cool travel guide

Musings on Mallorca: part 2

laradunston@mac.com (Lara Dunston) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 02:15:00 PDT

So what did we not enjoy about Mallorca? Well, Mallorca is not for everyone. Sure, that could be said about a lot of places, but there are some destinations that few people dislike: Paris, Italy,...

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Musings on Mallorca: part 3

laradunston@mac.com (Lara Dunston) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 03:54:00 PDT

Of course experiencing local culture is not high on every traveller's list of priorities - as we were often reminded in Mallorca. Some people simply want to lie in the sun and read a book, others...

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Mallorca’s most appealling beaches, part 1

laradunston@mac.com (Lara Dunston) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 23:22:00 PDT

Mallorca became one of Europe’s most popular summer destinations for a reason. There’s no denying the island boasts stunning beaches. Unless you have a boat, though, it’s impossible to escape the...

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Mallorca’s most appealling beaches, part 2

laradunston@mac.com (Lara Dunston) — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:15:00 PDT

And here are some more of Mallorca's most stunning beaches (my favorites anyway), where you can soak up some sun, work on that tan, and have a wade in the calm sea; continued from part 1 (below): *...

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More on Mallorca... another day

laradunston@mac.com (Lara Dunston) — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 01:16:00 PDT

My scheduled posts on Mallorca didn't go up as hoped, so I'm going to save my best boutique hotels and best restaurant lists for another day, as I have some packing to do... I will post them over the...

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Where to next?

laradunston@mac.com (Lara Dunston) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 01:03:00 PDT

Well, we're off again. And yet it seems like we'd only just arrived. After five taxing days of sleeping and eating in Barcelona, and before that seven grueling weeks working on a book in Mallorca,...

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Trip Base travel awards

laradunston@mac.com (Lara Dunston) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 01:42:00 PDT

The nice people at Trip Base recently gave me a little award - well, I was a finalist in their Best Travel Guides category - and I was so busy I didn't even have time to thank them properly (although...

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Travel with us on Twitter

laradunston@mac.com (Lara Dunston) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 02:24:00 PDT

I might not get much time to blog over the next six weeks as we have a tight travel schedule, bouncing around the Middle East researching stories and doing hotel and restaurant reviews. So why not...

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Goodbye Dubai

laradunston@mac.com (Lara Dunston) — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 08:14:00 PDT

We spent our last night in the UAE in Dubai - stuck in a traffic jam, checking into our fully booked hotel, shopping for last minute necessities at busy Dubai Mall - packed with shoppers laden with...

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Damascus is Buzzing

laradunston@mac.com (Lara Dunston) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 23:02:00 PDT

The atmosphere in Damascus is electric now, and the streets of the Old City more alive than we've seen them before - and we've been regular visitors since 1998. Summer traditionally sees Syrian...

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Syria's Bewitching Boutique Hotels

laradunston@mac.com (Lara Dunston) — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 06:27:00 PDT

Syria has long been home to some of the Middle East's most bewitching boutique hotels (the only country that beats it in the beautiful hotel stakes is Morocco) so we're delighting in one of our main...

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Abu Shady, the last of Syria's traditional storytellers still tells his tales

laradunston@mac.com (Lara Dunston) — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 21:22:00 PDT

One of our many reasons for coming to Syria this time was to interview Abu Shady, the last of the hakawati, or traditional storytellers. We last interviewed him almost two and half years ago when we...

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Aleppo and our room with a view

laradunston@mac.com (Lara Dunston) — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 21:55:00 PDT

Aleppo is Syria's most atmospheric city after Damascus and it's our next favorite destination after the capital, the highlights for us being the medieval souq, the labyrinthine old quarters dotted...

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Aleppo's labyrinthine souqs

laradunston@mac.com (Lara Dunston) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 01:11:00 PDT

Aleppo's labyrinthine medieval souq - or rather souqs within a souq - has long been one of our favorites in the Middle East, mainly because it has remained relatively untouched by tourism up until...

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Access momentarily denied

laradunston@mac.com (Lara Dunston) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 09:31:00 PDT

My harmless little blog Cool Travel Guide has been blocked in Syria for a whole 24 hours - I was confronted with the dreaded "Access Denied" sign when I tried to update it yesterday. But, there's...

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Blogging and Blogspot in Syria

laradunston@mac.com (Lara Dunston) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 23:16:00 PDT

A number of people have contacted me via the comments to my post below and on Twitter in response to my appeal for advice after my blog was momentarily blocked in Syria. Shukran jazeelan to everyone...

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Postcript: blogging and Blogspot in Syria

laradunston@mac.com (Lara Dunston) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 08:33:00 PDT

Another postscript to my posts of a couple of weeks ago on blogging and Blogspot in Syria (see my last post and the postscript before it): after uploading the posts below, I received loads of emails...

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Desk update from Abu Dhabi: month #45 on the road but whose counting?

laradunston@mac.com (Lara Dunston) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 05:57:00 PDT

We're back in the UAE and after a couple of days in Dubai (pictured*), we're chained to desks once again in Abu Dhabi - not our desks, but our friends', at their colossal home in the new part of the...

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Envying a donkey his pace - the frenetic tempo of travel writing, part 1

laradunston@mac.com (Lara Dunston) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 08:06:00 PDT

Our recent trip around the Middle East (see this post) wasn't meant to be that kind of trip. There was no guidebook to write. No insane photography commission for Terry to undertake. Just lots of...

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Envying a donkey his pace - the frenetic tempo of travel writing, part 2

laradunston@mac.com (Lara Dunston) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 08:35:00 PDT

So how, as travel writers, do we get ourselves into the situation I described in the last post? And is it possible to be a travel writer and avoid this frenzied pace of life? To answer the second...

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In print and online

laradunston@mac.com (Lara Dunston) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:13:00 PDT

It's been a busy period for Terry and I, as you've gathered from the dearth of blog posts these last months. And we've got a lot of work being published to prove it, from a small 'Up Next' piece on...

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Behind-the-scenes in a Michelin-starred chef's kitchen and the kindness of chefs

laradunston@mac.com (Lara Dunston) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 03:15:00 PDT

Being able to spend a night in the restaurant kitchen of a Michelin-starred chef - in this case that of Pierre Gagnaire at Reflets, Dubai - is one of the delights of our job. It wasn't our first time...

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Travel experts versus 'real' travellers

laradunston@mac.com (Lara Dunston) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 06:29:00 PDT

Travel 'experts', whether they are travel writers, guidebook authors, travel bloggers, tour guides, travel agents, hoteliers etc, are also 'real' travellers in my mind. Yet publishers and travel...

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Travel insights from travel experts

laradunston@mac.com (Lara Dunston) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 01:02:00 PDT

I am probably suffering from chronic information overload - how about you? - but increasingly I'm finding myself wanting to read more informed opinions from people with experience and expertise in a...

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Your worst hotel experience?

laradunston@mac.com (Lara Dunston) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:36:00 PDT

A recent hotel stay reminded us of just how bad they can occasionally be. We checked into a respectable five star city hotel in the early evening, did some work, then went out to dinner and checked...

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Cool travel guide
Travel insights, reflections and other stuff you won't find in guidebooks: a perpetual globetrotter and professional travel writer muses about the things that are cool about travel and what inspires us to travel.