Top Five African Safari Destinations

Any vacations in Africa will not be complete without going on a safari to experience the wild animals and the peace and tranquillity of the bushveld.

But there are literally hundreds of national parks and wildlife areas in Africa that you can travel to. And some are definitely better than others when it comes to providing the potential for a great safari holiday.

In my experience, and in the general consensus of the wildlife tour industry and other sources such as the first hand accounts of safari trips in the travel diaries at African Safari Journals, here are the top five safari vacations in Africa:

1. Tanzania - Serengeti

During the annual migration, when the wildebeest and zebra pack up and leave their grazing areas to find fresher ones, the Serengeti is an astonishing place to be.

It's a very good safari vacations in Africa destination at other times of the year too but the migration has been ranked by many as one of the wonders of the natural world.

Hard to beat in the safari stakes.

2. Kenya - Masai Mara

If you want to see the big cats, this wildlife park is hard to beat. Lion, leopard and cheetah abound and they are relatively easy to spot because of the grassland vegetation which means you get unrestricted views for miles around.

Another big plus is the fact that going off-road is allowed as long as you are not making new trails of your own. This is one of the few vacations in Africa parks that still allows this and it is a big advantage because the animals will rarely oblige you and stay next to the major roads.

The only downside here is that because of it's popularity there are a lot of people around so if you want to spend time in isolation with nature this is not the place to go.

3. South Africa - Kruger National Park

For sheer variety of species no other place in Africa can come close to the Kruger Park. And because it is so large (larger than Wales) it has a number of different ecosystems that you can pass through in your search for animals and birds.

It is one of the best managed parks in Africa and the accommodation and infrastructure is superb.

4. Botswana - Selinda Reserve

Seasoned safari travellers rate this reserve in north Botswana extremely highly and they return to it again and again, drawn by the very high concentration of wildlife, high standard of accommodation, service and exclusivity.

5. Zambia - South Luangwa National Park

South Luangwa is a diamond in the rough, just waiting for enough exposure to bring it to its rightful place at the crown of vacations in African wildlife destinations.

Ayurveda Honeymoon Tour Packages

Ayurveda honeymoon tour packages are the latest craze among young tourists visiting Kerala. Honeymoon with Ayurveda packages receive tourists to a one of a kind travel experience, where they experience abundance and fullness of life.

Welcome to a land where the lifestyle of people is their best defense against diseases, a land so blissfully blessed by nature and a land where you can keep your peace of mind while staying away from mental turbulences, tensions and worries.

Newly weds or people looking to refill their life with youthfulness, and people keeping a youthful charm in their minds can come to Kerala to an Ayurveda honeymoon tour. Ayurvedic packages for honeymoon tour are so unique and new that it is not copied anywhere else.

Ayurveda package honeymoon tours mostly include a stay in a luxurious Ayurvedic cottage or in a luxurious houseboat, where the couple receives Ayurvedic healthy diet, medicated oil massage and directions for a healthy life. Visitors take home golden words of healthy, blissful living. Receive advice on everything from healthy lifestyle, food habits, daily yoga practice, meditation and requirement of keeping minds happy, fresh and lively.

Not many Ayurvedic resorts in Kerala offer specialized Ayurveda honeymoon tour programs. The resorts in Kerala that offer Ayurvedic honeymoon trips provide world class living environment, usually in a calm, serene location. Visitors to Kerala utilizing Ayurvedic honeymoon packages also closely watch preparation of healthy food.

Honeymoon Ayurveda packages also come with plenty of opportunity to explore serene backwaters, hill stations, beaches, cardamom hills, tea plantations, coffee plantations, wildlife, boating, trekking, and fishing among many lively locations and activities.

Ayurveda honeymoon packages are both thrilling experience and is the where you will be more dedicated to your health, happiness and enjoying life meaningfully. Ayurveda honeymoon packages can be rightly called holistic healthy Ayurveda yoga tour programs.

Come to Kerala, the land blessed so abundantly by God with blissful environment, and the science of life called Ayurveda. Come and take away all your heart can take and prepare to return to this land so often

Vietnam Is A Popular Place For Senior Travel

A place that seems to attract a lot of tourists is Vietnam, which is a country within Southeast Asia. Surrounding it are Laos, Cambodia, and China, which makes this country a wonderful place to visit. The history of this country is remarkable, as it holds a little bit of everything from colonization, war and rebellion. Vietnam travel for seniors is an excellent way to spend that vacation time and there are not many people who have visited Vietnam, that would disagree.

Being a place of such historical events, it is no wonder that people of all ages and cultures love to see Vietnam. But do not forget your visa, as you will not get in unless you have it and you will not leave the country either without that visa, so take extreme care of it. Remember, if planning your Vietnam travel for seniors trip ahead of time, you need around four to seven days to process your new visa. You are able to get one faster by applying for the express visa, but you will end up paying double the price.

Climates And Holidays

The different tourist attractions on the Vietnam travel for seniors trip, will offer a little bit of something for everyone, the climate of Vietnam will do just the same. If you are venturing into the southern portion, the year round weather is pretty stable at a hot and tropical temperature. As you venture on up to the northern parts of Vietnam, you will find that they have four seasons. When your Vietnam travel for seniors trip takes you into the central regions of Vietnam, there is a mixture of the southern and the northern climates and there is also a lot of rain in the summer, instead of the winter months.

Now as far as holidays are concerned, the Vietnamese New Year is by far the biggest holiday celebration. This celebration takes place between late January and March, by following the Chinese Unisolar calendar. During the three days of celebration, many people close up their shops to spend time with family, which means that this may not be the time that you want to plan your Vietnam travel for seniors trip for. If heading to the right location, during the right time of year, you are bound to have an amazing time and learn a lot about their culture.
source:http://seniortravelreviews.com/2009/04/vietnam-is-a-popular-place

See the world — in California's Long Beach

A recently published survey showed hat, even in these precarious economic times, a vacation is a luxury that many people are unwilling to give up. Hard-earned and well-deserved, those sacred two weeks serve as a wellspring of rejuvenation for the next grueling 50 ahead.

Still, the dilemma remains - with so little time and ever-shrinking disposable income, where will your dream vacation take you: Spain, Italy, England, Latin America or the Pacific Rim? With so much of the world offering appealing alternatives, how does one choose?

Here's an idea: Go to Long Beach. You can experience all of the above destinations much more economically, and you won't need a passport.

Long considered Los Angeles' less glamorous younger sister, Long Beach has spent much of the past two decades refurbishing, refashioning and revitalizing itself. The result is one of Southern California's most surprising vacation destinations. Part of that surprise stems from the realization of just how cosmopolitan the city is.

In Long Beach, you can take a trip around the world in 80 blocks.

Day 1: Spain

The history of Rancho Los Alamitos is, in essence, the history of Southern California: the mix of the Native American and Spanish cultures and of the mission and rancho systems. Situated atop Bixby Hill behind the gates of an exclusive residential community, the 1800s adobe ranch house, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is a living history museum. The ranch house and the beautiful gardens surrounding it are all that remain of what was once a 300,000-acre Spanish land grant given by the crown in 1790 to a Spanish foot soldier named Manuel Nieto as a reward for a job well done.

Standing here today, it is difficult to imagine that when Nieto took ownership, the land grant encompassed much of present-day Long Beach and neighboring Orange County, stretching all the way to the Palos Verdes Peninsula. After his death, his heirs petitioned the crown to split the vast holdings into five ranchos, with the eldest son getting the 28,500-acre Rancho Los Alamitos ("little cottonwoods"), which, though considerably diminished, was still the largest cattle ranch in the United States after California joined the Union in 1850.

Visitors can tour the house and gardens, one of which, the Secret Garden, was designed by the firm of the famous Olmsted brothers, who designed, among other notable projects, Woodland Park and the Ashland Park neighborhood in Lexington.

After your visit to Rancho Los Alamitos, continue the Spanish motif with dinner at Cafe Sevilla Restaurant and Tapas Bar on multicultural Pine Avenue. The restaurant features original Spanish fare such as grilled chorizo, paella, green mussels and jamon (ham) Iberico, along with a flamenco show every Saturday night.

Day 2: Latin America

Long Beach is home to the only museum west of the Mississippi River dedicated exclusively to Latin American art. The Museum of Latin American Art is a gem that focuses intensely on artists who have lived and worked in Mexico, Central America, South America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean since World War II.

Located in the developing East Village Arts District, the building is spare and lean, with vaulted ceilings, polished wooden floors and a sculpture garden. Like many Southern California structures, MOLAA occupies what was once a film studio - Balboa Producing Co., which was a major distributor of silent films from 1913 to 1918. After the studio closed, the building was reincarnated as the Hippodrome, a popular roller rink for four decades.

Thanks to its extensive collection, its future as a museum seems secure. I was drawn to the work of one artist in particular, Belkis Ayon of Cuba, who was interested in the myths of the Abakua, the island's all-male secret society that adheres to the arcane rituals of an Afro-Caribbean religion. Ayon's black-and-white collage-type prints feature a recurring theme: a woman, Sikan, who penetrates the society and is then sacrificed by the men to safeguard their secrets. The pieces are mesmerizing and eerily reflective of the artist's all too brief life. The official cause of her 1999 death at age 32 is suicide, although rumors circulate that this was indeed a case of life imitating art - that she, like her definitive character, got too close to a forbidden society and paid the ultimate price.

Day 3: The Pacific Rim

The Aquarium of the Pacific offers a comprehensive journey across the world's largest ocean, from the California coast itself to the icy waters of the North Pacific to the colorful reefs of Mexico's Baja Peninsula and the tropical South Pacific. The aquarium has 19 major habitats with 32 focus exhibits.

Among them are the tropical Pacific gallery, which evokes the islands of Polynesia and Micronesia, with their coral reefs and shockingly hued fish, and the North Pacific gallery, home to translucent sea jellies, diving birds, a reclusive giant octopus and crowd-pleasing sea otters.

My favorite exhibit was the Southern California/Baja gallery, the entrance to which is the three-story, 142,000- gallon Blue Cavern. The cavern is a colorful montage of shimmering kelp forests, giant-spined sea stars and colorful garibaldi, the official marine fish of California. A companion gallery is home to the 211,000-gallon seal and sea lion exhibit.

You can plan to spend a full day here, especially if you have kids, or if you want to pair an aquarium visit with a whale-watching cruise or a harbor tour.

Day 4: Italy

It's called Naples Island, but the area is more evocative of Venice, ringed as it is by a system of canals that flow into Alamitos Bay.

There are few better ways to experience a Southern California sunset than to rent a gondola and gondolier, who might come equipped with wine and cheese but who definitely comes with a voice worthy of the Italian arias. The hour-long gondola ride will take you around the island, with its colorful cottages in a variety of architectural styles and often dripping with bougainvillea and jasmine. There's even a "Bridge of Sighs" where your gondolier will stop for the requisite serenade.

Afterward, continue the experience with dinner in one of the city's excellent Italian restaurants. L'Opera on Pine Avenue has a decor of vaulted ceilings, crystal chandeliers and marble columns, and a menu of such dishes as carpaccio classico, ravioli stuffed with black truffles and scallopine with forest mushrooms and mascarpone cheese. La Traviata is a stunning restaurant, designed to mimic a 19th-century opera house. The cuisine is described as nouveau Italian with a California twist, and opera singers and pianists perform every weekend.

Day 5: England

There's nothing more quintessentially English than afternoon tea, and Forbes Traveler Magazine has called Long Beach's Vintage Tea Leaf one of the best tearooms in the country. Visitors can select a vintage hat (bowlers for gents and flowery creations for the ladies) and an antique china cup for enjoying one of the 120 custom-blended teas from the personal recipe file of Beverly, the tea mistress.

Then it's on to one of Long Beach's premier tourist attractions: the Queen Mary. Permanently docked here since 1967, the luxury ocean liner sailed between Southhampton, England, and New York for the Cunard Line from 1936 to 1967, although it was pressed into service during World War II to transport troops. Its list of famous passengers includes Winston Churchill and William Randolph Hearst. Greta Garbo always ate early in the Verandah Grill so she could sneak back to her stateroom, while more sociable types like Marlene Dietrich and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor danced the night away in the Starlight Lounge.

Today, both venues are remnants of the Queen's fabled past, but guests can enjoy a cocktail in the Art Deco Observation Bar and dinner in Sir Winston's. They can even choose to spend the night in one of the 314 original staterooms.

If you do nothing else, take one of the daily tours, which give you a behind-the-scenes look at one of the world's great ocean liners
source:http://www.kansas.com/788/story/753319.html