I love the mountains, and I love a quiet lake in a woodsy spot. But I’m definitely a summer person and a water person, so when people ask me about the best places I’ve travelled I almost always answer with an island destination, such as isolated Lord Howe Island in Australia. With that in mind, and given it’s the time of year when people start thinking about their top places to travel for the next year, here are some top islands to visit in 2027, with no particular order or ranking in mind. JIM’S TOP TEN ISLANDS TO VISIT PONZA, Read more
Waiheke Island
AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND – You gotta love the Kiwis. They have a reputation of being something like we Canadians. But when it comes to tourism, they certainly seem to be more “out there” than we are. I’ll have some examples of this coming up in the next week or two, as I take you on a tour of Matamata (where they filmed much of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit), Rotorua (where I rode a sail-powered go-kart and a spinning contraption called a drift-kar), Picton and Marlborough (a wine tour and a kayak trip), Kaikoura (a chartered plane Read more
AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND – We hear a lot about bungee jumping and hot springs in Rotorua and those oh-so wonderful pinot noir wines from Otago and the sauvignon blancs from Marlborough. But even a travel guy who should know better finds himself in this wonderful country and gets surprised at the sheer variety of the place. Auckland, for example, gets vastly overshadowed by the “usual” tourist spots in New Zealand, not to mention the attention that gets showered on cities such as Sydney by visitors such as Oprah Winfrey. It doesn’t have an opera house to rival Sydney or a Read more
