Dinosaur adventure off the beaten track

PHU WIANG National Park is like many other dinosaur-related travel sites around #Thailand. It is weird, wonderful and wacky, located well and truly off-the-beaten track, or the so-called ‘tourist trail’, and is hundreds of miles away from Bangkok, in Thailand’s Northeast region of Isan. 

All around Isan, visitors are most likely to find huge #dinosaur statues towering over a park, at a zoo or alongside a temple. Dinosaurs eve decorate the tops of some public lamp posts as a shout out to the region’s big lizardry claim to fame. 

Khon Kaen province is famous for dinosaurs, and this yarn is all about travelling to the heart of dinosaur country in the Phu Wiang mountains where several important paleontological discoveries were made, including two previously unknown species: ‘Phuwiangosaurus Sirindhornae’, a 15-metre (49 feet) long sauropod named after Thailand’s beloved Princess, Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, and ‘Siamotyrannus Isanensis’, an ancestor of Tyrannosaurus Rex (T-Rex) named after Thailand and Isan.

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Living Down Under . . .

COOBER PEDY in South #Australia is an entire town where the people live underground.

Coober Pedy is the opal capital of the world and where opals were once dug out by hand the dug outs that began as one room expanded as people dug deeper in their search for opals.

The homes are not caves but are actually dug into the hill sides. The entrance is usually at street level, and the rooms extend towards the back into the hill. They are no longer dug out by hand but by machinery and then the walls are sealed with a clear layer to prevent dust.

Fancy a stay in an underground? Choices are endless from B&B's, Hotels,Resorts and a backpackers hostel.

www.cooberpedy.net

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Picture Credit: 106390427@N06/13540130844 Coober Pedy via photopin.com, 106390427@N06/13539812595 Coober Pedy via photopin

A night in the zoo

FANCY a night at the zoo? The Jamala Wildlife Lodge located in the National Zoo & Aquarium in #Canberra, #Australia offers all inclusive overnight packages to spend a night listening to the sounds of wildlife from all around the world.

Split into three accommodation areas all integrated within the zoo exhibits suitable for families and couples alike.

uShaka Lodge has seven suites and features a shark tank in the lounge.

Giraffe Treehouses consists of six suites located in a private enclosure with free roaming animals including the giraffes you can feed from your balcony.

Jungle Bungalows consists of five suites located around the zoo with only a glass wall separating you from some of the biggest and fiercest animals on the planet including lions, bears and cheetahs.

www.jamalawildlifelodge.com.au

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Picture Credit: 8628862@N05/29389541786 Fear or Delight via photopin.com

Stay in a castle!

A 15TH CENTURY castle near Genoa, Italy, has had a major refurbishment and now offers holiday accommodation.

SENAREGA Castle – used in earlier centuries as a prison and a school – has four bedrooms, four bathrooms, a kitchen, and living rooms for guests. The castle is also available for private parties. Overnight stays start from £47 per night for a double room and £73 for a quadruple room.

The area around the castle large number of trails for walkers, bikers, and horse riders. www.liguriaheritage.it/heritage/en/liguriaFeudale/Genova

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Picture Credit: www.liguriaheritage.it

Calling all hobbits!

THIS vacation rental in North Carolina could be the smallest self-catering property in the Western world. (Let me know if you know it isn’t!) 
The three-storey property is 850 sq. ft. small, into which is squeezed two bedrooms and a living room, plus kitchen and shower room. It sleeps six.

Hobbit House, inspired by The Lord Of The Rings, is deep in the woods 4,000 feet up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, so you’d need a 4W-drive to reach it.If guests get a touch of cabin fever, they can go for a mountain walk, or there’s a hot tub in the yard.

The house can be rented for $250 (approximately £164) a night from via the letting agents, Carolina Mornings, in Asheville, North Carolina. (www.carolinamornings.com)

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Picture Credit: www.carolinamornings.com

Europcar brings ToMyCar app to rental market

THE ToMyCar app is a new service from Europcar. With it, customers can book, unlock,
and drive their hire car using their smartphone, eliminating the need to visit the counter.

The service is being launched first in the UK from four key locations – London Heathrow, Manchester and Edinburgh airports, and the Europcar Mobility Centre at ExCeL London.

Customers will be able to return their hire car at any of these key locations.

‘ToMyCar harnesses the latest mobile technology to put our customers in control of the car hire process,’ said Ken McCall, managing director, Europcar UK Group. ‘They can locate and unlock their hire car with their smartphone, eliminating the need for picking up the keys at the desk and returning them after the hire.’

The app provides a map, highlighting the pick-up location of the vehicle, allowing customers to go straight to their hire car. They are then able to access their vehicle using their downloaded key via their smartphone.

Any vehicle damage can be recorded by the customer and reported via the app, before they open the doors and begin their journey.

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Surf Snowdonia!

SURF SNOWDONIA – scheduled to open in July – will be a water sports park in the village of Dolgarrog in the Conwy Valley, North Wales. 

It’s being billed as the world's first publicly-accessible Wavegarden artificial surfing lagoon.

It generates consistent surfing waves of heights up to 6 feet, in a 980ft lagoon, and is said to be safe for both beginners and experienced surfers.

www.surfsnowdonia.co.uk

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Picture Credit: Courtesy surfsnowdonia.co.uk

Fact or fiction, the challenge for Nature Watch

A SURVEY by UK holiday property rental company holidaycottages.co.uk suggests that one in seven children believe that they might come across fictional creatures from the Harry Potter series in the British countryside. 

Fourteen percent of the 7-12-year-olds questioned said they believed in dragons and werewolves, creatures commonly spotted at Hogwarts, while 11 percent thought Gilly Weed and Whomping Willow were real plants and trees.

In response, holidaycottages.co.uk is urging families to remedy this and encourage children to explore the country’s wildlife as part of its Nature Watch campaign.

When asked to state whether certain species were real or fictional, almost half of the children surveyed either didn’t know or thought that common native trees and plants, such as Silver Birch, Holly, Bluebell and Honeysuckle, were imaginary species.

The agency’s Nature Watch campaign is designed to encourage families to spend more time in the countryside this spring and summer. In an effort to raise children’s awareness and understanding of wildlife, nature and the importance of protecting their natural habitat, it has developed a free wildlife activity pack that can be download from its website.

It’s also running a competition. Young explorers who share their wildlife picture, photograph or short story have the chance to win a £500 voucher towards their next family holiday. Full details at www.holidaycottages.co.uk/blog/nature-watch.

‘We take great pride in offering holidays to some of the UK’s most beautiful locations and want to encourage the nation’s children to enjoy the great outdoors with Nature Watch,’ said James Morris, director at holidaycottages.co.uk. ‘I come from a generation that spent a great amount of its childhood playing outside, not cooped up in front of a television or computer screen. The fact that a third of today’s 7-12 year-olds don’t know or think that dragonflies, honeybees, and daddy long legs are not real just shows us that we need to get back to that and celebrate our native wildlife more.’

Go Holiday editor David Kernek comments: The company was either extraordinarily unlucky in surveying what turned out to be an exceptionally dim sample of children, or education standards in our schools are far worse than even the pessimists fear. Either way, these findings are terrifying!

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Picture Credit: GoHoliday via Wikimedia Commons.

Where to see the whale sharks

WESTERN AUSTRALIA is preparing for another big whale shark season, following sightings of the world's largest fish near Exmouth in the State's Coral Coast region ....

More than 19,000 people visited the World Heritage-listed Ningaloo Reef in 2014 to get up close with the creatures, who migrate to the Western Australian shores between March and August each year to feed on plankton and krill.

Whale shark swim tours will begin from Coral Bay and Exmouth from mid-March until August, allowing visitors the opportunity to have a face-to-fin encounter with whale sharks – which can grow up to 59ft in length.

www.westernaustralia.com

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Picture Credit: "Requin baleine" by zclemz - Own work via Wikimedia Commons.

More ‘looking for a road less travelled?’ - the sequal

Here’s some more from OPERA, makers of the Opera web browsers, and its list of stand-out-from-the-pack travel websites that might help you to discover some amazing, quirky and unusual travel experiences well of off the trodden track.

Adioso: If you’re one of those people without a clue about where and when to travel, this flight comparison site is a great resource. The site offers flexible travel options based on budgets and interests.

Spotted By Locals: No matter where you travel or how much research you do, as a tourist you are bound to end up at some standard “must-see” tourist attractions, unless you have a local connection. This is where this site comes in, offering curated content from locals spanning more than 50 European and American destinations. Each city has local authors who give insider tips on what to do and, more importantly, what not to do in their cities.

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Picture Credit: From Top -  Temple of Debod, Madrid, Spain by Fernando García Redondo via Wikimedia Commons;  Black Bottle restaurant, Seattle, USA by Joe Mabel via Wikimedia Commons

More ‘looking for a road less travelled?’

Here’s more from OPERA, makers of the Opera web browsers, and its list of stand-out-from-the-pack travel websites that might help you to discover some amazing, quirky and unusual travel experiences well of off the trodden track.

Atlas Obscura: A compendium of the most strange and obscure places in the world. 

Whether it’s a small Michigan town called Hell on Earth, where anyone can be mayor for a day, or the strange Skeleton Lake of Roopkund in India, the website never fails to surprise with its bizarre attractions. http://www.atlasobscura.com/

Oh! ........and here's another website of the whacky and weird we found for you: http://www.weirdus.com/ 

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Picture Credit: Frm Top -  Skeletons in Roopkund Lake, India by Schwiki via Wikimedia Commons; Hamilton Pool, Texas, USA by Eric in SF via Wikimedia Commons