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Posts Tagged ‘Galapagos Islands’

During 2010 I have decided that I am going to educate myself a little more about all the wonderful places in the World.

I will admit that Geography was never my best subject when I was at school. It didn’t help that my teacher was a real bore and he didn’t seem to enjoy the subject.

However, my 2 children have studied Geography and both have been absolutely fascinated by all there is to learn and listening to their enthusiasm has prompted me to maybe reconsider my Geography knowledge.

My son is thinking about destinations to travel to for his Gap Year adventures. I think he has decided to plump for a Galapagos Islands Holiday. Well it isn’t going to be a holiday, more a learning experience and a real change to his everyday life.

He is planning on starting his travels in the Galapagos Islands, so I think a good starting point for my Geography lessons would be there. The islands are part of Ecuador and consist of six main islands, with twelve smaller islands and at least forty small islets. Some of the islands are quite far apart with some of them taking upto 6 hours to travel to by boat. Bearing this in mind I would have thought that Galapagos Cruises are a really popular choice with visitors to the Islands and an absolutely brilliant way of experiencing the Galapagos.

Now for me Walking Holidays don’t sound brilliant, but when you consider what you will actually be experiencing you might change your mind. Who know’s you might just manage to get a glimpse of the fantastic Giant Tortoises native to this area. I have already carried out a bit of research and have discovered that there were fifteen species of the Galapagos giant tortoise, but sadly four are now extinct. However, thanks to all the efforts of the conservationists, the remaining species are managing to survive, which is absolutely fantastic.

I think my son is going to have a fantastic time when he is away, and he will certainly bring lots of new experiences and knowledge home with him. I think I will have my work cut out to learn about all the places he is going to visit, but I definitely think it is worthwhile, as knowledge is wonderful.

It is coming up to the 100th Anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic.

It seems absolutely unbelievable that it is nearly 100 years ago since this awful event happened. 

As we all know the Titanic was an absolutely magnificent vessel for its time, but do you know how much it would have cost to travel on this huge sea vessel back in 1912?

If you were really lucky enough to be travelling First-Class, one of their parlour suites would have cost you approximately 4,350 US Dollars.  In today’s money this equates to roughly 50,000 US Dollars. If you had a bit more cash, you could have booked one of their most expensive rooms and in today’s money this would have been equivalent to 80,000 US Dollars.

It seems very strange, but even though First-Class passengers had paid so much for their ticket, they still had to pay to use the swimming pool, which worked out about 25c per swim and if they wanted to have a game of squash, this would have set them back about 50c.

A third-class passenger ticket would have set them back 35 US Dollars and in today’s money this would be approximately 620 US Dollars.    There could be as many as 10 people per room, and sometimes the rooms were divided between females and males, so hence families were split.

The Titanic even had its own newspaper and it was called the Atlantic Daily Bulletin.     This was prepared daily on the ship and as well as news articles and advertisements, it had information such as the daily menu, latest stock prices, society gossip and even horse-racing results.

There is now going to be a Titanic Memorial Cruise due to set sail on April 8th 2012.

Personally speaking I cannot think of anything worse and would much prefer to set out on a Galapagos Cruise.   Imagine sailing around the beautiful Galapagos Islands and seeing all the beautiful and wondrous things.  Surely this has got to be more agreeable than following the doomed Titanic route?