My World Map

I just thought I would share with you this really cool thing that I found on the web. Below is my travel map and highlighted are all the countries I've visited. It's really great for people like you and me who love to travel and show all the places they've been to. It's especially good for people like me whose ambition it is to travel to every country in the world. This map shows me how well, or not so well I'm doing.

 I thought I had visited a lot of places and to be honest it does look like I've conquered a lot of the globe, but according the the travel map I have only visited 17 per cent of the world. This does not sound like much at all, although it does not count Scotland and Wales as separate countries and I do. It also obviously hasn't got the new country of South Sudan on the map yet, which just became a new nation on Friday. So it looks like I have one more country to add to my list.

Don't get me wrong though, for me it's not just a list and something to tick off. I want to experience, feel, taste and meet people in every country.

So for those of you who want to see your own map of the world. Visit www.world66.com and click on my world, then map of the world.



create your own visited country map

Travel makes us smarter and sexier

According to a new Lonely Planet article travel makes us smarter and sexier. I always knew that there were more reasons to travel than just to see new places and have fun and now it has been proven by scientific research.

I have always learnt so much on my travels, from the terrible history of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia to the life of Picasso in Barcelona and all about whales in Argentina. I truly believe that travel is one of the best educations you can get.

The article claims that travel also makes you younger, well this may not be entirely true, but life does slow down the more you travel. Everyone always says how fast life goes and it does when you are doing the same things day in and day out, but have you noticed that a two week holiday seems to last a lot longer because you are experiencing new things everyday.  Two years ago I travelled around South America for five months, when I look back on all the places I went to and all the things I did during those five months, it seems like I was there more than a year. In comparison these last two years back in London have flown by.

The third thing that this article claims, is that travel makes you more productive. Now this I do agree with. When I come back from travelling I always have new ideas for articles, new art ideas I want to try out and new dishes to cook. Travel definitely inspires me to do more things that I would never have even thought of before.

Lastly, the article claims that travel makes us more sexy, I'm not entirely convinced by this one. It might make us more intelligent and therefore the opposite sex might find us more interesting - making us appear sexier, however other than getting a tan, I not sure it makes us physically sexier. Sorry guys. But, let me know if you have found this one to be true too. Suffice to say, we definitely make conversations more interesting and if that makes us attractive then great!

Any way you look at though travel is good for us. Click here to read the article and the scientific research for yourself.

New Travel Writing Job

Well, as some of you know already, but a lot of you probably don't, I will be starting a new job writing for Wexas. I will be writing travel itineraries and articles for their website. Don't worry though, I will still keep up with the travel blogging here and keep you up to date with my travel related musings.

London and The Royal Wedding

So yesterday was the Royal Wedding as you all know, and while many people decided to take the extra bank holiday to go travelling, my travelling was a bit closer to home this time - to the centre of London!

The day started by hopping on the tube, and as soon as I got on I could feel electricity in the air. People starting piling on wearing crowns, Union Jack wigs and wacky costumes, and as I got out at Hyde Park station the atmosphere was positively buzzing. As I walked towards the 3 giant screens showing live coverage of the wedding, I was handed a free William and Kate flag and proceeded set up my picnic blanket alongside 120,000 others. We all watched as Prince William appeared first in his military red uniform and a big roar rose up from the crowd as 120,000 flags were waved ceremoniously in the air. Then there was the gasp as we all spotted Kate's dress for the first time and the cheers and flag waving happened all over again.

I looked around me and saw a strange mix of people all here to celebrate, those with wedding dresses on, those that had come dressed for a wedding, the hundreds of other Wills' and Kates' or those strange few that had come in any old fancy dress, even if it was a bright purple spandex super hero suit or a multi coloured jester outfit. Bands were playing and Pimms was being handed out, it felt more like a festival than a wedding. I looked down at my jeans and royal blue top and wondered if I could have made a bit more of an effort.


Suddenly, I realised that  I had reached the height of Royal Wedding fever, I wanted to be in the action, I wanted to actually see William and Kate for real. I was only a short walk away from Buckingham Palace, and was sure I would be able to make it in time for the all-important kiss on the balcony scene. I skipped the procession on the big screen and started at a fast pace towards the Palace. As soon as  I got within a mile of the Palace though I knew I had made a big mistake, I couldn't even see the road for the thousands and thousands of people standing in front of me. I felt myself being crushed in all sides, a huge backpack pushing me from behind into a bicycle in front. Somehow I had managed to get one side of a small fence and I was stuck. Policemen were shouting and us and wouldn't let us past even though there seemed to be lots of space and people walking on the other side. A surge began and people started to push and shout and I felt like I couldn't breathe, I longed to be back in the park and watching the big screen again.

Finally, somehow (I'll never really know exactly),  I managed to get back to the park just in time to see Kate and William appear on the balcony on the big screen. A World War II bomber plane flew past the balcony on t.v. and then in appeared right in the sky above us. We all waved and cheered at the plane and as Kate and William leaned in for the royal kiss, the crowd went crazy and not one single inch of the sky was to be seen as 120,000 arms, flags, cork bottle tops and who knows what else was thrown up into the air.  Now, I usually don't get caught up in things like this and I am not patriotic at all - in fact most of the time I wouldn't even consider myself to be British, but just at that moment with everyone cheering as hard as they could and all waving their flags I felt proud to be British and wouldn't have wanted to travel anywhere else in the world at that moment - England was perfect.

Get Your Easter Chocolate Fix in Barcelona

It's Easter tomorrow, and while we all know the true meaning of Easter, most of us will associate it with chocolate. Forget about going to Belgium or Switzerland for your chocolate fix though, Barcelona has now emerged onto the scene as the new place to go for chocolate and the city is re-staking its claim as Europe's chocolate capital.

Barcelona was actually the first European city to get chocolate after it was brought over by Spanish explorers from South America and it was here that the first chocolate factory was built. For the past few years chocolate boutiques have been springing up around the city that present chocolate more like pieces of art than pieces of food. Visitors to the city will find many of these artisan chocolate shops, selling everything chocolate they could ever want,  from chocolate beer to chocolate CDs.

Not only is Barcelona the perfect place to buy and eat chocolate, but it is also the place to educate yourself about this delicious treat as it is home to a chocolate museum.  El Museu de la Xocolata, details the history of this addictive treat and its journey from a spicy drink in Mexico to the sweet it is today. Every year around Easter the museum also holds the Annual International Chocolate Figure Competition, where chocolate artists from all over the world go to  to compete. Feast your eyes on a giant chocolate model of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia or a life size model of literary famed, Don Quixote.

Enjoy chocolate tours around the city or go for a meal in a restaurant composing of three courses all made from chocolate. Whatever you decide, you will find that Barcelona will surprise you as one of the top chocolate places in the world.

Coffee Around the World

Since last week was the first ever UK Coffee Week, raising money for African coffee producing countries, I have decided to dedicate this blog to this much loved (and sometimes much needed) drink. Coffee is grown on many different continents of the world and the production of coffee now brings in income to many people who rely mainly on the West’s consumption of it. Coffee has become not only a drink, but also a social interaction between people, and like everything else in the world, coffee comes in many different types. Let’s take a look at coffees around the world.

The Largest Producer of Coffee in the World – The coffee giant of this world is also one of the world’s largest countries and is home to the most important eco-system in the world. It is of course Brazil. Brazil produces about 35% of the world’s coffee and its main export is a type of coffee called Santos.

Best Coffee in the World – There has been much debate about this topic and just like wine tasting, coffee tasting and coffee critics are just as serious. A new list is produced every year, but one coffee that quite often tops the list and appears in the lots of web searches for the best type of coffee is the Esmeralda Special grown in Panama. It hails from one farm in Western Panama and it is also one of the most expensive, fetching up to £76 per pound. This is not the most expensive coffee in the world though.

Most Expensive Coffee in the World – The most expensive coffee is also one of the most disgusting sounding coffees in the world, as it is also known as poo coffee. It is called Kopi Luwak and comes from Indonesia and the coffee is so expensive because each individual coffee berry has to pass through the body of a weasel like animal first called a civit. The civit digests part of the berry and what is left it excretes and this is turned into coffee! No really – I’m joking.

Most Unexpected Coffee Growing Country – Until researching for this blog, I wasn’t aware that America actually grows its own coffee – well not America specifically, but the island of Hawaii.  It may not produce a lot of coffee but has consistently won awards for the standard and taste of its unique coffee beans.

Most Significant Coffee Growing Countries in the World – Apart from the countries I have mentioned, other significant coffee growing countries include: Ethiopia, Colombia, Costa Rica and Kenya.

So tomorrow morning when you are taking your first sip of coffee just think about where it might have come from.

Travelling with your Kindle

I recently got a Kindle and I have heard a lot of good and bad press and comments about whether a Kindle is a good device to go travelling with (as a guidebook substitute) or not. On a recent trip to Malta, I decided to use my Kindle, rather than buy a paperback to see for myself. I bought Malta chapters from Lonely Planet and downloaded them to my Kindle for use on the trip. 

On the plus side –

•  I found it great being able to store my reading books and guidebooks on one small device instead of lugging around 3 or 4 books with me.
• I also felt safe carrying my kindle around, it doesn’t look big or too expensive so I was not worried about it being stolen. 

On the negative side - 

•  The writing and maps were extremely small so I had to squint to be able to see anything. The maps were so small that they were basically unusable, not great since I use maps all the time when I’m travelling.
• The maps took 5 minutes or more to load and I found myself thinking that it would have been much quicker to just look on a paper map.
• There is no index with the kindle guides so finding the page you want quickly can be a bit of challenge.
• Don’t try and use your kindle to access the Internet while away, it will be much quicker to find an Internet cafe. The kindle can’t click on certain buttons and won’t let you click send when writing e-mails. 

Overall, I think that Kindles are good travelling devices for reading books. They may be OK for certain guidebooks, as long as you had separate maps. I think though, that I will stick to paperbacks for my guidebooks until I can get an iPad or another device that works even better.