NEWSLETTER 57: January 2021

Dear , thank you for your interest in the Afaranwide travel blog.

WE’VE had an unusual 2020, but then, haven’t we all? We left Hong Kong and are temporarily living in Portugal on our way home to England after almost 15 years as expats. Throw Covid and Brexit into the mix (we like a challenge) and we’re a good example of how flexible we have all become. Sue has had five family members with Covid, all now more or less recovered. In the meantime, we have carried on with our travel blog to report on near-empty flights, near-empty hotels, and empty streets. Next year let’s hope we enjoy moments of good old-fashioned travelling just for fun, if we can overcome our new-found fear of crowds. Here’s to 2021!

RUNNING a website is a steep learning curve, and one of the many things you have to get your head around is search engine optimisation – SEO for short. You have to use keywords, include appropriate links and do a host of other things designed to get your posts noticed by Google and, to a lesser extent, other smaller search engines. The holy grail of SEO is to have your post listed on the first page of a Google search – and best of all is to be the first item on the first page.

Top out of 20 million – and that's Afaranwide's Colin Simpson with a cheetah in the third photo from left

So we were delighted to reach the first page top spot for the popular search phrase "Dubai private zoo". There's been a lot of interest in this subject thanks to a couple of young Instagram stars who keep lions, tigers and other exotic animals, and this search generates 20 million results. Our top spot post features a large private zoo belonging to a senior member of Dubai's ruling family.

Even better is our placing for the search phrase "qe2 handover Dubai" – we are in both first and second place on the first page for that one. Our gallery of photos from the day Dubai acquired the Queen Elizabeth 2 liner is top, and our post about the handover is second. In fourth place is a news report about the event written by Afaranwide's Colin Simpson. Other Afaranwide posts that feature on Google search first pages include one on a Saudi camel farm (first place out of 9.8 million results), one on World War 2 heroine Simone Serrière (third in English-language search), and one about Dubai Emirati weddings. And many of our photos are featured on Google search first pages.

SINGAPORE, the setting for the hit movie Crazy Rich Asians, has seen its economy slump drastically because of Covid – and tourism, aviation and exhibitions have been hit hardest. But the city state is determined to bounce back. Trade minister Chan Chung Sing told socially distanced delegates at the recent TravelRevive conference: “We want to be the front-runner reinventing global travel.” A key factor in Singapore's bid to offer Covid-safe trade will be mega-attractions such as Gardens by the Bay. Vast tree-shaped structures rise up on the waterfront close to the striking Marina Bay Sands resort, and there are two enormous dome-shaped glasshouses to explore.

WE'RE currently in Portugal's Algarve region, and for the first time since we left the UK in 2006 at the start of our expat travels we don't have a local bank account. We're therefore hit by a £5 “non sterling transaction fee” by our British bank every time we withdraw cash using a debit card at an ATM. But costs can be even higher if you use one of those ATMs you see outside shops and other businesses, rather than at a bank. In Portugal banks don’t charge for using ATMs – however, you can still lose out. When you use an ATM you’ll be quoted an exchange rate. In Portugal, we’re finding the rate is around 1 euro to £1, even though the rate on the currency markets as I write is 1 euro to £0.90. This means a 200 euro withdrawal would cost £200, compared with the £186.72 my UK bank charged me, even with the £5 fee. The way to avoid this is to reject the conversion – that way you’ll pay at your home bank’s rate, which in our experience will probably be better value.

V2, the latest wartime thriller by British author Robert Harris, rocketed up the best-seller lists in 2020. It’s set against the backdrop of Nazi Germany’s assault on London with the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missile, the V2 of the title. A hulking reminder of this period towards the end of the Second World War can be found looming up in the countryside in North France. La Coupole, with it’s vast concrete dome, was built as a launch site for the rockets.     

EVERYONE’S bombarded with scam emails all the time, but they seem to have become even more common during the pandemic. Many are travel-related. We received one purporting to be from Cathay Pacific offering a HK$100 voucher that would give us two flight tickets to anywhere in the world. It could be used any time in the next 12 months, ie when travel begins to return to normal as Covid vaccines are rolled out. Often poor grammar gives these phishing emails away, but this one looked very convincing. One way to check if an email is genuine is to examine the sender’s email, and sure enough this one wasn’t from Cathay at all but from a Hotmail address. Cathay confirmed it was fake, saying they believed scammers were trying to fool customers into providing personal information through the use of fraudulent forms. The golden rule if you receive a suspicious email is, of course, to avoid clicking on any links. If an offer looks too good to be true, as this one did, then it’s almost certainly fake. And scammers often try to get you to respond quickly – this one said the voucher was available for only 48 hours. It seems a shame that, at a time when so many people have responded to the Covid crisis with great kindness and generosity, scammers simply see it as another way to cheat people out of their money.

Faro airport looking pretty empty

AFTER just over two months living in a very quiet, almost deserted, Algarve it seems like good news from Skyscanner that searches for flights from Britain to this beautiful part of Portugal have soared by 48 percent in recent weeks. In fact, Faro (where the local airport is) was the global company’s top European search, followed by Malaga, Palma de Mallorca and Ibiza in Spain, and Dalaman in Turkey. Spirits rose and the tourism board was cautious but optimistic. Then came the UK’s sad Covid spike, and Portugal’s ban on entry to the country from the UK unless you’re a citizen or resident, described as “another adversity” by the government. We fear this will be the shape of things to come for some time.

Afaranwide

afaranwide.com

© 2021