Category:

Asia-Eco-Travel

REMOTE ISLAND PARADISE, Christmas Island

Christmas Island, also known as Australia’s ‘Galapagos’, is a remote Island territory in the Indian Ocean. Boasting several endemic species of birdlife & host to the annual red crab migration – an event that does not occur anywhere else in the world, it’s an Eco-paradise just waiting to be explored. Add in the beautiful landscapes, amazing coral & marine life, impressive rain-forest & the friendliest locals that just want you to enjoy and love the island as much as they do – and you’ve got the ingredients for an unforgettable adventure. We’ve got everything you need to know to Travel to Christmas Island including recommendations for where to eat, where to stay and the incredible things to do on Christmas Island plus essential visitor information such a flight routes, what things costs, how to get around and recommended tour operators and resources to make your stay the best it can be.

Flying Fish Cove is the official capital city of Australia’s Christmas Island, and is the central point to life on the Island for many locals. On any given afternoon you’ll find families relaxing under the cabanas along the foreshore, people swimming and snorkeling in the cove, children jumping off the jetty and the port going about it’s daily business. On days where the swell is up it is also possible to surf in the cove – although with no surf experience myself, I’ll leave it up to your own abilities/competence to decide whether it’s a good idea or not (it looked very shallow to me!).
The Cove is also a great sunset spot so be sure to include an evening here on your Christmas Island Itinerary. Grab a cold one (or two, or three) and pull up a seat as mother nature turns the sky different shades of pink and purple in front of your eyes – and keep a lookout for spinner dolphins on the horizon!

If someone says “Christmas Island” to you, your first thought may be the Christmas Island red crabs who’s spectacular migration is one of the most impressive on the planet (more below) but the Island is so much more than a habitat for red crabs. There are in fact over 20 different crab species that have been found on the Island. From the endemic blue crabs that inhabit the wetlands, to the extraordinary Robber Crabs who are the world’s largest land crustaceans and wander across the Island’s roads as if they own the place (and you will be required to Slow down. Drive Around when navigating the Island). They also have a habit of stealing any shiny and foreign objects that they find in their path, to the point that locals will hang bags from trees rather than leave them on the ground when camping or hiking (Just be sure to remember where you put it!). There are also various species of hermit crab, ghost crabs, nipper crabs and cave crabs on the Island (to name a few) and if you are really interested in getting to know them I recommend reading Crabs of Christmas Island by Max Orchard. – or if you want to see it all in action, take a look at my Christmas Island Photo Essay post for some wanderlust worthy pictures!

And now, a little bit about the main event.

The Christmas Island Red Crab Migration is one of the highlights of the tourism year, and a truly incredible event to witness. It is too much to go into serious details about the crabs migratory behavior and spawning in this post (but you can read all about it here – coming soon!) but suffice to say when Sir Richard Attenborough described it as one of the “most astonishing and wonderful sights” he was absolutely on point.

The Island is home to 50 million red crabs (scientific name Gecarcoidea natalis –which are only found on Christmas Island) and each year the adults migrate from the jungle to the coast to breed and spawn. The event takes place between October and January, although it’s commencement is dictated by the wet season and levels of moisture in the air. The synchronized and island wide migration is truly a one of the worlds natural wonders – the carpet of crabs a sight that needs to be seen to be believed. Click through to my full post about the Christmas Island Red Crabs where I (hopefully) have given them the attention they deserve.

DIVING & SNORKELING

Offering some of the best snorkeling and diving in the world, the narrow fringe of reef that surrounds Christmas Island is home to 88 different species of coral and 600 species of fish. (This is one place that you don’t want to forget your GoPro when you jump in the water!)
On any given day there are turtles, manta rays, giant trevally, lion fish, spinner dolphins, various small shark species and between October and January, the chance to see Whale Sharks on their migration.

The tiered structure of the Island – which is much like a wedding cake – also continues into the water, with the ocean floor dramatically dropping away into the abyss less than 50m from the coastline. This provides divers and snorkelers with beautiful views of the coral and fish in the shallows and a shelf and wall which drops down to the depths where the fish become larger, and the chances of spotting a (small) shark increase.

WALK THE BOULDER TRACK

Christmas Island National Park covers twothirds of the island and the Boulder Track is a fantastic walk to get you into the heart of it. Where the track to the Blowholes start, the Boulder track heads off in the opposite direction and winds through the rain-forest and along the coast to the Boulder at South Point (an area of the island which has been ravaged by the Phosphate mine). There is usually lots of red crab and robber crab activity along the track, and visitors are encourage to stick to the path, as the crab holes that cover the ground at either side make the ground less stable (and can result in a shoe full of National Park when your foot disappears down one of them! And yes I am speaking from experience) – although keep your eyes peeled for coloured tags along the trail that will take you out to the coast at various viewing points, the most impressive of these being the Natural Arch. Also, keep in mind that some of the viewpoints may not be accessible at all times of the year due to weather fronts that hit the island, the results of which can occasionally block paths.

CHECK OUT THE VIEWS FROM THE LOOKOUTS:

Providing dramatic panoramic views across the coastline, Margaret Knoll is an easy to reach, but isolated spot, located on the East of the Island. A favorite with bird watchers due to the number of seabirds in the area. Head to lookout to watch the Frigatebirds, Golden Bosun, Christmas Island flying foxes and the Red-footed and Brown Boobies as they fly and nest in and around the coast.

LB4 LOOKOUT

Drive along the Murray Road over the north coast towards Settlement for a panoramic view across the island from the on-site gazebo. Surrounded by recent planting’s in the Rainforest Rehabilitation Program, Abbot’s Bobbys may be sighted flying to and from nearby nest sites. Sighting opportunities are increased in the early evening when the birds are returning to their nests and more birds can be spotted beyond the lookout along the section of the road where the crab grids are.

TERRITORY DAY LOOKOUT

The spot to take that iconic shot above the expanse of Flying Fish Cove, and come face to face with some of the island’s seabirds. There are picnic, BBQ and playground facilities and it is also the start of the Territory Day Walking track that leads to Tai Jin House.

To read more articles by this author, please click here.

Solo in Tasmania

Tasmania has the country’s friendliest locals and solo travel in Tasmania is incredibly safe for women to travel around even at night. There isn’t a specific travelling trail and it doesn’t have the party scene that you find on the mainland Oz so it’s ideal for the quieter traveller.

Tasmania has a great road network so it’s perfect for a self drive but watch out for the nocturnal wildlife. As on the mainland make sure to log any walks in the visitors books at national parks if walking alone.

Tasmania is actually one of the states of Australia and is believed to have once been part of the mainland. Today it is an island 150 miles south of the continent and being Australia’s largest island we feel it deserves its very own destination page.

‘Tassie’ as known to the locals is a World Heritage Area and nearly half of the island is full of national parks and reserves with ancient rainforest and untouched landscapes. The island has five unique regions and the South-West is home to the world’s only temperate rainforest eco system. If you’re into partying then this isn’t really the place for you but if it’s the great outdoors, convict history and wildlife that you’re into, Tassie is the place to come. Many miss it off their list but we think it’s worth a visit (and where else can you see a Tasmanian devil?)

If you only do one thing when you visit Tasmania, make sure it’s a visit to Port Arthur. This old convict settlement holds the key to life back in the nineteenth-century. Its hidden past lays within haunted ruins and desolate buildings and if you want to be scared silly, join the nightly ghost tour (but it is not for the faint hearted). Visit the historical site of the nearby Coal Mines for more convict history and free entry to the ruins.

To read the full article, please follow this link: www.girlabouttheglobe.com

Surfing in Bali

Lots of people come to Bali to spend their vacation on the beach. Unless you stay in the Bukit peninsula, you won’t get much of a chance to enjoy deserted white sand, clear blue water beaches. Areas like Canggu (located south-western & east Bali coasts) famous for its black sand beach. More popular destinations like Kuta/Seminyak tend to be more crowded filled with tourists more suitable for beach bumming then surfing. What do people here do for a perfect getaway to find beach paradise? Head to Gili Islands! Gili Islands! Where is that? “Gili” – is a word locals call a very small tiny island. An island you can stroll from one side to the other in about 30 minutes or less. There are several islands like this not far from Bali. The most famous of these small islands are three islands next to each other called Gili Trawangan, Gili Meno, and Gili Air. You can get there by speedboat in one hour. There are other lesser known islads such as Gili Gede, or Gili Naggu. It takes a bit longer to get there, but is a very desolate place. One special thing about Gili Islands is the lack of cars and motorbikes with absolutely no traffic. The islands are small and everything is within walking distance. If you truly feel lazy and absolutely do not want to walk, renting a bicycle, or hitching a ride on a horse carriage is an option. There is nothing to do on the islands, so its a perfect place to lose track of time and be completely free of the daily grind of life. It encourages laziness and spend your days sun bathing, swimming, or snorkeling. Maybe even take up scuba diving lessons if you’re looking for more activities. In Gili Trawangan, (aka Gili T) nightlife is quite active. There are a few bars right on the beach, so you can spend the night away drinking and dancing.

Read more at: http://www.baliblogger.info/gili-islands/

Two weeks across Palau

Back home in the city, it’s the evening rush hour and my little urban street is clogged with cars. Through the window, the sound of a car horn signals the frustration of a driver below. But my apartment is empty, only my slowly-dying plants can hear it.

Fourteen thousand kilometers away, the sun is casting its first rays on a minuscule tropical island in the South Pacific. With no other humans for miles all around, I unzip my tent and gaze at the morning sun across the white sand of our heavenly beach. A perfect day. Palau is one of the smallest countries in the world (#4 by population) but it is blessed with some of the wondrous natural beauty. Above the water, some 300 rock islands pierce the impossibly clear baby blue water. Green and undercut into a mushroom-like shapes that are occasionally cut by white corral sand beaches, these jungle-covered islands are a deep green color with the occasional gray of a limestone cliff. They are, quite simply, unspeakably beautiful.

Under water, the spectacle is overwhelming: implausible abundance of corral give home to the world’s highest diversity of reef fish with abundant sharks, turtles, and rays of all kinds. The water is a warm 29 degrees and at 40+ meters, visibility nears the theoretical maximum. But how do we get there? And where on Earth is Palau? To find this country, you must first turn the globe to the all blue part. From there you find the region of Micronesia at the western tip of which, if you zoom in a lot, you find Palau. If you look closely, you’ll notice that most of the country is surrounded by a barrier reef. This gave me an idea: I frequently explore my own country by canoe-camping; with the reef cutting the swells wouldn’t it be possible to explore these islands in the same way?

After a bit of digging and some very expensive long distance calls, I discovered that there isn’t a single canoe in Palau, other than a few traditional outriggers. But I did manage to get my hands on a sea kayak which I gambled would be big enough for our trip. And so after packing the necessary safety gear for an open sea tour, my fiancée and I hoped on a plane to BC, then to Korea, then to Palau.

Some forty hours later, we landed in paradise. We promptly hooked up with our kayak dealer and obtained our sun-bleached old steed, which was over a decade old but looked approximately seaworthy. While in Palau, we would obviously be diving and at the dive shop we found a local who knew the islands by heart. He pointed out to us on our map the spots in the rock islands where beaches made camping possible. The rock islands are steep and undercut, so camping is only possible on the beaches. A word of warning to those thinking of camping: There are no maps for sale that show where the beaches are, so if you can’t find a local to point them out for you, your best bet is to take pictures of the mural map that is on the wall of the lobby of the Koror state office. That one shows beaches.

We booked a diving trip and made arrangements with our diving operators to drop us off with our new kayak on the far side of the country. Over the next two weeks, we would make our way across the rock islands back to the town of Koror. It would be the most visually beautiful adventure of my life so far.

The boat dropped us off on an empty beach where we spent our first night in complete solitude. For the rest of our trip, the only people we saw were the occasional day trip tour boats bringing Chinese tourists to snorkeling sights. These we crossed some days, but after 4pm, and until about 11am, the entire rock islands invariably belonged to us. Given the beauty of the place, it’s hard to believe that we were the only ones camping here, but the state rangers would later confirm to us that we were.

The temperature was, to say the least, consistent. Reliably, the daily high was exactly 29C; perfect t-shirt weather. At night, the daily low was an equally-reliable 28C. It was always sunny with a few small white clouds; we got a total of three 15 minute showers the entire trip. Most nights, we didn’t put the top fly on the tent, so that we could enjoy the absurd number of stars in our remote skies.

As predicted the reef-sheltered sea was calm and nonthreatening. The water was so clear that we could see the shadow of our kayak 20 meters below us, giving us a strange sensation of flying. Whenever the desire to cool down struck, a quick swim was just a jump overboard away. The sea floor is a mix of pure white sand, which gives the water a hue so blue it looks fake, and corral gardens with tropical fish. The latter made us feel as though we were paddling in an aquarium. We were also greeted daily by various turtles, sharks and other fish; and at night, baby sharks loudly terrorized schools of fish in the shallows of our beaches.

The high culmination of any trip to Palau has to be a visit to Jellyfish Lake. This inland brackish lake is home to an endemic specie of stingless jellyfish that crowds the lake in clouds of millions. We got to jellyfish lake in the morning of our third day and expected to share it with day-tripping tourists, but we had the lake all to ourselves. There are so many jellyfish in the lake that you can clearly see them from the sky. Perhaps understandably, I initially had some reservation about jumping into this hostile-looking cloud. But it turned out to be one of the most exciting underwater experience of my life so far. After brushing against them for an hour, we eventually got used to these harmless primordial creatures. They became almost endearing to us.

Back onboard our leaky steed, we made our way to an island where two different seasons of Survivor™ were filmed (Survivor Palau and Survivor Micronesia). Ulong island was quite out of the way, but the massive beach, once again deserted, made it worth our while.

Palau is a modern-day Eden. But behind the soothing atmosphere lies a frightening past. Death and destruction reigned here for a time during World War II and as we explored we often stumbled upon vestiges of those days in the form of bombed-out fortifications and bunker tunnels. At night, as we camped beside this ruin or that, we could almost hear the sound of artillery echoing from the past. One day, as we left one of our favorite beaches, we saw something in the water below us. Donning our snorkels to inspect, we found it to be a shot-down Japanese Zero plane submerged in shallow waters.

Topside, the islands’ interior is a dense jungle full of tropical birds and giant fruit bats. But having no scorpions, spiders or poisonous snakes, they are perfectly safe to explore on foot. We came across ancient Yapese stone money, stone-age cave paintings and centuries-old potteries fragments but we didn’t uncover any skulls or bones, which can apparently still be found occasionally.

We capped our trip with the smallest commercial flight of our lives. To travel between islands, PMA Pacific offers regular ticketed flights in a 5 passenger Cessna 206. We met our friendly pilot Stephan at the airport whence we flew to the dirt runway of nearby Angaur Island. To describe this flight, requires superlatives. This is, most certainly, the most beautiful flight offered on the planet Earth. And as a bonus, the profits PMA makes are directly used for their charity cause, providing emergency aerial assistance to Palauans in need.

Zhangjiajie: Climbing the Avatar Mountains

After spending a brief evening in Shanghai, I embarked on a 24 hour overnight train to Zhangjiajie, Hunan: home of the “Avatar Mountains”. If you’ve seen the movie Avatar (the one with the blue aliens, not the air bending child), you may remember the “floating mountains”. These mountains are huge column peaks that float in a magnetic field. Why are the Zhangjiajie mountains now dubbed the “Avatar Mountains”? James Cameron actually got the idea of the floating mountains in Avatar from the Zhangjiajie mountains in Hunan. On a perfect day the clouds will drift through the column peaks making the mountains appear as if they are floating!

Zhangjiajie has always been on my bucket list, just check out this post I wrote before studying abroad winter of 2012! After seeing the Ice Festival in Harbin this winter, Zhangjiajie was the last place in mainland China I really wanted to visit. I guess after over a year and a half of living in China I’ve pretty much been EVERYWHERE.

To read the rest of this article by: Richelle at Adventures Around Asia, please click here

Liveaboard in Komodo National Park

A slow boat took our group of 8 out to sea from Labuan Bajo. After 90 minutes the Amalia came into view. But first, dragon trek!The crew helped transfer our luggage while speedboats whisked us away to Rinca Island, where we saw Komodo dragons. Remembering how fierce these beasts were on BBC’s Life we stayed close to our guide.

About Komodo dragons: Komodo National Park is the only place in the world where you can find these cannibalistic lizards. They’re mostly on Rinca and Komodo Islands, with around 1,500 dragons on each. There have been around 35 deaths to date. The most recent accident took place 4 months ago when a Singaporean tourist (who went without a guide) was bitten by one of the dragons. Luckily, he survived the attack.

First Time Visitors Guide To Koh Lanta Island

My first visit to Koh Lanta did not leave a good impression on me. That was about four years ago towards the end of ‘high season’. The menagerie of touts bombarding the new arrivals at Saladan Pier was overwhelming to say the least. All eager to gain a few more bucks before the low season arrived. An abrupt ending of a relaxing and picturesque ferry ride from southernmost Koh Lipe. However, my more recent visit, at the end of low season, showed me a more loveable version of Koh Lanta. I also got a better sense of Koh Lanta as a community rather than Koh Lanta as a tourist hot spot.

Koh Lanta Yai (or just Koh Lanta) is the name of an archipelago of 52 islands (Similar to the archipelago-style layout of Langkawi, Malaysia). The one main island, Koh Lanta Yai, is surrounded by smaller isles and islets. Some of which are inhabited and many that are not. Koh Lanta, itself, is just 30km long and 6km in width, making it a relatively easy island to explore in a short period of vacation time. Koh Lanta was previously known as Pulau Sa-Tuk which is actually Malay and means ‘island with a long mountain range’. In 1917, the official name of Koh Lanta came from the King of Thailand himself. The meaning could refer to the Javanese word ‘lantas’ (a type of grilled fish) or the more mysterious, ‘Koh lan daa’ (the island of a million eyes).

To read more of this article by: Vanessa Workman please click here

Sri Lanka Road Trip for Dummies

Are you a lover of the open road? Do your favourite memories involve good friends, good tunes, and car karaoke? Have you ever thought about what it would be like to do on your own road-trip/dance party whilst overseas? Well that’s exactly what we did this August and we decided to do when we started our Sri Lanka road trip!

When we visited Sri Lanka earlier this year we hadn’t originally planned on renting a car. The famous Sri Lankan railway journeys were fresh in our minds after talking to friends who had visited and loved Sri Lanka. Having loved the trains in India we weren’t really thinking about alternatives when we booked our tickets into the country. It was only once we started researching how to get to places from Colombo International airport that we started thinking about other options.

To read the rest of this article by: Sha Tara Travel, please follow this link: http://www.shataratravel.com/srilanka-roadtrip/

Luxury Retreat to Rejuvenate Your Senses

LUXURY RETREAT TO REJUVENATE YOUR SENSES [MAHABALIPURAM]

As Delhi bloggers van (Ex-Chennai) rolled into Chariot, we were welcomed with garlands made of sea shells and refreshing coconut water.

That’s when it sunk in – I was finally at the beach.

42 acres of bliss beckoned me… and I was ready for it!!!

As a guest of Chariot beach resorts, for this bloggers retreat, my only plan was to have fun in the sun, chill in/by the pool and meet other awesome bloggers – Tick, tick and tick – Mission accomplished.

Chilling by the pool was high on the charts – Tick!

The hard worker in me took on additional responsibility of tackling Chariot’s Instagram for the fun filled 3 day retreat. The idea was to showcase this luxury resort and ofcourse give a glimpse into how other bloggers were enjoying and experiencing the property – This was a big success and turned out to be invaluable in connecting with other bloggers as well as helping the brand out while the resort was scurrying to ensure things went smoothly.

So apart from all the social media work and amazing blogger talks, there was a lot of downtime, beach parties and tours around Mahabalipuram, carefully curated by the resort, so we could experience all flavors of Chariot and beyond.

Follow this link to read more of this awesome article:https://www.wanderwithjo.com/chariot-beach-resort/