Our Travels

We’ve enjoyed being out and about in Hong Kong, with 90% of the population not owning a car here, the public transport is frequent, low cost and easy to use. The first thing we did was buy our Octopus cards, you can pick these up at any MTR station. We used the local ones, which are loaned to you, the initial cost is a deposit of 50 HK$ plus a credit of 100 HK$. There is a tourist version available…

Hong Kong’s peak is 550 Metres above sea level, so it affords incredible views of this most spectacular city, the harbour, and Kowloon, across the water. There are basically three ways to get up there – by car, on foot, or via the world famous Peak Tram, which has been running for around 120 years. We chose, quite sensibly, to go up on the tram and to come down on foot! The tram station is in Garden road, and easily…

Our flights from Lanzarote to Madrid with Ryanair and Madrid to London with Iberia were uneventful, although the Iberia A320 felt too cramped for comfort after the Boeing 737-800 with Ryanair. I’m doubtful we’ll use this airline as a codeshare with British Airways from the Canaries in the future. The Iberia seat pitch in economy is 28 compared to the 30 in Ryanair, which left us short on legroom, although both have the same seat width of 17. Our flight…

We had arranged to meet a bunch of friends from the UK in Gibraltar, for the boys to go diving, while the ladies enjoyed some sunshine. In order to extend our own holiday, we decided to fly into and out of Madrid, and to drive down one side of Spain and up the other. I’ll cover the road trip part in another post, but this one is about Gibraltar. The rock is an oddity – clearly joined to the mainland…

We woke to a rainy day in Tromsø with low cloud cover, after breakfast at the Blu Radisson hotel we decided to scrub the cable car ride up to Storsteinen for a fabulous view over Tromsø, as it was shrouded in cloud. We caught up our work online with the free wifi in the hotel, before venturing outside. It was grey, wet and very slippy underfoot. The rain had partially melted the snow and ice which made walking somewhat difficult.…

We found Hurtibear lost in Portugal at our Midcounties Travel Conference, this little furry polar bear stowed away in our luggage in a bid to find his way home to Norway. We’ve travelled quite a bit in the last few weeks, and have become attached to this little character! It’s going to be hard saying goodbye to him when we board the MS Finnmarken at Tromso in a couple of weeks. Hurtibear was given his very own hashtag #gethurtihome for…

It was our first visit to Portugal, and only a short one, just for the weekend and the Midcounties Travel Conference. We were at leisure from arrival during the Friday daytime, so we wasted no time in walking the 2km distance our hotel to explore the old town area of Albufeira. There’s a lovely view point overlooking the main beach and town of Albufeira, we were surprised to find two escalators built into the hillside for easy access to the…

Every guide book to every destination on the planet seems to fall back on the oldest cliche of all – “It’s a country / city / town of contrasts.” But in the case of Morocco, I have finally found a place worthy of that hackneyed phrase. On the one hand, I have never witnessed such abject poverty at close quarters, and on the other, I have seen more Maseratis during my week here, than I have in my previous 54…