Travel Guides

Hudson Bay, in northern Manitoba, is wilderness at its finest. This huge body of water was discovered by Henry Hudson in the 17th century. Here the Hudson’s Bay Company established its first trading post to trade for furs with the Cree, Inuit and Naskapi who inhabited the area.

Churchill, a town of about 1000 people, a mixture of Dene, Cree Inuit, Metis and Caucasian, nestles on the western shore of the bay. The smaller settlement of York Factory, which encompasses a Reservation and a white settlement, has a population, all told, of under 1000, and is further south along the shores of the bay.

This is a country of contrasts. Summers are short but warm, and, if you visit during July and August, experienced scuba divers can find a real adventure scuba diving with beluga whales. In winter, dog sledding is an excellent pastime. Another great pastime – just sitting at your window watching the brilliant display put on by the aurora borealis – the northern lights as they play across the sky.

During summer, temperatures are mild, often rising to sixty degrees Fahrenheit. In winter, however, it can drop to 40 below zero, and often much colder. Add to that, a strong wind and blowing snow, and it’s a good time to stay indoors beside a roaring fire.

If you are a wildlife connoisseur, the Hudson Bay area is the place for you. Water creatures include seals, walrus and beluga, bowhead and killer whales. Birds include everything from barn owls to ravens to Canada geese. Dozens of species of animals inhabit the area – polar bears, beaver, moose, caribou and wolves.

Bangalore is officially called “Bengaluru” and is the capital of Karnataka State and the story behind the naming of the city is great too. Bangalore, according to state historians, got its name from Bendakalooru (the town of boiled beans) after a king strayed into the area during a hunting trip in the late 14th century. A woman offered him a meal of boiled beans which the king enjoyed so much that he named the town after the dish. Bangalore is the 3rd most populous city in India with close to 6 million people living here. Bangalore is one of the fastest growing cosmopolitan cities in Asia. It is called as “Silicon Valley of India” with thousands of IT Companies and lots of outsourced jobs; it is an outsourcing hub where many of the critical projects from Fortune 500 companies are done here. Bangalore is also famous for its climate and is also called “Garden City of India” for its many parks and trees.
Bangalore is a mix of both old and new, with its palace, museums, parks, pubs, restaurants and many shopping malls. “Bangalore Palace” is one of the attractions; it was built by Wodeyar King in 1887. It was inspired by Windsor Castle. This palace was built keeping in mind the Tudor style of architecture with fortified structure, battlements and turrets.
If you are interested in nature, you can always go to “Lal Bagh” which is a well known botanical garden in Bangalore. It was constructed way back in 18th century by ruler Hyder Ali and the plants from various countries were brought by his son Tipu Sultan and planted in this 240 acre garden. It houses close to 1000 species of rare flowers and plants and it has trees well over 100 years old. It is place visited by lot of people everyday mostly joggers and nature enthusiasts. The Glass House which has many of the rare flowers is a center of attraction in “Lal Bagh”. The Lal Bagh Rock, one of the oldest rock formations on earth, dating back to 3000 million years is another attraction that brings in crowds. Cubbon Park is another famous park in Bangalore among joggers which is in the centre of the city.
There are many other attractions in Bangalore like “Vidhana Soudha” which is a seat of Karnataka’s State Legislature, “Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum” which attracts close to million visitors every year, “Bull Temple” which is a temple built in 1537 and has an idol of “Nandi the bull” and is a sacred place for many people.
Bangalore is also very famous for its pubs and nightlife; it has various pubs and discos which are pretty much in demand on weekends among the youngsters. Even though pubs in Bangalore close at 12.00 am, restaurants are open till 3-4 am. If you are interested in shopping, it is home to many shopping malls which have great offers running all through the year. Bangalore is growing up to be a great city but it also has its problem like high traffic, costlier than other Indian cities and lack of Infrastructure. But it is a great place to visit with its perfect blend of history and modernization.

I think all of you know, or have heard about Mallorca, this spanish mediteranean island. It means beaches, parties, night life. But if you want to know how to have an adventure trip in Mallorca, then allow me to tell you something about visiting El Torrente de Pareis in Tramontana Mountains.

This is a trip in the mountains, lasts a few hours, and you have to take the following precautions:

-do it only on good weather. During rain, there is life danger, because you are constantly descending under sea level (1000 meters)

-take enough drinking water and food, do not drink alcohol.

-take appropriate mountain equipment

-do not go alone, unless you are an experienced mountainer. In your group must be one, for sure.

-you must be in the best shape

-do not take with you unnecessary things, making your backsack too heavy and unbearable to cary

Since a few weeks I visited Mexico City and collected a lot of stuff which you can find in my posts.

What I did not mention up to now is a very special trip: the illegal border crossing from Mexico to U.S. Many mexicans undertake this trip hoping in a new better life. A part of them die, as this trip is very demanding. If you wanna check your limits, and go far beyond them, I would advise you to try this trip. But do not forget, you must be in the best physical and psychical shape!

You will experience really hard and hot sensations. I am totally for this kind of tours, and if you made it once, the other conventional tours will appear to you very artificial.

If you plan to visit Barcelona, keep in mind the following dont’s. If you already visited Barcelona, maybe can you confirm all these things. And if you visited Barcelona, but were not aware of these things to avoid, keep them in mind for your next trip to Barca!

1.Dangerous places: avoid empty streets, and also the streets from the old city. Avoid particularly Barri Gotic and El Raval, where the thiefs operate in gangs. The peak hours for pocket thiefs are 21-24 when most of the locals eat, and the streets are crowded with tourists, and also at dawn(3-6) when the target are the drunked.

2.Boutiques for leather accesoires from La Rambla. The leather is not the best, and the prices are shameles.

3.Gambling in La Rambla. You might think, that your chances to win are high. But keep in mind that almost all surounding people are together. Avoid also the gitanes who try selling you flowers, while they research your pockets.

If you want to understand El Zocalo like an insider, then you should know some facts about it. Namely the followings, listed bellow.

First of all, travelling for the first time at Mexico City, probably by air to he Benito Juarez airport, you can see shortly from the plane the mexican flag. There is Zocalo, or Plaza de la Constitucion, also known before as Plaza de Armas.

The name Zocalo stays for the english plynth. Here should be builded a statue in the XIXth century, but only the plynth rose.

Zocalo is huge, it is one of the world’s biggest squares. It has been builded by the spaniards in the XVIth century, on the ruins of the demolished Templo Mayor, the heart of the aztec capital of Tenochitlan. There are plenty of archaeological sites in the neighborhood, and some of them unveil even earlier civilisations than aztecas.

If you plan a visit in Barcelona, Sagrada Familia shall be the first on things which must be seen!

Sagrada Familia is a church, “the church of the poor”, as Antonio Gaudi, its architect, used to say. Antonio Gaudi was a genial, brilliant ,succesfull architect, which dedicated his life mainly to Sagrada Familia. He joined the group of Modernista, active by the end of 19th century, was a fervent catholic and a catalan nationalist.

First design of Sagrada Familia and the first stones falled in 1883. Two years later, Gaudi had the genial idea of making the bell towers round, instead of square, as usually! In 1923 the Saint Joseph chapel, the crypt and the east facing were completed. In 1926 Gaudi died smashed by a tram near his church.

Well if you think Uptake is yet another travel site, then you are wrong. Uptake is a search for travel sites. There are tons of travel sites out there like TripAdvisor, Farecast, Travelocity, Expedia etc. So a normal user searches most of these sites to find the best deal and ends up wasting lot of time. What Uptake does is it searches most of these sites so that you don’t have to and finds the best deal for you. Like the site says “it searches 1000 travel websites and 20 Million Reviews”, which is a lot of content for a user.
Uptake is a semantic search engine for travel which makes it easier for the user to get more relevant results. It generates tags by searching various travel sites and their reviews of hotels, destinations, theme parks. By doing this it does not have to wait for the users to tag. With the use of semantic search, the ranking in Search Engines like Google, Yahoo will be higher and lot of results from Uptake will be shown for travel queries. The technology behind Uptake is really great where millions of reviews are indexed and arranged in a proper way and the embracing of semantics has helped them a lot.
It has options like “just get away, family vacation, romantic getaway, pet friendly, girl getaway” which search sites based on this consideration. If a user is searching for family vacations, the site looks for tags which are relevant with family vacations like kids, pool, shopping and kitchen and shows the result based on that. It also has maps attached to its pages to know the exact location of the destination you have chosen or planning to choose. Uptake also has a feature called “Things to do” for most of the destinations so that you are not clueless when you are travelling.
Uptake currently indexes only US Destinations which is a bad thing for a travel search site but I am sure they will add International Destinations too as they go along. With the competition in Internet Travel Industry increasing day by day, they should add international destinations sooner than later. The other thing I am not very impressed with Uptake is their User Interface. Its User Interface is not very easy to use, Any website which is asking its users to scroll down to see the important content is doing a bad job. With the content this size they should arrange it better and should keep the main page clean, Instead of showing most of the destinations in the homepage. When Uptake adds International Destinations, the content would be way too much and they will have an uphill task of arranging it neatly and adding more languages to the website so that it becomes easier for International users. Travel is not bounded by boundaries and Uptake has taken the first step to improve it.