About Barbara Weibel

Barbara Weibel After years of working 70 hours a week at jobs I detested, I felt like the proverbial "hole in the donut" - solid on the outside, but empty on the inside. Searching for meaning in my life, I abandoned my successful but unsatisfying career and set out on a six-month solo backpacking trip around the world to pursue my true passions of travel, writing, and photography. My blog features stories about the destinations I visit, people I meet, the crazy things...Read more here....
  • Eiffel Tower, Paris, France
  • Angkor Wat Cambodia
    Angkor Wat, Siem Reap, Cambodia
  • Hill Tribe Chief Northern Thailand
    Hill Tribe Chief, Thailand
  • Machu Picchu Peru
    Machu Picchu, Peru
  • Franz Josef Glacier New Zealand
    Franz Josef Glacier, New Zealand
  • Olympic National Park Washington State
    Olympic Peninsula, Washington
  • Damnoen Saduak Floating Market Thailand
    Damnoen Saduak Floating Market, Thailand
  • Maasai Tribe Ngorongoro Tanzania
    Maasai Warriors, Ngorongoro, Tanzania
  • Lion Serengeti National Park Tanzania
    Serengeti National Park, Tanzania
  • Chichen Itza Yucatan Mexico
    Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico
  • Wat Xieng Thong
    Wat Xieng Thong, Luang Prabang, Laos
  • Feast Central India
    Traditional Feast, Central India
  • China Shangahi Skyline Pudong
    Pudong Skyline, Shanghai, China
  • Honeymoon Beach Florida
    Honeymoon Beach, Florida
  • Great Wallof China Jinshanling Beijing
    Great Wall, Jinshanling, China
  • Lake Louise Banff National Park Canada
    Lake Louise, Banff National Park, Canada
  • pura ulun danu temple batur bali
    Lake Temple, Central Bali
  • Galapagos Islands Ecuador
    Galapagos Islands, Ecuador

The smiling faces behind the front desk at St Christopher’s Inns hostel in Barcelona, Spain were a welcome sight after my bad experience with Equity Point Hostels the previous week. Their warm greeting was quickly followed up with an efficient check-in process and instructions for finding my females-only dorm room. My first big surprise was the attention that had been paid to security. I had to scan my key before the elevator would move, use it a second time to access the hallway leading to my dorm room, and yet  third time to enter my room. Inside my room, the pleasant surprises continued. Double bunks were securely attached to the wall and each had dark gray privacy curtains, an individual light and an outlet. Below the beds were large metal lockers on wheels that were easily pulled out for secure luggage storage, using a padlock that I carry with me. My 22″ rolling suitcase and my mid-size backpack both easily fit into the locker. Best of all, with three wifi routers on each floor, there was free rocket-fast Internet available in all rooms.

Front desk at St Christopher's Inns hostel in Barcelona, Spain

Smiling faces behind the front desk at St Christopher’s Inns hostel in Barcelona, Spain

Continue reading

Mercè Barceló never expected to own a hotel. At university she studied philology, which qualified her to teach English and German. For years she tutored private language students until, in 2006, her world changed forever.

My big changes came when I decided to divorce,” she explained. “I have a very open personality, as my mother. We always have people in our home…and we always talk and are very spontaneous. So I thought this (hospitality) business could fit in my world.

Are you from this town?” I asked.

I grew up here. This was my house.

Really! So you converted your home into this hotel?

I looked around, trying to imagine Niu de Sol Hotel Rural as a private home. The rear sitting room, with its old brick fireplace, had been her parents’ original house. Mercè swept her hand around the dining room where we sat chatting. “This was the new house I built with my ex-husband. When I decided to divorce, it was also a (way of) not keeping memories of my past life.

Spain-Palau-Saverdera-Niu-de-Sol-Common-Room

The siting room is a favorite spot to curl up with a book

Initially, Mercè converted only the front of the building but soon after completing construction her father suffered an embolism and could no longer climb stairs. She helped her parents relocate to a ground-level apartment, then converted the rear portion of the building, increasing the size of the hotel to its present 14-room configuration. Her plan was risky. With only three restaurants and a bar that offers live jazz music each Friday night, the town where Niu de Sol is located, Palau-Saverdera, is anything but a tourist mecca. Yet this sleepy village, located in the exquisitely beautiful foothills of the Costa Brava region in Catalonia, Spain, offers something more precious than excitement.

People who come to me want to be near the coast but a little bit interior. They are searching for a charming hotel in quiet village.Continue reading

I could see the question on the faces of the owners of Can Dionis, a 700-year old farm in Catalonia, Spain as we sat down around a long table set up in their inner courtyard. How do you get a group of travel writers to put down their smart phones, cameras, and laptops?

A press trip with travel writers means constant tweeting, Facebook status updates, taking photos, Instagramming, sending emails and taking notes

A press trip with travel writers means constant tweeting, Facebook status updates, taking photos, Instagramming, sending emails and taking notes, until….

From the edges of the patio they watched us with cocked heads, puzzling over our strange behavior. Moments later, the wife smiled knowingly and signaled for her family to begin serving. To the baskets of fresh-baked bread, whose yeasty fragrance was already suffusing the air, they added plates of meaty red tomatoes, glass carafes of oil so rich it sparkled green in the sunlight, and giant chunks of farm-fresh cheese. Fresh-squeezed orange juice, Spanish Jamon and homemade yogurt followed. Last but not least, the father set a flat-pan cake coated in powdered sugar in the center of the table with a flourish. Neus Vila i Figareda, the director of the Visitors Bureau for the Girona Region and our guide for the day, cut into the golden crust, explaining, “This is a specialty of the house. I asked her to make it for us today. It is delicious spread with their homemade marmalade.” Continue reading

By the time I finally arrived in Spain from Lanai, Hawaii, I’d flown on five different planes, ridden in a taxi between La Guardia and JFK airports in New York City, and taken two trains. I’d been traveling for 41 hours straight and was dead tired, but the Travel Blog Exchange (TBEX) Conference I was scheduled to attend in Girona was due to start in four hours. Thankfully, the folks at Wimdu had arranged for me to stay in a comfortable apartment in the city center with three fellow travel bloggers.

Full kitchen was the nicest feature of our Wimdu apartment in Girona, Spain

Full kitchen was the nicest feature of our Wimdu apartment in Girona, Spain

As Heather Cowper from Heather on her Travels, Isabel Romano from Diario de a bordo, and Laurel Robbins from Monkeys and Mountains scoped out the three bedrooms I plopped my luggage on the polished wooden floor and sank down on the sofa. Too tired to move, I let the other girls take the bedrooms and claimed the fold-out sofa. I rubbed my aching feet and checked out my home for the next few days. The rental agent who checked us in explained that the apartments had just been completely redone, right down to the furniture; we would be the first people to sleep in the new beds. Our check-in time had even been delayed because a crew was still moving in furniture. Continue reading

There’s a kitschy movie playing in the lobby of Lub-d Silom Hostel, George of the Jungle. The antics of the apes and toucan are making me laugh, but also reminding me that a week ago I was happily perched in my own private jungle tree house. Unlike George, I wasn’t in the deepest, darkest heart of Africa; I was on the little-known island of Phra Pradaeng in the heart of Bangkok, Thailand. Across the Chao Phraya River loomed skyscrapers and industrial facilities, but the view from my “nest” – the delightful name for the elevated glass cubicles that serve as rooms at Bangkok Tree House – was of dense mangrove forest where turtles sunned on the banks of canals. Bangkok may have been right across the river, but the hustle and bustle of the city felt a world away.

Owner Joey Tulyanond shows off Bangkok Tree House restaurant with elevated glass "nests" in the background

Owner Joey Tulyanond shows off Bangkok Tree House restaurant with elevated glass "nests" in the background

Bangkok Tree House is the inspiration of Joey Tulyanond, Owner & CGO (Chief Greening Officer) of the unique six-month old guest house. His quest began in 2006 when he read Best Urban Oasis, an article in Time Magazine authored by Andrew Marshall, who thrust a little-known jungle oasis located smack dab in the middle of Bangkok into the limelight. Remarkably, few residents of Bangkok were even aware of the existence of this pristine bit of land. Located in a giant loop of the Chao Phraya River, the only way to visit the island is to make a roundabout drive to one inconveniently located bridge or take a no-frills ferry that makes the crossing every 20 minutes. The inconvenient access had one giant benefit; the land never caught the eye of developers. Today it is criss-crossed by miles of elevated paths that run along mangrove-studded canals shaded by banana trees, where turtles bask in the sun and lizards scurry softly through the underbrush. Continue reading

Let me just say it…I love hostels! Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate luxurious resorts and upscale hotels too, but there’s a special kind of energy in hostels that doesn’t translate to other accommodation types. Travelers who stay at hostels are generally less interested in being pampered and more interested in having an authentic experience in the country they are visiting. It’s not uncommon to plop down in a chair in the common area and soon be engrossed in a conversation about the best undiscovered restaurants and local places not included in the guide books that are definitely worth a visit.

Unfortunately, I so often hear objections to hostels, especially from travelers in my age group. There is a pervasive belief that hostels are frequented by 20-somethings who party half the night and then return to the dorm room and have noisy sex. Many also believe that hostels are dirty, are located in dangerous neighborhoods, and that things go missing in the dorms. On all counts, they couldn’t be more wrong. I have stayed in hostels all over the world and most are clean and located in safe areas of the city, plus they all have firm rules about no sex in the dorms (I’ve never experienced a situation where this occurred). And in all my years of traveling, I have never had anything stolen in a hostel.

Lobby at Lub-d Silom Hostel in Bangkok, Thailand

Lobby at Lub-d Silom Hostel in Bangkok, Thailand

What will be a surprise to anyone who hasn’t considered staying in a hostel is that almost all of them now offer private rooms in addition to dorms, and the private rooms almost always have private rather than shared bathrooms. Add to this the very affordable prices offered by dorms and you have an unbeatable combination. Like hotels and resorts, however, amenities and facilities vary from one hostel to another and I’ve gotten adept at reading between the lines of customer reviews when choosing a property. My criteria, in order of importance, are: in-room wifi, location near the city center, price, safety, and cleanliness. Most of the time I can’t meet all my criteria but once in a while I get lucky, as I did several years ago when I discovered Lub-d Hostels in Bangkok, Thailand, which offers the following amenities, among others:

  • Free high-speed wifi access in the rooms and common areas
  • Lub-d has two hostels in central Bangkok, one in Siam Square (the heart of the shopping district) and another in the Silom (the commercial and nightlife area), both of which are an easy walk to the Sky Train and MRT subway
  • Lub-d Hostels are exceptionally safe and secure, with closed-circuit TV, electronic keycard access, fire protected emergency exits and fire & smoke alarms throughout the facility
  • Without a doubt, Lub-d are the cleanest hostels I have ever stayed in; their website says: “At Lub-d, cleanliness is not an option. It is the foundation of everything we do.” I believe it; their shared bathrooms virtually sparkle!
  • Extremely affordable prices that range from $13.56 per night for a dorm bed to $47.46 per per night for a double room
My spotless double room at Lub-d Silom in Bangkok

My spotless double room at Lub-d Silom in Bangkok

Since I often use Bangkok as a base for my Asia travels, I’ve had the opportunity to stay at Lub-d numerous times. Initially I chose Lub-d Siam Square, where I stayed in the female dorms; by my second visit the staff was greeting me by name when I walked in the door. This time around I opted for Lub-d Silom because it was better located for some business I had to conduct while in Bangkok, hoping that it would be as wonderful as its sister property. In a word, it was unbeatable. I arrived at 1 a.m., dead tired Continue reading

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