Blue Dot Travel Blog

There are fish markets, and then there are fish markets!  The Jagalchi Fish Markets in Busan fall into the latter category. Markets are not every traveller’s “thing,” but I have to confess that being a market is tragic - especially when they are there for the locals, not the tourists. And even more so when…

One of northern Ethiopia's highlights is Gondar, a historical town home to some significant and truly unique sights. Depending on the time of year when visiting, you may see many Ethiopian Orthodox pilgrims near Timkat at what is known as the Ethiopian Epiphany (see our post on Timkat here).  Some of the highlights from Gondar…

When I was about 7 or 8, I watched the movie Papillon with my parents at the local drive-in theatre in North Ryde. The Steve McQueen/Dustin Hoffman classic greatly impacted me as a young boy, so almost 50 years later, I was excited to visit the islands off the coast of French Guiana, where the movie…

I arrived with Kate into cricket-mad Guyana from Panama City. The airport at Georgetown (named after King George III) is about an hour’s drive from the city. Our driver, Patrick, talks the entire journey so we feel like we know a lot by the time we arrive in town.   We’re booked into Cara Lodge, a famous colonial-style building not far…

Along with my small group of 8, I crossed the border into Rwanda from Uganda with the typical level of bureaucracy expected in a developing African nation. After an hour or so and several processes which didn’t make a lot of sense, we were on our way.    We head to Mountain Gorilla View Lodge in northern Rwanda, not all…

I still have my “L” plates on when it comes to parenting my teenage daughters.  At 13 and 15 they are into stuff that, well, I simply will never understand. Thankfully, my wife Kate, “gets” them but even so, we still had to work out what to do with teenagers in the Big Apple. The…

Many tourists come to Cuba to seek out the gorgeous beaches on the north coast but for me, it was the unique vibrancy of the people that drew me to this little piece of socialism in the Caribbean. Cubans have a real sense of pride in their country’s defiance of the American capitalists who sit…

You probably know them by sight if not by name – the Mursi are one of the most fascinating tribes in Africa, widely recognised for the clay plates the women insert into their lower lips and sometimes their ear lobes. The tribe lives in the Omo Valley, one of the most isolated regions of southern…

Many people who have travelled to Namibia’s Etosha National Park rate it as the best wildlife-spotting destination in Southern Africa. Having taken a trip to Namibia on one of our small group tours to Africa, I have to agree.   Etosha is an enormous National Park – about 22,000 square kilometres, or about 1/3 the size…