With fuel prices soaring, these last two months have been devastating for airlines. Today another airline, Euromanx, the airline of the Isle of Man declared bankruptcy. In April ATA, Aloha, Skybus, and EOS have been among the other victims of this crises. Smaller carriers are facing bigger financial challenges as the costs of operation keep increasing, while the revenue from passengers doesn't match this cost increase.

Money Blue Book Blog has some advice on how to protect yourself against companies who are at risk of going bankrupt. In essence the advice is to use your credit card for any payments where there’s a risk of the company going bankrupt, be it an airline, a tour operator, or any other similar business.

This weekend it was the turn for an Irish trip. We decided to go to Westport, in the west (duh!) of Ireland in County Mayo. The trip from Dublin took around 4 hours, with a short stop-over for lunch in the lavishly decorated PV's pub, in Longford. The GPS on my IPAQ worked perfectly and took us exactly to the entrance of the Glenderan B&B where we were staying.

The B&B was an excellent choice. The room was newly furnished with old style furniture, and was tastefully decorated with hand-made candles and dried flowers. The attention to detail like the two wine glasses, digital TV, supply of tea and coffee, and room service, made this place one of the best B&B's I've ever been to. The breakfast consisted of a selection of cereal, a choice of full Irish breakfast or yoghurt cheese and fruit, and tea or coffee. It's also well priced at 38 Euro per person per night.

Westport is a nice local Irish town which even on a bank holiday weekend was not full of tourists. We got the impression that even though the place is well catered for tourists with a considerable number of B&B's, it's mostly Irish tourists that visit the place. We got further proof of this when we went into a pub on the main street on a Saturday night, and people were looking at us like we had 5 heads.

Westport is also a good starting point for visiting other attractions spots in Mayo. On Saturday and Sunday we visited Achill Island and Croagh Patrick. Achill Island is a postcard picture of the typical Ireland, with rolling green hills, 40 shades of green and an Irish traffic jam with sheep blocking the road. The place is scenic, relaxing and easily toured by car in a day. It reminded me a bit of the Isle of Skye in Scotland.

Croagh Patrick is the mountain (hill for people who live in places with real mountains) where St. Patrick reputably spent 40 days fasting. The mountain which is about 8km away from Westport is a popular pilgrimage site, and some people walk up the mountain barefoot as an act of penance. This must be a really awful experience considering how many rocks of literally all shapes and sizes litter the path. With our hiking boots tightly fastened, we walked up the mountain on Sunday morning in a rare day of glorious weather. The slope gets quite steep at the end, but it's something most people can do. It took us about 2 hours to go up and about the same time to go down. You can rent a stick before starting the ascent, something that's highly recommended if you don't have your own walking stick. On top of the hill there's a small white chapel which is open on the last Sunday in July.

Pictures to follow

Just got back from a wedding weekend break in Warsaw. All the hype that I heard about Polish weddings was well justified, and even though my expectations were high they were completely satisfied. Warsaw itself wasn't the major attraction though, the place is rather dull and the weather didn't help make it any better. I will write a bit more about the Warsaw trip when I upload the pictures.

In the mean time I'm rather busy writing a literature review on Social Network Visualization, interesting but quite time consuming. Hopefully I'll be back to normal in a week's time.

In the same way A white shadow posts about Michael Mifsud's success, and dmiessler posts about atheism, I'm being taken by this Ryanair ad posting habit. After Sarkozy and Bruni won the lawsuit against the O'Leary's airline, the "low fares - high surcharge" airline put up this ad in Italy. It says "Pay your taxes - Not for waste (collection reference to Napels) but to escape". The irony is that Ryanair don't fly to Naples.

Is it a coincidence that they don’t learn? Probably not. The self propagating nature of these ads probably pays many times over, for the damages they incur.

Salon.com has an interesting article on what constitutes “visiting” a country? If you go to the Iguazu Falls and move from one side to the other, does that mean that you've been to both Brazil and Argentina? If you land in Frankfurt in transit to Malaysia, does that mean that you've been to Germany? The article (found via Vagablogging) by Patrick Smith, gives some similar examples and asks what does it mean to visit a country, and should it really matter which countries you’ve visited.

I'm all in favour of making lists of the places I’ve visited. I consider travelling as a hobby and most people keep lists of their collections. Birdwatchers have their birding records, beer fanatics have their beer logs, probably even stamp collectors have their stamp lists, so why shouldn’t a traveler have a places list? Travelling is like collecting experiences in different areas, so it’s no different from any other hobby in this regard. (I’m also a bit of a sucker for lists, and lists will be really handy when the good old Alzheimer’s starts settling in.)

Now to the main point of the question, what does it mean to visit a country? Well, for starters if you never venture beyond the airport’s perimeter that doesn’t mean you visited anywhere except the airport. By certain airport naming conventions, you might end up in a different country than the airport name. For example, Ryanair’s idea of Vienna’s airport is in Bratislava, which isn’t even in Austria.

Probably the commonest way of attributing a visit to a place is to attribute the visit to being physically in the place, and maybe visit some of the most representative sights of the place. For example a visit to Paris would mean seeing the Eiffel Tower, Louvre etc. On a deeper level, one can immerse himself in the ambience of the place, try to interact with the locals, eat their food, and learn about the culture. There are many different levels you can visit a place, but there needn’t be a clear cut judgment on what a visit should mean.

Any country is living organism, always evolving and changing. In some countries the change is more visible than others. In places where there has been war, poverty, oppressive political institutions, the change tends to be more drastic and more visible than the more gradual change happening in more stable countries. This added time attribute to a visit makes each visit unique.

As for what you’re going to write down on the list. I list cities in my “have-been-to” list. I find cities more manageable in terms of size and more representative in what you have really seen. If I visit Moscow that doesn’t mean that I’ve visited the whole 6.5million sq miles of Russia, but I can still say that I’ve been to Moscow.

At last I've uploaded some pictures from the Budapest trip in June. I had to lookup some places in the guidebook again because I forgot what they were. The pictures are uploaded at Smugmug in the Hungary 2007 album. These are the best 2 pictures in my opinion.

It's that time of the year, time to start planning a nice holiday escape out of Europe. As soon as I realized that the Russia/China plan fizzled, my mind started racing and exploring alternatives. Also, I haven’t really had the opportunity to choose a place for holiday in quite a while, so this is also part of it (the Venezuela trip wasn’t entirely 100% my choice).

At the moment I'm looking for interesting destinations and still open for suggestions. I had to park Japan and Madagascar options but they’re just slightly postponed to a later date. South America and Australia are also parked because of the recent visits and that leaves options in Africa and Asia. These are the options under consideration (in no particular order):-

China - For the cultural heritage and loads of other interesting stuff. Was already thinking of going there last year but again that didn’t happen. This year there are the Olympics so there’s a hope that road signs and the like will be translated in English. The Olympics period is not a runner but because it will be busy, but just after the Olympics should be good. China is cheap and there may also be some discounts after the Olympics.

South Africa:- This is a very good choice too, relatively safe and quite a popular tourist destination. The definite must visit places here are Kruger Park and Cape town, which happen to be on different sides of the country but that’s ok. I already have some planning done her because I was going last year with my travel mentor.

Namibia: This is probably the safest spot you can visit in Africa. I know 3 different groups of people who went there. All of them said it’s very cheap and very easy to get by. Like South Africa we can go on a safari, but in Namibia there’s the desert and some very unique scenery.

India: Again a good destination with loads to see and explore. The only thing is that I don’t know much about the place and planning might be a bit tricky with all the options available.

Cambodia/Loas/Vietnam: The Cambodia/Vietnam thing is also very interesting. This area is getting quite a lot of attention from tourists supposedly being beautiful and cheap. Vietnam is probably the most interesting of the 3. Probably might end up choosing 1 of the places to see it properly depending on the time available.

So basically there are spots in Asia and Africa. The Asian part is more concentrated on culture (especially China and India) and the Africa is more concentrated on nature. All of the countries are cheap to visit. Probably the most expensive option from the lot would be South Africa.

If anybody has been to any of these countries or has any alternative suggestions please feel free to comment.

Update: NY Times list of places to visit in 2008