Travel The Hangar Travel Thread

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Howard Moon said:
It's funny how travel like anything is just about personal opinion and nobody is wrong but when someone at work goes to the USA or something for a second time over Europe, and has never been to Europe I can't fathom it! I try so hard to talk them.Into Europe, has anyone gone and not been in awe? it's Europe! the centre of everything for ever!
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I'm definitely aiming to go to Europe in the not too distant future, but if you told me I could go to NYC again, I'd jump at it in a heartbeat.

New York City is an amazing place. I don't know if I could live there but it is absolutely impossible not to go there as a visitor and not be energised and pulled along by its energy. It literally never sleeps. Want to head out at 3:30 in the morning on the train to your local bar? No problem.
 
camsmith said:
31? Great effort!

Travelers do love their lists! Of those I've been to New York City, London, Istanbul, Amsterdam, Netherlands, Berlin, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Sydney, Bangkok, and Prague.

Istanbul and Prague were probably my favourites to visit. Would love to live in NYC one day, and London I think, is a pretty exciting place to spend a couple of years in your 20's.

I do want to go to most of the others mentioned. In particular Petra, Rome and Jerusalem for it's natural wonders and history. But amongst others the next on my list, that I never got to when in Europe were Dubrovnik and Budapest, mainly for the nightlife.

Can't think of many other cities that could be on the list, Munich as mentioned, or a city in Canada... Vancouver/Toronto perhaps? Oslo? I haven't been to many other cities yet!
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I guess it could be easy to be well travelled and still have only like 5 of the list, some people just don't dig cities I suppose
 

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Howard Moon said:
I guess it could be easy to be well travelled and still have only like 5 of the list, some people just don't dig cities I suppose
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Definitely, I know quite a few people that would explore all around Thailand for instance, yet never have the desire to check out Bangkok. Each to their own, I love seeing different cities.

Howard Moon said:
It's funny how travel like anything is just about personal opinion and nobody is wrong but when someone at work goes to the USA or something for a second time over Europe, and has never been to Europe I can't fathom it! I try so hard to talk them.Into Europe, has anyone gone and not been in awe? it's Europe! the centre of everything for ever!
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My best mate is like this. Been to the USA three times, will probably go back again next year.

Try to sell Europe, Asia.. South America even. Nope.. LA, Vegas and New York wins out...
 
Howard Moon said:
Same, just exploring cities , how people live. I get so bored at the beach.... few days and I'm done
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I prefer mountains over beach any day.
 
Despite my best efforts I've only chalked up 8 of those. If you're talking about the city rather than the sights around it though, I'd definitely query a few on that list. I'd much rather visit Phnom Penh and Hanoi again than Siem Reap and Hoi An, for example. Plenty more you could squeeze in, but I suppose that's the beauty of "definitive" lists.
 
fodzilla said:
Despite my best efforts I've only chalked up 8 of those. If you're talking about the city rather than the sights around it though, I'd definitely query a few on that list. I'd much rather visit Phnom Penh and Hanoi again than Siem Reap and Hoi An, for example.
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Hoi An was an interesting one. The food was the best in Vietnam without doubt for me, and the architecture is beautiful.

But- being small- it is a little limited after a two or three days. And, it's a bit too touristy in parts.

Hanoi was great- nicer than Saigon, I felt.
 
Street food in Hanoi did it for me. The only other place that vaguely competed was Xi'an.

As for the appeal of beaches, you just need to find the right beach, with the right bar perched on it.


In other news, after a bit of wrangling we've booked ourselves in to spend Christmas in Prague, which should be fun.
 
The thing that set Hoi An food apart for me was that, by my reckoning, finding central Vietnamese grub in Australia is quite hard compared to finding classically southern or northern Vietnamese dishes.

I certainly had a lot more things in Hoi An, Danang and Hue that I'd never had before than I did in Saigon or Hanoi.
 

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Howard Moon said:
Think I had that in India, fusion menu?
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Invariably the riskiest places for getting food poisoning in those sort of places is the places that serve Western-style grub.

Much riskier than the street food.
 
Now that it's official I can announce that I get to lead a trip of 16 year 10 students through China next year (and hopefully 2016 too). We get to travel to Beijing, Dali, Kunming, Li Jiang and Xian (I think, its all happened at once and I haven't wrapped my head around it yet). The kids get to spend a few nights with their host family and the rest of the time we will be travelling.

I can't wait. I know some people will say "ew, travelling with students", but given that I get to help pick the students, it wont be so bad. They're a pretty good bunch of year 10s next year.
 
Howard Moon said:
clearly you teach in the good end of town! .. we went to Phillip Island :)
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Most of our other camps are local; Adelaide, Grampians, Portland and Buller. It just happens that we (and 2 other schools in the district) have sister schools in China, so we go as a group trip to save costs, but each school has pretty much their own program.
 
Orazio2Joe said:
Most of our other camps are local; Adelaide, Grampians, Portland and Buller. It just happens that we (and 2 other schools in the district) have sister schools in China, so we go as a group trip to save costs, but each school has pretty much their own program.
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id love to take students travelling, infact id love to be a teacher full stop!

When we travelled to Egypt, we joined up with a tour for 9 days that went from Cairo, up to aswan, luxor, along the nile, red sea ect ect, it was ptretty much me, my missus, and a group of 10 year 11 students from a girls school in Sydney on a history tour/excursion. I actually still talk to some of them today on social media, we became friends.

To be fair my missus wanst thrilled at the group we attached to but i had a ball. But more to the point how can you not learn properly actually being there, walking thru the valley of the kings and into king tuts tomb.. rather than casually flicking through a book from your deak in Australia.

Travel, the greatest teacher.
 
Howard Moon, when did you go to Egypt?

My missus went there in January 2011...now cast your mind back to some of the events occurring there at the time...

:confused:
 
The revolution, what a time! would have been exciting to say the least! Wouldn't be able to avoid getting caught up in the emotion, she have good stories?

We went in 2004, lots of armed convoys, particularly in Sinai but pretty safe really
 
Well, she didn't tell me the full extent of how hairy it was for a while after. Basically, after Egypt they were going to Morocco, so in normal circumstances that would have simply involved them flying out of Cairo to get the flight to Rabat.

However, while they were in a little place called Dahab, the situation in Cairo deteriorated sharply- full scale rioting to the point where the airport was closed. So instead they were flown from Sharm el-Sheikh (near Dahab) to Alexandria, where the situation was supposedly safer.

Well, safer than Cairo maybe, but still not safe- they were firstly delayed in Alexandria for a couple of days because the Moroccan airlines were refusing to send their planes to Egypt because of the situation, so they had to wait around until someone else (Jordanian Air I think?) came to the rescue.

So during the enforced layover, they were walking around some part of Alexandria (right next to the coast, I'm told) when an impromptu protest in the area started to turn ugly. There was only one place that looked safe- a mosque. Given that Alexandria is to this day a Christian majority city, this might seem odd, but there we go. So eventually her and her two friends (all 23 year old girls at the time) took refuge in there for basically an entire day. They then faced a race against time to get back to the airport for their flight to Morocco, and with the situation as it was, taxis were basically impossible to come by. So what happened? The local Imam/Mufti organised one of his men to take (at breakneck speed, I'm told) them to the airport and they got there with ten minutes to spare.

The added factor here was that the internet and phone lines has been cut by the government and thus, her family and I had absolutely no way of knowing whether she was okay or where she was. Even the embassy had no idea. It was ******* nerve wracking to be honest, and I think my sigh of relief when she informed us she was okay and had landed in Morocco was heard in the next suburb.

Oh, and their flight from Alexandria, when it finally left, made unscheduled stops in Tripoli (where of course things turned to s**t only months later) and Algiers to top it all off. So she ended up going to every far northern African country bar Tunisia.
 
fodzilla said:
Anyone been to Iran? Mostly looking at you, Howard Moon. We'd like to see a bit of the Middle East while we're not too far from it, and, perhaps counter-intuitively, alongside Turkey and Israel it seems like one of the safer places to visit.
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Friends of mine went there on their round the world honeymoon at the end of 2012. They loved it. His family was from Shiraz and it looked beautiful. They also visited Tehran, which they also loves.
 
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