Linggom Roy M. Napitupulu

As wine bars have grown in popularity, their style has become somewhat homogeneous. If you don’t want to change drink for the sake of changing scenery, here are 10 unusual settings to spread your wine drinking wings.

Not only is this bar set inside a cave, it dates back to the 1st Century BC and is thought to be the world’s oldest bar. Located at the entrance to Petra, dubbed the ‘red-rose city half as old as time’, the Cave Bar is the perfect refuge after a day of sightseeing. Although the bar is ancient, these days it is run as part of the Crowne Plaza Hotel and consequently has a delectable wine list to enjoy.

With the roving vineyards of Beaujolais spreading for miles around, there is hardly a better place to indulge in a drop of wine. Juliénas is one of the Beaujolais Crus (Cru being best), but it is not just the light, fruity taste that is interesting; the winery is set inside a disused 14th century church. Cast aside for being too small, the church is now a fundamental part of Domain Grander’s family-run wine business. Don’t miss the stunning frescos inside.

Ever wanted to experience a drink in the clink, but with the confidence you can go home at the end of the night? If so, Bodmin Jail can grant your wish. The jail was built (by its prisoners) in 1779 but closed in 1922. Today, visitors can explore the cells, which have been renovated to provide a glimpse of prison life. After the tour take to the Witness Box Wine Bar for a tipple. The wine list is a decent length and covers an international selection.

The Conrad Maldives Rangali Island has two unique locations for sampling wine. First, is the Wine Cellar, which sits six feet below sea level and is the best place for the resort’s sommelier to take you through their extensive selection. The second choice lies 16 feet below sea where you can sample wine over dinner at Ithaa Restaurant. It is the world’s first all-glass undersea restaurant, and provides 180-degree views of the reef.

Ice bars are usually filled with vodka sippers but the Below Zero Ice Bar in London runs a special session so that Champagne drinkers can experience the bar’s freezing conditions. Don a designer cape and step into an environment made entirely of pure Swedish ice from the walls to the seats and even the bar. Thermal gloves are supplied and are essential as your Champagne glass will also be made of ice.

If you enjoy the escape of a glass of wine after a hard day at the office, then visiting this bar in Tokyo may not offer too much of a reprieve. Designed to replicate the look of an office space complete with a photocopier, desks, bookcases, filing cabinets and desk lamps, this quirky bar is a surprisingly popular place. Best of all are the views the bar offers across Tokyo.

For those who simply can’t wait to board their flight, passengers at Zurich Airport can visit Runway 34 for drinks and dinner in a static airplane.  Dine beneath the belly of the plane, enjoy the Wingwalker aperitif bar or visit the tube of the plane for the Cigar lounge, which has been kitted out in bright red and designed to replicate the interior of a first-class cabin. A good selection of wine is available.

The world’s most southern bar does not rest in Ushuaia, Argentina, but even further south at an ex-British, now Ukrainian run research station, Verdansky. At the spot where the hole in the world’s ozone layer was noticed, you can enjoy libation in a cozy bar that was once fashioned on a British Pub but now has Ukraine’s own style stamped on it. Yes, most people will be drinking vodka, but this is one of the world’s more interesting spots to sample Ukrainian wine.

Of all the places one might think to go for a glass of wine, McDonalds is unlikely to feature on the list. However, the delectable wines of Mendoza are so impressive that they truly do deserve to be served with every meal, even if that is a Big Mac Meal. Although you are unlikely to go for more than one glass (though the Malbec is pretty good), the presence of wine in McDonalds is arguably worth a visit at least once?

In many ways this is an idyllic scene, but to be honest, for a while today I was feeling a bit tired and jaded about travel. When you’re on the road too long the spark of newness fades, and travel can feel like a long, pointless slog, a detour from loved ones and from life.
Then I started reading the quotes you’ll find below. Some made me laugh. Some made me wince.
But all of them rang true, and reminded me of why I travel: to learn and grow, to challenge myself, stretch my limits and foster an appreciation of both the world at large and the chair waiting in front of the woodstove back home.

I hope you’ll find similar inspiration in these quotes. Without further ado…

1. Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness – Mark Twain

2. The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page – St. Augustine

3. There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign – Robert Louis Stevenson

4. The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are – Samuel Johnson

5. All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time – Paul Fussell

6. Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life – Jack Kerouac

7. He who does not travel does not know the value of men  – Moorish proverb

8. People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home – Dagobert D. Runes

9. A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it – John Steinbeck

10. No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow – Lin Yutang

11. Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure – Aldous Huxley

12. All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it – Samuel Johnson

13. For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move – Robert Louis Stevenson.

14. Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it – Cesare Pavese

15. One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things – Henry Miller

16. A traveler without observation is a bird without wings – Moslih Eddin Saadi

17. When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in. – D. H. Lawrence

18. To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world. – Freya Stark

19. Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover – Mark Twain

20. Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living – Miriam Beard

21. All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware – Martin Buber

22. We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open – Jawaharial Nehru

23. Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going  – Paul Theroux

24. To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted – Bill Bryson

25. Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail – Ralph Waldo Emerson

26. Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by – Robert Frost

27. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step – Lao Tzu

28. There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it – Charles Dudley Warner

29. A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving – Lao Tzu

30. If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home – James Michener

31. The journey not the arrival matters – T. S. Eliot

32. A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles – Tim Cahill

33. I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them – Mark Twain

34. Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quiestest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey – Pat Conroy

35. Not all those who wander are lost – J. R. R. Tolkien

36. Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen – Benjamin Disraeli

37. Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends – Maya Angelou

38. Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation – Elizabeth Drew

39. Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe - Anatole France

40. Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind - Seneca

41. What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do – especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road – William Least Heat Moon

42. I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within – Lillian Smith

43. To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries – Aldous Huxley

44. Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art – Freya Stark

45. The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it – Rudyard Kipling

46. Travel is glamorous only in retrospect – Paul Theroux

47. The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land -  G. K. Chesterton

48. When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable – Clifton Fadiman

49. A wise traveler never despises his own country -  Carlo Goldoni

50. Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white – Mark Jenkins