Leh is beautiful and so are its people (at least the Tibetan refugess).
Cook Islands are wonderful with great friendly locals who sing and play ukuleles and drink beer. Had a wonderful time staying wih an African extended family in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe and in Tafara township in Harare.
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A great place to visit for 6 months but wouldnt go back packing with out a big gun.
Faliraki.. or Scilly Isles
trail_rat - Member
...odd you should mention that - in austrailia on the gold coast - i was very glad to be leaving places after a day. full of pricks most of the places - unfriendly and pretencious - a bit like herebrisneyland and sydney were good but the bits inbetween i did not like !
Hate to say it but the Gold Coast is full of Poms, so no surprise 🙂
Best parts of Oz are in the north or west. North & West Queensland, Northern Territory, W.A. It's possible to get hundreds of miles from anywhere.
Canada is good. We went last year, flew Manchester to Calgary, picked up a hire car & drove to Canmore - about an hour's drive. It's just outside the Banff national park so it's a bit cheaper to stay than Banff itself, which is only 20mins up the road
We stayed there for 6 nights, then back to Calgary for 2 nights for a wedding. Then a road trip to Vancouver, staying over in Kamloops - surprisingly hot at 38deg during the day in early August. 3 nights in Vancouver & then another road trip back to Calgary for the flight home - bad planning, could've flown home from Vancouver & had another night there.
Plenty of scope for outdoorsy stuff in the Rocky Mountains - two trips you shouldn't miss are Lake Louise:
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and the Columbia Icefields:
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Downtown Vancouver is nice - I'd move there tomorrow - but there's also Vancouver Island to visit, maybe a bit of whale watching, or a trip to Whistler (about an hour or two away). And there's also Stanley Park at the northern end of downtown:
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Chinatown is well worth a visit too - eat in a proper chinese restaurant, where the chinese locals eat
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South America- Boliva, chile argentina
Beautiful place though. The food is absolutely outstanding and Lebanese Christian women may very well be the most beautiful people on the planet.
Chinses-Malaysians - especially in Penang for me.
Did a 3-week raod trip to BC, it was brilliant. Started in Vancouver then picked up our RV and went to Tofino (van island) where we got engaged!
Then to squamish, whistler, Kelowna and Nelson then back to vancouver.
Absolutely amazing riding too. Can't wait to go back to nelson, but would avoid Kelowna.
I've also had the pleasure of going to a couple of african countries but wasn't ideally placed to get a full cultural experience.
New York.
French Guiana. Twice.
Not as exotic or adventurous as some of the above, but we did camp out in the jungle, go boating at night looking for jungle wild life, and nearly sink at midnight somewhere between our camp and a Foreign Legion camp.
portsmouth.
its the only place in this world I've actually felt in danger of getting mugged.
john drummer and backhander, that was another idea of ours, would love to do some sort of trip maybe starting up north in vancouver or calgary then travel down the rockies via various methods of transport! or similar thing in the andes!
Sorry for stating the obvious but the place is ****ing massive! We'd have struggled to make the rockies from van and back in 3 weeks and seen/felt the places in any depth. we wanted to do the rockies but it meant an average of driving 250 odd miles per day. In any case, it gives us reason to go back. If I ever get even half a chance to emmigrate, I'll be off in double time. Seeing the whales etc off van island was undescribable, seeing eagles soaring and bears wandering around left me speechless.
