Ponce de Leon, the explorer who was sent by the Spanish to the New World in search of the Fountain of Youth is buried in the Cathedral of San Juan in the city's Old Town. A three or four minute walk from the cathedral takes you to the second oldest church that has been in continuous use in the New World - Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic takes the number one spot. San Juan's colourful, hilly Old Town, surrounded by the waves of a crashing sea, make...

Actually we weren't in Nassau at all. Travelpod couldn't recognize the ugly little island of Caycoco where we'd stopped for the day so Nassau is the listing, like it or not. Anyway, we stopped at Caycoco after just 12 or so hours, to spend the day on this wretched little Bahamian beach. Elenka and I snorkelled out to a very unspectacular reef where the owners of the island - one of the cruise-line companies - had placed some boat parts and cannons ab...

 The addendum runs only to the asterisk:  Although it took us three days, Elenka and I together have come to the conclusion that Hollywood Beach is one of the best beaches in the world."Water and sand does not a beach make," I said to her. "For each and every one of them have an abundance of both." "What makes a beach stand out," she replied, "is its ambiance."   I agreed whole-heartedly. Last night we sat on a boardwalk bench and simply people watched unt...

Clouds of white smoke sat still, as though frozen on the tops of chimneys. Shivering, but not feeling the cold, I stood by the front window of Campbell's Drug Store, just down the street from Drury's Meat Market, my parents shop. An illuminated clock with the smiling Alka Seltzer kid lit the back wall of the pharmacy; a blue Royal Bank calendar hung beneath it. I looked at the watch my mother had just given me for my fourteenth birthday. Both time-pieces ...

We left Bangkok around ten in the morning. It was a four something hour flight to Beijing, where we waited three hours before flying direct to Toronto. For the record only.