Affordable Travel

Antigua Guatemala has become a popular destination of foreigners who have extra income and can afford to take advantage of the relatively cheap prices for labor, food, and housing that the city affords. They find that the enjoyment of a high quality of living is easy to purchase, and this makes life there almost irresistible to those with some expendable income. You may want to experiment with this lifestyle, as many do, by spending part of your year there enjoying the beauty of the city and its culture.

But because you are still living in a country where most people have few resources, there are hidden costs that you may or may not realize. For instance, for some months of the year the fire department in Antigua does not even have adequate access to running water. So if you have a luxury condo there decked out with fine furnishing, you can easily watch it all go up in smoke if a disaster hits. At such times everyone is reduced to the same basic common denominator, and although you may have the financial resources to recover, you will be at the mercy of the local economy and the resources it can sustain, during the actual event. If you become sick, for instance, you may have difficulty getting to a modern hospital, and if you are accustomed to such amenities as first class highway systems, comfortable public transportation, and constant assurance of personal safety, you may have a rude awakening if you become one of the unfortunate victims of an accident, illness, or crime in a place like Guatemala, where the quality of life can shift dramatically under extenuating circumstances.

Visitors to Rome used to be able to witness the city’s “cat lady”, who is no longer alive but who gave life and food - miles and miles of spaghetti, to be precise - to the many cats living in her district of the old Italian city. One young woman who visited Italy from Texas as a child said that her parents were rather disappointed that after visiting so many famous tourist sites, the only thing that the little girl recalled was the cat lady. This anonymous cat lady was an elderly widow who lived in the historical section of Italy near the Roman coliseum, and every day at an appointed hour she would venture into the street outside her home, and unwrap several newspapers full of cooked pasta. Cats would begin to arrive by the dozens to eat the pasta, and soon by the hundreds. It is estimated that nearly four hundred cats may have been fed by the old woman, in what turned into an astonishing spectacle.

Although you can visit Rome and its ruins, you will not be able to see the cat lady. But if you ask around, you will find many locals who enjoy telling the story of how the little old woman used to prepare enough pasta to feed hundreds of cats and then wrap it in newspapers to spread on the sidewalks as the cats seemed to appear out of nowhere and eat it voraciously. If you are especially lucky, you might even find someone with a photo of the event to share with you.

If you like to hike and be in the woods, enjoying the sights and sounds - or pristine silences - offered by being in touch with wilderness and nature, then a trip along the Appalachian Trail may be just perfect for you. The humorous and insightful author Bill Bryson wrote a best-selling book about walking the famous “A.T.”, and many others have made it an annual trek. Some people have even planned their entire lives around the trail walk, by planning to live nearby where they can hit the trail every chance they get.

The “A. T.” runs from Maine to Georgia, through some of the most untouched and spectacular forested mountain regions of the USA, and is a well maintained walking path. Sometimes it opens up into a wide road path, and other times it involves fording streams or scrambling over boulders, but the path leads one for hundreds of miles, without ever encountering modern civilization. Of course most travelers who camp along the trail will stop from time to time to resupply in nearby towns, or to just enjoy the comfort of a hot shower and a soft bed.

It is possible to walk only a section of the trail. Some people walk it for an hour or a weekend, whereas others walk it for months, trying to plan their trip so that they don'’ hit the worst weather - the blizzards up north or the swarms of mosquitoes in the hot south of Georgia - but there are many ways to approach hiking the Appalachian Trail, and there are hundreds of places to begin at a trailhead along the way.

If you are planning to take a cruise, either as a tourist or for a summer job which will allow you to make money while you see the world and enjoy many of the benefits that tourists do, you can first read about what to expect by picking up one of a number of good publications dedicated to the cruise ship industry. There are magazines with articles about the cruise industry (like the glossy publication “Porthole”) and you can sometimes find relevant articles and info in other travel magazines like “Travel and Leisure”. In addition, there are many websites dedicated to informing people about what to expect on a cruise. These will often critique various cruise ship companies and describe the pros and cons of travel on each one, as well as give detailed information about the work conditions, wages, and other aspects of life on cruise ship as an employee.

Essentially, traveling on a cruise ship involves living in a floating hotel - there are budget versions and super luxurious versions - and many have amenities including swimming pools, bars, disco clubs, restaurants, gambling casinos, movie theatres, and Internet cafes. You can expect to spend extra money on the ship for things like beer and food, and you can also expect to stop in many ports along the way, where you will have a chance to spend anywhere from a few hours to a few days, sightseeing and shopping for souvenirs.

Few know that the very first indoor shopping mall in the USA was built around the beginning of the 1900s, by one of the most ambitious developers in the tourist town of Asheville, North Carolina. Mr. E. W. Grove built inns, hotels, and invested heavily in real estate, around the same time that Biltmore Estate was being created by George Vanderbilt, another super wealthy gentleman with a penchant for building large and comfortable dwellings. One of Grove’s largest hotels burned to the ground in a mysterious fire, and he decided to dismantle an entire two story hill - a favorite place for locals to go hunting and hiking - in order to build a 14 story high-rise to replace the old hotel. At first he built a two-story shopping center, and before he could complete the rest of the project, he died. His son finished the Grove Arcade, which existed for some time as an indoor and outdoor market, mostly for farmers to sell vegetables. But the plan for a skyscraper hotel never materialized, and the Arcade later closed due to a poor local economy.

But in the late part of the 20th century, interest in the historic Arcade led developers to renovate it and create a shopping plaza complete with stores, restaurants, and bars, topped off by luxury condos. Today the Grove Arcade is a magnet for those throngs of tourists who flock to Asheville to enjoy the mountain scenery but also get in some serious shopping time, and on weekends it is jammed with customers who can stroll through the Arcade and entertain themselves all day long.

In the western part of Virginia, which was one of the first regions of the USA to be settled by European pioneers, there is a wonderful and unique museum dedicated to preserving the history and teaching the traditions of frontier America. This “Frontier Museum” lies on some 100 or more acres of land, just off the main Interstate Highway 85, and has a library of old and out of print books on frontier life, culture, tools, and traditions, plus real working farms or homesteads, where you and your family can watch people in period costume doing things the way they were done by pioneers. In one homestead you can watch bread being cooked in a Dutch oven while women spin yarn from sheep’s wool. And you can even sit and have a taste of the bread once it’s done. On another tract, you can learn how to make fences using old hand tools like the drawing knife and broad axe, and on another one you can pet the horses that used to be used - and at this particular site still are used - to do chores like plowing and hauling firewood. The working museums are staffed by volunteers, many of them students of anthropology or agriculture from nearby universities, and you can spend the entire day at the museum, walking from the Appalachian style cabin to the Pennsylvania style farmhouse to the English style homestead, learning as you listen to the volunteers describe what it was like in the old days. The site is a must-see destination for people of all ages, and is a convenient way to break up a long trip along the eastern seaboard of the USA.

India is home to many of the oldest cultural traditions on earth, as well as more of the world’s religions than any other country. So many different religious systems coexist there, side by side, that India is known as a multi-cultural society like no other. But most of them meet at the river, which provides a kind of natural common denominator for the various belief systems and ritual traditions of India, where the sacred river is not only important for water, transportation, and trade, but for its fundamental function within religious practices. There are many sacred rivers - or rivers that are universally recognized in India as having great religious significance, power, and miraculous potential - throughout the country, and none is bigger or more well known that the Ganges River. The Ganges stretches through almost the entire continent, beginning as melted snow in the highest regions of the Himalayan Mountains and descending through the country to places like West Bengal, where millions of pilgrims gather each year to bath in it while chanting songs and playing drums and cymbals. Near the village of Mayapur, about 100 miles from Calcutta, the Ganges blends it waters with another significant “holy river”, the Sarasvati. Similarly, in the more northern village of Vrndaban, not far from the Taj Mahal, the Yamuna River winds its way through temple towns and is the site for daily bathing rituals, funerals, and celebrations of holy days to commemorate the many deities of the Hindu faith.

You can easily find the major Indian rivers on maps, and plan your travel to coincide with some of the major - or minor - festivals that take place at temples and in the villages that line these famous rivers. Ganges is perhaps the easiest to follow, and it is a wide, blackish-silver river with strong currents that in some places is great fun for swimming, as well.

If you are planning a long road trip and have children, you may want to plan ahead to keep them entertained along the way so that you don’t constantly hear them ask, “are we there yet”. As adults, it is easier for us to tolerate a long trip by just talking or listening to the radio and watching the landscape go by, but for children - especially little ones who can’t even see out of the windows and only see treetops and clouds going past - the trip can be long and difficult.

There are many game kits available for children that are especially designed for travel, and you can find these at department stores and bookshops. Within these kits will be many educational games that kids can play by themselves or with others, to help pass the time. Of course many modern gadgets have electronic games attached to them, and if you are not opposed to having your kids spend hours playing electronic games, that is one of the most effective ways to distract them. They can even play the kinds of games that are imbedded in Ipods, cellphones, and laptop computers. And for the ultimate in on the road entertainment - which also gives you some control over the educational value of how the kids distract themselves - nothing beats a portable DVD player. The children can watch DVDs and be perfectly content, for hours on end. Many cars and vans now come with DVD players already installed, or if you own a laptop computer with DVD technology, you can power it with your car’s cigarette lighter and let the kids use your laptop to play DVDs which they can watch on the laptop screen.

Let’s say you are a big baseball fan, and you want to take a tour of the factory where they make Louisville Slugger baseball bats like the ones that Babe Ruth used to use. Or perhaps you like M&M candies, and want to visit the chocolate manufacturing plant. Maybe your hobby is cigars, and you want to tour a cigar making facility, or you would like to visit a real mine, where they dig coal, gold, or rubies from deep beneath the earth. There is every chance that you can have your wish, if you follow a few procedures and protocols to work out your plan in advance of your excursion.

Try to first contact the main office of the company that owns the facility you would like visit, and get information about how to communicate with someone in public relations or community relations. Most large companies have a department that specializes in working with the general public to answer questions, and if you can get in touch with someone in that department, they may be able to grant you clearance to take a special tour of their facility.

You may have to follow certain guidelines. For instance, you may not be allowed to take photographs, although you might be given free brochures, postcards, and other materials with pictures in them. And you may have to wear special clothing. For instance, if you are touring a mine, you will be asked to wear a hard hat, which they company will supply to you for the time of the tour. And if you are visiting a place like a military base or the White House in Washington, DC, you may have to submit to a search and even a background check.

If you want to explore tourists’ sites that are off the main track, try some of these tour ideas for a change. If you are in a celebrity town, especially Los Angeles, the home of movie star studded Hollywood, hook up with a local guide who can take you on a car or bus tour of the homes of famous stars like James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, and Charlie Chaplin. And you can also visit the sidewalk of stars, where many Oscar winners have a star in their honor. Tour trips will include visits to historical movie sets, restaurants that celebrities frequent, and to the famous sign on a hillside overlooking Hollywood, where you can have your photo taken.

You can also check while in any big city to see if there is a tour agency offering odd tours like those in some cities that take you on ghost tours, to sites where people claim to have experienced the presence of ghosts and spirits. Some towns will take you to ghastly but nonetheless historically important places where famous gangsters were killed, where famous people met ill fates in car crashes, or where famous criminals were born and began a life of murderous crimes. Whatever your cup of tea, there is probably a tour for you, and if you inquire you might be surprised what you find. In Amsterdam, for instance, there are tours especially designed to introduce you to the red light district, where the sex trade is legal and there is even a service worker’s union organized by prostitutes under the auspices of the Dutch government.