Taking off Travel blog

I’m not a big ranter, though there are a few things that get me hot under the collar.  But on my last trip, there were a few things that made me feel that I’d really been taken advantage of. My current pet peeve is the cost of getting from an airport to anywhere. Of course, it was my own fault. I know better than to take an official airport cab. On this occasion, I was traveling with my family, we were tired and we hadn’t made an arrangement with our local cab firm to collect us and take us to Jersey City. The result was an expensive lesson – $55 plus tips for a 20 minute cab ride that had only cost us $28 on the way out. I get that airport cab drivers probably have to pay for the privilege of being official, but does that really justify doubling the normal fare? I don’t see how.

Travel Rebates?

And while we’re on the subject of taxis, if I have to use my own GPS to help out a cab driver who doesn’t know the way from the airport to the nearest major city, shouldn’t I get a rebate or something? (Interesting fact of the day: London cabbies have more than average brain development, according to an exhibition at the Museum of Natural History in New York, because they have to learn ‘The Knowledge’ – all London streets – before they can be licensed.) Read more »

What are your favourite travel food memories? You know the ones I mean. Sometimes you have a gastronomic experience that is so great that you can still almost taste it 10 or 20 years later. Sometimes it’s not about the food but about the context while at other times it is very much about the food. Here are some of my best loved food travel experiences.

Iced Tea, Venezuela

It’s been more than 20 years but I can still remember the first time I tasted iced tea. These days, everyone’s drinking it but it was much more of a rarity in the 80s — and I’ve never found anywhere that can make iced tea in the way I first had it. This was during my trip to Venezuela when I was still a student. Around the corner, say about 10 minutes walk from where we were staying in Sabana Grande, was an Arab eatery that served the falafel with iced tea. This tea did not taste like tea at all — it had a heavenly scent of lemons and exotic spices. It didn’t taste like lemonade either — more like Pimms without the alcohol — but it was pure ambrosia. Read more »