Affordable Travel

Many of us travel with a camera, and take pictures of every place we go. But in recent years especially, it pays to exercise a little discretion when shooting photos inside airports. If you do this in the USA, especially if you take pictures that include a view of security operations, you might be accused of trying to snoop on the government in an attempt to learn the security procedures for a nefarious purpose, like terrorism. It may sound outlandish, but it happens.

Worse still is the situation in some other airports, in smaller countries, where the government combines the civilian airport facility and the military airport facility. This often is the case in smaller or less economically powerful nations. To save money they have one airport for both their military and their commercial planes. But in some countries, if you take photos of anything inside the airport can be in violation of the law, because they have laws against taking photos “inside a military facility”. If you are charged under such laws, you will be charged with espionage.

So when in doubt about the rules and regulations of an airport you’re passing through, the best advice is to abstain from taking photographs. But post cards instead, because as far as we know, nobody has been dragged in front of a firing squad for buying a post card.

Learning a foreign language is a daunting challenge for most people, and can take many years to master. It can also be hard to learn to hear and say the basic phrases necessary to get along nicely as a tourist in a place where you don’t know the language. So there are millions of companies selling practical  and not so practical  tools to help you with foreign language skill development. You can buy gadgets that translate words for you, and appear like a real geek as you type in what someone just said to you, to figure out how to reply. And you can find dolls that speak in another language, computer software to train you, and of course phrase books that teach you “vital language skills for tourists”. Some are lousy, some are okay, and others are excellent.

One thing to keep in mind when dealing with language is that if you can’t pronounce a word with the native accent, nobody is going to understand you, no matter how much vocabulary and grammar you learn. Pronunciation and accent is critically important. So pick books that help you with the phonetics of the words and phrases, if you are buying a phrase book. And keep in mind also that just because you travel - for instance - in a Spanish speaking country, the people may not all use the same version of Spanish. Even natives of Mexico have trouble understanding people in Buenos Aires, and Puerto Ricans drop whole syllables from words, leaving people from Spain clueless. So pick a phrase book designated for the particular region where you will be traveling, and you’ll learn the local way of speaking.

When you go on a long trip, or decide to go and live in another place for an extended visit for work, study, or because you are one of the lucky ones who gets to do such things, keeping track of your mail from home can be a major issue. You can let it accumulate at the post office, but after a few bushels of mail stack up, the post office might decide to cut off your service. You can ask a neighbor to check your mail for you, and tell you if anything urgent arrives, but that means your neighbor will have to read your mail  something that both of you might be uncomfortable about doing. Better yet, you can hire a professional “mail forwarding” company, and let them ship your mail to you by a service like Federal Express or DHL Couriers.

These private companies agree  for a small fee  to have you forward all your mail to them. They can toss out the junk mail if you like, or send everything on to you, and all you have to do is to keep them informed of your addresses as you move about and hop from place to place. They will set up a schedule with you, to send your mail every month, every week, or as often as you like, and they will charge you a fee based on how often they send it.

Staying in touch by phone is easier than ever before, and if you travel to another continent, you might be able to keep your same phone and phone number. Long before you travel, start checking with phone companies to figure out the best plan for you – it might take some time to sort out all your various options, because there are many ways to stay in touch by phone for travelers. Some companies allow you to take your cell phone to another continent, and continue business as usual, but they increase the fees for calls since they are considered international calls while you are gone. Other companies will sell you a phone that works in the place you’re going, so that you have phone service in your hand when you arrive. And sometimes you can take your cell phone to a phone company in a foreign country and they will put a chip into it that allows you to switch over to the local cellular service, for a very reasonable price. Then there are the new companies that let you place calls from your laptop computer by using special headphones and software. The advantage to this kind of phone service is that you can make as many calls as you want, for free, if you use the company Skyper, based in Estonia. The downside is of course that if your phone rings, you have to put your laptop up to your ear (just kidding).

Traveling is an art and a skill, and the seasoned traveler knows that a big part of traveling smart is carrying the right stuff – and not carrying the wrong stuff – so that you can travel light as well as right. Some essentials that you might take for granted won’t be there when you need them most, and if you can figure out which items to carry with you to avoid that scenario, you are way ahead of the crowd. For instance if you are going to Guatemala, you may expect to find plenty of good chocolate, since they grow it there. But they export almost all of the good stuff. If you want to have first class chocolates for your week in Guatemala, buy some at home and take it with you. If you are going to India, you might want to bring along your favorite antibiotics, because you might get sick and not find them there. If you’re going to the Andes Mountains, bring along some polartech fleece, to keep you warm, and if you’re heading out to Tehran, don’t forget to bring along your favorite Beatles records on a portable player, or you might not hear many Beatles tunes while you’re away.

Most veteran travelers will say to carry your favorite medicines and brands of personal hygiene products like razors, toothpaste, and condoms, because you might not find those particular brands where you’re going. Take plenty of good batteries and if you have a quirky camera, take film for it. And of course, comfortable shoes and extra pairs in case you lose a pair, are a must.

Havana, the capitol city of Cuba, is one of the most beautiful tropical cities in the world, if not the most beautiful. There are sights there that you can’t find anywhere in the world – for example, due to shortages of certain products like American cars, you will see hundreds of vintage American cars from the 1950s. The whole city is one big car show. And there are no billboards or flashy ads or signs in the streets, because that kind of marketing is illegal under Castro’s government. You will see none of that kind of advertising, and that in itself may take some getting used to – in a pleasant way that is so odd it almost seems surreal to someone from the gaudy modern cities of the 21st century, where loud ads are the norm.

The Mafia invested millions of dollars in a hotel and casino in Havana, right before Castro kicked out all the Americans, so you can stay in a hotel that is furnished with the most elegant styles that were available to the rich and famous back in the 1950s. Strolling around Havana is like walking into a retro museum, because everything is sort of frozen in the 50s, and the architecture, furniture, cars, carpets, designs, everything, is top of the line, classy, and elegant. So the city is one of the world’s great treasures or museums of the best that the 50s had to offer in terms of decorative arts and fashion.

The national beer of Guatemala is Gallo, a straightforward, somewhat dry, inexpensive brew that is made in batches small enough that the beer if not available for export. People who drink beer are not surprised that when they sit down in a bar in Guatemala, the server doesn’t ask if they’d like to order a beer or cerveza, but instead just asks “Would you like a Gallo?” because everyone assumes that if you want a beer, you want a Gallo beer.

The beer comes in brown glass bottles or in aluminum cans, with its logo of a black rooster – the Spanish word for rooster being “gallo” – and many people use up their entire quota of exportable duty free alcohol when leaving Guatemala, not on rum or tequila, but on cumbersome bottles of Gallo. You can even enjoy this beer at room temperature, the way Guinness is meant to be served, although it is best served ice cold in a chilled beer glass. Gallo is also available on tap in some bars, and is worth seeking out, because if the beverage is good from a bottle, it is phenomenal from a fresh tap.

So if you are looking for a good excuse to take a vacation, and are one of the many who enjoys a good beer in a tropical climate, then make your way to the land of perpetual sunshine, springtime, and great national beer, and find out why so many people go to Guatemala and then never return home again.

Amsterdam, Holland, home of some of the world’s most stunningly beautiful art and architecture – including a whole museum dedicated to the works of Van Gogh, is a city built below sea level. As a result, the historical part of the old city is a series of canals, in semicircular shapes, running concentrically alongside the streets and sidewalks of Amsterdam. The canals are beautiful at night, when the lights of the city come on and reflect against the water in the canals – in spite of the fact that the canals are themselves polluted and not exactly fit for swimming. There are however, many houseboats and flat barges used as stores – florists for example can be found on many of the houseboat/barges in the canals – and real estate prices for living on a houseboat in these old canals is very high, making them some of the most exclusive residences in the world.

To visit Amsterdam and the canals, it is especially convenient to stay in one of the city’s old hotels. Some of the hotels here only have six or ten rooms in them for rent, so don’t expect to have an easy time finding a vacancy on short notice. It is a good idea to book well ahead, to ensure a room with a view overlooking the canals at a hotel like the elegant and understated “Fantasia” on Kaiser Street.

Although television is generally derided, and rightly so, for being a mind-numbing technology that makes us dumber by the minute, some aspects of the boob tube redeem it as an educational tool. One of these is not so much related to the content of the show you watch as it is to the availability of subtitles. If you are learning a new language, the subtitles displayed on the bottom of the screen can help you practice your skills. For instance, you can watch an English program and put on Spanish subtitles to practice your recognition of Spanish words and vocabulary, or you can switch to a Spanish program with English subtitles, to practice your Spanish pronunciation without losing track of what is being said during the television program.

Of course you can do this without traveling, by surfing your cable TV channels, but it is much more fun to watch TV in another country, so you are able to step outside your hotel room door and hear the native language spoken everywhere. Take along a phrase book, some language learning CDs, and you are all set to learn a new language, while seeing the sights. And when you come home at night – or back to your room – you can tune in for homework by using the subtitle technique to study while you lay back and become a couch potato – or pomme de terre if you’re learning French!

Bowen’s Island is a tiny island of not more than 5 or 10 acres, in a marsh just west of the beach at Folly Beach, South Carolina, about 15 miles from the old historic city of Charleston. Even if you look for Bowen’s Island, and a weathered old highway sign pointing to it, you probably won’t spot it until the 3rd or 4th attempt, because it is way off the beaten path, although it is only a few hundred yards from a major highway.

This restaurant was established about 60 years ago and has not really gone through any renovations since then. Some would claim that it has not even been cleaned or dusted since then, although the kitchen area is the exception to that rule, being clean and sanitary and compliant with local health codes. But true enough, the rest of the place is rather startling, with graffiti covered concrete block walls, old tile floors, and random mismatched furniture and decades of memorabilia scattered about the place. But the view from outside on the docks is stunning, especially as the sun sets over the wetlands.

Bowen’s is known for serving the best seafood in the part of the country, in the roughest and most unadorned atmosphere. You will either be served on a paper plate or on top of old newspapers, and if you order a beer it will be handed to you in a can. Men serve the all-you-can-eat oyster dinner in stained clothes and literally use shovels to serve the steaming oysters onto your table atop sheets of newspaper. It is then up to you to shuck the oysters yourself. But the food is some of the best in the world, and tourists staying in five star hotels show up to stand in line with motorcycle gang members and frat boys, to get their tray of fish.