Tag Archives: hotels

Hi folks!

You’ve had volcanoes and geysers and out-of-this-world scenery; now for the more practical side to life in Kamchatka – where to bed down of a night!…

First, let me state the obvious: Kamchatka’s no resort. It has long beaches, but the ocean’s always cold; and Kamchatka’s also hard – and expensive – to get to given it’s so remote. Accordingly, there aren’t the corresponding hundreds of large chain hotels dotting its coastline. But, obviously, there have to be places to stay – and there are; they’re just more modest than your Marriott’s and Hiltons, etc. Nevertheless, the places to stay and the level of service at them is decent, and getting better by the year – as we keep finding out ourselves…

Our first overnight is practically always in or near the village of Paratunka, not far from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky – here. Why? Because it’s built upon magical hot springs: hot, pure mineral water on tap and in the pools of all the guesthouses in the village – which range from the bare basics to rather the luxurious…

This year we spent the night in the village next door to Paratunka called Termalny (Thermal). And here’s the guesthouse we stayed in:

And here’s its naturally-heated pool. Yes – new. Yes – very nice! And just look at the view!…

Read on…

At the foot of Kizimen volcano in Kamchatka – literally in the middle of nowhere, with no roads or settlements for 70 kilometers – today there happens to be… a five-star tourism base (here)! ->

What? The lap of luxury – out here?! Pretty much. For there’s hot springs, a marvelous view of Kizimen, digital detox (at least – partially; more on this below), delicious food, hunting & fishing, mosquitos, bears and assorted other pamperings to please office plankton. They’ve even done something to prevent insects from coming near the complex!

Read on: Kamchatka-2024 – Part 4: Could this be the world’s remotest hotel?

Sollipulli volcano – conquered. So what else is interesting around these parts (in the Araucanía Region)?

First, much of the local population is made up of indigenous South Americans – the Mapuche. And you can tell this simply by walking along the bank of a lake here. Different toponomies are also curiously interesting; for example, we passed a road sign with Das Dorf on it: clearly there are plenty of Germans here too…

But for me the main things here are the natural beauty and the meditative views. For example, there’s the Villarrica volcano (named the same as both the lake and town it towers over)…

Read on…

The time has finally come to lift the curtain on something I’ve only been mentioning in passing while writing these here Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk expedition posts: the where-we-stayed situation up inside the Arctic Circle and in just-as-cold other areas of Yakutia…

In the smallest of nutshells, the situation is as follows:

• There are places to stay – but often they’re nothing like hotels or guesthouses
• A hot shower isn’t guaranteed
• A toilet is guaranteed – and it’s not always outside!
• The range of comfort levels couldn’t be broader – from dossing down on floors of town-halls or school sports halls, or sleeping in our vehicles (ugh), to the relative (for permafrosted locations) luxury of decent hotel in a city; like the Tygin Darkhan in Yakutsk ->

Tiny nutshell – done. The rest of this post: details…

Read on…

The next stop on our whirlwind Euro-April-2024 tour – Budapest…

We’d had our Italian Partner Conference days before – in Milan, as mentioned (and the press loved it). Now it was time for our Global Partner Conference in the Hungarian capital. As per, we had guests fly in from every continent apart from Antarctica (of course) and also, alas – Australia (due to the geopolitical situation). The rest of the world however was in full attendance :) ->

…But I’ll come back to that topic. First, we needed to get from Italy to Hungary…

Read on…

On our recent business trip to Dubai for our first global Cyber Immune conference, we chose probably the most unusual of places to stay out of any business trip I’ve been on. So unusual was it that it deserves a whole post to itself…

As the title of this post indicates, we stayed on the Queen Elizabeth 2 – or, as everyone refers to it, the QE2. But, what were we doing “staying” on a British cruise ship in UAE? We were staying on “her” as, since 2018, she’s been a converted hotel – permanently docked in Dubai!…

It was the first time I’d step foot on a cruise ship; probably the last too, since cruises are not me thing at all. But here, we weren’t cruising!…

Read on…

I’ve shown you how awesome China‘s lesser-known (to non-Chinese) natural-beauty-tourisms can be. But what about the places to stay and dining options for tourists there? How do they stack up?

Quick answer: it all depends on how much you want to spend, for there’s everything in China from bargain-basement lodgings and street/fast/junk food, through to 5* hotels and gourmet cuisine at fine restaurants. As for us, we mostly went for somewhere in the middle for both accommodation and dining – sometimes opting for somewhere nearer the upscale-end of the spectrum; for example, in Enshi (canyon, cliffs) we stayed at a small private hotel that was really very nice indeed. The views: wonderful ->

In the cities we tended to stay in larger hotels – often franchises of international chains, and overall they were decent and comfortable. The views to be had from the rooms in some of them were pretty decent too, for example in the hotel in Xinning County near Langshan where we stayed after our decompression-river-cruise on the Fuyi River. In one direction:

In the other:

Read on…

And finally, as per tradition, it was time finish off our typically active vacation – this time our Kenya safari – with a spot of decompression: to take it easy after all the dashing about and tourism-till-you-drop and getting up early every morning to fit everything in; also, to make sure the return to the reality of everyday life doesn’t take place too quickly for the mind (or is it spirit, or even soul?!) to cope…

And since our tour of Kenya’s national parks took us, slowly but surely, eastward – from Nairobi over to the east-African coast along the Indian Ocean – the perfect setting for decompression was deemed to be Diani Beach, just south of Mombasa. Why? Because “it has been voted Africa’s leading beach destination for the fifth time running since 2015” (– Wikipedia, 2020). And I can see why: not busy at all, super-fine sand on the beach, and refreshingly cool water (too cool for comfort actually, neoprene advised)…

Not that we resorted to the neoprene; we were here to take it easy: no active anything – including watersports. Instead – inactive everything; e.g., beach + Bombay Sapphire, and sun + Scotch – on the rocks sand!

…

Read on…

After the brief Bali-interlude, we’re back in Kenya…

First – recap:

Pre-safari Nairobi – done.
Ol Pejeta reservation – done.
Lakes Naivasha and Nakuru – done.
Maasai Mara – done.

Next up, Amboseli National Park – here. Amboseli is more of the same wonderful wildlife but with the accent firmly on elephants – and with none other than  Mount Kilimanjaro in the background…

Read on…

Before continuing with my narrative along our route through Kenya, I must tell you a bit about where we stayed on the bank of Lake Naivasha. It was at Hippo Point (but don’t click that link just yet)…

Now, before reading on, dear readers, can you guess what I’m about to write here? Was I one-star-hotel slumming it, or five-star-living-large?…

See, I do both – and everything in-between. I prefer 5*, of course – who doesn’t? – but sometimes lesser star-rating hotels (or no-star establishments, like Airbnb-style apartments in remote towns in deepest Siberia) are the only thing going. In Tibet and Nepal the ratings tended to dip, while in Kamchatka and Altai we’ve always bedded down of a night in the tents we carry on our backs all day. Then there are the spartan but cozy-enough cabins we sleep in on yachts workhorse ships – that sail around, say, the Kuril Islands or even Antarctica. Things sometimes get real bad: in the year 2000 we stayed a night in an abandoned port in Belomorsk; it was… indescribable. Heck – the trauma lingers to this day!

So, come on folks, what do you reckon?…

Well, it went like this at Hippo Point:

Joke. That’s the former servants’ quarters of even stables of the British landed gentry that must have had the place built and who lived here originally. Here’s where we were staying:

No, it’s not an Edwardian country pile in Surrey – it’s actually Hippo Point here in Kenya!

Inside, just like outside, and just like the lawn and garden – all in traditional English style. Couldn’t complain…

…Wait: yes we could!…

See, the place was so old-fashioned and typically British that it still featured old-fashioned and typically British… taps (faucets to our American friends); meaning: one tap is for (freezing) cold water; the other – for (scalding) hot water. No mixer tap/faucet where you can get just the right temperature for the water for your bath. And bath’s the right word since – there’s no shower here either! What? In 2023? :0)

We have a walk around the property and its grounds…

Africa, stone fireplace, armchairs. The only things missing are a Sir John and Lady Mortimer or some such!

All’s set for cocktails at sundown ->

And finally – my luggage lost by Ethiopian Airlines arrived! ->

Over there – zebras!

From here to the lake – a zebra crossing! ->

Sunset: another aaaaah ->

And that was that. All very nice. We’d have loved to have stayed longer in this little piece of England, but we had to be up and off in the morning…

The rest of the photos from Kenya are here.