World Travel Market 2007 From The Carnivore Restaurant to Romantic Wedding Packages

World Travel Market 2007-11-13
In November the world’s country tourist boards, destinations, airlines, hotels and attractions held a trade show in London at ExCel to publicize their latest stories and sell their features for next year. So what's new for 2008?
http://www.wtmlondon.travel/
http://www.wtmlondon.com/

As well as teaching English I am a travel writer always on the lookout for destinations suitable for Valentine’s Day, weddings and honeymoons and anniversary weekends.

UK
Wales is offering a mid-week Valentine’s package at Lake Vyrnwy, in a country house hotel with panoramic views of Snowdonia. Some bedrooms have lake views or four-poster suites. One has a bath by the window. The hotel also has a spa pool.
http://www.lakevrnwy.com/

Dream Weddings organizes wedding packages in Larnaka, Cyprus.
http://www.palmbeachhotel.com/

Kenya
Kenya offers lots of attractions in and around Nairobi. Narobi's most famous restaurant is The Carnivore where diners can taste meats ranging from giraffe to snake. Also see the Karen Blixen Museum and the Daphne Sheldrick’s elephant orphanage. You can go walking with the Masai warriors who are now running tourist attractions. 'They don't visit the dentist. They visit the toothbrush bush.' Accommodation includes tented camps with nets over beds. Forms of transport include trains and matatu minibuses with music and spectacular painted designs. http://www.magicalkenya.com/

USA
More pampering can take place at Red Door Lifetyle Spa, Elizabeth Arden, at the Hyatt Regency Bonaventure, in Florida, where she gets a bikini wax and he gets a sports manicure.
www:reddoorlifestylespa.com

Romania
In Romania you can travel on the recently restored Royal train, or follow Jewish heritage.
http://www.romantiatourism.com/
email romaniatravel@btconnect.com
or tel:0 207 935 6435.

Israel
Israel, official travel destination of Arsenal football club, is the world’s oldest wine producing region and has 150 wineries. In the Dead Sea you can’t sink and don’t need to apply sunscreen, and you get 8% more oxygen so you breathe easily. Eilat in the south has a restaurant offering underwater views of the coral reef.
thinkisrael.com

South Africa
South Africa’s malaria free Madikwe Game Reserve has a wedding package offering the bride a spa treatment and the groom and friends archery target shooting. The Madikwe Hills Game Lodge has a honeymoon suite where the bathroom is enclosed by boulders.
http://www.madikwehills.com/ http://www.madikwecollection.com/

Italy
In Italy the beautiful bay of Naples, where fishing boats go out at night to attract fish by using lights, inspired opera singer Caruso to write Come back to Sorrento. You can stay in the Caruso Suite where he wrote it, enjoying the view from the terrace, and using the piano at the hotel Excelsior Vittoria (victory).

At Heathrow you’ll see ads for featuring fooball’s FIFA World Player of the year, Fabio Cannavaro, promoting Campania, the area of Naples, Sorrento, Positano, the Isle of Capri, Vesuvius, Pompeii and the Amalfi drive coast.
http://www.turismoregionecampania.it/ www.regione.campania.it

Looking for visit something unusual and uplifting nearer home? On the way to the World Travel Market on the train I met a friend. When I told her about my seeing the Chagall windows in Zurich, Switzerland, she told me you could see Chagall windows in Tudeley church near Tunbridge Wells.

A rich Jewish Sephardi landowner who married a Christian lost his daughter in a drowning accident and later in her memory commissioned the church windows which contain the symbolic ladder to heaven as well as images of water. The windows are beautiful on a sunny day.

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. Please share links to posts.

SWITZERLAND & CHAGALL

Switzerland and Chagall
Oct 5, 2007
Switzerland has several sites of interest to Jewish travellers and I recently saw some connected with painter Chagall in the capital Zurich. Two of the city's major attractions are the Chagall windows and the art museum.

The Chagall windows are in a church. They are the main attraction in the building. The windows are in a separate chapel at the 'back', the opposite end to the altar. I'm not sure which was is north or whether the church is orientated towards Jerusalem as many religious buildings worldwide are. (Maybe somebody could comment on this.)

The chapel is small high, echoing and peaceful. People enter and stand at the back reverently looking up at the windows which are pencil thin. A few chairs are either side of the doorway and people sit contemplating. It is quite uplifting.

It was a haven of cool on a hot day in September. So calm. And restful.

I recognized some symbols. Jacob's ladder.

I bought a book about the windows, hoping for more enlightenment. What I learned was the interesting history of the commissioning of the windows. The city had run a competition for local people to submit designs but nothing was considered suitable. Then a Chagall exhibition at the nearby art gallery showed his windows in the chapel of the hospital in Israel.

Chagall, already quite old and very busy, was asked if he would consider a commission. It seemed doubtful that he would. However, he visited the site and was so delighted with its atmosphere that he accepted.

Only a proportion of the necessary funds had been raised to pay both the designer Chagall (who had to travel from France I believe) and the makers of the huge windows (plus no doubt transportation and installation and lots of other costs). However, new donors appeared.

Only a few steps across the bridge to the other side of the 'river' from the nearby lake, and a determined march up the cobblestoned alleys of the old city brings you to the skyscrapers of the new city and the art museum which houses Chagall paintings.

Travel The Pleasures & Pitfalls

I've done a lot of travelling. Lived in the USA as an expat from the UK. We used to leave early Friday afternoon and drive away for the weekend.

Also went on press trips. My spouse was a speaker at conferences. So we were given a room in the big hotel at company expense. Sometimes the hotel was full and we were in a nearby hotel. Rush, rush, rush.

Exhausting politics. Get to met VIPs at breakfast. Should you complain about being in second rate hotel or keep quiet?

Lots of the time it is not as glamorous as it sounds. You fly through the night. Lose luggage.
Arrive on five hours sleep. They don't have your booking.

You are given a room overlooking a building site. Instead of the (Sydney) harbour view you are due to spend a week looking at dustbins.

You sit listening to a party next door while you wait for your spouse to come back from a meeting which has taken two hours longer than they said.

You miss the morning's guided tour waiting for room to be changed. Then you lose more time sending off your spouse's clothes to the laundry.

The promised swimming pool is closed for repairs or for winter. The hotel is miles from the city.

At dinner you smile into space for two hours having been told not to interrupt because of some important negotiation. You dare not speak because you must not risk revealing that you diverted to that country not on holiday but because of a job interview wtih another company.

I didn't appreciate how lucky I was until I got a peeved letter complaining, 'You are a fantasist. Nobody lives that life style.'

Really? So who is in all those big hotels at conferences? Actually businessmen whose marriages fall apart because four conferences out of five the wife is left at home wondering whether her husband is sleeping with some other woman.

I'm not complaining. That's where I want to be. Using up frequent flyer miles to visit exotic locations, swim in the hotel pool, pad across the sandy beach to paddle in the surf, back to the bubbles of the Jacuzzi, buffet breakfast, souvenirs on discount from the hotel shop. American hotels are the best - doesn't every shop in America have discount of the day?

Given the choice between cleaning and cooking, shopping for food, shopping for souvenirs and clothes, and sightseeing, guess what I would prefer?