Greencaviar Travel

The Super Bowl 50 frenzy and the crowd in the San Francisco Bay Area, made me long for that South Pacific tranquility.   So this past month I revisited the island of my dreams: Moorea, Tahiti.   It was indeed the place to go if you really wanted to get away from the crowd. You can bike around the island and not run into anybody.  I found a sense of peace in the lagoon, palm trees and the beach and sunset.   That said, I don’t really have that much to share and write about my five-day stay, except that I soaked in the soul-soaring beauty of the South Pacific.   Oh another discovery: the many shades of blue.                                                                                                  ...

On a recent visit to the Blue Mountains, I saw that the cable car we rode in a decade ago had been retired and now on display like a museum piece. I also noticed that the gift shop and restaurants had been expanded and that we had to go through a long 'queuing' area to get to the ticket counter that it felt as if I was entering an amusement park.  Photo by L.O.M My first visit to the Blue Mountains was a decade ago on my first trip to Australia. I remember several things about that trip. My relatives from Australia and I seemed to be the only visitors there that day. We drove from Sydney and stopped at some park to grill slabs of meat and shrimp on the Barbie. We were surrounded by colorful birds: finches, sparrows, cockatoos. My little niece explained to me how the Blue Mountains got their name (from the blue haze that comes from the oil of the Eucalyptus trees covering the mountains). When we arrived at the park, we bought some tickets to ride the scenic skyway to the ot...

I had forgotten just what a beautiful place Venice was.   I have been to Venice three times.   The first time I came here was when I was a young student and we focused more on seeing the artwork at the Basilica of St. Marks or the whole basilica as an art piece.   The second time I came here was when I was on a whirlwind tour in Europe.   I remember our guide taking us for a gondola ride, then a regular boat rides to take us to the restaurant and a show as part of the package tour. Our boat navigated through the narrow canals to get to the restaurant.   The whole place looked sad to me.  I felt sad seeing the dark, empty buildings and thought that Venice was really sinking. Last fall I visited Venice again, I was surprised to see how lively the town had become.   Considering that it was the end of the tourist season, it seemed that the town got more than its fair share of tourists and boat traffic (from the big cruise ships, I guessed). ...

After a visit to a wine cellar of a small village in Bled, where we were entertained by two lively dancers dancing to a lyre-playing boy muse, and a hearty dinner of the famous Slovenian sausage, we returned to our hotel by the lake. The fairy-tale setting before me could have been a dream; it was surreal. I was lying in bed, staring at the brightly lit castle on top of the hill and its reflection on the water. Bled was like a fairy-tale setting where the center of it all was the lake. Oh wait, was it the island in the middle of the lake or the castle up on the hill? Oh well, I’ll let your imagination run wild in the mist covered hills, the lake's shining waters, the ducks and swans gliding in the water, small churches and gingerbread houses by the lake, the castle on top of the hill, the moon setting with the beautiful view of the Julian Alps in the backdrop, and the sounds of the church bells and birdsong captured in my video. Below the hill was a small c...

After a fun filled day and a windy night in Dubrovnik, we headed for Montenegro, a small country in the Balkans, on the Adriatic Sea. So, I planned on sleeping during the bus ride to Montenegro, but the stunning showcase of Bayside beauty before me; miles of shoreline and blue waters and granite mountains rising above the water’s edge, kept me awake.     One of the highlights of our trip to Montenegro was a visit to the Church of Our Lady of the Rocks in the Bay of Kotor. I heard about it as a pilgrimage site, but had no idea about the sheer physical beauty of its location. Soon we reached the little town of Perast where we set off to take a short boat ride to the island known as Our Lady of the Rocks.  There was a group of pilgrims inside the small church, so we had a few minutes to explore the tiny museum behind the church and listen to the local guide explained about the history of the church. Story has it that sometime in the 15th century, native sai...