Review of The Year – 2013

Please excuse me a self-indulgent blog to begin the new year as I look back over the previous one.

The top ten most hit blog pages in 2013 on my Travel Blog have mostly surprised me but then I don’t understand how search engines work.  I say hit blog pages rather than read because I am neither conceited enough of sufficiently naive to claim that a hit equals a read.

In 2012 the blog recorded 170,889 hits and the upward trend continued into January and I was optimistic that this number was just going to keep going up but then Google changed their search criteria it stopped and fell back and has never recovered.  I have finished the year with less than half of the previous year total with only 79,450 hits but in November I did manage to limp past half a million in total.

These are the Top Ten blogs of 2013:

No. 1 

Krakow,  Salt Mine

First posted on April 6th 2010

This post is up from number 3 in 2012 to number 1 this year with 5,030 hits. I posted this in April 2010 after returning from a visit to Krakow in Poland.  It was a good trip but I am not sure why so many people would hit on it.  It is not as interesting as my trip to Auschwitz or the Crazy Mike Communist Tour.

No. 2

Mount Vesuvius

First posted on March 25th 2010

4,220 hits and a second year in the Top Ten and up three places.  A bit of a surprise because this is the account of a day trip to Mount Vesuvius whilst on a holiday to Sorrento in 1976 with my dad.  From my memories of the same holiday I posted several blogs about visits to Capri, Naples, Pompeii, The Amalfi Drive and Rome but these have only achieved a handful of hits between them.

No. 3

Moscow and Lenin’s Mausoleum

First posted on July 6th 2012

Strait in this one at number 3 with 1,740 hits.  Cameras and mobile phones are strictly forbidden because the authorities don’t want snapshots of Comrade Lenin turning up on the internet in peoples’ Blogs or Trip Advisor reviews so they have to be left in a locker room and if anyone tries to defy this and is caught by the thorough security checks then there punishment is to be sent to the back of the queue!  It seems however that a couple of visitors have somehow sneaked a camera in and I found the pictures through Google and I assume people find my post in the same way.

No. 4

Norway, Europe’s most Expensive Country

First posted on February 15th 2011

1,510 hits – that’s about 2,000 less than the previous year but still holding on to fourth place.  This was a second blog about my trip to Haugesund in January 2011. It contains some interesting facts and figures which might explain the number of hits that it has received but I am not really convinced that this is the reason unless top European economists are using it for research purposes!

No. 5

Fifth place with 1,060 hits and which demonstrates the importance of an About page.

No. 6

Royal Garden Party

First posted on June 26th 2009 and therefore the oldest post in the top ten.

1,000 hits and staying in the Top Ten and up one place from number 7.  This one has always been popular especially around the Spring and Summer when invitations to the Royal Garden Party are going out and when people are wondering how to get one or what to wear if they have one.

No. 7

Travel Tips when Flying Budget Airlines

First posted on August 2nd 2011.

940  hits and also going up one place.  I first wrote on this subject in 2009 and it immediately started getting hundreds of hits and then in 2011 it just stopped completely.  I reviewed and reposted it and changed the title from the specific ‘Travel Tips when Flying Ryanair’ to the more general title that it has now and hey presto the hits started coming again.

No. 8

Twelve Treasures of Spain – Sagrada Familia, Barcelona

First posted on March 2nd 2013 so the most recent post in the top ten so at under a year I will be interested to see what happens to this one in 2014.

With 750 posts a newcomer in the top 10 this year.  The “Twelve Treasures of the Kingdom of Spain” was a contest/poll that was conducted by the Spanish Television Company Antena 3 and the radio broadcaster Cope. The final results were announced on 31st December 2007.  I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the eight out of the twelve that I have visited.  Tenth in the competition and the final Cathedral in the list is the unfinished Gaudi masterpiece Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.

No. 9

Onyx UK and an Inappropriate Visit to the Moulin Rouge

First posted on August 23rd 2011.

Another post devastated by Google changes and only 696 this year so dropping like a stone from number 2 to number 9. I have written a few times about my recollections of working in waste management in the private sector in the 1990s.  All of the posts manage a respectable number of hits but this one gets the most.  I don’t suppose for one minute that people are interested in my stories of mismanagement, incompetence and rubbish collection but they do like to read about dancing on a nightclub stage in Paris.

No. 10

Sorrento, Mount Vesuvius – Living on the Edge of Disaster

First posted on March 23rd 2013, two days before the Vesuvius post at no. 2.

This one surprised me with 690 hits and a first show in the annual top ten because it is an old post from May 2010 which only goes to show that old material sometimes has legs.

There is a famous phrase that says ‘See Naples and die!’ which originated under the Bourbon regime and means that before you die you must experience the beauty and magnificence of Naples.  Some, less charitable, now say that the city is so mad, dangerous and polluted that death might possibly be a consequence of a visit there and my post is about Vesuvius, Pollution, Pizzas and Crime!

If you have read one of these posts or any of the 1,140 others on my site ‘Have Bag, Will Travel’, then thank you very much!  I guess it proves that George Bailey (It’s A Wonderful Life) was right when he said: “The three most exciting sounds in the world are anchor chains, plane motors and train whistles.”  

Dropping out of the Top Ten this year were:  Norway, Haugesund and the Vikings,  Pula, Croatia and Onyx UK and the Dog Poo Solution

  

And just ‘bubbling under’ …

Alternative Twelve Treasures of Spain – Antoni Gaudi, Germany, Triberg the Cuckoo Clock Capital of the World, Twelve Treasures of Spain – Seville Cathedral and Russia, Tsars in our Eyes – The Grand Palace at Peterhof

It’s Nice to Feel Useful (2)

  

It’s nice to feel useful…

Six months or so ago I took a look at my statistics and was baffled by some of the search questions that seemed to have brought web-surfers by to visit my site.  I have done it again looked at my statistics for the last month and selected my favourite  Search Engine terms that brought people to my blog.

I have set them out here together with a link to the appropriate page…

First off this time…

“do flights landing in Naples fly over Vesuvius?”

Now, this seems to me to be an especially dumb question.  I am not an expert on aviation or air traffic control but it seems very unlikely to me that aeroplane carrying over three hundred passengers landing at an international airport in Italy would want to fly over the top of a 1,300 metre high active volcano because it sounds full of potential hazards to me.

The page they were directed to was probably my post about my visit to the mountain.

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Now, I like to think that my posts are occasionally informative and the contents have some useful trivia but I really don’t see how I could possibly help with these two searches because it seems to me that someone is looking for a level of detail that I just can’t get down to:  “Montreuil sur Mer allotments“ and “the name of the street behind the Moulin Rouge?”.  I have posted on these two locations so perhaps this is where they were directed: 

  

Montreuil-Sur-Mer                                      Moulin Rouge

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This one cropped up before but it’s well worth repeating again here because I can’t believe anyone would google this – “How big are Ryanair seat belts” – I dealt with flying with Ryanair in my post Travel Tips When Flying Budget Airlines – These people are going to be really disappointed when they get the answers!

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This is a really good one, I like it – “committing suicide on p&o mini cruise”. Some people go to Switzerland to end their lives unnaturally whilst others look for a solution on line.

I have been on a P&O mini-cruse from Hull to Rotterdam and although it was not what you would describe as a luxury experience, the food was good and the bar prices reasonable so I can think of no really good reason to throw yourself overboard!

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Another dumb historical question next – “how wealthy are the Romanovs?” and dumb because most people know that the entire Romanov family were killed by the Bolsheviks in 1917 during the Russian revolution.

There are some claimants to the titles of the Russian Tsars but even if they were confirmed to be true descendants they would be extremely unlikely to be wealthy because the Russian communist regime confiscated all their money and valuables.

I visited Russia in 2012 and posted about the fate of the Romanovs so I guess the enquirer might have ended up on my post about the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg.

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I rather liked this question and for once I can be certain that I have the answer:  “Is it always raining in Wales” and the answer in my personal experience is YES!  I went to Wales in 2011 for a week and it rained so much that after four days I gave up, abandoned the holiday cottage and drove back home.  This is my account of the journey!

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I was also delighted to be able to help with this enquiry – “seagulls on my roof” because I have had exactly the same problem and posted about it last year when the fledgling chicks started to fly – I called it ‘The Seagull has Landed” because although Seagulls may well be a feature of the seaside when I moved to Grimsby I didn’t expect to get a pair nesting on my roof!

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Whilst it is nice to think that sometimes my posts might have been useful I have saved my absolute favourites for last and to be honest I have no idea at all where this search led people to on my blog pages – First: “Bodrum handbag prices”, because anyone that reads my posts will know that I am not by any stretch of the imagination what you would call a shopper.

But here is my absolute favourite, probably of all time:

“can pubic  hair grow more with regain?”

because I don’t think I have ever written a post about pubic hair!

?????

I’d love to hear from you about weird search results on your sites!

Review of the Year 2012

Please excuse me a self-indulgent blog to begin the new year.  The top ten most hit blog pages in 2012 on my Travel Blog have mostly surprised me but then I don’t understand how search engines work.  I say hit blog pages rather than read because I am neither conceited enough of sufficiently naive to claim that a hit equals a read.

In 2011 the blog recorded 151,493 hits and the upward trend continued until May when there were 17,845 in one month and I was optimistic that this number was just going to keep going up but then it stopped and fell back and has never recovered.  I have finished the year with 170,900 hits which is an increase of 13%.

A reason for this may be that I have been removing old posts and archiving them in a separate blog called ‘Another Bag, More Travel’.  The main blog was running out of space so being a skinflint and not wanting to pay for extra space this was my cunning solution.  This blog has recorded 43,600 hits so if I add them together then the annual increase on my travel blog pages is increased to 43% which is much more respectable.

This however is nowhere near as good as performance on my memories blog ‘New Light through Old Windows’ which has increased by 84% from 100,671 views in 2011 to 185,700 in 2012.

These are the Top Ten blogs of 2012:

No. 1 (for the second year running)

Norway, Haugesund and the Vikings.  

I travelled to Haugesund in January 2011 and visited a Viking monument and blogged about it.  This post has had 14,755 hits which is over 10,000 more than the post in second place.  Over 9,000 hits have been recorded from the single word ‘Vikings’ in various search engines!  I have concluded that this is because there are a lot of people using the search engines to find content about the Minnesota Vikings American Football Team and they are probably disappointed when they come across my page about a wintery day spent next to the North Sea in Norway. Without any shame I have exploited this opportunity by adding a paragraph about the Minnesota Vikings.

No. 2

Onyx UK and an Inappropriate Visit to the Moulin Rouge

Straight in at no. 2 with 4,416 hits.  I have written a few times about my recollections of working in waste management in the private sector in the 1990s.  All of the posts manage a respectable number of hits but this one gets the most.  I don’t suppose for one minute that people are interested in my stories of mismanagement, incompetence and rubbish collection but they do like to read about dancing on a nightclub stage in Paris.

No. 3

Krakow, Wieliczka Salt Mine

Dropping a place from last year at No 2 with 4,342 hits. I posted this in April 2010 after returning from a visit to Krakow in Poland.  It was a good trip but I am not sure why so many people would hit on it.  It is not as interesting as my trip to Auschwitz or the Crazy Mike Communist Tour.

No. 4

Norway, Europe’s most Expensive Country

3,975 hits and up from eighth to fourth place  This was a second blog about my trip to Haugesund in January 2011. It contains some interesting facts and figures which might explain the number of hits that it has received but I am not really convinced that this is the reason unless top European economists are using it for research purposes!

No. 5

Mount Vesuvius

3,326 hits and a second year in the Top Ten and up two places.  A bit of a surprise because this is the account of a day trip to Mount Vesuvius whilst on a holiday to Sorrento in 1976 with my dad.  From my memories of the same holiday I posted several blogs about visits to Capri, Naples, Pompeii, The Amalfi Drive and Rome but these have only achieved a handful of hits between them.

No. 6

Pula, Croatia

2,916 hits – twice as many as 2011.  A bit of a mystery to me how this one gets so many visits.  I have blogged two or three times about Roman Amphitheatres – Rome, Arles, Merida, Segobriga and about larger Croatian cities at Dubrovnik and Split but this one gets the hits and I don’t know why?  The Pula is the national currency of Botswana so perhaps they are intended as exchange rate enquiries?

No. 7

Royal Garden Party

2,625 hits and staying in the Top Ten despite dropping 3 places from last year at no. 4.  This one has always been popular especially around the Spring and Summer when invitations to the Royal Garden Party are going out and when people are wondering how to get one or what to wear if they have one.

No. 8

Travel Tips when Flying Budget Airlines

1,800 hits and new this year.  I first wrote on this subject in 2009 and it immediately started getting hundreds of hits and then in 2011 it just stopped completely.  I reviewed and reposted it and changed the title from the specific ‘Travel Tips when Flying Ryanair’ to the more general title that it has now and hey presto the hits started coming again.

No. 9

Onyx UK and the Dog Poo Solution

The third new entry in the Top Ten this year with 1,7066 hits and the second post about life in the Waste Management industry.  Some people have accused me of writing crap but others clearly like to read about it!

No. 10

Andrew – The About Page

The final new entry this year with 1,358 hits and which demonstrates the importance of an About page.

If you have read one of these posts or any of the 921 others on my site ‘Have Bag, Will Travel’, then Thank you very much!  I guess it proves that George Bailey (It’s A Wonderful Life) was right when he said:“The three most exciting sounds in the world are anchor chains, plane motors and train whistles.”  

Dropping out of the Top Ten this year were: The Colossus of Rhodes, Cofete Beach, Spartacus the Gladiator and Love Locks on the Ponte Vecchio

Cory Environmental and Onyx UK – The Chronicles of Waste

For ten years between 1990 and 2000 I worked in the private sector in the waste management industry and I have some rather good memories of that time.

When I say waste management to be more accurate I suppose I should say waste mismanagement because the two companies that I worked for were completely hopeless.

These are the complete chronicles of incompetence, extravagance and waste.

Cory Environmental, Blunders and Bodger

The Tendering process

First Weekend as a Refuse Collection Contract Manager

Disorganising the Work

Cory Environmental at Southend on Sea

Onyx UK

An Inappropriate Visit to The Moulin Rouge

Onyx UK and the Dog Poo Solution

The Royal Ascot Clear Up Fiasco

An Unexpected Travel Opportunity

Only one chapter left to go about how I returned to employment in the public sector and got my own back and that will be posted soon.

Onyx UK and an Inappropriate Visit To The Moulin Rouge

“That is the Can-can. The idea of it is to dance as wildly, as noisily, as furiously as you can; expose yourself as much as possible if you are a woman; and kick as high as you can, no matter which sex you belong to. There is no word of exaggeration in this. Any of the staid, respectable, aged people who were there that night can testify to the truth of that statement.” – Mark Twain – ‘The Innocents Abroad’

Between 1995 and 2000 I worked for a French company called Onyx UK (now Veolia Environmental Services) and they used to take us away frequently for management meetings and we stayed in expensive hotels and hung out in bars and nice restaurants.

Best of all was that once a year we all met up and assembled at Waterloo station and they put us on Eurostar train and took us through the tunnel to Paris for an annual conference.

Moulin Rouge in Paris…

One year when they were really showing off after buying out a competitor they took us to the Moulin Rouge for a special treat and we had champagne to drink and watched an extravagant stage show.  Although they would have negotiated a group discount on account of there being about eighty of us someone told me later that this demonstration of extravagant folly cost the company over £8,000 which was about the equivalent of the annual salary of one of the street cleaners that it employed.

To his credit my friend Mike Jarvis refused to go because of this and because he considered it inappropriate to accompany female work colleagues to what he described as a strip-club.  I did not share his lofty moral objections, satisfied myself that it was an up-market strip club, was not going to pass up the opportunity and happily sold my soul and accepted a ticket for the meal and the show.

The Moulin Rouge opened on 6^th October 1889 in a building at the foot of the Montmartre hill.  Its owners were visionary businessmen who understood perfectly what Parisian society wanted at that time and they created a nightclub on the precipice of sleeziness to allow the very rich to go legitimately to the fashionable but seedy district of Montmartre where they could demonstrate egalitarian virtues and mix with workers, artists, prostitutes, the middle classes, businessmen, elegant women and foreign tourists visiting Paris.

By day the exterior of the Moulin Rouge is rather disappointing and the red windmill looks rather out of place and almost quite absurd on this busy Paris Boulevard but by night it is something completely different with glitzy lights, the whiff of gauloise on the evening air and a sense of anticipation as people turn up for the show. We arrived in two buses and were ushered through the lines of people waiting behind barriers who would gladly buy our tickets from us if we were prepared to sell and past ladies of dubious employment who would willingly accompany anyone who had a spare.

Walking along the corridor and through the doors into the interior was an awesome experience, like stepping back to Belle Époque (French for Beautiful Era) turn of the century Paris into a room predominantly decorated in lavish scarlet with rows of table lamps flickering like glow worms in a forest and columns adorned with Toulouse Lautrec posters and other appropriate memorabilia.

My first open–mouthed impression was that this was a magnificent venue with authentic mural paintings and columns with the original posters of the big name stars that have appeared here, somewhere that epitomised the European golden age of peace, extravagance and optimism all perfectly captured here in a sort of time capsule.  It isn’t especially big inside which gives it an intimate ambiance and this was emphasised when we squeezed into out allotted tables about half way back from the stage in between two rows of decorative gold barriers that separated the eight hundred and fifty diners into convenient corrals to make it easier for the waiters to serve tables.

The Galop from Jacques Offenbach’s ‘Orpheus in the Underworld’

is the tune most associated with the famous can-can dance and which is a prominent feature of the entertainment and as the room began to fill this played repeatedly in the background until the buzz of anticipation eventually drowned it out.

Once everyone was in their seats the lights went down, the music exploded into the auditorium and the dancers in lavish costumes opened the two hour show with the iconic high kicking dance.  During the show there was an average three-course corporate entertainment meal and for our table of eight there was cheap champagne and a bottle of red and white wine which proved completely inadequate and was soon consumed.  We considered buying more but it was prohibitively expensive because the management doesn’t want tables full of boozed-up louts acting inappropriately, leering and wolf whistling at the girls on stage so we stayed dry for the second half of the show with the intention of making up for it later back at our hotel.

After the show the room emptied quickly as guests were efficiently whisked away to the street for waiting taxis and transportation.  Our coaches were there and took us directly back to the hotel where Mike was sitting in the bar and over a drink or two remained stubbornly uninterested in our tales of the evening’s entertainment, he didn’t want to know about the mime artist or the acrobat who balanced on chairs and he especially didn’t want to know about the half dressed dancers, and on reflection, although I confess that I  enjoyed it, retrospectively I have to say that I agree with him – it was a scandalous waste of money.

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More tales of incompetence, waste and extravagance:

Cory Environmental, Blunders and Bodger

The Tendering process

First Weekend as a Refuse Collection Contract Manager

Disorganising the Work

Cory Environmental at Southend on Sea

Onyx UK

Onyx UK and the Dog Poo Solution

The Royal Ascot Clear Up Fiasco

An Unexpected Travel Opportunity

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Onyx UK, The First French Invasion in a Thousand Years

Onyx UK no longer exists as such and has been renamed Veolia Environmental Services (sounds impressive doesn’t it?) and its website claims that it ‘currently delivers refuse collection services to around five million residents in the UK… Working with Veolia Environmental Services means Local Authorities can be assured of receiving an efficient, reliable and responsive service.’  Well, things must have changed dramatically there as well because they turned out to be just as hopeless as Cory Environmental.

Read the full story…