Why to use a travel agent for Cruise Vacation

Most cruise line has a policy of no discount fare. Hence price remains constant unless you have a huge group and book most of the rooms on a cruise. Where there are chances that a travel agent will share a portion of their commission as on board credit. There are so many cruse lines to choose from. Sometimes it becomes difficult to judge if experience will be one of the best while on a dream vacation. It is the job of the travel agent to advice you what fits your liking. Not all cruise lines have same kind of entertainment. For example, Royal Caribbean has DreamWorks on four of their ships. (Check info about these ships here if you are interested. You may search for some of the sailings here). It is a life time experience and one should not miss the wonderful time. It may be a different thought for you where you might wish to go a cruise who serve unlimited wine with fewer crowds on board. One would rather spend time on the deck then going to such shows. It is the job of the travel agent to advice and let you know what would fit your need. All Cruise Lines would like to sell their product but only a travel agent will give you an unbiased judgment of what is good for you. A travel agent takes care of all your need that helps your vacation to be a memorable one. Get a life time experience now and get talk to a cruise expert today at www.worldwinger.com

Bon Voyage!!!

Online Cruise Deals

How often you have thought about going on a cruise and thought it would be very expensive. Well, many believe all we need to do is plan ahead. You can hold your space with as low as $500 for and get full refund if you cannot make it. This should be doen ahead of time to make it to our advantage. Instead of paying creadit card companies huge interest by booking it at the last moment and paying full, it is always good to hold a room in advance then keep paying monthly to save on credit card interest and make your cruise vacationa a memorable and inexpensive. if you decide not to go, get a full refund, which is almost like a saving that you get back. However do not miss the oppurtunity to enjoy and get pampered. WorldWinger Travel now has online cruise booking engine where you can search for the best cruise deals available. you may visit the site or call 888-699-4643 to get the best of the best deals for cruise.

Happy sailing

Closer look at Saphire Princess on a Mexican Rivera Cruise trip

The green, green grass of home

Lately, I'd been thinking a lot about India. In fact, to be truthful, I always think about India- it's people, it's multi-cultured and multi-lingual personality, it's heritage, it's idiosyncrasies, and all the other tidbits that makes it what it is; that makes it home. And when you are this far away from home, you're bound to miss it.
However, when posed with the question "what do you miss the most about India?" most people seem to come up with family, friends and food as the answers, in no definite order. Of course you miss your family, no doubt you miss your friends, and obviously you miss your home food, especially your Mom's cooking, but are these the only things that you miss about a country where you spent at least twenty years of your life? (this is for all those 1st generation immigrants)
Call me weird, call me crazy, or call me Bhagat Singh like my husband does, but I sure miss a lot more about India than only my family and friends. Just the other day I got into a discussion (read argument) with a friend as to how I would still want to go to India even if all my family and friends were here. To me, India and my family are not synonymous. I love India in its own right. Not because my family lives there. Not because I left my friends there. Now you might ask that why do I love India then? Well......I ask you, why do you love your Mom? Why do you love your child? Any answers? Maybe this is the beauty of love. You don't need a reason or an excuse to love someone or something. You just do.
I too love India just like that. I don't need a reason to love it. Many people have tried to show me the advantages of leaving India, telling me what a mess that country is. Yes, I agree that India is a mess of a nation, but, it's my mess; and I love it. And I miss it. I miss the dusty roads. I miss the sweaty people. I miss the crowded buses and trains. I miss the familiar faces in the crowd. I miss the train rides. I miss the station tea. I miss the shouting hawkers. I miss haggling for prices of anything and everything. I even miss the potholes on the road.
There are so many things, feelings, emotions and sensations that I miss now that I took so much for granted back home. Take the simple vegetable hawker for instance. Oh how I miss them. Although the grocery store is not that far from my house here but having to go there every second or third day sure is a headache. How I would love to have the 'sabjiwala' come to my door and ask me "didi kuch lengi? sabji taaza hai". And why only the sabjiwala, I miss the kabadiwala too. It pains me to just throw away all the newspapers and magazines at the end of every month, even if I'm throwing them into the recycle bin. I miss getting Rs 3 for every kilo of newspaper or magazine I could have sold. I also find it weird to just throw away stuff, be it anything. Back home, we hardly ever threw away anything. It was all saved for the kabariwala. I miss those ice cream vendors that came in the hot summer afternoons. The ice creams, of course used to be made of synthetic colours but there was nothing synthetic about the fun we had waiting for the ice cream man. And speaking of hot summer afternoons, how can I forget 'gheesa baraf'. I know I can have as many slushes here as I please, but it's just not the same. There was something about that small earthen bowl in which they used to give the 'gheesa baraf' that I cannot find in the plastic cups of the slushes. Summers also meant mangoes, and having lived most of life in that part of the world which produces the best mangoes, I cannot pass the mangoes available here as real mangoes, no matter how hard I try. To me, mango is Dussehri, Langra, Chausa and an occasional Alphonso maybe.
Now that I've recounted the joys of summer back home, how can I leave the monsoons behind? And thinking of monsoon makes me think of that earthly scent of a sun parched land getting its first rain. Oh that divine scent, which I've never smelt here; although it rains nine out of twelve months in the town I live. After the monsoon, it's winter. And with winter comes the moongfali wala. And gajar ka halwa, and sleeping in the sun outside while all the ladies of the colony gathered to make pickles. And yes, the pickles. How I miss those pickles.
What more do I miss about India? The numerous festivals big and small, the bright and colourful three day long weddings which gave you the excuse of dressing up extravagantly. The wedding processions that took four hours to travel a distance of four kilometres. The Diwali lightings, the Holi colours, the Dussehra Ramdals and Ram leelas, I miss all of these, but maybe most of all what I miss is the arrival of guests without any prior notice, and also going to others house without informing them a week before. Maybe this was the biggest cultural shock I got after coming to US. Back home, guests were always welcome, whenever they arrived. They did not have to make reservations at my house a week before coming and I did not have to seek their permission to go see them. I know the reasons why this is not possible here, but that does not stop me missing it.
There are so many things I miss about India. Too many to put down here at least. Sometimes I wish I were there. Back in the land which I had called home for twenty four years. Back with my family, with my friends, eating home made food and enjoying all that India has to offer, and specially now that I can appreciate them more. But then, these are only wishes.........and only end up reminding me a few lines of a poem by William Cowper I'd read in school-

"How fleet is a glance of the mind!
Compared with the speed of its flight,
The tempest itself lags behind,
And the swift-winged arrows of light.
When I think of my own native land,
In a moment I seem to be there;
But, alas! recollection at hand
soon hurries me back to despair."

Been there, Done that!

So, as you all know through my last post (I'm assuming you read it), we i.e, me and my hubby D were all set for a vacation. By 'all set' I mean we had agreed that we wanted/needed a break from our routines and so had thought of going on a vacation, and after much discussion (arguments??) we had settled on a trip to Egypt.
So what do you do when you've finally decided on a place for your vacation and are all in a tizzy over it? Obviously, you plan ahead. You surf through the net and pay visits to numerous travel sites, call a few travel agents who you feel are giving good deals/packages to your desired destination, maybe spend a day visiting tour and travel companies downtown, read as many travel blogs as you can and make the lonely planet website your homepage. Trust me, I did all of this, only to realize that even after two weeks of trying to find a proper travel package/deal, I was no near to getting it than I was a month ago.
To my utter frustration, I discovered that I'd visited most of the known travel companies and tour operators who were operating Egypt tours and yet had not succeeded in finding one that suited my needs as well as my pocket, and to add insult to injury most of the tour operators were asking me what all I wanted to see in Egypt and I had no answer to it. Well, they are the ones operating the tours; shouldn't they be telling me all the places to see in Egypt. Of course I wanted to visit the great pyramid, the sphinx, the cairo museum, but then that was not all there was to Egypt. Was it?
That was when it struck me that I actually knew very little of the place I so badly wanted to see. Actually, apart from these world renowned sites of which everyone knows, what else did I know about Egypt, its people, its culture, its history? Only as much as my history book and Hollywood had told me, which unfortunately was neither enough, nor accurate.
So with renewed vigor I delved into the history and geography of Egypt, both as a nation and as an empire and civilization. Thanks to the internet and specially Wikipedia.org, I was able to brush up my history as well as Egyptian mythology and religion. As for the geography, and other travel related queries, it was wikitravel.org that came to my rescue.
A wonderful site with all the information you need on a country, state, city or even a specific site. The articles in wikitravel included everything from the culture to the economy of the country as well as the rates of the tickets for entering the pyramids and the museums. Another site which provides detailed information specifically on Egypt is www.ask-aladdin.com. This site provides information on everything starting from the entry visas to train/bus timetables.
So being much better informed about my destination, I now prepared a chart to the places I wanted to see there, and if the tour company could add a few of there own, all the more better.
And yes, I finally found a travel company who provide private guides and cars at reasonable rates.
So if you are planning a vacation, make sure you know the place you want to go to and most if not all of the sites you want to see there. I'm sure you'll appreciate these sites more if you're well informed about them beforehand rather that hunting them up on guide books and on the internet later. And not to mention, the tour companies too will find it extremely difficult to make a monkey of well informed traveler :)

Freedom

Freedom

Freedom to roam anywhere in the world. Freedom to do anything you desire. Freedom to see different countries. Freedom to eat anywhere you please. Freedom to be you.

It isnt much I ask for. I do wish a lot of times that there were no borders, no barriers to keep us from going places so enchanted, so old, or so new that we stop all of our work and commitments and reach there in a jiffy. If only no one would worry about a deadline. If only no one would think about how going travelling is a waste of time. If only airlines wouldnt charge so much money for you to go to a different country hahaha. Well, if only things were so easy, I would catch the earliest flight to Austria, Europe; go meet my friend in Vienna. Hug her and tell her I crossed seven seas...ok well that was exagerrated..to meet her and also if I could see a little bit of Europe on the side. Since this doesnt seem to happen anytime soon and I do have a 3 year old to take care of, all this wishy washydreamy Europe vacation seems a distant dream. But one day and I do hope that one day my son will share my dream and would love to go with his mom to all the art galleries and museums and all the amagizingly beautiful locales of Europe. I know his dreams will be very much different from mine but I do hope that he dreams of the Swiss Alps so his dream will be just a train hop away from mine :).

One of my earliest wishes was to see the Eiffel Tower and regale in its man-made beauty. To see the beautiful palaces in Britain, to eat in Italy and see the Coliseum in Rome. To visit the Louvre and gaze at the Mona Lisa for hours. To look at the tulip fields alongside the windmills in Holland. To be completely mesmerized by churches in Spain and Rome too, for that matter.

Freedom is such a wonderful thing.

Taking the road more or less traveled

So how does a vacation happen? You're tired, fed up of the same old routine, need a change, and so decide its time for a good ol' vacation. Right? Right, but this is not exactly what I asked. My question is more in the lines of "How do you plan for a vacation?", rather than "Why do you need a vacation?".
From about last two weeks (or maybe more), I've been trying to plan a vacation. And not just any vacation- A great vacation which has all that I and hubby dearest want. Now just so you don't get any ideas, me and my hubby (let's call him D) are quite compatible and all, but as it turns out, planning a vacation together has become a clash of the titans. I'm pretty sure most of you must have gone through this at least once, if not every time you plan a vacation. Seems that when it comes to holiday planning, me and D are two ends of a magnet. I want to go to all the godforsaken places on this earth, he will only go where there is Internet connectivity. I'm thinking of shopping in exotic bazaars, he thinks we should take all we need from home so that we don't have to go shopping there. I want to stay disconnected from everybody during the vacation, he's thinking how to stay connected with his work all that time; and the most troublesome of them all; I'm set on 5 star accommodations, and he wants a budget trip. This list seems to be endless, however, there's a tiny ray of light. Both of us agree on two things- one: we don't want travel in a huge group shepherded like cattle from one touristy site to another; and two: we both agree that the trip cannot be less than ten days.
So, taking that as a good omen, I start to plan our trip. It seems that this is no joke. While banging my head searching for tour operators and travel packages it comes to me that it was so much better when as a youngster I used to go on vacations with my family. Absolutely no headaches. Well........for me and my sibling at least. I'm quite sure my parents got enough headaches planning a trip every year.
Anyway, coming to the topic, how do you plan your vacation? I did it by going to Google. Yes, that was my first step. Next, finding a place to go. Mind you, all this time I and D were fighting over the trip, there was no set destination. So, the next step is finding a place to go. The world is huge, and being a huge fan of Michael Palin, I'm willing to travel to the most distant corners of this earth. However, if I'm to travel with D, I have to find a more habitable place. After reading many travel blogs, and visiting an equal number of travel forums, we decided not to go to Europe (which was our first choice). I'll not give the reasons here, maybe in another post. I was also quite sure that I did not want to tour the USA now, nor was I interested in greater Asia, and having traveled most of India, I left that out too.
Thus being decided on where not to go, I focused my attention to the world map, and discovered that the options that were left to me were Latin America, Mexico, Africa, Middle East and South East Asia. For some time we (I and D) were quite exited about SE Asia, but to our utter dismay found the tour packages (even the cheapest ones available) becoming quite pricey and way beyond our budget when combined with the airfares from USA. So SE Asia too was struck off the map, and I did not even look at Latin America, rather set my eyes, mind and heart straight at the Middle East and Africa. Or should I say more appropriately Jordan and Egypt.
Egypt jumped out at me from all the other places (even scored over the African safaris )simply because right from the time I first read about the Egyptian civilization at the age of 7 or 8, I'd dreamt of living there. Well, if I cannot live with the pharaohs, at least I can visit them. As for Jordan, that's D's choice. He says he wants to see Queen Rania (which I doubt he will), and I'm not complaining.

Having finalized our destinations, I now set out on a mission to find a tour operator who would meet our expectations as well as budgets. And mind you, this is no easy task. While I fell in love with a tour itinerary provided by Abercrombie & Kent, I also realized that the price for covering the said itinerary was a few thousand dollars over our budget. I did not tell this to D obviously, he might have had some sort of a heart attack.
So, I was or am back to square one, but it's getting late here, and having been searching for a tour package almost the entire day, have now got my stomach growling angrily. Will let you know the updates to my great trip planning adventure in my next post. Till then, au revoir.

Can Kids have fun on the cruise?

Oh YES!!!

Kids have more fun than an adult. They have a world of their own with too many things to do. There are trained staff on board to take care of your kids. Most of the curise lines have pager for parents so that they can be reached any time if their child is in the play area.  Click here to see a video to get some idea.

No Visa required for Cruise to Mexico from United States

If you are not a Citizen or permanent resident of United States, one should always check with their nearest consulate since the requirement keep changing. Recently it was learnt the travel to Mexico by sea does not require a Visa. This was confirmed by an email from Mixico consulate in Seattle as below.

"If you travel by sea, don't need a visa, the Inmigration Authorities give to you the permition to stay in Mexico for the days tha you need., but if you travel by air or land you need to apply for mexican visa.


If you have any questions let me know.


Thank you.


Lic. Gabriel Díaz Cedeño
Consulate of México
2132 Third Avenue
Seattle, Washington, E.U.A. 98121
Phone: (206) 448-8435 ext 105
Fax: (206) 448-4771"

WOW!!! this is so nice.. it saves a lot of travel budget and adds more fun to enjoy the vacation. Below is an example of routing for 7 days Cruise Vacation to Mexico. It may change depending upon sail date and cruise line.
 

 
Let the fun begin. Take royal vacation with WorldWinger Travel. Call at 1-888-699-4643 or email at cruise@worldwinger.com

Cruise Vacation

Vacation is always required to have a happy mind and do something different from usual work days. Cruise vacation even though sounds expensive as it has a royal touch, has been discovered to be least expensive and value for money spent. It helps us cover more ground with international travel, sleep and enjoy while you reach your next destination. Free food to with eat as much as you can with choice of your favorite cuisine, party on every evening to make you feel light. It’s a paradise for kids with much activity that cannot be found with a land tour.


WorldWinger Travel is a member of Cruise line International Association and offers service from most of the cruise lines. To name some

• Princess Cruise Lines
• Carnival Cruise Lines
• Norwegian Cruise Lines
• Disney Cruise Lines
• Celebrity Cruise Lines
• And many more…

There are different types of rooms

• Inside
• Ocean-View Obstructed
• Ocean-View Un-Obstructed
• Balcony
• Suites

If you are doing this for the first time, there are more that you can learn from WorldWinger Travel at 888-699-4643. Email: cruise@worldwinger.com They are expert in helping you fulfill your needs.


Happy Cruising!!!