The city of Dunedin considers itself ‘the Edinburgh of the South’ so it seems only fitting that a short drive away along the Otago Peninsula, you will find New Zealand’s only castle. An imposing vision sitting atop a hill, Larnach Castle is infamous, in New Zealand at least, for it’s scandalous history and rumors of ghosts.

Some say calling it a castle is little over the top, given it was never home to royalty and lacks the basic knight armour and swords that are showcased in European castles. From a distance, you could imagine that it was once home to knights and ladies who staged jostling tournaments and protected their domain from invaders.

But the truth of the matter is that it’s not that old (1871) and it was built not by a king but by an Australian born merchant, banker and politician William J.M. Larnach for his wife Eliza Jane and their six children.

 Building began in 1871 with no expense was spared – marble was imported from Italy, glass came from Venice, and tiles from England.  Special features included a Georgian hanging staircase (the only one in the Southern Hemisphere), carved wooden ceilings, a Venetian glass wall with panels representing England, Ireland, Scotland, and New Zealand, and a one tonne marble bath that took six horses and twelve men haul up the 1000 foot hill to the building site.

Sadly, by the time it was finished in 1876, his beloved wife had died. This was the first of many tragedies to strike Larnach Castle. William Larnach’s luck never improved. He married two more times, but his second wife (Eliza’s half-sister) also died and his third, it was rumoured, had an affair with Larnach’s eldest son, Douglas. William Larnach himself committed suicide in 1898 by shooting himself in the head.

So you can see why there might be ghosts.

The first Mrs. Larnach, who died alone of apoplexy, has been known to make her presence felt near the bedroom in which she died.

Larnachs’ favorite daughter Katie, who died of typhoid in 1888, is said to haunt the ballroom that had been built to celebrate her 21st birthday in 1886.

The tragedies, one after the other, broke the family and  caused tremendous legal tussles over the estate.

As a result…

(more…)

The second twice-yearly National Travel Writing Month is already in full swing, and it seems fitting to mention it and encourage any budding travel writers out there on this day, which happens to be the birthday of one of the most esteemed and well-read travel writers working today: Paul Theroux. (Just because I like neither him nor his books, as I wrote about in the post Famous Travel Writers I Don’t Like, doesn’t mean he’s neither esteemed nor well-read. Humph.)

Blogger Christine Gilbert came up with the idea of National Travel Writing Month. Modeled partly on the long-running annual National Novel Writing Month, the event focuses on prompting wannabe travel writers to craft one well-written story pitch/query every day, and (this is the key) to send it out to a publication the writers think might be interested in the story.

Ten days leaves you a little behind if this is the first you’re hearing about the challenge. But that’s no reason why you shouldn’t dive in anyway. I know there’s a lot of bloggers out there, writing about their travels, and a lot of writers dreaming of the day they’ll be widely published. This is one of those chances to get encouragement, advice, direction, and inspiration from others with the same dreams. The participants include widely published, very experienced writers, people who are complete beginners, and even me. Some people have written a pile of query letters already, some stalled out at two. Some have received assignments through this challenge, and some their first rejections (which always hurt). Speaking for myself, I am now 4 pitches behind, and will probably not keep up the pace, but am having fun writing down my ideas anyway.

If you’d have fun, too, why not join in?

Even after a lot of years as a traveler, there are still plenty of times when I stop during a trip and think, “Gosh, why didn’t I bring *XYZ* with me?”

My recent trip to Beijing and Shanghai for the China 2.0 blogger’s tour was no exception.

For your own trip planning reference, here’s the gear I forgot:

• Eyeglasses prescription. Did you know that you can have high-quality eyeglasses made while you’re in China, for a fraction of US “Pearle Vision prices?”  I normally wear contacts, so forgot to pack my written glasses prescription, and in Shanghai I could have gone bananas getting US$20 glasses, including prescription sunglasses.
• Web-enabled phone.  I’m almost ready to jump in and get a smartphone (I’m a T-Mobile customer lying in wait for the next Android phone) but seeing my travel companions effortlessly emailing, uploading photos to Facebook, etc. on their Web-enabled phones gave me major Shiny Object Envy. The iPhones were all jailbroken, however, like millions of others already operating in China.
• Small gifts from home, for people I met. Nothing fancy, but I wish I’d brought a bunch of something small, flat and packable as a presento – a little gift with a unique US or Texas flavor.
• Snail mail addresses for postcards.  I’ve gotten out of the habit of sending postcards from other countries, so I was lazy about bringing enough addresses from family and friends (don’t lug an address book; just write ‘em all on one sheet of paper and tuck it in somewhere.) Finding local stamps and post offices is half the fun.
• Small radio. I have one with AM, FM and shortwave, and there are lots of great ones for travelers. Why didn’t I bring mine and see what interesting local tunes the antenna could pull in? Duh.
• My photo on my business cards.  I met so many folks in China, and often wished that their business card had a small photo so I could remember them better. That made me think, why doesn’t MY card have my face on it? Using photos of me traveling in various places (uploaded from my computer) I recently ordered exactly that from the UK-based Moo.com printing company. Love ‘em.
• Tampons.  Let’s just say that the Chinese don’t seem to be into tampons down at the corner Watson’s drugstore chain, and I WAY prefer them over bulky pads, which were very easy to find.
• Energy bars.  I’m a breakfast gal, but a couple of times, breakfast was not easily available other than paying big bucks for the hotel spread.  There were mornings when I didn’t know any locals to help me find a good place nearby, so I wish I’d brought more Power Bars.

What am I glad I brought? An inflatable neck pillow for the plane, Immodium anti-diarrheal (didn’t need it but always feel safer having it) and Oral-B Brush-ups for getting that icky feeling out of my mouth after a flight.

What did I not have to worry about? Most electronics are dual-voltage up to 240 volts, and I only occasionally needed a plug adaptor (which I’d brought.)  My camera, phone and laptop etc. all plugged in and juiced up every night without any problems.

China and Asia travelers, what are your best tips for handy-to-have gear?

Related posts:

• Battling blazes in Beijing’s Forbidden City
• Dining Xinjiang (Uighur) style in Shanghai
• Renaming a place doesn’t make it Shangri-La

Last Saturday I picked relatives up at JFK, and realized that, not only have I not been to an airport in almost a year and seriously miss traveling, but that the very act of going to the airport woke a craving to pick up a book and a mocha and hang out near the gate of a delayed flight (any delayed flight) for a couple hours.

I love being in transit. I don’t know if this is rare, or if people are just so used to complaining about airplanes and airport layovers that they fail to acknowledge how much they enjoy it. Trains most fully satisfy this addiction, as evidenced by the number of travel books focused on travel by train — or I could just drop the name Paul Theroux and you get the picture.

Airports have their own way of catering to the traveler’s soul. There’s nothing like a delayed flight to challenge your powers of self-entertainment and observation, not to mention patience. One of the most memorable days I’ve ever spent was an 8-hour delay in Frankfurt about 12 years ago. I was sitting by a gate after a failed attempt to get on an earlier flight, and was trying to decide between reading a novel or writing in my journal.

Frankfurt at that time was one of the more depressing airports of the Western world. I’d just flown out of Moscow Sheremetovo, which was everything you could imagine about an Eastern Bloc airport and more (or less), and Frankfurt was vying for an airport-most-like-the-Soviet-Union prize in its run-down, ill-lit state.

So there I was, barely 21, just loving being in this new place, and sinking happily into the special state found only in airports while waiting for your next flight: the feeling of being between worlds, something like being between major choices, or stages of your life. C.S. Lewis’s book The Magician’s Nephew (the 6th in the Narnia series) with its dead-quiet Wood Between the Worlds came to mind. I sat there watching the different people and peoples waiting patiently, shoving in line, berating the flight attendant, soothing children.

An elderly woman walked up to me and said in English, “Can I sit next to you?” Of course, I told her. She sat down and told me that she had a long layover for her flight back to Edmonton, Canada (I was heading back from Moscow to St. Andrews in Scotland), and had been looking for someone nice to sit next to. “Your aura looks very good,” she said, and she’d picked me.

We spent the next six hours chatting. I couldn’t place her accent, and she told me she was returning from visiting her family in Slovakia, where she was originally from. She showed me all the pictures of her trip, already placed in a little flip-album (in those far-off days before digital cameras and ubiquitous laptops), a beautiful little wooden home in the mountains and woods, not unlike where I grew up in Montana, coincidentally only about a 12-hour drive south of Edmonton.

It was a beautiful interlude, and defined for the rest of my life how I feel about airports, no matter how decrepit, and layovers, no matter how long. I actually look forward to a 3-hour delay, or more, and sitting in an airport by myself with a book, notebook, water bottle, and mocha pretty much smacks my yoga class on the head for Zen-like peacefulness.

It’s been a long time now, and I’m starting to feel like my college roommate did when she couldn’t find someone to have sex with for a couple weeks (the number of times I got sexiled over those four years …). Traveling enriches my life in more ways than I can count, but it’s not just about the new peoples and places. It’s the in-between places, too, the in-transit moments, when who knows what kind of looking glass will show up to put a new perspective on your life.

Like many great caverns you can visit in the U.S., the Cathedral Caverns complex is a bit off the beaten path, but is worth the drive.  The site is in a big state park about 30 miles from Huntsville, not too far from the famous Unclaimed Baggage Center in Scottsboro.

So what are the superlative claims to fame in this cavern system?

1) The “Goliath” stalagmite column is supposedly the world’s largest such column inside a commercial cave, standing 45 feet tall and 243 feet around. It’s older than dirt.

2) Cathedral Caverns supposedly has the largest entrance to any cavern system, at 126 feet wide and 25 feet high. (See photo above)

3) It has the largest “flow stone wall” known to exist in any caverns.

On top of all that, and some really impressive formations, they’ve found shark’s teeth inside. How cool is that? You can see one of them stuck in the ceiling when you go on the tour.

It only costs $10 for an adult ticket and $5 for a child’s ticket, which is half what you’ll pay at many commercial cavern sites, including Luray Caverns in Virginia (Where I paid $42 for two adults—ouch).

You get your money’s worth too: the tour is an hour and half, running 1.5 miles underground. See more at the park service’s Cathedral Caverns site.