Also known as Candi Borobudur, this magnificent temple was literally carved out of volcanic stones during the reign of the Sailendra dynasty, which is estimated to be around 700-850 AD. Historians are clearly awed at the majestic structure but was baffled as to how and why the temple was erected. They were also puzzled how the temple was abandoned and was consecutively covered by thick layers of ashes (there were lots of volcanoes in the area). The Borobudur temple was rediscovered by the British as they came to Indonesia for the first time in the 1800’s.

The temple featured 9 separate levels leading to nirvana, or rather, the top of the temples for those who are still living on Earth.  As you get to the last 4 levels, you will encounter ornate stupas, little effigies of Buddha in a sitting position. It is interesting to note also that some of these statues were purposefully built to contain the ashes of revered high priests. Should you not be able to make it to the higher levels, you can still obtain a beautiful view of the scenic temple compounds and feast your eyes at the wall carvings and ornate inscriptions upon the walls. I find that a postcard of the Borobudur Temple as well as carefully taken photographs is a must-have to commemorate your trip there.

Nearby Borobudur, you can travel a short distance to Prambanan where you can see many more temples. In the olden days, Prambanan was a kingdom that belonged to King Baka and his daughter, the beautiful and virtuous Princess Lara Djonggrang. However, the king was tragically slain by the evil and conniving Bandung Bondowoso, who wants more than anything to make Lara Djonggrang his queen. The princess refused, because which woman in the right mind would marry her father’s killer? She could not refuse the forceful wishes of Bandung Bondowoso but she could set one impossible task for him as a condition to the marriage – building 1000 temples in one single night!

Of course, the cunning Bandung Bondowoso hired demons to help him build the structures and when the princess thought that they had almost succeeded, she quickly asked her maids to start a fire and pound the rice in the paddy fields. Thinking that the light of the fire was the rising sun and associating the pounding with morning activity, the roosters wasted no time crowing. The demons were then fooled into thinking that time was up and they fled, leaving Bandung Bondowoso only with 999 temples, angry and frustrated. He then cast a spell on Lara Djonggrang and turned her into stone.

The story does not quite end there. To commemorate the incident the temples around the area were inscribed with the tale of the tragic kingdom and the stone princess. Out of the 999 temples, only 50 or so survived the test of time. You can check them out the next time you visit Yogyakarta and Prambanan!

With a reach spanning from the exotic islands of the Maldives to the lively hustle & bustle of the UK, LastMinute.com aims to help you have an exhilarating experience while brushing off any signs of monotony that you may have collected over time!

Their travel packages will have you roaming the globe via land, air or sea. You also have the oppurtunity to choose between flexing your tense muscles by skiing, snowboarding, mountain biking etc or you maybe will opt to just go straight to one of the spas offering much needed tranquility and relaxation. Either way get ready to visit exotic restaurants offering nothing less than mouth watering treats be it a tea stall in Bali or a dinner for two at the Ritz.

With 2.5 million people in UK alone using the site for the best travel deals possible – it doesn’t come as a surprise that lastminute.com is the most popular travel and leisure site there ! They have other claims to back that up of course , they seem to be the largest retailer of theater tickets for the world famous West End Theater (with the site responsible for sales of approximately 1.5 million tickets every year!) They also boast selling hotel rooms out of 80,000 vacation properties to choose from and their flight deals spans 300 airlines! This means on average they send 750,000 tourists abroad (or even locally) on holidays annually!

So why wait? As the site so nicely puts it: It’s your free time. Invest it wisely.

Parkr.info is a website dedicated to helping you find all the park locations, around the world!

It basically has a Googlemap that pinpoints parks in a selected region (show with a blue `KR’ logo). Clicking on a marker will give you the address of the park, as well a link to an info-page of the park. The info page primarily contains information about how other people have rated a park and allows them to their comments. If you’d like to leave a comment about your park experience then you’ll need to sign up but its free , so not much of a hassle there.

Advantages and Features of Parkr.info

• Find amusement and theme parks.
• Search by address or zoom in.
• The site lists amusement parks from all over the world.
• Additional info such as images, user ratings, park contact details also provided.
• Register on the site to rate parks and leave comments.

Check out Parkr.info

For those of you who are into cycling and would like to discover new routes and places in United States, Europe and other countries need to check out Bikely. A free web-service that allows you to browse bicycle routes that are shared by other cyclists from around the world.

Bikely allows you to browse up to 100,000 bicycle routes. You can even add yours if it isn’t mentioned on the website yet. To narrow down your search you can also search for bike trails by country, by specific location and filter results by length of the route.

Similarly, if you’re more interested in Motor Bikes then you take a look at Motowhere. It works exactly like Bikely and helps you discover the best places to ride. Whether you’re looking for offroad tracks, fast and twisty mountain passes, or long distance cruising, MotoWhere puts the best rides right on your map worldwide.

To make it look more interesting the website uses Google Maps infrastructure which allows you to literally dray your favorite motorcycle roads straight onto the Maps. If you own a GPS device you can always download routes you plan to ride into your GPS.

It is pretty normal for anyone to plan their trip and book hotels online. Infact it’s best if you book hotels online rather than reaching your destination and run around to look for the best affordable hotel that suit your needs.

This is where HotelCalculator comes in action. A free hotel search engine that lets you save time by searching multiple travel websites. I used it in the past, and can tell you that I found some pretty good budget hotels. HotelCalculator allows you to easily check the availability of hotels with just a click on a button.

To get started simply choose your dates, number of guests and rooms that you require. Once done hit the “search and Compare multiple travel sites” button to start your search. The website will hardly take 15 to 30 seconds before it shows a well organised list of hotels options available for your requested dates.

Unlike some other Travel search websites it also presents you hotel availability and prices so that you can choose the beat deal and navigate the merchant offering it and book the hotel directly.

Here’s how it will work

Enter the name of the city
Enter Date, days and number of guests and hit enter

From here you can easily narrow your search by price, rating and accomodation type.

Check out HotelCalculator.com

1. TripIT

TripIt offers the best way to organize and share your travel plans. All you have to do is simply forward your individual booking confirmations, reservation emails etc. TripIt will recognize these emails and create a master itinerary that puts together all the individual pieces, provides extra information.It also enables the user to add notes and ultimately share and collaborate on this master itinerary with others.

2.  ATMLocator

ATMLocator is a free service provided by Visa that allows you to instantly locate ATM cash machines in your vincinity. All you have to do is select the country and city name along with the pin code and it will provide you address details and map for each ATM. Currently, it covers over 170 countries worldwide.

3.  Metro

Metro is a free worldwide public transport guide that can be used mostly on all the existing smart phones. It allows you to calculate travel time, major landmarks,shortest distances and of-course travel direction between any stations.. You can download their program for over 250 cities worldwide and have an easy subway, bus and tram station guide rite on your phone.

4. SleepingInAirports

For travellers who are on a low budget and looking for a way to skim a few bucks off their travel expenses can always consider sleeping in an airport.This is where “SleepingInAirports” come in handy. It provides guide for camping overnight or a few hours in an airport. It lets your browse and read through brief overview of the airport along with user-submitted review on safety, facility, photos and more.

5. Yapta

Yapta is a service for travelers that lets them purchase tickets when prices drop.  The website basically lets you track and see if prices drop at any time. There are lots of airlines that have policies that allows travelers to get refunds/vouchers if the price of the ticket that they have purchased drops. So make full use of this service and track flight ticket prices and receive email notifications as soon as price changes.

Currently, Yapta supports AirTran Airways, Alaska, American, ATA Airlines, Continental, Delta, Frontier, JetBlue, Midwest, United, US Airways / America West. You can also add a Browser add-on that lets you easily bookmark flights that you find on popular airline or travel website.

Is it that wrong for a man to have more than one wife? How about a woman with more than one husband then?!
Enter Francine Fleiss – the woman with five husbands!
Sultry Francine has been flitting around the continent over the past decade,
and has collected five husbands from five of Europe’s coolest cities!
If you’re an aspiring husband collector then you can check out her tips to get your collection going.
Cool Capitals is a fresh new alternative to the usual travel agents and sites.
It specializes in travel to the less trodden European cities of Vienna, Valencia, Amsterdam, Antwerp and Zurich.
They all possess a cool mixture of old and new culture that is a breath of fresh air against the typical touristy European destinations.
Check out the site!

Have you heard about FON before? If not, they are a European company that have created a global network of free internet access. How it works is, if you use a FON router at home, you gain free access to all FON routers around the world.

So, at tripwolf a competition is running to build up user’s social communities and the prizes are FON routers. The competition mirrors the natural community building experience of the tripwolf site—awarding one point for each friend and ten points for each new member referral. Every two weeks until November 25th, the two tripwolf members who have accumulated the most points win routers. More information about the competition can be found at http://tripwolf.com/en/page/foncompetition

“Tripwolf is a social travel guide and trip planner that allows users to get a feel for how a destination will feel, look and sound, and adds a social recommendations layer on top of that again.

The site offers advice and recommendations by locals and experienced travelers, and users get highly personalized travel recommendations from friends, peers and like-minded travelers. Users can create new locations, upload and edit content, then share their favorite places around the world with friends.”
Read an exclusive interview with Sebastian Heinzel taken by me.

The site has a pleasant design and the interface is absolute joy to use and won’t take much time to get used to. The site can be viewed in German which is a helpful feature, also a Spanish version will follow in 2009. All the key locations are available in a list which, next to the map, makes it even easier to narrow down on your search. The site contains a Journal which contains experiences of other travelers who have kept a log of their trips. The Galleries are another feature in which you can share your pictures from a place you’ve visited and can view other’s pictures. This helps in socializing with others and also you can plan your trip based on other’s recommendation.

If you feel you are lacking information about the place you are going to visit, there are Trip Gurus who make things easier for you. They are the people who have visited many places and willing to share information and helpful facts about the place you are visiting. You might be lucky to even meet a Trip Guru who has been to the place you have been planning. As you visit more places and when you are sure you can help out other users with their trip plans, you can become a Trip Guru too. You can add new places which you have visited and don’t already exist on the site.

One of the many brilliant features of this site is the Facebook integration. Facebook is a social-networking site which has millions of users throughout the world. If you have a facebook account you can log in through it and add an application called Tripwolf which helps you meet many people with similar interests. The site allows wiki-like editing which allows the users to edit most of the stuff which ensures that the information provided is first-hand. You can drag and drop the places into the scrapbook and print it as a pdf at the end which might be used as a guide/quick reference for accommodation, places to visit, shopping etc.

Geo-tagging, another feature of this site, which can help users find a wide variety of location-specific information. For instance, one can find images taken near a given location by entering latitude and longitude coordinates into a Geo-tagging enabled search engine. The co-ordinates might be useful for travelers who might be using GPS systems. The travel blogs posted on the site show routes on the maps to famous and major tourist spots. The hotels and different sightseeing places are rated by the users which give an idea on prioritizing which places to visit and how much time to spend.

Tripwolf will definitely make planning your trip a memorable one. There is nothing more memorable than a well planned trip and will make you explore the world some more.