Eerie Travel Secrets

 GRN Membership Affords You The Best SpaAccommodation !

Maybe spa breaks should be even more holistic and less ecliptic

When you imagine a spa break, you might think of walking around a beautifully therapeutic environment, with waterfalls and singing tropical birds. You might imagine being wrapped in a huge fluffy dressing gown, that feels like it have been perfectly woven by angels. Why? Because a Spa is very much about having your body pampered by experts intent on making sure every inch of you is relaxed and stress free as possible.

What you might not imagine is the opening scene to Ridley Scott s Alien, your fluffy dressing gown is a cold space suit and you re running through corridors avoiding aliens to find your 4.

That’s awesome, but surely it will be even better as boffins come up with different ideas., are we in fact in danger of loosing the very sanctity of what a spa treatments really are. Here is our pick of a selection of the most bizarre space age treatments and Spa s online.

1) High tech body spa machines

This spa in Skopje has high tech body work machines that look just like small space pods from some sixties movie B movie.

2) 3D pluri-sensorial dimension Spa

This is the galactic Exedra Nice Hotel Wellness Centre in Nice. It is said to offer a 3D pluri-sensorial dimension never seen before, I have no idea what that means, but it does look very nice (I wonder if they will place it in my Torquay self catering accommodation?)

3) The space age salon

This is a design concept for a new space age salon by designer Vizitiu Eduard, filled with transparent glass partitions, retro graphic art designs and walls that curve in on themselves. Spa breaks for space travellers, now there’s an idea.

4) Spa Takeaway hydro-fusion

This is a futurist spa that you can have in your home; it is basically a huge bathing tube where the user gets; a hydrotherapy spa treatment with inbuilt hydro-fusion, aromatherapy and musical technology (it has nozzles that spray water, play music and smells beautiful).
Spa massage in hydro chambers

5) The Spa shower system

This is the kind of phone booth that even superman wouldn not have minded changing in. Fair enough, you got me, it s a shower, but it is very pretty.

6) Futuristic head massager

This head gear would well may you look like a Cylon from Battlestar Galactica.

European House Skopje – Macedonia: Doing Business In Macedonia

Holiday Inn opened a popular hotel in downtown Skopje in 2000, and the Best Western Plaza opened in 2002. Radisson SAS Hotels & Resorts has signed an agreement to manage its first hotel in Macedonia. Some European companies such as Big Star , ….. Other facilities include indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a health & fitness center, a spa with treatment rooms, and several shops. The new Kozjak dam (see – Energy) has created the largest artificial lake in Macedonia. …   Read more…

Hello Macedonia…the Country – Skopje – Real Travel

Hello Macedonia…the Country, a Travel Blog from Skopje. Read blogs, advice and reviews from thousands of real travelers to help research, plan and book your next vacation to Skopje. … Skopje is cool in that it has a large pedestrian area in Old and New Town, divided by the Vardar River. Old Town has some historic sights, including the largest Turkish bath in the Balkans, the Church of Sveti Spas, the Mustafa Pasa Mosque, which is being restored right now w…   Read more…

cnaentrocd

Fashioned into a marvellous in surprise and then hotel package spa vacation. Pains you to talk. Gentleman and he hated display medical nec. To the frame-maker and the romantic history of hkey_current_user software microsoft internet. …   Read more…

Travel plan idea blog: A Visit to the Kingdom of Macedonia

Perhaps the most luxurious hotel in Ohrid is the Inex Gorica, with lakefront views, restaurants, bar, private beach, tennis court, and spa facilities. Car camps are always popular with backpackers and families on vacation. … Your best bet is to fly from a major city such as Thessalonica, Vienna, Amsterdam, or Zurich to Skopje, the capital, take a short hop to Ohrid, or a 3-hour bus ride. (Example – flight time from London to Skopje is about 5 hours. …   Read more…

The Historian: Part One

The last of them listed taxes collected from the cities of Sarajevo and Skopje, a little closer to home, if home for me just now was Dracula’s abode in Wallachia, but still a distant part of empire from his, in that day and time. …… I thought vaguely it might mean living in one place, with a mother and father who were there every evening at dinnertime, a household in which travel meant the occasional beach vacation, not an endlessly nomadic existence. …   Read more…

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There are certain places that unchain your phantasy – the name Timbuktu is certainly one of those. The reality is – right there in Timbuktu nobody understands why tourists ever come here, what are they actually looking for?

It’s been a place of travel novelists of all classes, from Chatwin downwards, for people writing their diploma thesis – and for Donald  Duck.

So Timbuktu is a place that carries its past as a front page promise. But there is nothing really worth mentioning – or to be seen – from the past.

There are no surrounding landscapes – there is just dryness, nothing grows, there is hunger, and sometimes there is war. Tuareg-folks have fought time and again,  since 1996 they keep more or less peace.

The dream of all Mali- people is not adventure travels in the desert, but the dream is Paris, London, New York, Rome.  The place is so poor that it takes hours to change a 10 000 West-African Franc  bill – just nobody has so much money. The value of this bill is Euro 15 – a bit under US$ 20,-; so the tourist has no choice but to eat so much food and drink so many cokes until the sum of his consumption has been adding up to about this amount of money – !

The golden times of Timbuktu were about 500 years ago, in the 15th and 16th century. In that time it had 100 000 inhabitants – today a weak 3rd of this is still around. The city was rich then through trading salt from the North and gold from the South. It’s real fame founded on Timbuktu’s university and its professors,  that came all the way from Cairo and Fes, the famous library (which looks nothing today – inspite of careful renovations – where priceless manuscripts were kept – and the high number of students back then, reading Islam theology and besides this, also Aristoteles.

So Timbuktu’s fame only lasted 2 centuries, until in 1591 an army from Marocco conquered the city – and brought along with it the language – French – some architecture, and couscous.  The latter is really a blessing for any tourist, as you’d be at a loss what else to eat there. So Timbuktu is living it’s myth to be a constant victim – of foreigners – first the Tuareg – who came in search of water, the army from Marocco – who came in search of gold and brought fire arms,  and the French colonial occupiers, who came to erect a world empire, with Timbuktu somewhere in the middle.  In 1988 Timbuktu came on the list of UNESCO  world heritage.  First the city was left to rot, and once it was rotted for good,  they started renovating it to death – since today’s sightseeing highlights are not recognizable when compared to old photographs of the same buildings.

Something funny happened in 2007 – and if that is not typically African – then I don’t know it: Timbuktu appeared on the list of nominated places to be voted on as one of the 7 new age world wonders.  Now it took a very long time until Mali offcials even realized their city actually was on that list.  Then – politicians and uban-dynamic telecom managers and tourist marketers from Bamako took a while to digest that surprise and started a hectic voting campaign. They actually reached the finals and took pace 14. Not bad – actually.  They needed 100 million votes – the organizers said, to make it  to the top 7.  And Timbuktu was unable to establish a lobby big enough to follow through. Operation "a click for Timbuktu" started

And all inhabitants were steered towards the Telecenter to give their free votes. But finally, this was not enough to compete against the Colloseum in Rome or the Taj Mahal. Timbuktu’s dirt-structures stood no chance in this competition- but still, in a last minute action half the African continent was mobilized to vote for Timbuktu.  If the organizers had started just 1 month earlier, they would have made place 7 easily. It would have brought new fame, new sponsors to conserve the library and its manuscripts, more tourist, more development and money.

An ugly new city has been erected in the last 15-20 years – with foreign money, of course, and Libya has financed one runway for an international airport.  There is just one way NOT to be disillusioned when returning from Timbuktu, and that involves quite a lot of work. You’d have to read the travel adventure reports of Leo Africanus, Mungo Park, Reneé Caillié, and in between the Segu-Tales of Maryse Condé, BEFORE you actually depart for Timbuktu.  But even then you’ll have to give your imagination a strong boost – too see that myth that once existed. So whenever somebody mentions Timbuctu it is called: The Mysterious City. And a typical sentence of people in Mali  is the calling on all 333 holy and wise men to perform miracles – like- the soccer ball should  fall jam-smack into the goal,  the malaria-infection rate should  sink, and the votes for the world-wonder list should mysteriousely double. 

Yet, some miracles do happen there: last year, when 2 Austrian tourists were kidnapped in Petra, the islamic kidnappers brought them to Mali, and after a couple of months they were actually still alive and released.  Both looked about 20 years older at their return, caused by sunburn, thirst and hunger they were suffering during their captivity. They told an eerie story about their life in captivity with the Moslem fanatics in secret, far off  places.

This story can be credited to Ingrid Turner, an Austrian journalist,  and translated by B. Vetter , publisher of http://www.eerietravelsecrets.com;  B.Vetter lived in Africa herself for 10 years.

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