Travel
-
Last Call For Budget Holidays
Emergency air supplies have been provided, the fasten seat belts sign is on and we have all adopted the brace position in order to preserve our dental records. Prepare yourself for an emergency landing as rising fuel prices could be about to cause some serious turbulence for our beloved budget holiday.
Like anyone nursing a one thousand pound, interest free, overdraft I have embraced budget airlines like the friend I always dreamed of making. From messy weekends in Amsterdam to cultural excursions in Barcelona the possibilities have seemed endless – and with the introduction of Zoom flights across the pond perhaps they are. Yet the ever dooming credit crunch and increasing price of oil means it may be time to take up rambling.
Companies, like Ryanair and EasyJet, have indulged our travelling needs by providing flights from as little as £1 and offering other subsidiary services that left package holidays as dead as a dodo. It seemed as if EasyHolidays were now the only way to holiday. However, the escalating price of oil may be set to put an end to our regular beanos to the continent. It has been estimated that some 5 million passengers are going to be priced out of the budget holiday market as there is a 10 percent rise in the average ticket – you guessed it, because of rising oil prices. Other, lesser known companies, like Oasis Hong Kong have already been forced to close because they just cannot afford to fuel.
Yet walking through London today I see an array of Evening Standard signs telling me to not to worry, that in fact Ryanair prices are going to drop. How can this be? Have Ryanair ventured to yet undiscovered sources of oil? Or are they going to use the age-old tactic of stripping even more luxuries from their flights so that eventually we are all packed in as tight as a group of asylum-seeking sardines? Well actually, neither. It would appear that in an attempt to price its competitors out of the market Ryanair has nobly taken heavy losses…but how long can this go on? As big budget airlines like BA and Iberia are forced to merge we can only presume that air fares will eventually have to rise. However, although your ticket price itself may not rise be prepared to start paying huge fuel surcharges and perhaps only taking one pair of pants in your limited luggage!
So, as we all enjoy these last few months of cheap flights and various airlines attempts to outbid each other, perhaps it is time to start considering our alternative travel arrangements. Maybe a weekend in Bognor would not be so bad?
By Sam Selmon
-
Culture Crushed: Beijing Transforms to Meet Olympic Standards
If you’re not a fan of sports you can join me in celebrating the end of another Olympic Games and the media frenzy which surrounded it. All the reports and articles, which had originally interested me eventually began to saturate our news to the point where anything related to China’s changing society bored me senseless, simply because I thought I had heard it all before.
It was not until this summer, when I stepped out of the world’s biggest airport terminal into the thick, stifling Beijing air, that I realised, for all those articles, I had no real idea about what that change actually meant. While I was there, it concerned me how quickly everything seemed to be changing. Was China heading in the right direction as it desperately tried to impress everyone, particularly the West? Could all their efforts have been to their detriment? As our plane landed I asked the woman next to me if that was fog I could see outside. ‘Oh no, no,’ she replied, ‘that’s just the air.’
As I walked through the streets of Beijing this June, I found myself looking at a city that had been unmistakably gripped by the drive to modernise and to ‘clean up’ in time for the Olympics. Street vendors had been banned in part to make the streets look more presentable but also so that no naïve foreigners got food poisoning. The friend I was visiting told me how he was missing the once commonplace ‘Jian Bing’ vendor. Jian Bing are breakfast pancakes made with vegetables, egg and hot sauce, and they were once eaten by many Beijingers on their way to work in the morning. Vendors risked being fined if they started selling them, and the people who used to buy their pancakes for breakfast were being forced to pay more by going to the nearby restaurants. We agreed that it all just detracted from the ‘real’ experience of Beijing, even if it did remove some minor risks.
It wasn’t just the food that government officials controlled. While I was there, they were also in charge of the weather. I had arrived in a city that, I had been informed, had daily weather patterns operating ‘like clockwork’ to dissipate pollution before the Games and, without fail, every seven o’clock in the evening there would be the most torrential downpour. The cause of those predictable weather patterns was the ‘Beijing Weather Modification Office’ which, for the past few decades, has been honing its skills in controlling where and when it rains. By firing rockets and flying planes loaded with chemicals, Weather Modification teams have for some time now been able to make the rain fall on crops and clear bad weather before public holidays by ‘seeding’ the clouds with compounds that stimulate rainfall. It was a given that as we went out in the evenings we could expect to be rained upon, and rained upon we were as we jumped over puddles, swearing loudly. ‘F***ing Lonely Planet said Beijing was a dry city!’
But it wasn’t all unhappy news; one experience stands out in my mind during those two weeks when we took a trip to Hong Kong by rail. During the return journey I was interviewed on the topic of China’s burgeoning industry and the effect the Games were having on the country as a whole. The interviewers, however, were ten-year-old schoolchildren and seemed to enjoy grinning while they asked their questions. They asked me a slew of them: ‘Do you like China?…What do you think of China’s growth?…What do you think of the Olympics?’ In the background, their teacher smiled encouragement as he took photos of us all with an enormous camera. I told them I liked China and that I wished I could be there to see the Games, but when they left I wondered if their excitement could be just as commonplace as I had read about.
With the 2008 Games a thing of the past, I hope that China will take stock of what it has done to itself to prepare for the Olympics and really question whether it is happy with the changes it has hurriedly made. With a bit of luck they won’t be irreversible, and it is a small hope of mine that the cheerful optimism I had seen on that train won’t fade and that, maybe some day, those pancakes will return to the streets of Beijing.
Will Vickers
-
I Went on Holiday and I Took….A Lightweight Camping Towel
The Lifeventure Fibre Trek Towel can absorb 9 times its own weight and dry 8 times quicker than a standard beach towel. Surely it must be the perfect travelling accessory? The must-have hiking tool for weight-conscious travellers who want to make a quick departure after their morning shower? Alas, no! Be warned: the quick dry travel towel is host to a variety of discomforts that could ruin even the most cheerful person’s morning. The towel itself is coarse and uncomfortable and once you have endured the displeasure of drying yourself and placed your towel casually over a fence catastrophe inevitably arises. A fleeting gust of wind whips past and you see your new super-absorbent towel fall in to the dirt…’not a problem!’ I hear you cry, ‘we can just shake that towel clean.’ However, the super-absorbent camping towel will not let go of those little specks of dirt and woodchip so you are left to pick away at 9 times your towel’s weight in crap while the rest of your party enjoys a leisurely breakfast. Perhaps a lightweight beach towel would suffice?
Ranging from £7.99 to £17.99 dependent on size.
By Sam Selmon
-
Chilax - Spa breaks in Nottingham
Coursework deadlines are approaching, Hallward is getting busy again and there is a notable lack of queues out and about in the eve at Notts, so although not the cheapest and most necessary part of student life we thought maybe what you hard-working students really need is a break…
Escape, Indulge and Relax all this can be done at the Nottingham Belfry Hotel, nice and close by you could easily take a day off and feel as revitalised as stepping out of the shower post-isis, but with none of the awkward memories flooding back. For 99 quid you get free use of all facilities in the hotel, an express facial followed by a back, neck and shoulder massage. And finish by indulging in a three course meal at their rosette restaurant. Prices are based per person per night for two adults sharing a standard twin or double room.
For those of you happy to splash the cash, and everyone else who would like to be briefly transported to anywhere but Lenton or Campus, imagine this: Brookdale Health Hydro on Nottingham Road. Fear not there will be no local beestonites lurking, for this sanctuary is found in South Africa. The ‘Hydro Extravaganza’ includes steam, hydrotherapy, reflexology, Tea, Clarins Luxurious Massage, Dead Sea Mud Experience, Lunch, Back Massage, Guinot Luxury Facial, Make-up or Solar Bronze Application. And the grand price for all this is R. 1,600.00, ok, so it sounds pretty horrific, but infact weighs in at an incredibly reasonable £113, so now all you have to do is pay for the flights out there. If only.
For more info go to:
http://www.marstonhotels.com/hotels/the-nottingham-belfry-nottingham-nottinghamshire/reflections-spa-leisure-spa-treatments.shtml
http://www.brookdale.co.za/dayspa.php -
Bad Blood in Bolivia
Nearly eighty people died in the Bolivian riots of 2003, yet few in the West knew anything about it. This is a tragedy equalled only by the events themselves. I was unfortunate enough to be trapped in the capital, La Paz, at the time and between dodging tear-gas and rioters, I managed to spend some time talking to the people, albeit in exceptionally bad Spanish. These broken conversations gave an insight into a stunningly beautiful yet deeply troubled country.Bolivia measures 1.1 million square kilometres and boasts incredible geographical and climatic diversity. Over half of Bolivia’s population of 9 million speak Quechua, the language of the Incan Empire, as their first language – probably the reason for our sketchy Spanish conversations. In a disastrous war with Chile in 1879 Bolivia lost half its territory and was left entirely landlocked. At the heart of its troubles, however, lie two remarkable natural resources.
The first is coca, a green tea grown in the Andes, used for centuries as a pick-me-up by indigenous miners and farmers. There are statues dating back to Incan times of priests chewing coca. It tastes like mud, but it’s a wonderful little plant: when working at high altitude a few chews of this little leaf lowers the heart rate and helps you go on for longer. Unfortunately, it can also become cocaine, peddled in clubs and streets around the world. It is a testament to the negative influence of the West that rich Westerners have corrupted this plant, used for years by indigenous people in their work, into a recreational drug. Liberal, free-thinking America has decided to heap the blame on Bolivia and tried to ban them from growing coca. Hang on, but doesn’t it grow there naturally? That doesn’t matter to the US - the miners and farmers will just have to survive on coffee and sugar. In reality of course coca is still sold in the markets and chewed just as readily by the natives, but there is a feeling of bad blood among the people that I spoke to against America for its playground bully-like behaviour.
The second resource is natural gas, highly favoured in the West. Bolivia is a poor country, relatively new to the tourism game; the natural solution to its poverty is the gas. Export it to the West, charge high, and bingo, a ready income for the country. However it is not that easy. Bolivians do not want to lose control of their biggest natural resource, and feel that it should be nationalised and made available to the poor. The introduction of the ban on coca growing has inflamed the public against America, the biggest market for gas. Moreover, the cheapest way to export the gas is through Chile, the country that took the Bolivian coastline. Thus the two countries Bolivians hate the most in the world, America and Chile, are their ticket out of poverty. For the average Bolivian this is hard to swallow.
When President Sanchez de Lozada tried to export the gas through Chile to America, hundreds of thousands protested, went on strike and constructed extensive road blockades across the country. These mobilisations were marked by intense confrontations between security forces and protesters, so much so that the times are now named Bolivia’s Gas War. Eventually the army was called in to break up the demonstrations. This was an unmitigated disaster. One attempt by soldiers to quell resistance resulted in 26 deaths in one day; my memories of that day involve hiding in a local man’s shop basement as fighting raged outside. In all nearly 80 people were killed before the president stepped down. Unfortunately he left his successor Carlos Mesa with the same problems. He too has recently been forced out of office and the new President, Veltze – the third in less than two years – is now faced with the same problems, the same blessings and curses.
It is amazing that in the midst of a virtual civil war, the people I spoke to were so friendly, so willing to help a frightened traveller. It is a source of constant sadness to me that I can see no solution for them. In a world where rich countries get richer and the poor remain poor, is there no way out for the Bolivians?
Chris Arrowsmith
-
Havana Club
Cuba is a mess. It’s a country rife with contradictions, where the modern world and colonial past collide with mixed results. It’s one of the last bastions of communism in the world, yet its primary industry is tourism. It has the highest literacy rate in Latin America, yet one of the weakest economies. It’s a country where taxi drivers earn more than doctors, the food is awful, the rum is cheap, the beaches are incredible and the music is better. You should go there.When I first stepped onto the bustling streets of Havana, part of me secretly expected to be accosted by a passionate mob of revolutionaries who might wrap me in a Che-emblazoned shroud, offer me a cigar, hustle me into a 1950s car and insist that I convert to communism.
Instead I was mugged by a ten-year-old boy.
After spending two hours in Havana Centro Police Station (also a prison) I decided I didn’t like Cuba’s capital - it was a bit grubby, a bit old-fashioned and more than a bit terrifying. And so, vowing to return once we’d “seen somewhere a bit nicer,” we caught the morning bus to the colonial town of Trinidad.
A myriad of vibrant pastel painted houses and cobbled streets, Trinidad truly is the gem of Cuba’s south coast. We rented a room in a Casa Particulare (private house licensed by the state) owned by a humble, obliging couple who presented us upon arrival with oil lamps “in case of a power cut.” There wasn’t one power cut during our ten-day visit. There were six.
Cuba is still recovering from the economic devastation caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989; shortages of petrol and fuel are widespread. During this sensitively named ‘special period’ it became compulsory for private vehicles to pick up hitchhikers, a practice still fairly standard today. Everywhere in Cuba you will see sweaty herds of people huddled under the shade of trees and overpasses waiting to be picked up by passing cars and trucks.
Bizarrely, it is along these roads that communism is most palpable. Instead of advertising products and services, roadside billboards in Cuba are all Socialist propaganda, promoting the revolution and its heroes. Support for socialism is visible everywhere, from large banners in hotels to tiny quotes and slogans etched on the side of buildings. It is a country furiously resisting the capitalist onslaught that will inevitably come when the regime collapses.
A lack of capitalism gives Cuba a lazy vibe. Never before have I seen so many people standing around with (apparently) so little to do. If there were an award for a nation’s ability to pass time unproductively Cuba would win. They really do sit on their front step smoking cigars all day, they really do sit on the beach drinking straight rum out of plastic cups at ten in the morning, and they have a really good time doing it. There’s nowhere better to soak up this relaxed atmosphere than on Cuba’s stunning northern beaches, where fine white sands meet the warm waters of Florida straits and the living is easy. Unfortunately we could not dwell in this rum-soaked paradise until the end of our three weeks; we had a second date with Havana.
After renting a dubiously legal room in the apartment of a very jolly but undoubtedly mad local woman who asked us kindly to keep our shutters closed at all times and to please hide in the cupboard if immigration came round, we set off to explore the museums and leafy squares of the old town.
Havana won us over and we returned happily hours later to find a salsa lesson in full swing in the living room and our hostess strumming away furiously on a battered old guitar. They may not have McDonalds but they sure know how to have a good time!
Cuba is vibrant, interesting, challenging and very odd. Yet there is something quite remarkable about a country which lies just sixty miles off the coast of Florida but doesn’t sell Coca-Cola. Cuba is on the cusp of change and well worth visiting before this lifestyle is lost beneath a sea of franchise restaurants and superstores.
Lizzie Dickson
-
Tsunami: An amazing account of survival
On the 26th of December 2004, my family and I were on holiday on the East Coast of Sri Lanka in a little village called Arugam Bay. At about 9.20 in the morning, we were hit by the tsunami.
This is a difficult thing to write because words can’t describe the feelings of fear and desperation that I felt that morning. The water came in as a trickle at first that made me lift up my skirt. I looked around me and saw in a second the look of terror on the faces of my family. I didn’t have time to think but I turned my body the other way and ran, yelling at my dad, the closest one to me, who followed me up a tree. Seconds later, the water was reaching my waist up in the tree, and I saw my mother being swept away to my side. She was completely alone, her head barely out of the water. I screamed “mummy” to my dad who jumped in the water after her, and I was left alone. I scrambled to the top of the tree and jumped onto a roof, the water still rising. I gripped the roof with my legs, breathing hard, screaming and looking around me for the next place I could get to if the roof collapsed.Time seemed to go in slow motion. Buildings were being ripped down around me. I’d lost my whole family. I was sure I would die. The noise was immense with corrugated iron crashing into steel and fridges and chairs being thrown around. After about fifteen minutes, the wave began to retreat and I was left on a square metre of roof. From nowhere my brother appeared about three metres away from me, clinging onto a palm tree. We were to face six more waves over the next four hours. I was later reunited with my father and sister, but to us, it was a cert that my mother had died. Still, we couldn’t let ourselves think about this as we had to concentrate on our own survival. We later found her on a hill that everyone had gathered on. The re-union was the happiest moment of my life.
The next day we were helicoptered out of the area and eventually made it to Colombo, where we learnt that Arugam Bay was the worst hit area in Sri Lanka. Five hundred out of eight hundred people had died.
When I got back to London, I found myself suffering from post traumatic stress. I was angry and tearful all the time. I felt wrong being at home in safety and was desperate to go back to Sri Lanka and help. I flew back out in the summer of 2005 and faced my nightmare.
Through the work I was doing out there, I was able to watch the rehabilitation progress. Though we seemed to be doing a lot, it was incredibly slow, and looking back I realise our work had only touched the surface. It was frustrating knowing that there were so many camps filled with people that weren’t going to have a proper home for years to come. In Weligama, a small town, there were twelve refugee camps each with about two hundred people sharing basic needs like toilets and water pumps. I visited three camps each week to work with children who were so brave. They had such determination to learn what I could teach them. It opened my eyes to their strength. I left Sri Lanka with a new -found confidence. My nightmare had been turned into a positive experience. Although I will never be over what I went through, I have grown and learnt many lessons for which I am grateful for.
For people on Boxing Day 2005, the tsunami would have been forgotten by most. But it is still real and alive in the minds of the people who went through it. Haunting images flood back as the hours are watched and you remember what you were doing at exactly that time last year. But mixed with the terror of it, I can smile at the amazing stories of survival and sacrifice that I have heard of.
Laura Squire