Comment on following saying. Must be seen to be believed. It may be interesting for you to know about some different places where you can spend your holiday abroad

TRAVEL

1.   Comment on following saying:

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and  instead of thinking of how the things may be, to see them as they are. ( S. Johnson)

Must be seen to be believed.

2.Now  read the description of one of the numerous beautiful places on our planet and try to guess where it is taken from: tourist guide, encyclopedia, some magazine, or scientific journal.

THE MALDIVES

Kunfunadhoo. The atolls lie scattered over 500 miles of ocean, like a string of shattered pearls, just above and below the Equator at the foot of India.

It’s an amazing sight. Most have no vegetation and indeed no beaches. They are just reef, perfect pools of green and blue in azure seas.

They are, in fact, the tips of extinct volcanoes, literally mountains under the ocean.

There are no ships because the Maldives are off the shipping lanes. There are no jets. Lonely planet.

In 2,000 years not much happened here. The Portuguese arrived in the 16^th century and the British a bit later. They have been Buddhist and are now Islamic. They have the lowest murder rate in the world and the highest divorce rate. Being Muslim, Maldivian men can divorce their wives simply by saying: «I divorce you».

Before 1972, not a tourist had come here.  Today 70 islands have hotels. More holidaymakers arrive every year now than there are islanders. At least half of the tourists come to dive. They say it is the best diving in the world and that if you don’t dive it is like going to Rome and not seeing Coliseum.

You can, if you want and why anyone would wish to I don’t know, feed sharks from your hand. At 10 meters, the ocean is as clear as at one metre, the reefs are underwater gardens, the fish as thick as rush-hour traffic at Waterloo.

Personally, I don’t go with all that. I prefer snorkelling, it is safe and fun. I promise you it’s quite thrilling  to get to the edge of the reef and the friendliness of the rainbow coloured fish in a few feet of water and suddenly be over 200 fathoms of precipice. The dramatic change in depth brings an immediate chill. The water, a pale blue satin, becomes a dark blue ink. Look down into the gloom and you will catch a flash of silver  as a big fish turns somewhere below you on its lonely cycle.. The great fun about the Maldives is that everyone at dinner has a wonderful fishy story to tell about what they saw that day.

If you can bear  tear yourself away from the ocean, the land is almost as beautiful.

Yet this paradise idyll hides a cunning face of nature. At one hotel, the Banyan Tree on Vabbinfaru, I witnessed young Maldivians, toiling as we lazed, moving sand from one tiny island to the other. If they didn’t the island would literally change shape and our beachfronf villa would be under water in few years. Because of global warming, the sea will have risen by perhaps 15 inches within 40 years, and some islands are only a few feet high.

There is an irony that the Indian Ocean waters of the Maldives are their main tourist attraction, but may also threaten their very survival.

3.It may be interesting for you to know about some different places where you can spend your holiday abroad....

Camp site: a place where you can pitch a tent or park a caravan

self-catering flat: flat which you rent, you cook yourself.

guesthouse: accommodation like a hotel but cheaper and with fewer services

youth hostel: cheap accommodation, mainly for young people, with, perhaps, ten or more people sleeping in bunk beds in one room.

holiday camp: a place providing holiday accommodation in little chalets or flats, with restaurants, bars, swimming pools and lots of other facilities and entertainment

time- share apartment: accommodation which one owns, say, a 26^th part of and so has the right  to stay there for 2 weeks every year.

...and what you can do during your holidays:

sunbathe; swim/ go swimming; do some/ go sightseeing; go for a drive; hike/ go hiking; tour/ go touring; cycle/ go cycling; go fishing; ski/ go skiing; go shopping; do on an excursion; climb/ go climbing/ mountaineering; camp/ go camping; canoe/ go canoeing; sail/ go sailing; hand-glide/ go hand-gliding; windsurf/ go windsurfing

Travelling by train

There are various means of travel. We can travel by car, train, boat, aeroplane, and, finally, we can travel