Danik the Explorer
Travel Blogger
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Travel Agent, Personal Travel Consultant & Travel Blogger, Photographer, from Stevenage, UK. Travels the world a lot.
My name is ‘Danik’, well not really, it’s the Russian nickname for my real name ‘Daniel’ which was given to me back in 2006 and has kind of stuck and I come from one of the first ‘new’ towns of England, Stevenage, located 50km north of the British capital. Born in August 1982 in the small historic market town of Hitchin, UK, I am the eldest child in my family with two younger brothers.
Whilst growing up myself and my brothers were dragged all around our home island on caravan vacations and slugging it out in holiday camps whilst exploring the areas intensely. After my college days (where I obtained two A-levels in Leisure and Tourism and obtained an ABTA travel agency management certificate), I joined the movie industry by working in the local cinema in Stevenage before moving on to work in the railway industry in London, France and surrounding areas.
This is where I have remained but outside my ‘real’ job I do a lot of travelling (well, hence the travel blogging) a lot of photography, keeping fit by doing a lot of running, cycling and hiking as well as going to watch sports team like Stevenage FC in the English Football League, Dinamo Riga in the KHL ice hockey league in Latvia and sometimes the odd jaunt to watch Lille FC in France’s top football league.
I have done crazy things in the past like being smuggled into a Palestine backdoor from Israel instead of an official check-point, nearly hitting a turtle on an American highway at full speed, trekked in the Arctic, got stuck on an inhabited island in the Indian Ocean and got speeding fines in whilst driving cars in several countries. I have also ran up the Jungfrau mountain in Switzerland and cycled from my home town of Stevenage to Amsterdam (Netherlands) via France and Belgium in under four days.
I haven’t tried the nomadic lifestyle (yet), or travelled for months on end as I haven’t had the chance to do so (relationships and mortgages do get in the way), but if I had the chance, I would take it. When I do get away be it a trip to a state park with a stately home in it in nearby London or flying to a tropical island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, I will always take it if given the opportunity. I have been pretty lucky so far with my job as I get ample of time off and get paid a good wage to pay the bills and travel.
I have read quite a few testimonials from other bloggers and everyone who does travel, they travel differently. It is true I am a different kind of traveler, I love to do a bit of everything from backpacking (sleeping at train stations in the middle of a European winter springs to mind), to being a typical tourist and checking out the sights (New York City comes to mind), working in a foreign country for a very short while (Paris & Lille in France was great in my younger and wilder days), to doing luxury resorts (Maldives) and hopefully soon I will do the Nomadic way or if can’t, to travel for longer periods of time.
Since I have left college I am not the same person as I used to be. I have grown up; I have learnt a lot whilst on the road, I am more eager, full of life and not the shy little boy anymore. Whilst growing up I travelled a lot with my family, most of it caravanning around my home islands and thanks to my parents by shoving an world atlas in my hands when I was a child, I was looking at places I could travel to when I was older. I also wanted to learn about new cultures and pick up new languages. I may not be great at them but I do pick up a few phrases. Still, the French language will always be my second language.
I find spending a short time in a city or a new country is not enough time to appreciate the area. When I first started travelling with no-frills airlines, I would do a day or two trips into Europe but felt after a while I was rushing my visits. Now when I plan trips, they are for longer! I have done a four week backpacking trip around south-eastern Europe, spent Christmas in the Maldives, road trip around New England in the States, travelled to the island of Svalbard in the Arctic, and spent some quality time in Tunisia taking in and sleeping in the Sahara desert.
I am not the sort of person who buys souvenirs whilst on the road. I like to create memories and hold onto them. I also love taking photos and I am lucky that looking at the photos I have taken, it doesn’t get mixed up on how I remember the place I have visited. I also love sharing my memories and experiences and decided that travel means the world to me so I have created a website so that anyone in the world can follow me if they like to. I have done some crazy things in the past like, jumping off boats in the sea, playing guitars in bars in Israel and Maldives and of course eating 50cm sausages in Moscow. I have so much more to do; my bucket list is getting longer and longer every day.
Will I have time to complete it? Probably not but one day when I am a lot older, I will look back and hopefully I can say, I lived my life and enjoyed every minute of it. For now, I am going with the flow and see where my life will lead me next but if it was not for the travelling, I be stuck in a 9 to 5 job, bored and getting drunk every Friday night. There is much more to life than doing the routine, born, school, job, married, have children and then die. My advice, take any chance given in life and take risks. It could be for the better.
I came here (flying into the nearby international airport), we hired a car, drove into the centre as the city was the first stop on our road trip around Central Switzerland, parked in an underground car park, went upstairs to street level and whilst on the pavement as I was looking at a map in my hands, a pigeon shat on my head. The House of Savoy came to rule the city (and ruled the area of northwestern Italy and the Cote d’Azur in southeastern France) and this lasted under two hundred years before the Savoy’s got kicked out and the city aligned itself with the Swiss Confederacy. In the 18th century, as Geneva lies on the border of France, the French tried to take the city by influencing the town folk which didn’t work for years, however in 1798, the French got fed up and annexed the city. It’s a French speaking city (the locals have the Swiss-French dialect but understand ‘French’ from over the border down the road).
The Agora is made up of a large area full of ancient ruins located with a lot of trees and bushes dotted about to give the place a more feel good factor. Then over the centuries the Persians, Romans etc came and went, sieging the place then becoming a residential area before falling into ruins (but in a lot better condition than the other sites around the city). However a huge discovery was made in the late 19th century when construction workers of the Athens-Piraeus railway found a large part of the Agora, so the project didn’t come through here and a lot of excavation took place. Currency can be exchanged at the airports and train stations (for a huge fee) so I would recommend either going to a currency exchange place downtown, to a bank (if they have good rates) or if you got a good bank account with fantastic exchange rates, then use an ATM machine (may incur a small fee
I just simply love this area and when I am here, I usually hit up Nice, the main city of the region, as part of every trip, even if it is for a day or two. The city then became an important trading post along the coastline for the Greeks however there was a rival trader in the area, the Romans had a port in Cemenelum (which is located in the district of the city known as Cimiez, just north of the modern city and the old town of Nice). See my post on the Nerva Valley which is part of the North-Western Italy and is only a fifty minute drive from Nice Eventually the area gave up its independence and joined the Counts of Savoy (an area which had Turin and most of the very north-western tip of modern-day Italy) around the 14th Century. Built in the 1860s in the typical French Gothic style, the Basilica is the largest church in the city, however, it is not the cathedral, that is located in the Old Town (as mentioned earlier).
Since being founded in the 6th Century BC, the city has been ruled by Romans, Islam, Christians and Phoenicians and whilst exploring the centre of the city, it’s like walking around an open-museum as there is a lot of archaeological remains and monuments to check out. However on the day trip here we did check out the beach and walked around taking in amazing views of the sea. As mentioned earlier, visitors will either come for the sun, sea, sand, food and drink or they will also come and do sightseeing, embrace the culture and create memories. Another popular destination for British people to visit (and easy to get too with flights from the UK), the main place to hit up is the mountain known as The Rock, which has amazing views, hiking trails and monkeys.