Top Travel Leads

Sat Nav 1 Chelsea 0

Once upon a time, Earl Spencer’s daughter had tickets to go and watch the London Derby, Chelsea v Arsenal. Her taxi arrived and her driver typed ‘Stamford Bridge’ into his sat nav and off they went. The journey was taking a little longer than expected, and after much deliberation they arrived in a small village outside York- 230 miles away from the real Stamford Bridge, where Chelsea were playing. Needless to say, they missed the match.

Ho Ho Ho… All the way to Lille

A group of Christmas shoppers from Gloucester decided that Lille (France) was the ideal place to find their loved ones perfect gifts for Christmas. A coach load of them headed to Lille, but started to have concerns when they saw road signs for Eindhoven, which is in the Netherlands. The coach driver insisted he was on the right tracks, but unfortunately he’d picked the wrong one of two ‘Lilles’ that had shown up on his sat nav. The shoppers only managed to get 2 hours shopping time in before they had to return to the UK. Shame it cost them £150 each to get there…

£96,000 Down the Drain (or Swollen River)

On her way home from a Christening, this woman got more than she bargained for while following instructions from her sat nav. The sat nav instructed her to follow some pretty dodgy country roads, only used by farmers in their 4×4’s. Instead of turning back, the woman kept on driving in the same direction until her £96,000 Mercedes sports car got caught up in a swollen river due to heavy rain on the previous days. The electric soon blew, forcing the windows to open and creating a dangerous scenario for the driver who couldn’t get out. A local villager came to her rescue. Unfortunately, the car was written off. Lesson to be learned: Always use common sense when using a sat nav!

Long and Winding Road

A Swiss man learned to use common sense when using his sat nav the hard way- he followed directions from his trusty GPS system all the way up a goat track, half way up a mountain. His van then got stuck on a tricky corner and had to be rescued by helicopters. Although he realized he was lost, he continued up the goat track until he realized there was no way forward (or backwards). He was later applauded for being able to get that far up the mountain via a goat’s footpath.

Choo Choo

A 20 year old student had a near miss when her sat sav directed her to a metal gate. Convinced that her sat nav was giving her the correct route, she opened the gate and drove onto a railway line. To her horror, her Renault Clio got stuck right in the middle of the track and couldn’t be moved in time. The student had to stand back and watch as a train smashed into her pride and joy, which couldn’t be saved from the brutality of the passing train. Realizing that sat navs can actually make mistakes, the student from Redditch told the Daily Telegraph, ‘I’ll never use a sat-nav again’. The phone call to moneysupermarket.com must have been an interesting one.

Drive like a Royal

One lucky person who bought a Jaguar from an auction ended up with more than they bargained for. The Jaguar happened to be previously owned by the Duchess of York, complete with a sat nav. The Duchess obviously isn’t as safety conscious as she should be as she left the address of her and her two daughters in the sat nav, as well as the post codes of their favourite places to go. Note to ones self- always clear your sat nav history before selling ones sat nav!

Tips for using Sat Navs

1. Check what you type- it’s so easy to put a ‘0’ instead of an ‘o’, or an ‘I’ instead of a ‘1’. Like our taxi driver friend who ended up in York, you could end up 100’s of miles away from your destination.
2. Keep your sat nav updated. By hooking your sat nav up to your PC you can update the GPS data to make sure you have the most current information. Buildings and roads change all the time, so don’t be caught out.
3. Don’t make the same mistake that the Duchess of York made- never type in your home address as a destination. If you sat nav were to be stolen it would make it easy for thieves to track you down.
4. Never leave your sat nav in your car. Sat navs are appealing to thieves because of their price tags. Always take store your sat nav out of the car when you’re not using it.

Bocas del Toro province

In Almirante, a jumping-off point for the Bocas del Toro archipelago, if the light is right, you may catch a glimpse of a picturesque canal settlement. So it may seem for a moment, but quickly the undeniable ambiance of board-and-tin hovels, a mixture of squalor and romace, though more of poverty-stricken Chiquita banana port town creeps in. Indeed most of what one can see around this township are banana trees and most residents are indeed in the banana business, for the most part poor folk who toil the endless stretches of banana plantations in the vicinity and in spots from here on to Changuinola.

Almirante, Bocas del Toro

Before one nears the one lane decrepit iron bridge across Rio Teribe and enters the uninspiring, one long-street town of Changuinola, one passes by a few of Nobe-Bugle settlements. Their simple houses on stilts and roofed with thatch lay scattered on the doorstep of a gorgeous virgin rain forest that stretches into the distant Parque Internacional La Amistad on the high slopes of the Talamanca and Central Mountain Ranges on one side and the simmering islands amidst turquoise blue waters of the Bocas del Toro on the other. While most tourists never make it up this way, the route is a pleasant one and offers three things to do – to continue on through the back door to enter Costa Rica, take a ferry to the Bocas, or, and this is perhaps the best reason for coming to this remote part of panama, and that is to visit the the Naso Indians, better known in Panama as the Teribe or Naso-Teribe.

Public transport, Changuinola

On January 10 Tata Group launched the world’s cheapest car with a sticker price of 1 lakh Rupees (100,000 rupees, or 2,500 dollars), which some analysts say could revolutionise automobile costs worldwide – and – how about getting one of those and have a great trip around India on your own? Anyway, Chairman Ratan Tata dedicated the world’s cheapest car to the people of rural India who did not have the means to buy a car, hoping to improve their lives, giving them a better and a safer form of personal transport, assuring that safety on four wheels will be by far more than on a two-wheeler – not unusual to see entire families, two adults with as many as four kids traveling routinely on motorcycles throghout India. Having a 650cc engine and 70 horsepower, the car is said to had met crash test requirements.

India Package Tour: Goa and Kerala