Category: travel

Arriving in Sharm el Sheik

Took a while to adjust myself, took some money out and forgot to pick it up, then made my way to Na’Ama bay.

Since getting a flight from Manchester was the cheapest option. With Thomsonfly £123 single. I’ve flown into Sharm rather than any of the other destinations which worked out considerably more expensive plus didn’t have the flexibility.

Sharm is not my ideal choice, but I’ll hang out here for a couple of days to get my bearings.

PADI
Also, Sharm is one of the cheapest places to do a PADI.

I intend to do a course, so will be blogging this and what it entails.

Serbia & Kosovo – A new front for the war on terror

Kosovo: 10th December marks the official deadline for sovereignty negotiations to end. For someone that’s visited Kosovo (and Serbia) within the last 3 months, I can bring back the following observations.

a) Kosovo has been invaded by Albanians:
Maybe you need to quantify this statement in wikipedia. As a foreign onlooker, the number of Albanian, not Serbian, flags throughout the territory leads you to believe you’re in Albania, not Serbia.

b) Almost 1/3 of the traffic on the roads is KFOR:
If, like the newspapers are saying, there is a rumbling of radicalism. It stands to be toward the Serbs.
With 45,000 troops stationed there, any attack on Kosovo is likely to be met with stiff resistance and international back-up.

In black and white
Historically pitted with conflict, there are no black and white solutions.
In an attempt to be seen to be ‘doing good’, KFOR’s presence has had the net-effect of setting both Serbia and Kosovo back 7 years, also, giving rise to the growth of criminal cells with close links to terrorism, who have prospered under the troops presence through illegal-goods, prostitution and the supply of drugs.

The politics
Personally, I don’t think the region has any potential for serious conflict, Serbia is too poor and Kosovo has too many troops.

If Kosovo achieves independence, you can expect that within 5-10 years resolutions will make it part of the wider Albanian authority, and eventually becoming part of Albanian territory per-se.

Budget flights – new season – new search engine


Part of my job for the site that sponsors this blog lonelyplanetexchange.com is a routine shuffling of the site’s accommodations and flights databases.

Twice a year, May and November, two of the databases on which the site rests are removed along with all the information about easyjet flights or cheap hotels in Amsterdam and thrown in the bin.

Not like a genocide, more a general purge of all the nasty old stuff from yester-month replaced by new business and new flight routes.

A lot of the sites I’ve been on today I’ve noticed how shabby their systems are.
In a number of cases, operators display flights which don’t exist to make their search forms look busy.

Here’s a list of the search engines in the UK budget flights market and how they rank.

:) Nice
1 – Ryanair – Fast, fresh data with pop-up warnings initially alarming but at the same time helpfull.
2 – Easyjet – More aesthetically pleasing than Ryan also displays departure days making it easier to get the cheaper flights.
3 – Thomson – Copes well considering the level of seasonal fluctuation. During the UK summer Thomsonfly is the UK’s largest operator by routes.

:( Nasty
1 – Air Baltic – Clunky and green with high prices. Baltic whisks you off to affiliate sites quicker than you can say ‘gulag’.
2 – BMI baby – Another browser hijacker. Pick a flight; next thing the browser is doing the walking for you.
3 – Fly Thomas Cook – A site where the homepage is located in the script repository.
Most of the routes are in action but a large minority (40%) are just there to make it look good.
I’m pretty sure Thomas Cook don’t have one individual, designer or manager, with responsibility for this site because it’s a mess.

A quick word from our sponsors
Given my experiences, I can look and say that by using budget flight search engines like lonelyplanetexchange or skyscanner, you’re removing an element of hit and miss and getting a selection of the cheapest flights from a variety of sources.
That’s got to be the way forward.