Any traveler, who ever been  to Iceland, know that is one of the country full of creative people and interesting places to explore. Last May thanks to Kex Hostel, a new hostel concept that was an instant hit with locals and tourists alike. There are 16 bunk-bedded dorm rooms—and if you aren’t a 20-something backpacker anymore you can stay in one of sixteen private rooms, two of which have a private bath. 

Kex is the Icelandic word for biscuit, and the 132-guest hostel was built in an old biscuit factory on the Reykjavik shore overlooking Mt. Esja in the distance. It’s located near the main shopping street, close to many restaurants and bars—nothing in tiny Reykjavik is really very far away, but you could easily never leave the hostel and have a great in-house experience.

While staying at the hostel, you won’t be bored, even for a week. You will find there a variety of dorms and rooms for up to 138 guests along with a café and bar, lounge area, heated outdoor patio, tourist information desk, laundry room, old school gym, guest kitchens, meeting room, free Wi-Fi, and more. KEX is also just steps away from an interesting array of cafés, museums, shops, bars, music venues and various attractions.

KEX Hostel offers a full range of accommodation options. Shared accommodation is available in dorm rooms for 4, 6, 10, or 16 persons. Private accommodation (with shared WC) is offered in family-style quad rooms as well as double and single rooms, and there are also two hotel-quality double rooms that include private WC.

The biggest surprise is in how quickly the restaurant and living areas became a destination for both locals and tourists to hang out. But by far, the most was seeing local Reykjavik residents, teenagers as well as people in their 70s and 80s, coming in for dinner.

Cabo Polonio, a remote beach village in southeastern Uruguay, sits on a green peninsula between the Atlantic and a desert landscape of shifting sand dunes. Strewn across the grassy promontory are a single lighthouse and a few hundred whimsical dwellings.

Rasta-colored flags serve as wind vanes, tinted glass bottles are embedded in walls, and exteriors are painted with pictures of suns, cow spots, rainbows and a Klimt-like rendering of a woman. One stands out as particularly fanciful.

No roads lead to Cabo Polonio. To get there, most visitors cross the sand dunes to the west by jeep, horse or on foot. Save for a handful of businesses with generators or wind power and houses with solar panels, the structures in town have no electricity or running water. The only power lines in sight illuminate the lighthouse.

Cows graze on earth banks where the beach begins. Long blades of grass swirl in the wind, tracing their own form of hieroglyphics in the sand. Vendors pass from shack to shack, selling mussels, cakes and hot water to refill thermoses of yerba maté. A small pickup truck from a neighboring town distributes bags of ice once a day.

Besides being a nature preserve, Cabo Polonio is also something of a cultural preserve, a place to find a bohemian ethos that is disappearing from the Uruguayan coast, where, 50 miles to the south, around José Ignacio, construction of high-end hotels is booming.

Polonio’s spectrum of regulars spans artesanos who sleep on the beach and sell their wares in town — jewelry, wind chimes, miniature lighthouses made of seashells — to doctors, lawyers and the occasional celebrity. The French-Spanish pop star Manu Chao and the Academy Award-winning Uruguayan composer Jorge Drexler have been known to go occasionally, while the Argentine writer Alan Pauls, the songwriter Diego Frenkel and the actress Inés Estévez have been spending summers here for years.

Though there is cellphone service now — seven years ago, you could find it only on the top of the lighthouse or the peak of a nearby sand dune — Polonio remains largely unplugged. The only place to recharge your cellphone battery is in the main grocery store, Lujambio’s, and only when its generator is running. Dim in the daytime, Lujambio’s flares up at night, becoming a beacon for people fumbling through the dark in search of food, water, batteries, candles and beer. Last year, Lujambio’s started Polonio’s first “Internet cafe,” consisting of one laptop and a stool.

Not everyone wants to preserve the bare-bones lifestyle. Some people who live here year-round say that keeping things primitive is unnecessarily costly and complicated. A restaurant owner named Diego Grignola told me that when his truck broke down on the way to buy gas for his generator, he was in a jam. “Without gas, we have almost no battery left,” he explained. “Soon we’ll have no music, no blender for smoothies.” He pointed to a small windmill on the roof of his restaurant. “Everything depends on the wind.”

“Electricity is the most incendiary topic of all,” said Laura Cánepa, who owns Posada de los Corvinos, a hostel-cum-library where, to borrow a book, you must leave something that holds value where you live but not in Polonio, like your driver’s license or fingernail polish. “The fishermen and business owners want electricity, since it would be much cheaper to keep things cold. Others of us are strongly opposed.”

At night, life is lived by candlelight. If you venture outside, your chances of making it to your destination depend on the cycle of the moon and the power of your flashlight. When the moon is new and your flashlight dies, you must wait for the lighthouse to swing landward. With no televisions or radios, apart from a handful in the village center, and no cars to speak of, the loudest sounds are those of waves breaking on the sand or horses shuddering in the distance.

Today the Berlin-based Design Hotels group is staking the first big claim to the trend on the beach in Tulum, Mexico. The company’s founder, Claus Sendlinger, who moved with his family to Tulum last year, is spearheading the opening of Papaya Playa, a spiffed-up campus of cabanas once belonging to three now-shuttered resorts on about a half mile of beachfront land.

He brought in his creative team from Berlin to make simple stylish improvements to the 99 structures — “make it a bit more comfortable but keep the rawness,” he says — leaving about half of them with shared bathrooms, including a clutch of jungle huts with communal bunk beds that rent for $25 a night to the many backpackers, yogis and spiritual nomads who regularly drift through town.

But Occupy Tulum this isn’t. There are 40 ocean-facing cabanas with private decks and hammocks, a spa, a boutique, raw food to go from 42°Raw, and a restaurant run by the folks behind Bar 25 andKaterHolzig in Berlin. An international network of D.J.’s and artists will provide weekly entertainment and contribute to monthly full-moon events dreamed up by the Berlin creative agency Mamapapcola. “The fun part is that we brought our friends,” says Sendlinger, who adds that no one’s arm had to be twisted; most of them were already fans of Tulum.

Sendlinger himself is a longtime blow-in to the area, and he’d had his eye on this piece of land for six years before finally making a deal with its owner. Five years ago, he says, such an arrangement wouldn’t have been possible, but the financial crisis has created more opportunities in the hotel business for those who are “good at moving into a temporary space and creating something. I see this happening more and more.” And if it works this winter, it may become permanent — with some further construction and the help of solar and wind power. What won’t happen is a 500-room tower or luxury condos. “That would kill Tulum,” he says. “We want our kids to have as much as possible the same Tulum as we have.”

If you decide to visit Reykjavik one day, your trip is going to be full of excitment. Though the sky it will be grey for most of the time spend there, your visit will be anything but dark and gloomy. The colors found all around the country, from the landscape to the cityscape to the clothes people wore, spanned the full spectrum. Buildings stretched across the city’s skyline were dotted in teal, brick red, and mustard. Shops were filled with traditional knitwear in elaborate patterns and avant-garde pieces (think Bjork) in bold primary colors. The architecture, the sweaters, the bikes and the cars were painted in pop washes that complimented the bright cheery moods of the Iclenders.

In Iceland, even though the horses are brightly coloured. Around every corner it was common to spot unique shingle and roof color combos.

Reykjavik, like many cities, is covered in pockets of graffiti. But here the graffiti seemed even more colorful. Gone was a the grime in cities like New York.

A pink and yellow doorway made a rather boring building remarkable.

My favorite shop discovered was Icelandic designer Mundi’s boutique, which featured graphic t-shirts.

Brightly colored womens’ clothing.

Mundi also had interesting home designs like this blanket, which doubles as a coat.

Wisps of sea mist obscured the moon. San Elijo State Beach in Encinitas is one of the most popular campgrounds in San Diego County, overflowed with tents, RVs and campers. The campsites were van-size dirt parking spots, each with a fire ring and picnic table. The air was incredibly still and quiet and smelled like campfires. Diffuse moonlight illuminated the beach 100 feet below, the sand extending.

Surfing’s popularity grew at the same time California’s newly founded State Park Commission was looking for beaches and waterfront property to protect, and many of the best surf breaks on the coast became parkland. Eighty years later, the network of state beaches and campgrounds is one of the largest in the country and covers a third of California’s 840-mile coast.

Because most of the campgrounds between Los Angeles and San Diego are accessible by car, roughing it in Southern California isn’t very rough. Parks provide showers and bathrooms, and most bring everything they can fit in the trunk and put up mini outdoor versions of their homes.

San-O, as locals call it, was another surfing center in the 1930s, when the beach was a fishing camp and surfers had to pay 25 cents to get in. Back then the surf pioneers Hobie Alter, Dewey Weber and Dale Velzy would drive a Ford Model T truck to the beach and ride giant redwood boards on the mellow waves.

There are almost as many private campgrounds along California’s coastline as public ones. The Malibu Beach RV Park was truly a home away from home with Wi-Fi, cable television hookups and a stunning view of the Pacific. Surf crashed on the beach below, and a cool ocean breeze blew through the screens. Three hundred feet above the Pacific, alongside gulls gliding on the updraft, the scene probably wasn’t so different from the one that surfers who pioneered the California coast saw, nodding off for the night in the back of their Model T, hoping that the waves would be up again in the morning. All California state campgrounds take reservations through Reserve America.

DDB Paris created a simple fun ‘Escape Machine’ for the French travel company Voyages SNCF. Wonderful, colourful cubes waiting till somebody goes to bush the button. Then the cube asks where the person would like to travel. Pushing the red button produces a crazy celebration, complete with gigantic walking kisses, and provides the wishers large, customized mock tickets to their destination. Watching the faces of the onlookers is just as much fun as the experience itself!

The underlying message is that the company’s Escape service lets you travel to any destination you want. DDB Paris with executive creative director Alexandre Harve created this, as it did last year’s flash-mob “Welcome Service” scenes for Voyages SNCF.

The island of Madagascar is one of the oldest in the world. It is located in the Indian Ocean off the southeastern coast of Africa. Madagascar is a biodiversity hotspot in which over 80% of its plant and animal species are found nowhere else on Earth. This is because of island’s biodiverse ecosystems, broadly divided into eastern and south-central rain forest, western dry forests, southern desert and spiny forest.

Madagascar is the world’s 46th-largest country and the fourth-largest island. It is slightly larger than France. The capital of Madagascar, the city of Antananarivo, is located in the highlands, a plateau region in the center of the island. The island’s highest peak is Maromokotro, at 2,876 metres (9,436 ft), is found in the Tsaratanana Massif, located in the far north of the country.

Over 10,000 plant species are native to Madagascar, of which 90% are found nowhere else in the world. Many native plant species are used as effective herbal remedies for a variety of afflictions, perhaps most famously including the Madagascar periwinkle, which has recently been established as the most effective treatment for leukemia and Hodgkin’s disease.

The lemurs are the best known of Madagascar’s mammals. In the absence of monkeys and other competitors, these primates have adapted to a wide range of habitats and diversified into numerous species. They are almost all classified as rare, vulnerable, or endangered. At least 17 species of lemur have become extinct since man arrived on Madagascar, all of which were larger than the surviving lemur species.

The biodiversity of fauna in Madagascar extends beyond prosimians to the wider animal population. About 280 species of bird have been recorded on Madagascar, of which over one hundred are restricted-range endemics with a range of less than 50,000 km. A few families and genera of reptile that have reached Madagascar have diversified into more than 260 species. The island is home to two-thirds of the world’s chameleon species. The majority of insects on the island are also endemic. These include the world’s smallest bee, over 100 species of cockroach and over 80 species of stick insect.

And the people are no less interesting: arriving here some 2000 years ago along the Indian Ocean trade routes, they grow rice in terraced paddies, and speak a language that has more in common with their origins in Southeast Asia than with the African continent. Their culture is steeped in taboo and magic, imbuing caves, waterfalls, animals and even some material objects with supernatural attributes. Hill peoples live in traditional multistoried brick houses with carved balconies and, in some areas, dance with their dead ancestors in the ‘turning of the bones’ ceremony.

This is a real paradase throw in a soupçon of pirate history, coastlines littered with shipwrecks, great regional cooking, some of the world’s longest place names, and unfailingly polite and friendly people, and you’ll experience a refreshing take on the overused ‘unique’ tag.

STOCKHOLM is more than Abba’s town. It’s a wonderful place with azure waters, Nordic sunset and neighborhood’s clubs and concert venues. Years ago, Sweden was probably best-known for the saccharine pop of groups like Roxette, Ace of Base and Abba. But today Sweden is home to a diverse array of performers, many of whom are starting to earn international acclaim: demure singer-songwriters like Jose González, Lykke Li, Little Dragon and many more future jazz musicians. 

STOCKHOLM has recently declared itself as the “Capital of Scandinavia,” and for the moment at least, none of the other style-conscious Viking superpowers is mounting much of a challenge. With discount airlines like Ryanair bringing the rest of Europe to what is still technically just the Swedish capital, Stockholmers no longer fill weekend flights to Copenhagen for a dose of the international high life.

However waves of immigrants have seasoned the Swedish stew, and albondigas and kefta are the new meatballs in town as tapas, kielbasa and sushi roll out on menus across the city. And in a possible upside to global warming, summer seems to arrive earlier and stay around longer, making the charms of this floating city linger into autumn.

For its year as the European Capital of Culture, a designation given a different city each year by the European Union, the capital is also adding great events to its regular cultural fare. The special events range from jazz and puppet festivals to a steamboat regatta.

The city has a new showcase for the arts: The Moderna Museet (Museum of Modern Art). When you arrive at the former Modern Museum (now a museum of architecture), all you see next to it is a passageway to the new museum and its 195,000 square feet of floor space, blasted out of the rock. With spring nearly here, the city is starting to take on a festive character. Stockholmers take intense pride in their city, and even King Carl XVI Gustaf has turned civic booster with a promotional video of this city, which is one-third inhabited land, one-third water and one-third parkland.

The STOCKHOLM Subway is one of my favorite in the world… Instrumentalists I have encountered in the pathways of a downtown Stockholm subway station, but while public musicians in New York’s subways need amplification to be audible above the roar, here was a young flutist playing solo Bach sonatas. Another time, on a subway platform itself, I came across a man playing an acoustic guitar.

None of Stockholm’s subways are noisy enough to forbid conversation; none require the earplugs or tissue usually necessary at home, not only to protect my hearing, but also to save me from pain.

Standing on a Stockholm platform, looking down the track, you can see headlights well before you hear the train, which becomes audible only as it actually pulls into the station. According to the writer Ludwig Rasmusson, at the subway station in Stockholm’s Old Town, you can even hear the rats.

Many major carriers fly from Kennedy Airport to Stockholm, with fares starting at around $600 for travel in mid-October. Continental and SAS fly from Newark Liberty International Airport, with fares starting at around $700.

Today the world becomes more populated and inhabited. Nevertheless, there are places where the sun, sand and sea gusts are the only one friends….Welcome to Hateruma, located near the Tropic of Cancer, part of the Yaeyama Island group, Japan. This coral island is clothed in banyan trees, Indian almonds, bamboo orchids and colourful hibiscus. Somehow it’s a blissfulness of remoteness with no man-made noise and the exotic decent of frangipani perfumes in the air. 

Tourism is virtually non-existent on Hateruma – there are no big hotels or coach parties. The island is best explored by bicycle, at a slow pace fitting the pace of life here. The empty roads lead to endless reaches of sea and sky. There is one just village in the centre of the island, with most of the inhabitants involved in fishing, growing sugarcane or producing Awanami, a highly-priced alcoholic drink. Some of the wooden houses are plain and weathered, others are painted in pretty shades of green or blue, with traditional orange tiled roofs.

The clear blue waters around the island make this a good place for diving and snorkeling. There is plenty to explore, featuring coral reefs, rock arches and brilliantly colourful tropical fish. In the spring migratory fish, such as hammerhead sharks,can be seen. If you want to relax, the beach at Nishi, edged with pandanus trees, the most beautiful beach in Japan.

Hateruma is also famous for its astronomical observatory, as this is the only place in Japan from where you can view the Southern Cross. Of the 88 constellations, 84 can be seen from there, and the clear skies and lack of light population make this a great place to view the night sky.

You can get to Hateruma by plane or ferry. There is one Ryukyu Air Commuter flight which leaves daily from Ishigaki and takes about 25 minutes. The trip by ferry from Ishigaki to Hateruma takes about an hour and they leave 3 times a day. The roundtrip price is about 5800 yen. You can purchase tickets from ANEI Kankou Ferry  or Hateruma Kaiun Ferry.

Since I’m living in the city of Lyngby in Denmark what wouldn’t be more appropriate than advertise for the wonderful recreational area around it and inspire you to visit it. By giving you information and inspiring photos I hope that you would be able to enjoy it as much as I do.

The atmosphere there is breathtaking, especially when the sun is shining brightly above the clouds! On Lyngby Lake it is possible to get a ride with the old lake steamers. There are also several other locations to rent canoes – either by hour or the whole day. It’s a nice way to discover the lakes of Lyngby and Bagsværd. It’s also possible to canoe the Mølleø stream.

If you get tired of canoe-kayaking walk around Lyngby Lake in about 1 hour and on a hot summer day or a sunny winter day it’s a worthwhile trek. It is a good idea to call one of the rental places ahead as there is regulations in place limiting the number of canoes available for rent, it is also mandated to have lifejackets for everyone on the canoe – your rental place will supply these for free.