Visiting Beaches in Phuket

Beaches are integral part of any Phuket tour. The island hosts an array of beaches, all of which have something distinct about them. Famous beaches like Patong, Karon, Kata and Kamala are located in Phuket. Beaches of the Island are the rendezvous of sports, adventure, shopping and night life.

Patong Beach

Patong, most visited beach in Phuket, offers mist-wrapped mornings and the sunsets which are always worthy to watch. And Patong isn't finished with natural beauty. Add to it colorful atmosphere, a range of restaurants, fun-filled nightlife, fabulous fun-making, and the temptation to visit Phuket become irresistible. A long white sandy stretch, Phuket offers thrilling adventures and fast-paced shopping. Any visit to Phuket is incomplete without Patong trip.

Karon Beach

If you wish to avail full range of facilities, dining and activities, but are not too fond of crowds, Karon is your destination. A stretch of squeaky white sand, Karon beach has a number of budget guest houses, restaurants and bars. Some artists have built here a complex of huts and galleries, which would interest art lovers. A football stadium, which hosts both national and international events, is also located near Karon Beach. One can get here rejunevating spa and shop for handicrafts. For enjoying nightlife, you could visit Patak East Road.

Kamala Beach

Kamala is considered the most beautiful beach in Phuket, offering panoramic views of the Andaman Sea. Ringed by forested hills, this calm and pleasant beach has pretty white sands. If one seeks more than sunbathing, facilities like boats are available. At Kamala Beach, one can get a feel of old Phuket. Shopping in village markets has its own charm. One would find a range of hotels and apartments are nestled around the fishing village. After a day of water sports and shopping, one can entertain in evenings at Phuket FantaSea Entertainment Complex, known for sparkling dances and leg-shaking music.

Kata Beach

Milky sands and turquoise waters make Kata Beach different. Surfers like to have fun at Southern end of Kata beach. Every year, during December, beautiful yachts from all over the region arrive in Kata to participate in King's Cup Regatta, Asia's premier sailing event. Tourists wishing to explore beyond the beach can take assistance from several dive shops and tour operators. One could also shop for souvenirs and readymade clothes at shops in Kata village. A popular tourist resort, there are sufficient number of restaurants and hotels too.

Surin Beach

If you wish to relish delicious seafood and sunbath in peaceful and pleasant atmosphere, Surin could be your option. A casuarina-lined beach, Surin has calm and refreshing atmosphere, thanks to the absence of jet-skiis and speedboats. However, the beach is good to enjoy activities like snorkeling and and surfing. Near the beach, one can find facilities like shops, bars, cafes and small hotels.

Bang Tao Beach

A long milky beach, Bang Tao is known for luxurious resorts and villas. One can enjoy a slew of activities including golfing, windsurfing, elephant riding, kids sports, rock climbing, horse riding and ropes course. At open-air village market in close vicinity of the beach, one can get first-hand experience of a conventional Thai market.

Chalong Bay

Muddy coastline makes Chalong Bay unsuitable for most water sports. However, it does have a jetty where you can hire boats. Tourist facilities like parking, restaurants, information kiosks and shops are located on jetty.

Panwa Beach

Panwa is a tranquil beach at a short distance from Phuket town. The foremost attraction of the beach is Phuket Aquarium at the Phuket Marine Biological Center. It is the centre of most water sports competitions in Phuket.

Laem Sing Beach

People wanting a reclusive day can visit Laem Sing which has a white beach at the center and rocky outcroppings at both ends. Located between Patong and Surin, Laem Sing is good for snorkeling and sunbathing. You would find some locally run restaurants and bars, but no accommodation facilities are available.

Dinesh Patairya has been writing on tourism for several online and offline publications for years. He is currently working for a project on Phuket [http://www.yourasianvacations.com/thailand/phuket/index.html] with YourAsianVacations.com

Popular Holiday Islands in Thailand

Thailand is one of the leading travel destinations in the world and is home to many beautiful tropical islands. Some of these isles you might have heard of and some you will most likely never have heard of. This Thailand related travel article will list and review some of the most beautiful holiday islands in Siam.

Phuket

Phuket is the most popular island and is along with Pattaya and Bangkok the most popular tourist destinations of the country. There are many beautiful beaches on this isle which include Patong, Karon, Kata, Kamala, Surin and Nai Harn. If you enjoy the nightlife then perhaps either Phuket or Samui should be your choice for your next vacation.

Koh Samui

Samui is ranked among the top 5 vacation destinations in the country and has been known for a very long time as a backpacker heaven. Samui has however been under development a great deal during the last decade and visitors can now choose from a wide range of luxurious hotels and resorts. The beaches on this island rank among the finest of Thailand. Chaweng beach is the most popular beach resort area of Samui.

Koh Chang

Koh Chang is still relatively unknown to the general public however it is one of the fastest growing travel destinations of Siam. If you would like to visit Koh Chang then you should take the ferry boat from Rayong as there is no airport on this Thai isle

Koh Samet

Although Samet is not a very large island, it is one of the most romantic of all the Thai islands. Many travelers are like to visit Samet as it is located not too far from Pattaya. A lot of day trips are also organized to this wonderful isle.

James is a travel consultant living on Phuket and is working on a number of projects. If you are looking for information about Phuket then be sure to visit his Phuket guide and for information about Samui please visit his Samui Guide.

Corbett Tour: A Perfect Way to Rejuvenate Your Mind and Body

Are you dreaming of something adventurous and exciting for your honeymoon? Then, book your honeymoon travel package which includes a trip to the Jim Corbett National Park! Many tourists or honeymooners get bored of the monotony of the beaches and hill station tour and desire to add thrill and challenge in their vacation. Here, Corbett Travel is the perfect idea! What can be more exciting and fun than spending your day and night amidst the wildlife and exotic flora and fauna? The pleasure and delight that you can add to your tour is unmatched. At the end of your Corbett Travel, you will feel blessed and filled with energy and vigor.

Corbett Park well connected with rails and roads

There are also no issues or tensions to be pondered about the modes of reaching the Corbett Park while booking the Corbett Travel packages. The Corbett Reservation is well connected by both rail and road and is just 280 kilometers from New Delhi. Also, you can easily reach the Corbett Park from other cities as well which includes Agra, Rishikesh, Lucknow, Chnadigarh and so on. In fact, if you are enjoying your honeymoon in any of these locations, then you can easily book a honeymoon travel package and reach Corbett. What can be more delightful than adding an element fun, adventure and excitement in your honeymoon? It will actually feel like an icing on the cake!

Book your Corbett Travel during weekend

Corbett Travel is also taken up by the people during the weekends which highly give them an opportunity to unwind from their hectic life and spend some peaceful and thrilling moments. For the Corbett travel, there is also no need for you to take up a full- fledged leave from your office which is greatly difficult to get these days. You can find numerous Corbett Travel packages which offer a 2 or 3 days fun filled tour of the Corbett Park.

An escape to the exotic landscape and unique wildlife will rejuvenate your mind and body. During your Corbett tour, you will simply forget your monotony of work or other tensions. The wonder of nature and a glimpse of the varied variety of living beings residing in our planet will just mesmerize you. When you talk about nature, forests, wildlife, birds and exotic plants are always mentioned. Corbett tour packages guarantees a view of all of them!

Author is an associate editor for Corbett Tour Packages. Get all possible information about Holiday Packages and Corbett Holiday Packages. We also provide information about online hotel reservation, Flights Booking and Holiday Packages in India.

Getting to Know Phuket's Beaches

I spent a little more than a year living in Phuket and came to know the Phuket beaches well. Before I moved to Phuket I wasn't a big fan of beaches, but after seeing what the island had to offer, I eventually warmed to them.

For anyone visiting the island, the Phuket beaches are one of the primary draws. However, Phuket's most popular beaches are definitely the ones I would try and avoid. The beach that seems to attract more people every year no matter how much good advice is written about the place is Patong Beach.

It defies belief that people still flock to Patong Beach and continue to leave with the same complaints. The food is overpriced, there are too many people, the beach is dirty and so on. There's a reason why the people who live in Phuket only really venture to Patong Beach for the nightlife or else occasionally for shopping. It's a bit of a dive. There are much better Phuket beaches around the island.

My personal favorite Phuket beach will always be Mai Khao Beach. I first visited Mai Khao Beach about three years ago. It was the first time I had been in Phuket, but it didn't take long to decide which beaches to avoid.

Mai Khao Beach is an enormous stretch of untouched paradise. There are countless spots where there is nothing else except the sand, sea and you. If you want beautiful natural surroundings and the kind of beach you see in brochures, all you need to do is go to Mai Khao.

However, most tourists forsake Mai Khao, either because it's too far or too difficult to get to. Mai Khao Beach is located in the north of Phuket and can be reached a number of ways. The most obvious, if traveling from Phuket Town, is to take a songthaew as much of the way as possible and then hail motorcycle taxis. Otherwise you could rent your own motorbike for 200 baht or so and make the trip north.

The journey might take up to an hour from Phuket Town, but it's certainly worth the effort.

Another beach that receives little attention is Yanui Beach, a tiny little stretch of sand located just around the corner from Nai Harn Beach. As Phuket beaches go, Yanui is great during the high season when there are people keeping it clean. During low season it has a kind of romantic charm and is a great place to watch the sunset, but there's usually an accumulation of garbage along the beach.

There are heaps of other beaches dotted around the coast of Phuket. They all have something to offer. Patong Beach is definitely one to avoid, however.

After traveling to the majority of Thailand's beach destinations, I think that if you do Phuket right, you'll have a better time than at places such as Samui or Pha-ngan. Thailand has long been on the tourist trail and so no beach destination is perfect, but Phuket can get pretty close.

To find out more about Phuket visit Phuket Vogue.

Pompeii Tour Guide Trap - Three Ways To Avoid The Traps

The Pompeii tour guide trap is easy to fall into since it even affects relatively respectable channels. Lets go through them one by one.

1. Booking Pompeii Tours Through Private Drivers and limousine car service companies.

This is perhaps the easiest way to when it comes to booking Pompeii tours. This happens when you arrive at Pompeii using a pre-booked private car. Private drivers are found generally through a car-service website or a network of agencies that feeds them with customers.

When you arrive, once the driver has gained your trust, you will then be suggested additional services to enhance your visit.

But here is the rub.

Quality private drivers doesn't necessarily mean quality private guide. This is a case of misplacing your trust. The drivers look to add to their income by offering extra services and add the services of a guide. They charge you the customer the full price, and then they look for the guide via cell phone. But the drivers rarely want to pay the guide their official fee.

Frequently, it's also happening at the last minute, so the quality of the guide you will get tends to be a lottery.

You should know that the better guides may work once for these private drivers once or twice with the private drivers they know already; but thereafter, they tend to avoid the experience because they don't get the right money they should be paid for their services. For example, I have worked with virtually all the drivers in the Bay of Naples for 20 years, and I have my own preferred pre-selected group of drivers. However, it is extremely rare these days that I accept work of this kind.

2. On the spot Guides:

These are local guides at the main entrance to the Pompeii archaeological site. Many of these "guides" began working in the tourist shops many years ago. They learned a few words of some foreign language, and from this let's say, they auto-qualified themselves as guides.

You know that just deciding one day that you are a local guide does not mean you have the qualities to communicate what a place really means to visitors.

This may do for certain places in the world, but for the complexity of Pompeii, it is not enough. Many of these self-declared guides are still there getting their clients at the entrance of the site half a century later. Today since the end of 2008, they have created a kind of formalized booking gazebo or tent outside of the main entrances of the site of Pompeii. Whatever the system, the risk that you run is the same....and this is to end up with a very poor level of guiding.

Generally it is common for the "on-the-spot" Pompeii Tour "guides" take you into the site, give you a quick tour around and then leave you to continue "to explore the site on your own".

Why do they do this? Why do they leave you in the middle of the site? Your are left by them in the middle of the site of Pompeii so that they can rush back to the gazebo to get their names on the list in time to do another tour with more poor clients. Who would have imagined!

The result is that you'll have to continue by yourself exploring rather than to be shown a more appropriate tour escorted from start to finish for a couple of hours.

I am not saying that every single guide outside the site that is of a poor quality. There are good quality guides there too. But the risk for your the client, of finding a guide outside Pompeii in this way is that you end up with a poor quality guide, because you do not have the opportunity to choose your guide due to the waiting list system. Even if you meet a guide outside that you do like, the waiting list system means you get allocated whoever is next on the list. It is all a question of luck of the draw.

You may ask yourself, how could all this happen in such a world famous and important site? And you are quite right to ask. It is through mismanagement and corruption in the industry, but that is a whole different article. Lets look at a final group that you could also run into - the Pompeii site Guards.

3. Pompeii Site Guards

The Site Guards are responsible for controlling the site and keeping visitors safe. But the most frequent complaints I hear are about the things that are in their control:-

People complain about

* The stray dogs
* The dirtiness of the site of Pompeii
* Lots of houses inside the site are closed.
* There is no one to ask information or direction.

Why all this is happening?

Because the guards sometimes offer their services to visitors who are inside a site and need information rather than doing their own job of controlling the site and ensuring people are safe. They began doing this in a similar way to the self-declared guides decades ago, and they are still there.

If you get hurt, rather than being there giving assistance, some site guards are working illegally as guides.

In my opinion, each person is their own profession. Leave the guards to guard the site. If you want a guide, book a decent guide before arriving.

And now I would like to invite you to claim you FREE Instant Access to FREE planning guide to visiting Pompeii and other places in the Bay of Naples when you visit http://BarbaraGuide.com/tours/pompeii-tours/ (<--click this link)

From Barbara Giambattista - Expert Local Guide and Event Planner for the Bay of Naples Italy, Pompeii, Amalfi Coast and the Isle of Capri.

Tourism and Honeymoon in Kerala

A charming state on the tropical Malabar Coast of southwestern India, Kerala is a prominent destination for tourism and holiday India. It is one of the most charming and captivating states of India. Its capital city is Trivandrum. Also known as God's Own Country, Kerala is noted for its lush greenery, scenic landscapes and truly amiable ambiance for peaceful vacations. The state has great tourism opportunity with beautiful beaches, breathtaking backwaters, luxuriant jade hill stations, fragrant tea & spice plantations, exotic wildlife, rich flora & fauna, historical places & monuments, religious places & shrines, etc. Excellent accommodation facilities at different beach resorts and hotels are available according to your needs and budgets. Tree houses are houseboats are unique forms of excellent and unique accommodation in Kerala, God's Own Country.

With great tourism opportunity, excellent accommodation facilities and peaceful ambiance, Kerala is also popular among honeymooners or newly wed couples. It presents truly amiable and romantic ambiance for honeymooners coming from different parts of the world. Beaches and backwaters; hill stations and mountains; lakes and rivers; forts and monuments; historical places and religious places - Kerala has all to make it popular destination for honeymoon vacations in India. Water spots, river cruises and lots of beach activities give honeymooners a mind-boggling charm of Kerala tourism. Kovalam is an internationally famous beach town in the state. It is very famous among other kinds of vacationers along with honeymooners. Varkala, Fort Kochi, Beypore, etc are some other popular beach destinations in the state.

Backwater cruises on enchanting Kerala backwaters are perhaps the most entertaining activities in this charming state. Backwater cruise can surely enhance the charm of your Kerala honeymoon tour. Alleppey, Kuttanad, Kollam, Fort Kochi, Kozhikode, Kumarakom, etc are prominent backwater destinations in the state where honeymooners can enjoy cruises over the breathtakingly beautiful and tranquil backwaters. One of the main tourist attractions, the backwater cruises in Kerala are dream experiences on houseboats or kettuvalloms that are especially designed with open lounge, one or two bedrooms with attached bathrooms and a kitchenette. Houseboat stay is a truly romantic experience for honeymooners or romantic couples.

Hill stations of Kerala are equally famous among honeymooners and newly wed couples. There are some beautiful hill stations in the state which attract couples for exciting and romantic honeymoon tour in India. Munnar, Wayanad, Ponmudi, Peermede, etc are popular hill stations the state where you can seek delight for your honeymoon vacations in Kerala, God's Own Country. Well, if you too are looking for a right destination for honeymoon, Kerala can perfectly cater your needs for dream honeymoon destination in India.

This article is written by Terence Lewis an eminent writer of travel and tourism related topics. Know more about honeymoon tour Kerala and beautiful Kerala tourism destinations.

What You Need to Know About Phuket, Thailand

Phuket is one of the biggest islands in Thailand, located in the Amdaman Sea off the southern coast of the country. The island is rugged with a mountain range present in the west of the island. The mountains in Phuket Thailand grace the southern end of the island, stretching about 440km from Kra Isthmus. Mai Thao Sip Song, which stands at 529m, the highest point in Phuket.

Phuket has a total area of about 570 square kilometres and the main island is about 50km in length and 20km wide. About 60% of the land is covered in forest, rubber and oil plantations.

There are several beaches along both the coasts of the island. The western coast is covered by sandy beaches, whereas the beaches in the eastern coast are muddy. In the southernmost part of Phuket is Laem Promthep, which is a spectacular sunset viewpoint.

The northern part holds the Khao Phra Thaeo nature preserve, where more than 20 square kilometers of rain forest are protected. Khao Prathiu (384m), Khao Bang Pae (388m) and Khao Phara (422m) are the three highest points in this rainforest. On the northwestern coast is the Sirinat National Park, which protects both forest and marine life. Nai Yang Beach is near here where sea turtles come for nesting.

Patong beach is one of the most popular tourist areas. It is on the western coast of Phuket Thailand. The nightlife over here is very vibrant and shopping here is cheap and cheerful.

Adjacent to Patong, there are plenty of other beautiful beaches. Some of the best beaches are Karon Beach, Kata Beach and Kata Noi Beach. At the southern tip of Phuket Thailand you will find Nai Harn Beach and Rawai Beach. Towards the north of Patong are the beaches of Kamala, Surin and Bang Tao. Although much less developed than Patong, these beaches are some of the very best in the world. These places provide isolation for those who seek it.

There are also many smaller islands dotted around the coast of Phuket. Bon Island is one of the better ones and is a few kilometers away by boat. Coral Island is also very nice and this is where the marine life is particularly diverse. The Similan Islands to the northwest and the Phi Phi Island to southeast handle lots of activities such as scuba diving and snorkeling.

Care to find out more about Phuket Thailand? Get all the latest info from Phuket Thailand at these links.