Hostels are traditional backpacker accommodation, providing cheap beds in a communal atmosphere. Most have rooms with four to ten bunks each, kitchen facilities for individual use, showers, a common room with television, and clothes washers. Some have swimming pools, gardens, camping areas, game rooms, and other amenities.
Hostels belonging to Hostelling International usually enforce certain rules and standards. These include a midnight curfew and a mid-morning until late-afternoon lockout when all guests are required to leave the premises, although you can leave your stuffthere. (Many urban HI hostels now offer 24-hour access.) Simple chores such as emptying wastebaskets may be assigned. Non-HI hostels generally do not have a lockout period, and curfews are non-existent or flexible. Most hostels segregate guests by sex, but not all all the time.
Backpacker hotels are such a force in Australia and New Zealand that they are simply referred to as 'backpackers'. There are about thirty in Sydney, a dozen in Auckland, and every other city and town of size has at least one or two. While similar to hostels, they have no or looser lockout and curfew rules. Some guests really enjoy the atmosphere and stay for months while working, or looking for work. Some are large, older homes, while others are former regular hotels adapted to meet the new backpacker market.
Traditional bed-and-breakfast accommodation is common in Britain and Ireland. In Scarborough, England, I recall walking several streets where almost every house had a sign proclaiming vacancy. In seaside and other vacation towns bed-and-breakfast hotels are often clustered like this, so it can be relatively easy to find an available room.
Pensions are the rough equivalent to bed-and-breakfast hotels on the European continent. These small hotels have two to ten rooms, with usually shared bath facilities. Breakfast is provided, which is something of a social event as guests chat away. Many English patrons go to the same bed and breakfast at the same time every year, creating a family atmosphere.
Accommodation in private homes is also common in Eastern Europe and developing countries, where enterprising families trying to make ends meet take in guests on an informal basis. You maybe met at train stations by groups of older women holding signs declaring 'room' or 'zimmer' (German for room).
For every hostel in Europe there are four or five legal places to erect a tent, ranging from delightful municipal campgrounds in city parks, to gigantic caravan (RV) parks. Many small towns and villages, and nearly all medium-sized and larger towns, have a campground, usually within the city limits.
Norway, Sweden, and Finland have an 'Everyman's Right' law. This means campers are allowed one or two nights on private lands outside city limits as long as they stay out of sight and leave without a trace. Ireland, with its long tradition of tinkers (traveling menders), has many accommodating farmers if you ask permission. Many hostels have a lawn area where campers are allowed to set up at half-price, but with full use of all facilities.
So you want to get away for a while. I've combed the brochures for glamorous getaways at reasonable prices... and not a theme park in sight!
France
You'll feel like royalty in one of these marvellous apartments in the Chateau de Grezan, in the south of France. Surrounded by vineyards, with the beach only a short trip away, this is just the place if you're desperate to escape from city life. The Chateau consists of only four luxury apartments (so hurry before they're all snapped up!), an excellent restaurant and a swimming pool. If you can't resist the urge to go and mix with the extremely rich, St Tropez is just a few hours' drive away. Prices are based on seven nights self-catering with five people sharing an apartment and include return scheduled flights and car hire for the week. Cost is £325 per person departing mid-June with Crystal Holidays.
Egypt
If you're the type of tourist who enjoys a bit of sightseeing, Egypt is fascinating with its vast cultural attractions and the legendary River Nile. Luxor, the ancient city of Thebes, and the centre of Egyptian power for over 1,400 years, is not as busy as the more popular resorts. Luxor itself is extremely relaxing and, from there, you can take some fascinating excursions, which even include a Sound and Light Show. Seven nights at the New Emilio in Luxor cost £279 per person, departing in May and June, including return flights, airport transfers and bed and breakfast (B&B).
Kenya
The magnificent wildlife of Mombasa's famous game reserves undoubtedly attracts most tourists to this more exotic area, but the beaches and coconut trees swaying in the wind are also a welcome addition. With busy street markets, historic monuments and over 20 miles of white sand, Mombasa is a paradise. However, if you're after an alternative to sunbathing and swimming in the clear blue sea, there's lots to do – including a tour of Mombasa or a safari in Tsavo National Park. Seven nights at Mombasa's Jadini Beach Hotel cost from £399 per person. Departures in April. Price includes return flights, airport transfers and B&B.
Mexico
With its tropical scenery, Spanish churches and markets full of Indian delights, Mexico is becoming an increasingly popular place to visit. The West Coast is a diver's paradise, but even if you aren't into water sports, the beaches around Cancun offer silver sands with a taste of the Caribbean. If you're up to it, the nightlife is pretty wild, too. A 14-night stay with half board at the Sona Hotel in Cacun, in early May, costs from £449. Flights are also available on request.
Italy
For real peace and tranquillity, whisk yourself away to Selva in the Italian Gardena Valley, amidst the breathtaking Dolomites and just a short trip away from the pine National Forest. Take a chair-lift up above the tree tops and enjoy the beautiful scenery – pure escapism and the ideal location if you're the type who is keen on keeping fit and into walking. Selva is also the perfect base for excursions to Venice and border-hopping trips to Austria and Switzerland. Go for 10 nights B&B in June, including flights, from £408 per person.
The Australian population today is a mix of European, Asian and Aboriginal. Since the nineteenth century, millions of people have emigrated to Australia from other countries. Although Aborigines have lived in Australia for over 40,000 years, only one per cent of the population today is Aboriginal. After the first European settlers arrived in the eighteenth century, many Aborigines died of disease and hunger. Today only about 100,000 Aborigines survive.
Eighty per cent of the population live in cities. Nearly all the large Australian cities are on the coast and the distances between them are vast. Perth, in Western Australia, is over 2700 kilometres from its closest neighbour, Adelaide.
Sydney is Australia's largest city. It has a spectacular harbour, harbour bridge and modern opera house.
The landscape of the south and south-east is green and fertile.
Central Australia is called 'the Outback'. It is a huge area of desert, small trees and bushes, where very few people live. In the centre of the Outback is Uluru or Ayer's Rock, a giant red sandstone rock.
The Great Barrier Reef, a chain of coral reefs and islands, runs for over 2000 kilometres along the east coast.
Australia is separate from other continents and has its own unique species of wildlife. These include 'marsupials' - the kangaroo, wallaby and koala bear - which keep their young in a pouch. In the northern territories, you can also find crocodiles and aligators.
You can go to Australia flying low cost.
Strange things have been happening recently in Robertsbridge in the south of England. Last week a lady saw two polar bears outside a railway station and yesterday a jogger bumped into a team of husky dogs with a sled on wheels in a nearby forest. It seems that the dogs and the sled were real but the two polar bears were two students in disguise. They came from a local secondary school and were raising money for their field trip: a visit to the North Pole.
At the end of March, eight students from Robertsbridge School in Sussex will go on Polarwatch, a ten-day expedition to Resolute Bay, which is a small Inuit settlement of 200 people in the Canadian Arctic. The purpose of the trip is to study weather conditions in the Arctic and look at the effects of global warming. The climax of the trip will be a flight to the magnetic North Pole. They will be the first British school party to go there.
Anybody in Years 9 and 10 at the school was allowed to apply but only eight students were chosen. It made no difference if the students were rich or poor. They had to be strong and fit. In the end the teachers leading the group chose the ones who were the most sociable and had the most common sense.
Obviously, the expedition is going to cost quite a lot, so for the past year the students have been working hard to raise the money. That is what the students were doing in the forest with a team of husky dogs and a sled – they were on a sponsored sled run.
Alice Fletcher, one of the chosen eight students says, 'I've I ve always dreamt of going to the North Pole. It's the chance of a lifetime, isn't it? I can't believe how lucky I am.'
Andrew Martin has been living totally alone on a desert island off the coast of Australia for over thirty years. It wasn't easy to set up a meeting with someone who has no telephone and only gets letters every three months, but we finally got in touch and he invited me to visit.
As the helicopter approached, I found myself looking down on the kind of place that people dream of. Percy Island, which is covered in tropical jungle, has golden beaches lined with coconut trees and is set in clear blue sea. When we landed, Andrew Martin was there to greet me, wearing only an old pair of swimming trunks and flip-flops.
As we walked to the house, I found out more about him. After visiting his sister in Japan thirty years ago, he travelled to Australia, where he bought a boat. While a friend was teaching him to sail, they stopped by chance at Percy Island, which was for sale for £16,000. Andrew, whose boat was worth the same amount, immediately decided to buy it. Originally he planned to stay for a few months and sell it at a profit, but he found that he wanted to stay. Now, even though he could probably sell the island for £20 million, he is not interested. 'It's too good to sell to a developer who is going to treat it as some kind of toy. To me it's like the most precious jewel in the world.'
After a forty-five minute walk through the dense jungle, we got to the house, where we were surrounded at once by dogs, chickens, geese and peacocks. The building was not much more than an old wooden hut with a tin roof. He showed me round, and gave me time to unpack. The room which he gave me had a marvellous view, but the first thing I noticed was the largest spider I had ever seen. I tried to stay calm, but I got really nervous when I also learned that the whole island was full of poisonous snakes. Andrew told me not to worry. He said that the only ones I was likely to meet were the boa constrictors that hung in the trees near the outside toilet.
Over the next few days, I began to see what it was really like to live on a desert island. Percy Island is as beautiful as any exotic holiday advertisement, but Andrew does not spend his time sunbathing and swimming; it is much too dangerous to go in the sea, which is full of sharks and stonefish. He has to work more than most people to provide the things he needs, and makes a little money by selling fruit to boats that come to visit from time to time.
He says he never planned to live alone, but 'it just happened that way'. Now he is used to it, and does not miss other people at all. What he enjoys is the feeling of being completely free. Nobody can tell him what to do, and if he does not like anyone who comes to the island, he asks them to leave.
On my last day, as I sat on the beach waiting for the flight back to the mainland, I was desperately looking forward to getting back to the comforts of modern life. It was a great relief when the helicopter landed and took me away. Soon Percy Island was just another green dot in the deep blue sea. To me, it did not feel at all as if I was leaving paradise; it was like being rescued from hell.
The Pirahã are an isolated Amazonian tribe of hunter-gatherers who live deep in the Brazilian rainforest. The tribe has survived, their culture intact, for centuries, although there are now only around 200 left. The Piraha, who communicate mainly through hums and whistles, have fascinated ethnologists for years, mainly because they have almost no words for numbers. They use only three words to count: one, two, and many.
We know about the Pirahã thanks to an ex-hippy and former missionary, Dan Everett, now a Professor of Phonetics, who spent seven years with the tribe in the 70s and 80s. Everett discovered a world without numbers, without time, without words for colours, without subordinate clauses and without a past tense. Their language, he found, was not just simple grammatically; it was restricted in its range of sounds and differed between the sexes. For the men, it has just eight consonants and three vowels; for the women, who have the smallest number of speech sounds in the world, to seven consonants and three vowels. To the untutored ear , the language sounds more like humming than speech. The Pirahã can also whistle their language, which is how men communicate when hunting.
Their culture is similarly constrained . The Pirahã can't write, have little collective memory, and no concept of decorative art. In 1980 Everett tried to teach them to count: he explained basic arithmetic to an enthusiastic group keen to learn the skills needed to trade with other tribes. After eight months, not one could count to ten; even one plus one was beyond them . The experiment seemed to confirm Everett's theory: the tribe just couldn't conceive the concept of number.
The Pirahã's inability to count is important because it seems to disprove Noam Chomsky's influential Theory of Universal Grammar, which holds that the human mind has a natural capacity for language, and that all languages share a basic rule structure, which enables children to understand abstract concepts such as number. One of Chomsky's collaborators has recently gone on an expedition with Everett to study the tribe. We do not yet know if the Piraha have persuaded him to change his theory.
When seventeen-year-old David Lewis from Birmingham heard about International Travel Challenge, he was excited. The Challenge, for sixteen to twentyyear-old students, was to raise money for cancer research. The students had to complete a 1500 kilometre journey from the north to the south of Italy in less than fourteen days. The journey had to involve six different means of transport, but not car, motorbike, boat or plane.
David started his journey from Milan on 8th July and finished in Reggio di Calabria eleven days later on 19th July. On his first day he travelled by train from Milan to Florence. 'That was the easy part. It only took three and a half hours!' says David. From Florence he cycled to Rome. That took three days. From there he went by coach to Naples. It took six hours. The whole of the next day, he travelled by local bus to Cosenza. After Cosenza he walked 56 kilometres — a total of three days on foot — to Catanzaro, and then finished the whole journey, riding two days on horseback to Reggio di Calabria at the tip of southern Italy.
'It was a great experience,' says David. 'The best part was cycling from Florence to Rome. The worst part was the horse ride. It was only my second time on a horse! I was very glad to see my parents at Reggio and to have a good night's sleep in a comfortable bed!'
Schools close for the summer in the UK about the middle of July and open again at the beginning of September, so most families go on holiday in July or August.
Many families go to the Mediterranean to get two weeks of sun. The most popular destination in Europe is Spain. Outside Europe, Florida in the USA is the top destination. Many British people like to go skiing, too, in the winter months.
Many families stay in the UK for their summer holidays. Popular seaside resorts are Brighton, Torquay, Newquay and St Ives in the south of England, and Scarborough in the north. But even if the sun shines, the sea never gets very warm. A new alternative is to go to a leisure complex like Center Parcs, which has heated swimming pools under a big glass dome and many indoor and outdoor activities like cycling, horse riding and archery.
The Amazonian rainforest is roughly the size of Europe or Australia. It is the home of more than half the plant and animal species known to man, many of which are lethal.
In 1981 three friends went backpacking in a remote area of Bolivia: Yossi, 22, and his two friends Kevin, 29, and Marcus, 29. They hired an experienced guide, an Austrian called Karl, who promised that he could take them deep into the rainforest to an undiscovered indigenous village. Then they would raft nearly 200 kilometres down river before flying to the capital, La Paz. Karl said that the journey to the village would take them seven or eight days. Before they entered the jungle, the three friends made a promise that they would 'go in together and come out together'.
The four men set off from the town of Apolo and soon they had left civilization far behind. But after walking for more than a week there was no sign of the village and tensions began to appear. The three friends began to suspect that Karl, the guide, didn't really know where the indigenous village was. Yossi and Kevin began to get fed up with their friend Marcus because he was complaining about everything, especially his feet, which has become infected and were hurting.
Eventually they decided to abandon the search for the village and just to hike back to Apolo, the way they had come. But Kevin was furious because he thought that it was Marcus' fault that they had had to cut short their adventure. So he decided that he would raft downAhe river, and he asked Yossi to join him - he didn't want Marcus to come with them. Karl and Marcus agreed to go back to Apolo on foot. The three friends agreed to meet in a hotel in La Paz in a week's time.
Early next morning the two pairs of travellers said goodbye and set off on their different journeys... Yossi and Kevin soon realized that going by river was a big mistake. The river got faster and faster, and soon they were in rapids.
The raft was swept down the river at an incredible speed until it hit a rock. Kevin managed to swim to land, but Yossi was swept away by the rapids.
But Yossi didn't drown. He came up to the surface several kilometres downriver. By an incredible piece of luck he found their backpack floating in the river. The backpack contained a little food, insect repellent, a lighter, and most important of all... the map. The two friends were now separated by a canyon and six or seven kilometres of jungle.
Kevin was feeling desperate. He didn't know if Yossi was alive or dead, but he started walking downriver to look for him. He felt responsible for what had happened to his friend. Yossi, however, was feeling very optimistic. He was sure that Kevin would look for him so he started walking upriver calling his friend's name. But nobody answered. At night Yossi tried to sleep but he felt terrified. The jungle was full of noises. Suddenly he woke up because he heard a branch breaking. He turned on his flash light. There was a jaguar staring at him...
Yossi was trembling with fear. But then he remembered something that he once saw in a film. He used the cigarette lighter to set fire to the insect repellent spray and he managed to scare the jaguar away.
After five days alone, Yossi was exhausted and starving. Suddenly, as lie was walking, he saw a footprint on the trail – it was a hiking boot. It had to be Kevin's footprint! He followed the trail until he discovered another footprint. But then he realized, to his horror, that it was the same footprint and that it wasn't Kevin's. It was his own. He had been walking around in a circle. Suddenly Yossi realized that he would never find Kevin. He felt sure that Kevin must he dead. Yossi felt depressed and on the point of giving up.
But Kevin wasn't dead. He was still looking for Yossi. But after nearly a week he was weak and exhausted from lack of food and lack of sleep. He decided that it was time to forget Yossi and try to save himself. He had just enough strength left to hold onto a log and let himself float down the river.
Kevin was incredibly lucky – he was rescued by two Bolivian hunters in a canoe. The men only hunted in that part of the rainforest once a year, so if they had been there a short time earlier or later, they would never have seen Kevin. They took him back to the town of San Jose and he spent two days recovering.
As soon as Kevin felt well enough, he went to a Bolivian Army base and asked them to look for Yossi. The army were sure that Yossi must be dead, but in the end Kevin persuaded them to take him up in a plane and fly over the part of the rainforest where Yossi could be. It was a hopeless search. The plane had to fly too high and the forest was too dense. They couldn't see anything at all. Kevin felt terribly guilty. He was convinced that it was all his fault that Yossi was going to die in the jungle. Kevin's last hope was to pay a local man with a boat to take him up the river to look for his friend.
By now, Yossi had been on his own in the jungle for nearly three weeks. He hadn't eaten for days. He was starving, exhausted and slowly losing his mind. It was evening. He lay down by the side of the river ready for another night alone in the jungle. Suddenly he heard the sound of a bee buzzing in his ear. He thought a bee had got inside his mosquito net. When he opened his eyes he saw that the buzzing noise wasn't a bee...
It was a boat. Yossi was too weak to shout, but Kevin had already seen him. It was a one in a million chance, but Yossi was saved.
When Yossi had recovered, he and Kevin flew to the city of La Paz and they went directly to the hotel where they had agreed to meet Marcus and Karl. But Marcus and Karl were not there. The two men had never arrived back in the town of Apolo. The Bolivian army organized a search of the rainforest, but Marcus and Karl were never seen again.
A London family were enjoying an adventure holiday in Iceland last month when things went very wrong. Anne and Ben Harding and their two children, Claire, 13, and Sam, 11, nearly drowned in freezing water.
The accident happened while the Harding family were exploring a glacier in a popular Icelandic beauty spot. Anne and the children were walking along the edge of the ice when suddenly Sam fell in the water.
As Anne and Claire were trying to help Sam, they too fell through the ice into the freezing water. Sam swam to the edge and managed to get out of the water but then he dived back to help his mother and sister. His father Ben heard their screams and ran towards the edge of the glacier. 'My wife and children were struggling in the icy water and then my wife Anne just sank below the surface. It was terrible.'
Ben managed to pull his children from the water, but when he went to rescue his wife, another disaster happ-ened. 'As I was trying to jump across the hole in the ice, I slipped and fell in too.' Fortunately when he was in the water, he managed to catch the back of Anne's anorak and pulled her head out of the water. 'Her face was blue. It was really frightening.'
Some paramedics arrived a few minutes later and a helicopter took Anne to a hospital in Reykjavik. She spent three days there before the family returned to England. And what are their plans for their next holiday? 'A seaside resort on the south coast of England,' says Anne with a grin 'It's not quite so cold there!'