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.