My border crossing from Chetumal, Mexico, into the next country on my list, Belize, went pretty smooth, if not a little slowly. I took a bus full of tourists, just like me. First we exited the bus to get stamped out of Mexico. Normally you get charged a Mexican tourism tax with your airline tickets, which I did, but I read that the border guards try to scam tourists into paying it again when leaving. Me and the couple in…
I hope you’re comfortable because this post is gonna be dense. I left Tulum on an early bus going further south to Chetumal and then got right into a taxi to take me to the airport where I rented a car for this next leg of the trip. Because a car equals freedom. But before driving out of Chetumal, I made a quick stop at their Mayan Culture Museum. The museum was fairly small, but sure packed a punch. They…
Another adventure has begun! This has probably been the roughest start to any of my many trips so far, though. So much so that I’m not even in the right country. I was planning on three months in Thailand, but due to lots of miscommunication between Thailand immigration, the airlines, myself, and one stupid typo, I wasn’t allowed on the plane. The saga probably deserves a post of it’s own, but I’ll leave that for another time. Thailand, unfortunately, will…
I intentionally tried to end this trip to Italy with one of it’s bigger and more significant cities and Florence turned out to be perfect for just that. Along with the size and significance came an awful lot of people. This last several days has been a chaotic mix of pedestrian traffic jams, waiting in lines to see sights that a month ago I could just walk right into, and having to buy advance tickets for things wondering if I…
My route from Modena to Bologna may be the shortest stretch of travel I’ve had on this entire trip. Just a quick thirty minute train ride. And since I’ve already passed through the train station here three times in the past week, I may as well explore the whole city. Bologna is a really busy university town, in fact, the university is the oldest university in the world, established in 1088. Bologna, despite all the idealistic young hipster students walking…
It was another long, yet easy travel day following the Adriatic coast way up north to Ravenna. It’s probably not one of Italy’s more famous cities, but perhaps it should be. For most of the 5th to 7th centuries, around three hundred years, while the rest of the empire was falling apart, Ravenna was the capital of western Rome and after that, the capital of the Ostrogoth kingdom. Today Ravenna is most well known as the mosaic capital of Italy….
Just a couple of short train rides, first north to Brindisi for a quick connection and now I’m in Matera, one of the oldest inhabited places on earth. One source I read claims that it’s the third longest inhabited place on earth. How they know that is beyond me, but in any case, civilization has been in this spot for around 7000 to 8000 years. A long long time! It was afternoon when I arrived, so I only had time…
When I said in my last post that I was going to spend a whole day on a bus, I meant a whole day. I had to make my way from Sicily in the west all the way to the Salentine Peninsula (Italy’s boot heel) in the east. I left Catania about 930am. The most exciting thing that happened was the ferry crossing from Sicily to the mainland. About 530pm I arrived in Taranto for a four hour layover. So…
It really doesn’t seem that far on the map, but it took nearly five hours on the train to get from Agrigento to Catania, on Sicily’s east coast. Catania, like most of Sicily’s cities was originally a Greek city, going all the way back to the 8th century BC. The first thing I noticed while walking to my hotel, however, was the remains of the 2nd century Roman theatre. Most of it is buried underneath the modern buildings, but this…
Just a quick update from Agrigento on Sicily’s southern coast. I originally planned on visiting Selinunte as part of my stay here, but since the buses are uncooperative and since I ended up seeing it from Palermo in my one day rental car, I found myself with some extra time. So I visited the ancient city of Akragas, also known as The Valley of the Temples, and the only other thing I had planned, at a much more relaxed pace….