Tour and Travel

About las vegas, well who doesn’t know this city. It’s one of the notorious city at Nevada. Some call it city of sin, but hey, it’s much fun there!.

The history began when Raphael Rivera, first European visit Las Vegas Area in 1829. In that time, areas of the valley contained artesian wells that supported extensive green areas (Vegas mean green areas).

In 1844, Las Vegas was still part of Mexico. But on 1855, Las Vegas was annexed by the United States, after that day, United States assigned 30 missionaries to convert the Paiute Indian population to Mormonism. Later, Mormons abandoned Las Vegas in 1857, during the Utah War.

Las Vegas was re-established as a railroad town on 1905, when 110 acres owned by the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad was auctioned off in what is now downtown Las Vegas. Then Las Vegas became an city on March 16, 1911 and Peter Buol was assigned as the first mayor.

Enough for history lesson, now it’s the fun news. According to my friend, there’s a lot of Las Vegas Club and Casino at that city. All of that club and casino have unique landscape and design. And my lucky friend even go to strip club just for fun and prove to me that’s Vegas really had strip club, ha ha. When I ask him, why he didn’t go to Casino, he told me that it’s already seen on film so it’s no fun to go to casino.

One person’s budget for a fortnight in Egypt might well run to a couple of thousand dollars, for others it would be a few hundred.

Generally, budget travel is considered shoestring. Lonely Planet almost made the name their own with their original travel guide to Southeast Asia; for travelers on a tight budget. I even used the yellow book myself in the eighties.

Now LP have guides to just about everywhere, and have included mid-range and top end hotels in their places to stay; to cast the net wider. We’ll be looking at the guidebooks next week.

If you’re traveling on the cheap, there’s nothing to stop you entering the five star hotels. Some of them have good value, all you can eat buffets; at a price travelers can afford — occasionally.

If you’re starting out on a lengthy 3 to 6 month overland journey, you will indeed need to budget for three to seven thousand dollars.

Your budget will vary depending on where you travel. Europe is not as cheap anymore, and the gendarmes aren’t so tolerant of back-packers sleeping on the beach.

When the Summer is over you wouldn’t want to anyway, but it’s still a good time to travel in Europe. The queues for museums have gone, you’ll have less tourists in your photographs, and you will get to meet the locals; in the high season they’re all on holiday too. And guess what? The accommodation prices are coming down as well; almost half the price in some heavily tourist areas.

Amsterdam and Prague are great budget places in September and October, and Paris is coming back to life — the Parisians desert the French capital in August, and that’s not a lot of fun if you like to sit at a brasserie table and watch the world go by.

Good value travel can still be had in Asia, South America, and parts of Africa. In West Africa, for example, the Francophone countries are more expensive than the former English colonies, with Abidjan and Dakar the two most expensive cities. Ghana is a treasure. Now’s the time to start planning for the Southern Hemisphere

The most expensive part of the trip is usually the flight ticket. In this article, we are talking about the budget travel after the the ticket is bought. Getting a good price on airline tickets is quite an art in itself.

You can even make reservations online.

Your budget for traveling, once the ticket is bought, will of course depend on your comfort requirements in both accommodation and transportation.

Dormitory beds, or a room with your own shower; hard seats on 36-hour Chinese trains, or a sleeper in a closed compartment. These are the extremes and there is always somewhere in between.

I have stayed in some very nice hotels in South America for $5, and some dives in the United States for five to ten times that.

There are old colonial mansions in West Africa that you never want to leave and water palaces, surrounded by rice paddies, in Indonesia that offer an outdoor swim before breakfast. Once travelers tell Lonely Planet about these places, they loose the atmosphere. So I’m not going to tell you where they are either.

There are always gems on the route less travelled, and that is the beauty of traveling without knowing where you’ll be staying.

That’s budget travel to me. You have a wad of money when you start out, and you really don’t know how far you’ll get with it. If you want to know how much it’s all going to cost and where you’ll stay, then book through a travel agent.

Before you get your head down for the night you’ll have to get there. Some people do hitch-hike in Asia and South America, but transportation is reasonably cheap and frequent.

The greatest luxury is time, budgeting your time is also a part of independent travel. Again if you don’t have enough of it, you’ll be forced to take the tours.

In countries like India and China you will need to book the long-distance trains at least a day in advance, sometimes three days or more.

Many a traveler has come unstuck by looking around Beijing for three or five days, and then being forced to stay another three or five because they can’t get a ticket out.

On the popular routes, you sometimes need to book your tickets out, before you settle in. Unwanted tickets are easier to sell than trying to buy one for a train that leaves in half an hour.

In West Africa you simply turn up at the autogare and wait for the Peugeot to fill up — early mornings are always best. While other countries have bus stations with many companies competing to get you on theirs that is leaving right away.

So whatever your budget, there’s always something for you — you pay the money, you take the choice. Don’t forget that some countries require you to pay for a visa, and when your budgeted time is out you may well have to pay a departure tax.

Why do we travel?

Are we looking simply to escape, to take a break from the stressors of daily life? Is it because it makes us happy? Because it is fun?

I would say that the majority of people who travel are looking for something more—whether we realize it or not, the experience of travel provides far more than a relaxing and fun getaway (although that’s a big part of it). I might even go so far as to say that the desire to travel is a primal instinct, and if we all listen closely enough, we can hear it telling us to explore, to connect, to venture out into our world and see what it’s all about. After all, we’ve been doing this very thing since the dawn of man.

Even the most basic instincts are spawned from somewhere—a need to survive, a need to protect, a need to nurture. In a world where we are connected to cultures and happenings with the touch of a button, what could travel possibly provide us that we don’t already have at our fingertips, and why do we feel so compelled to go out and see it firsthand? Where does this need come from?

The African bushman story tellers talk about two kinds of Hunger: They say there is physical hunger, and what they call the Great Hunger. This is the hunger for meaning, and there is only one thing that is truly insufferable, and that is a life without meaning. There is nothing wrong, they say, with the search for happiness but there is something greater: Meaning, which transfigures all. When you have meaning, you are content and you belong.

There is nothing as insufferable as a life without meaning. This hunger to find meaning in our lives, our purpose—beyond the quest for happiness, beyond material things, beyond all else that outwardly defines us, we are looking for something deeper. Travel—near or far—I believe, satiates this hunger. When we travel, we can better understand our world, we come to understand ourselves and find meaning in the smallest of experiences, enriching our lives in ways that perhaps no other activity can.

I invite you to take a look at your own travels—past, present and future—and explore the reasons you go where you go, want to see what you see, and listen to other reasons that might not be so obvious. To find even deeper meaning and connect with the places you visit, consider getting involved when you travel. Whether its donating to or visiting travel philanthropy projects or taking a volunteer vacation, there are innumerable opportunities to give back, benefit and protect the places and communities we so cherish.

In this month’s Responsible Travel Report, learn about a project underway in Kenya to help communities and protect precious trees, with an opportunity to donate via our Travelers Giving Back program. Also, if you’re planning a trip to Latin America anytime soon, consider a volunteer vacation with Volunteer Latin America. Lastly, we’re taking an opportunity to thank our own valued volunteers in STI behind the Scenes