?). I absolutely cannot wait to see it. Before I go, I must watch Niagara again to remind myself of how it all looked in the 1950s so that I can compare. And I truly hope they have those very fetching yellow raincoats featured in the film.

Welcome to Wayfarer!

Greetings and welcome to the Wayfarer blog! First I would like to thank everybody who regularly followed the Jumping Through Hoops blog and gave me such good feedback. I very much enjoyed writing that blog about my daily life, but always felt it to be a bit unfocused. It's not that I have closed the blog completely, just put it on the back-burner for now. The purpose of Wayfarer is to focus primarily on travel. I unsure yet which direction to take this in, but it will mainly be about my own personal travels - past, present and future, the travels of others, travel news and any other related subjects. Please do not assume that I set out to be an armchair traveller - quite the opposite! I am just not yet in the position where I am able to 'travel write' full time as I eventually aim to due to the restrictions of a full-time degree and student finances! So it is my intention to develop my writing skills, and provide information (and perhaps a little entertainment) for others interested in travel.

As this is my very first blog, it would only be right to include some information about myself, however I am going to forsake the usual 'interests and activities' (see my profile if you want to know any of that) and instead borrow the wonderful The World According To... quiz from Wanderlust Magazine. I have been an avid reader of this publication for many years and it's back issues have completely taken over my spare room! It is the magazine I read when I wish to shut out the world and dream for an hour or two. My answers to this quiz have yet to be published (hopefully one day!), but here they are:

Mountain/desert/ocean/jungle ... which are you?

Ocean - in fact, large bodies of water in general. Lakes, rivers, seas... I feel very much at home beside water.

What was your first great travel experience?

Getting out of the holiday resorts and into rural, 'untouched' Spain as a child and learning my first lesson about other cultures.

What has been your favourite journey?

Four weeks travelling through Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand in 2009.

What are your top five places worldwide?

Tokyo, Japan; Berlin, Germany; Hoi An, Vietnam; Toronto, Canada; Sorrento, Italy.

Which passport stamp are you proudest of?

Japan - after years of dreaming I finally got there!

Which passport stamp would you most like to have?

Cuba

Where or what is your guilty travel pleasure?

I would have to say Marmite. There are times when the travel diet of a vegetarian is somewhat limited, and a little jar of Marmite does wonders for brightening up the most boring of meals.

These answers do differ from those on my somewhat out-of-date gowander.com profile. I need to update this as it is a highly useful networking site for travellers. I would be very interested to hear other people's answers to this quiz, so if anybody has the time, please e-mail them to me at gemma.gannon@googlemail.com and I will publish them in a future post.

Here's looking forward to much more to come!

Thank you xx

P.S. I would just like to mention that the photograph I am currently using as the title photograph for this blog was taken on a recent trip to Vietnam by my good friend Jenny Veness who is currently in Borneo doing some very important work for Raleigh International. The photograph is of myself and my friends Sam and Nic walking by the riverside in Hoi An on a very hot day.