Brazil has an exotic variety of wild life thriving in spectacular natural settings. This journey takes you to a selection of these remarkable places.
The trip begins in Rio de Janeiro, an imposing city clinging to forested mountains and the shoreline of the Atlantic Ocean. From here, head to Paraty, a colonial waterfront town with sun-kissed tropical islands just a short boat ride away. Head west to view the roaring waters of the Iguazú Falls, where a foaming torrent pours over 275 separate cataracts and walkways lead you through subtropical forest to stunning view points.
Next stop is the Pantanal wetlands, Latin America's wilderness safari park, and a wonderful place to observe thousands of aquatic, forest and grassland birds as well as a host of exotic mammals, before you head back to Rio for one last caipirinha cocktail and a stroll along Copacabana beach.
Travel insurance is insurance that is intended to cover medical expenses, financial (such as money invested in nonrefundable pre-payments), and other losses incurred while traveling, either within one's own country, or internationally.
Travel insurance can usually be arranged at the time of booking of a trip to cover exactly the duration of that trip or a more extensive, continuous insurance can be purchased from (most often) travel insurance companies, travel agents or directly from travel suppliers such as cruiselines or tour operators. However, travel insurance purchased from travel suppliers tends to be less inclusive than insurance offered by insurance companies.
Travel insurance often offers coverage for a variety of travelers. Student travel, business travel, leisure travel, adventure travel, cruise travel, and international travel are all various options that can be insured.
The most common risks that are covered by travel insurance are:
· Medical expenses
· Emergency evacuation/repatriation
· Overseas funeral expenses
· Accidental death, injury or disablement benefit
· Cancellation
· Curtailment
· Delayed departure
· Loss, theft or damage to personal possessions and money (including travel documents)
· Delayed baggage (and emergency replacement of essential items)
· Legal assistance
· Personal liability and rental car damage excess
Some travel policies will also provide cover for additional costs, although these vary widely between providers.
And in addition, often separate insurance can be purchased for specific costs such as:
· pre-existing medical conditions (e.g. asthma, diabetes)
· high risk sports (e.g. skiing, scuba-diving)
· travel to high risk countries (e.g. due to war or natural disasters or acts of terrorism)
Common Exclusions:
· pre-existing medical conditions
· war or terrorism - but some plans may cover this risk
· pregnancy related expenses
· injury or illness caused by alcohol or drug use
Travel insurance can also provide helpful services, often 24 hours a day, 7 days a week that can include concierge services and emergency travel assistance.
Typically travel insurance for the duration of a journey costs approximately 5-7% of the cost of the trip.
Many Canadians enjoy shopping for deals south of the border. Whether it
is new clothes, a new mobile device, gasoline or even larger
expenditures such as appliances, Canadians regularly cross that border
in search of savings.
In the last decade cross border shopping has steadily been on the rise. A Statistics Canada study
done in 2014 found that cross border shopping nearly doubled from 2006
to 2012 ($4.7 billion spent to $8 billion spent, respectively).
Unfortunately,
too many Canadians that cross the border opt out of travel insurance
protection. Most of the times these travelers get away with no coverage
since the odds of some drastic medical emergency happening are remote.
Oftentimes the thought pattern is that we can just cross the border back
into Canada if we get ill or injured, where our provincial healthcare
coverage is waiting for us.
However, cases do occur where a
Canadian who has crossed the border for the day is incapacitated and
ends up in an American hospital for several days. The result is a
whopping hospital bill that would have been covered by a travel
insurance plan for a few dollars per day!
In fact, things such as
massive heart attacks and severe strokes result in situations where
immediate hospitalization is an absolute must for survival, regardless
of how close the border is.
Why take a chance when travel insurance coverage for such a short duration is so cheap?
Suitable Types of Travel Insurance
If
you are considering getting travel insurance and love to cross border
shop multiple times per year then a multi-trip travel insurance plan may
be your best option. Also referred to as "annual" travel insurance,
these plans offer coverage for an unlimited number of cross border trips
for a specified "trip length". The shorter the trip length that is
covered, the cheaper the premium.
If we run some quotes from our online travel quoting engine
for a Trip Length of 4 days (for a person aged 35) we find that the
premium ranges anywhere from $30 to $44. In other words, for the same
price as a bottle of decent wine a Canadian can get travel insurance
that covers all of their cross border shopping trips for one year!
For
people who only do the cross border shopping once or twice a year than a
"single-trip" travel insurance plan might be the way to go. Running
more quotes, we find that a 35 year old that travels to the USA for 2
days can expect to pay a premium anywhere from $8.50 to $20. (Note that
Manulife Financial does not have a minimum premium like most other
insurance carriers, they are the ones quoting at $8.50).
We should also mention that travel insurance often comes as part of a personal health insurance plan. An example of this is the Flexcare
health and dental plan, which offers $5 million in benefits for 9 days
of coverage (there is a $100 deductible and more coverage is available
as an add-on).
Conclusion
The chance that a person is
hospitalized while cross border shopping in the US is rather small.
However, the cost of an extended stay in an American hospital can be
very high, and could run into hundreds of thousands of dollars.
For a few dollars a day, is it worth rolling the dice over?
Barcelona is the second largest city of Spain, located on the northeast coast of the Iberian Peninsula, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. The city has 4.5 km of coastline.
Barcelona is a city with long history, forming the Roman period. Archaeologists have found many traces of an ancient city at the time of the first century BC.
In its history, Bacerlona has repeatedly been invaded in the fifth century, and the second VIII reign of French Emperor Napoleon I (XVIII century).
Today Barcelona is the capital of the autonomous region Catalonia richest Spain. Autonomous Region had a population of more than 5 million people, accounting for more than a quarter of the country's GDP.
Barcelona is one of the most preferred destination for Europe thanks to the favorable climate and culture diversity. Barcelona owns a massive amount of cultural heritage of art, architecture and painting of the world. The city has more than 45 famous museums and art is known for unique contemporary design, including the work of architect Antoni Gaudi has been recognized as a world cultural heritage.
Barcelona is an important economic center of Spain. Like many other developing cities, regional production plays an important role in the development of Barcelona, while the service sector also grew increasingly strong. The most important industry is textiles, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing engine, electronic and print.
The service sector, transport, telecommunications and publishing of information plays an important role. In the transport industry, Port Barcelona is considered as one of the busiest sea ports of the Mediterranean.
Today Barcelona also known for designing the industrial sector and the city has won several major design awards in the world.
What they wanted was Monte Carlo. They didn't want Las Vegas.What they got was Las Vegas. We always knew that they would get Las Vegas. – Stuart Mendelson, Philadelphia Journal, 1978.
ATLANTIC CITY, on Absecon Island just off the midpoint of the Jersey shoreline, has been a tourist magnet since 1854, when Philadelphia speculators Atlantic created it as a rail terminal resort. In 1909, at the peak of the seaside town's popularity, Baedeker wrote "there is something colossal about its vulgarity" – a quality which it sustains today, even while beset by bankruptcy and decay. The real-life model for the board game Monopoly, it has an impressive history of popular culture, boasting the nation's first Boardwalk (1870), the world's first Big Wheel (1892), the first color postcards (1893) and the first Miss America Beauty Pageant (cunningly devised to extend the tourist season in 1921, and still held here yearly). During Prohibition and the Depression, Atlantic City was a center for rum-running, packed with speakeasies and illegal gambling dens. Thereafter, in the face of increasing competition from Florida, it slipped into a steep decline, until desperate city officials decided in 1976 to open up the decrepit resort to legal gambling.
ATLANTA is a relatively young city: only incorporated in 1847, it was little more than a minor transportation center until the Civil War, when its accessibility made it a good site for the huge Confederacy munitions Atlanta City industry – and consequently a major target for the Union army. In 1864 Sherman's army burned the city, an act immortalized in Gone with the Wind. Recovery after the war took just a few years: Atlanta was the archetype of the aggressive, urban, industrial "New South," furiously championed by "boosters" – newspaper owners, bankers, politicians and city leaders. Industrial giants who based themselves here included Coca-Cola, source of a string of philanthropic gifts to the city. Heavy black immigration to Atlanta increased its already considerable black population and led to the establishment of a thriving community centered around Auburn Avenue.
Very few of Atlanta's buildings predate 1915, and nothing at all survives from before 1868. Its characters, on the other hand – politicians and newspaper people – have changed little, and the "booster" tradition has continued to the present, peaking spectacularly when Atlanta won the right to host the 1996 Olympics. The bid to convince the world of the city's prosperity and sophistication was led by city leaders such as ex-mayor Andrew Young (the first Southern black congressman since Reconstruction, who became Carter's ambassador to the UN) and flamboyant former CNN magnate Ted Turner.
Today's Atlanta is at first glance a typical large American city. Its population has reached 3.5 million, and urban sprawl is such a problem that each citizen is obliged to travel an average of 34 miles per day by car – the highest figure in the country.
Cut off from each other by roaring freeways, bright lights and an enclave mentality, its neighborhoods tend to have distinct racial identities – broadly speaking, "white flight" was to the northern suburbs, while the southern districts are predominantly black. That said, the city is undeniably progressive, with little interest in lamenting a lost Southern past. Since voting in the nation's first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, in 1974, it has remained the most conspicuously black-run city in the US, and an estimated 200,000 black fami lies streamed in from states further north in the 1980s alone. The Olympics may not have been the triumph Atlanta so eagerly anticipated – even before the Centennial Park bombing tarnished the event itself, years of disruption and grandiose construction projects had left many Atlantans wondering whether the city had lost more than it gained – but with its ever-increasing international profile, cosmopolitan blend of cultures and hip local neighborhoods, the spirit and dynamism of modern Atlanta is a far cry indeed from its much-mythologized Deep South roots.
Amsterdam is a compact, instantly likeable city. It's appealing to look at and pleasing to walk around, an intriguing mix of the parochial and the international; it also has a welcoming attitude towards visitors and a uniquely youthful orientation, shaped by the liberal counterculture of the last four decades. It's hard not to feel drawn by the buzz of open-air summer events, by the cheery intimacy of the city's clubs and bars, and by the Dutch facility with languages: just about everyone you meet in Amsterdam will be able to speak good-to-fluent English, on top of their own native tongue, and often more than a smattering of French and German too.
The city's layout is determined by a web of canals radiating out from an historical core to loop right round the centre. These planned, seventeenth-century extensions to the medieval town make for a uniquely elegant urban environment, with tall gabled houses reflected in their black-green waters. This is the city at its most beguiling, a world away from the traffic and noise of many other European city centres, and it has made Amsterdam one of the continent's most popular short-haul destinations. These charms are supplemented by a string of first-rate attractions, most notably the Anne Frankhuis, where the young Jewish diarist hid away during the German occupation of World War II, the Rijksmuseum, with its wonderful collection of Dutch paintings, including several of Rembrandt's finest works, and the peerless Vincent van Gogh Museum, with the world's largest collection of the artist's work.
However, it's Amsterdam's population and politics that constitute its most enduring characteristics. Celebrated during the 1960s and 1970s for its radical permissiveness, the city mellowed only marginally during the 1980s, and, despite the gentrification of the last twenty years, it retains a laid-back feel. That said, it is far from being as cosmopolitan a city as, say, London or Paris: despite the huge numbers of immigrants from the former colonies in Surinam and Indonesia, as well as Morocco and Turkey – to name but a few – almost all live and work outside the centre and can seem almost invisible to the casual visitor. Indeed, there is an ethnic and social homogeneity in the city centre that seems to run counter to everything you may have heard of Dutch integration.
The apparent contradiction embodies much of the spirit of Amsterdam. The city is world famous as a place where the possession and sale of cannabis are effectively legal – or at least decriminalized – and yet, for the most part, Amsterdammers themselves can't really be bothered with the stuff. And while Amsterdam is renowned for its tolerance towards all styles of behaviour and dress, a primmer, more correct-thinking big city, with a more mainstream dress sense, would be hard to find. Behind the cosy cafés and dreamy canals lurks the suspicion that Amsterdammers' hearts lie squarely in their wallets, and while newcomers might see the city as a liberal haven, locals can seem just as indifferent to this as well.
In recent years, a string of hardline city mayors have taken this conservatism on board and seem to have embarked on a generally successful – if often unspoken – policy of squashing Amsterdam's image as a counterculture icon and depicting it instead as a centre for business and international high finance. Almost all the inner-city squats – which once well-nigh defined local people-power – are gone or legalized, and coffeeshops have been forced to choose between selling dope or alcohol, and, if only for economic reasons, many have switched to the latter. Such shifts in attitude, combined with alterations to the cityscape, in the form of large-scale urban development on the outskirts and regeneration within, combine to create an unmistakeable feeling that Amsterdam and its people are busy reinventing themselves, writing off their hippyfied history to return to earlier, more stolid days.
Nevertheless, Amsterdam remains a casual and intimate place, and Amsterdammers themselves make much of their city and its attractions being gezellig, a rather overused Dutch word roughly corresponding to a combination of "cosy", "lived-in" and "warmly convivial". Nowhere is this more applicable than in the city's unparalleled selection of drinking places, whether you choose a traditional brown bar or one of a raft of newer, designer cafés, or grand cafés. The city boasts dozens of great restaurants too, with its Indonesian cuisine second-to-none, and is at the forefront of contemporary European film, dance, drama and music. The city has several top-rank jazz venues and the Concertgebouw concert hall is home to one of the world's leading orchestras. The club scene is restrained by the standard of other main cities, although the city's many gay bars and clubs partly justify Amsterdam's claim to be the "Gay Capital of Europe".
