Do you remember the first time you went off traveling alone, without your folks? What a rush that was. I feel a bit like that with this post, the first, I hope, of thousands, on the first day of The Wanderer, the Sunday Times’ travel blog. We all have to start somewhere.
For me, it’s in fantastically noisy coffee shop in Kloof Street, Cape Town. A baptism by drill and sledgehammer, so to speak, for someone is making serial killer sounds upstairs. Sawdust is falling from the roof onto my keyboard. It’s the digital equivalent of a bad bus ride in Mozambique – noisy, dusty and a little dangerous. But the important thing is that I am on the road and the gear works. More or less.
The Wanderer is about travel, my favourite obsession. If it flies, floats, rides and takes you somewhere, it’s going to be in here. It’s about places on the map – and off it. It’s about good hotels, bad hotels, fleapits, bars, beaches, jungles, deserts, mountains, bad art and fine art, taxis and taxi drivers, air miles and airlines, cheap tickets, easy tickets and free tickets. How to do it, where to find it, how much to pay for it. Want to see animals? Check here first. Want to sail across the southern Atlantic in a schooner, ride the Trans Siberian Express, or find a secret beach in the South Pacific? All you have to do is ask.
You have travel pictures you want to share? Send them. Travel stories you think we should know about? Tell us.
Think of The Wanderer like two travelers meeting on the road, stopping to pass the time of day and share some tea, talk about the animals and ask what lies on the road ahead.
Which is why I give you this. Dubai, whose popularity is booming with South Afrrican travelers, is not the sort of place you walk into a hotel and ask for sex on the beach, either the cocktail or otherwise. After a few highly-publicised incidents, the Emirates are clamping down firmly on this kind of behaviour because Dubai ain’t no petting zoo, so to speak.
You can’t blame them – 230 Brits were arrested on public indecency charges last year. Two-hundred and thirty! Now the Madinat Jumeirah hotel has issued a guide of how to behave in public, the Times, London reports. Read the story here.

Related posts:

1. Six-Foot Flyer: Popping the double-deck cherry
2. Weird, freaky – and left behind
3. US hotel rates tank
4. Cape Town’s skyline grows up – and up
5. “Run Away!” “This place should be burned!” Yip, TripAdvisor’s Dirty Hotels list is out