Rachel Ricks shares her favourite vegetarian restaurant finds from her travels around South America.

As much as I admire the noble vegetarian, I’m not a veggie yet, but I thoroughly enjoy the food – healthy, nutritious and often more tasty than meat dishes. So I’m always keen to hunt out at least one meat-free option wherever I go, and this is a particular challenge in carnivorous South America. But dig a little and you can find some great vegetarian places to eat; the added bonus for the budget traveller being that they’re invariably really good value for money.

Here are my favourites I found while traversing the continent:

1.       El Encuentro – Now an institution in Cusco and with two further branches opened up in town, it’s no surprise these little cafés serve great food for excellent prices. Particularly good value is the lunch menu including salad buffet, soup, main course and tea for S./7 (£1.70/US$2.70).
Choquechaca 136; Santa Catalina Ancha 384; and Tigre 130, Cusco, Peru. 

2.       Tomate Café – I was very impressed to stumble across this forward-thinking café in La Paz’s centre, with comfy seating and WiFi, it’s a great place to linger over their delicious and well-made veggie burgers, paninis and pastries.
Calle Ayacucho 376, central zone, La Paz, Bolivia.

3.       La Vegetariana – This gets points just for boldly appearing in the capital of big meat Uruguay. An all-you-can-eat buffet where you could easily eat every night for a fortnight and not get bored – the range of options was impressive – from soups to quiches, from lasagnes to curries. Plus, you can choose two desserts afterwards.
Yi 1369, Montevideo, UruguayMore...

Stanfords is delighted to be the Official Bookseller at the Travel Festival, taking place at London's Kings Place on 22nd and 23rd June 2013.

We have 3 pairs of tickets to giveaway to see Jay Griffiths talk on  Sunday, 23 June 2013 at 5:00pm

The Riddle of the Childscape: Jay Griffiths

While travelling the world to write her award-winning book Wild, Jay Griffiths became increasingly aware of the huge differences in how childhood is experienced in different cultures.

Moving from the tribes of West Papua and the Arctic to the ostracised young people of contemporary Britain, she asks why it is so much more difficult to grow up in industrialised cultures than indigenous ones.

"If a tiger could write poetry or a polar bear prose, they might write a book as exciting as Wild." 
-Adrian Mitchell , Shadow Poet Laureate.More...

Stanfords is delighted to be the Official Bookseller at the Travel Festival, taking place at London's Kings Place on 22nd and 23rd June 2013.

We have 3 pairs of tickets to giveaway to see Jeremy Seal talk about his book Meander on Sunday, 23 June 2013 at 2:00pm

Jeremy Seal has spent the last 25 years exploring Turkey.

The course of the Meander is so famously indirect that the river's name has come to signify digression - an invitation Jeremy Seal wholeheartedly embraces while travelling the length of it in a one-man canoe. He was the first person to make the full descent of this fabled river in a folding canoe from its source in the East, through the mountains of Anatolia, all the way to Miletus, the birthplace of western rational thought.

He relives his trip through myths, history and the lives and stories of Turks today.

To be in with a chance of winning, simply submit your details below by Sunday 19th May. Good luck!More...

Jess Williams continues her blog series on India, travelling from Bodhgaya to the temples of Khajuraho, and on to Shimla, the old summer capital of the British Empire in India.

The next stop on our Great Indian Voyage was to Bohdgaya for all of a day. It’s not a big town but full of tourists and touts. However, there is a certain calm amidst it all. I guess that comes with Buddism, the serene stone face of the giant statue of Buddha (where we met a Burmese priest who was very excited to have his photo taken with us), and the sound of prayer wheels at the temple. This temple is the place where Buddha achieved enlightenment- I spent my time watching the fish. We’re on a similar level I think.

We were lucky enough to meet a young Nepali man who was visiting an orphanage he had helped set up. Mikku took us to meet the children of Elizabeth Children’s Home that evening. We were greeted by handshakes and a song. These kids have been taken in from the street and given an education and I felt very lucky to meet them. Mikku and his colleagues do such great work. To put it in the most clichéd way possible, I was humbled.More...

Author Charles Davis on the charms of walking in the mountains of Costa Blanca.

Read any good-life, back-to-basics, season-in-the-sun farm yarn about expats moving to Spain, and you can be fairly sure there will come a moment when the narrator takes to the mountains for a walk that proves to be a state-of-the-heart experience in which engagement with the landscape aspires to a quasi-spiritual empathy.

It's a rite of passage, as vital to the format as encountering the crafty peasant with a heart of gold, losing your rag with the local building fraternity, having an amusing mishap with the domestic livestock, being duffed up by the elements, and displaying a comic ineptitude when confronted with the sort of quotidian challenges that generations of illiterate country dwellers have prevailed over with apparent insouciance.

Such clichés exist for a reason and it's not simply because they happen to sell books. Like all clichés, they come of observable truths. Settle in Spain and you probably will bump into the wily old boy with a winning glint in his eye, be confronted by a belligerent chicken, and be battered about a bit by the big weather. For the most part, these experiences are the preserve of those who uproot themselves, but the mountains are something else.More...

Annabel Barber visits the beautiful area around Lake Garda, 'the land where the lemon trees bloom'.

“Kennst du das Land, wo di Zitronen blüh’n?” asked Goethe breathlessly, in one of his most famous lyrics. “Do you know the land where the lemon trees bloom?” He was desperate to share his secret of where earthly bliss could be found. He believed he had discovered it, on Lake Garda. “I have exchanged the cold, clammy north for the radiant air of Italy!” he exclaimed in one of his elegies. He was thirty-seven years old and was finally escaping to sow his wild oats, fleeing the constraints of his job at the court of Weimar and the manacles of a “platonic” friendship with a demanding older woman. Lake Garda, for him, was a dream come true. And he had never seen lemon trees before.More...

In part 4 of her blog series on India, Isobel Wilson-Cleary talks us through the highlights of her stay in Delhi.

Delhi. It’s a big place and if like me, you’re only there for a few short days you maybe want to see some of its biggest hits. Not as large as megacity Mumbai but big enough that these are the highlights of what I got up to whilst I was there. (And definitely check out the metro system!)

If you’re interested in seeing the everyday reality for many in India... 

Chandi Chowk should be top of your list. Boasting the Jama el Masjid and Red Fort which brings in busloads of tourists it is also the sight of a major Jain temple (with a bird sanctuary!) and gurdwara - a little microcosm of India in a few square miles. More people than you’d ever imagine crammed in such a small space wandering the streets is an experience not to be missed - try some street food; engage in some bargaining if something catches your eye (and it probably will the market is impressive) and pay the extra to go up the minaret (signs tells you women and children must be accompanied by a male) and see where you’ve just come from, it’s pretty hard to believe that this is some people’s everyday.More...

Iguassu Falls were confirmed as one of the New 7 Wonders of Nature in 2012, so , Rachel Ricks went to check them out...

My visit to Iguassu Falls in Argentina was one of those highlights of a lifetime – and it turns out, not just for the spectacular waterfalls themselves – it was going to be an extraordinary opportunity to see wildlife close up, too.

Within just metres of entering the Iguassu National Park, I spotted a family of capuchin monkeys crossing through the trees at arm’s length beside the footpath. Then more and more appeared, even a mother with tiny baby clinging on, swinging through the foliage, simply going about their daily business. Indifferent to us close-range tourists that gathered to coo and watch, one bold little ape even sat low in a small tree choosing fruits by picking them off the tree, tapping them on the branches and if they seemed satisfactory, peeled them to consume, otherwise they were tossed to the ground.More...

Maybe it wasn’t an obvious choice of first destination for a couple of first time travellers who like their home comforts, but actually Kolkata was not the terrifying culture shock people warned us about. Yes, we walked out of the airport to find a road made virtually uncrossable by unpredictable yellow taxis; we took said taxi in a seat-clutching ride across town seeing people cycling with boxes of chillies on their heads and live chickens tied to their handlebars; we were greeted in the streets by mothers begging for milk powder and packs of yellow dogs and men sleeping on the pavements. Yes, it was a million miles away, but amid this melee of people and smells and confusion, we found a city of incredibly beautiful buildings and parks, some of the best street food of the trip, and so many smiling faces: a girl who taught us Indian classical dancing in the Victoria Memorial gardens, a couple of street kids who we shared a lassi with, parents and children shaking ours hands at a Kali festival we happened to catch.

It wasn’t just that Kolkata allowed us to jump into another culture headfirst, it also allowed us to meet other travellers, get advice, make plans. There is definitely a district for travellers, and lucky for us, most of them had been around for a while. Trains were all explained, haggling (although we never really mastered that), the head wobble. We ended up travelling with a guy we met on the first day for three weeks. Really (and I hate to admit it) it does help to have a man around in India. They just get more respect. Annoying but true.

From Kolkata it was an overnight train to Darjeeling. The trains are really something. The queues for the tickets are utterly bewildering, but as long as you stand your ground as aggressively as everyone else pushes it shouldn’t take too long! The train itself is the best place to meet people. There’s always one man who takes charge of the conversation. Warning- he is usually the one that snores the loudest. You can buy everything under the sun. On that first train journey we counted 33 items that you could purchase, including yo-yo, statues of Ganesh, and nail clippers.More...

Matt and Sharon Ward recently spent a few days in Mui Ne, Vietnam. Here's what they had to say about their stay from a his and hers perspective…

The 5-hour bus journey up the east coast of Vietnam from Saigon was packed full of near misses, a distinct lack of seats, and a police pullover. The driver appeared to be more focused on speaking on his mobile than the safety of the passengers and we could both see the headlines about two British backpackers being involved in a road accident. After what could only be described as the worst travel experience of both our lives, we finally arrived at the Zenora Beach Resort, Mui Ne.

His Guide:

The first thing to do after our eventful bus journey was to dump our bags in our room and head down to the pool for a swim to help us unwind. Our resort appeared to be very quiet and felt like paradise compared to our previous accommodations. But due to the price, and being on a budget, we decided to only stay here for a couple of nights, before moving next door to the cheaper option, Austria House Backpackers. More...