http://www.quirkyguide.com Offbeat travel ideas and inspiration Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:47:39 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en In the world of extreme sports, skiing and snowboarding rate pretty low in the grand scale of all things fear inducing. It was perhaps with this in mind that the people behind the Arctic Man Ski and Sno-Go Classic decided to add snow mobiles into the mix. Every April, the worlds ... http://www.quirkyguide.com/arctic-man-ski-and-sno-go-classic-usa.html Surfers take note. The UK’s first Flow Rider – an artificial inland surf wave – opens in April 2010. A thin sheet of water surges over a curved bank, creating the illusion of a perpetual wave. Boarders can carve, turn, ride up and slide down the reverse cascade, with no fear ... http://www.quirkyguide.com/flow-rider-surfing-england.html Brazil is better known for carnivals and footballers than wine. But Bento Gonçalves, a hilly city of 105,000 people in the deep south of the country, is home to Brazil’s most important wine region. The top producers include Miolo, whose Rio-born winemaker admits that he had to “adjust” to ... http://www.quirkyguide.com/wine-tasting-brazil.html Tokyo may be known for its fast-paced energy, but once a year its inhabitants wind down to casually gaze at trees. Yes, really. The city’s cherry blossom season is generally between March and April, and is celebrated with hanami (literally ‘flower viewing’). A simple way to celebrate is by strolling one ... http://www.quirkyguide.com/cherry-blossom-season-tokyo.html If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to live a cloistered life, you can now try it out on holiday. The historic Austrian monastery of Maria Enzersdorf near Vienna has introduced a ‘monk for the day’ scheme, in which visitors can work and pray alongside the monks. The resident ... http://www.quirkyguide.com/try-life-as-a-monk-austria.html Stepping off the seventh floor of a building is not something I would generally recommend. Not unless you’re going to be scooped up and taken on a breath-taking aerial voyage. The architects of the HEP FIVE shopping complex in Japan had the bold and brilliant idea to build a Ferris ... http://www.quirkyguide.com/hep-five-ferris-wheel-japan.html If you’re fed up with overcrowded, built up, boozy party town ski resorts, Idaho’s back country may provide the remedy you’re looking for. Permanent buildings are banned in some of the most breathtaking regions of the state, resulting in the seasonal erection of temporary structures such as Mongolian-style yurts. Based ... http://www.quirkyguide.com/idaho-yurts-usa.html What to do with a huge Olympic stadium once the games are over is always a problem. Well, in Beijing, they decided the solution was to fill it with 80 tons of chocolate. World Chocolate Wonderland is the world’s first chocolate theme park. With five indoor areas and two outdoor areas, ... http://www.quirkyguide.com/world-chocolate-wonderland-china.html Water appears to flow uphill, people seem to change height and trees grow at apparently strange angles in the Mystery Spot outside Santa Cruz, California. Puzzling hundreds of thousands of visitors since 1940, the anomalies at this tiny attraction have been attributed to buried spacecraft, carbon dioxide, holes in the ozone ... http://www.quirkyguide.com/the-mystery-spot-usa.html If you have good sea legs and a fondness for the unusual, then don’t settle for a hotel with foundations set in stone. Spend the night floating on the River Kwai in a cabin quite literally on the water's edge. Often combined with a ‘Hellfire Tour’, during which you elephant ... http://www.quirkyguide.com/kanchanaburi-river-cabins-thailand.html