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A guest room lying 13 feet below the surface of the Indian Ocean is part of a structure floating over a clearing in a coral reef 250 meters from Pemba Island in the Zanzibar Archipelago, off the coast of Tanzania.
Spotlights outside the room’s eight windows illuminate any sea life swimming by. Guests can climb a ladder to a lounge and bathroom at water level and continue up to the roof to sunbathe or stargaze.
For visitors to Barbados, Atlantis Submarines (The Shallow Draught, Bridgetown, Barbados, BWI; phone +1 246 436 8929) offers dives in its fleet of two submarines to see exotic fish, coral reefs and a submerged shipwreck off of the coast of Bridgetown.
Tokyo Great Cycling Tour (1-3-2 Shinkawa, Chuo-ku; phone +81 3 4590 2995) offers four different cycling day tours to explore Japan’s capital, one very easy, two easy and one at intermediate level.
The easy-level “Edo-Tokyo Culture Ride,” on mostly flat terrain, takes six hours and departs from the company’s office. It begins at 9 a.m. and stops at eight sites, including a sumo stadium, the University of Tokyo and the Imperial Palace.
On Bali, Indonesia, you can take a tour of a traditional organic chocolate farm and experience hands-on chocolate making at Pod Chocolate (phone +62 361 239 440).
The hillside cacao farm is located on the grounds of the Bali Elephant Camp, near Ubud. The tour includes transport from and to your hotel, a trip to the trees to learn how the beans are grown and a visit to the factory, where you will make your own batch of chocolate elephants.
While traveling solo in Turkey for 26 days in May ’09, I was in Olympos and wanted to visit the town of Kas (pronounced Kash). I waited near a small store at the top of a dirt road and took the first bus that had an open seat. The ride took three hours. In Kas, I got a room at the Ani Hotel (Recep Bilgin Caddesi No:12, Kas; phone 90 242 836 1791) for TRY25 (near $11) per night, including breakfast and free WiFi. The room was very nice, airy and bright, with facilities en suite.
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The Shibanxi Railway (aka Jiayang Coal Railway), an authentic, narrow-gauge steam line on which foreigners may book tickets, is located in the town of Shixi, south of Chengdu in Sichuan Province, south-central China.
Tickets are available at the station in Shixi and cost RMB5 ($0.80) for the local train or RMB50 ($8) for the tourist train with air-conditioned passenger cars. All trains are powered by any of the six steam engines that take coal and passengers from Shibanxi to Bagou, making six stops along the 20-kilometer route.
A quick Internet check told me that there were once two to three thousand castles in Scotland. Many still exist as family homes, castle hotels or tourist attractions. Some remain picturesque ruins. Others have simply vanished with hardly a trace, their stones incorporated long ago into other buildings.
