UNUSUAL HOLIDAY IDEAS

The Illegal Border Crossing Tour in Mexico

This tour at Parque EcoAlberto in Mexico is my number one pick because it’s truly unusual. When I first read that this tour will recreate the experience of being a Mexican trying to illegally cross the border, I wasn’t sure that it was quite the right thing to do; but according to a New York Times reporter who tried it, the locals want tourists to understand the experiences and traumas that illegal immigrants face. Take this night-time guided hike and you’ll be chased in the dark, shot at by (fake) police and you may or may not make it under the fence. But you’ll definitely have an interesting story to tell the folks back home.




Surreal Trip to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone



Have you ever thought of packing a Geiger counter in your carry-on bag? Seriously. For the past several years, people from around the world have done just that, descending upon Kyiv, Ukraine for a chance to visit the contaminated landscape known as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
A 1986 accident destroyed Reactor 4 at the V.I. Lenin Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in northern Ukraine, releasing huge amounts of radiation into the atmosphere. The accident forced the evacuation of more than 100,000 people from an area within a 30-km radius of the plant. Twenty-two years after the disaster, people have returned to this area. Not to live - it is still too dangerous for that. However, the area is now considered safe enough for people to participate in "ecological" tours of the site of the world's worst nuclear accident.


The Vampire Tour of San Francisco

Special vampire tour guide Mina Hawker encourages her tour guests to come in costume when they want to learn about the vampires of the Nob Hill area of San Francisco. She is (apparently) a vampress created by Count Dracula, and she’s now lived in SF for a century, passing on local vampire legend. Right! But in case you start to get worried, the website carefully mentions that they don’t visit any stops that are “seriously gothic or dark”. To make sure you arrive on time they raffle off a “vampire-related prize” at the start of each tour, too. It’s full of gimmicks but sounds like a fun night out.


Ice Hotel

The Ice Hotel opened on New Years Day in 2001. For its first year it was located in Montmorency Falls Park, which is on the outskirts of Quebec City, with plans right from the beginning to move to the nearby Duchesnay resort for its next year, where it has been built ever since.

The hotel is located 10 km west of Québec City. It is the first Ice Hotel in North America and is erected each January. The hotel has a four-month lifespan each year before being brought down in April. It had 22 beds when it first opened in 2000. In its last iteration it had 85 beds, all made of ice but lined with deer furs and covered with mattresses and Arctic sleeping bags. Only the bathrooms are heated and located in a separate insulated structure.

It takes about a month and a half to build with 60 workers. The Hotel makes its own snow using a special mixture to adjust the humidity. It is built with metal frames, it lets harden for a few days, and the cranes are removed. The hotel is made of 15,000 tons of snow and 500,000 tons of ice and the walls are up to four-feet thick.
This year, the Ice Bar decor is inspired with gothic architecture. The medieval ice and snow décor with Gargoyles and snow vault will surely amazed you. You could say that you have visited one of the most beautiful ice bars in the world!


See the details at: http://www.icehotel-canada.com/index.php





The Catacomb Tour of Paris

Far below the city streets of Paris, in the quiet, damp darkness, seven million Parisians lie motionless. Their skeletons, long since dis-interred from the churchyard graves their survivors left them in, are neatly stacked and aligned to form the walls of nearly one kilometer of walking passage. Welcome to the Denfert-Rochereau Ossuary-- The Empire of the Dead.

The Catacombs of Paris or Catacombes de Paris are a famous underground ossuary in Paris, France. Its entrance is located near the Denfert-Rochereau station of the Paris Métro. Organized in a renovated section of the city's vast network of subterranean tunnels and caverns towards the end of the 18th century, it became a tourist attraction on a small scale from the early 19th century and has been open to the public on a regular basis from 1867.




The Undersea Resort

Accessible by an elevator and nestled in crystal clear waters of a 5 000 – acre Fijian lagoon Poseidon Undersea Resort is the world’s first seafloor resort and the only place where you can spend the night 40 feet underwater in incomparable luxury.
Beginning in 2010 a select group of world’s adventure travelers and undersea enthusiasts will have the opportunity to experience a week-long-stay in this extraordinary place.

See more at: http://www.poseidonresorts.com




The Harry Potter Tour

Yes, you can visit Platform 9¾ in your black London taxi on a Harry Potter Tour. And if you choose the full-day version of the tour, you can also get out into the English countryside and see quite a few of the locations used to shoot the films. Harry Potter is a real growth area for English tourism, it seems, and this one company alone has dozens of versions of the Harry Potter tour. At the end of the day, however, they unfortunately don’t guarantee that you’ll learn any magic tricks.



If you want to get to know more visit: http://www.capitaltaxitours.co.uk/harpot.htm


Have any of these holiday destinations got you itching to go to? Which one, in your opinion, would be most exciting experience?