World Tourism Blog

While at Pennsylvania, you cannot fail to visit the world famous Philadelphia tourist attractions that offers wide array of entertaining features and wonderful sightseeing. The two most important and prominent places to visit at Philadelphia are the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, these are a must visit locations whoever visits this city. There are varied tourist attractions at Philadelphia that includes the world famous Philadelphia Zoo, quaint old residential street and Elfreth’s Alley. The Philadelphia Zoo is one of the nation’s oldest zoos and still attracts a lot of people here. Given below is a brief introduction to some of the most visited and most famous Philadelphia tourist attractions:

1. Independence Hall locate at chestnut street is world famous; the hall is situated right opposite the Liberty Bell. The Independence Hall is a place of historic importance; this was the birthplace of United States that was completed in the year 1756. The monument is made of red brick and on the top is a clock tower. Independence Hall is one of the biggest and greatest icons of the United States of America; it is one of the most famous and major tourist attractions of Philadelphia. The most important room here is the Assembly room where George Washington was designated as commander in chief of the Army.
2. Elfreth’s Alley is located on the 2nd street, its one of America’s oldest residential street continuously occupied till date. The place dates back to early 1700s, the popular tourist attraction indicates how a colonial Philadelphia must have once looked like. The Alley’s narrow streets are lined up with the modest setting of brick houses that are built for skilled folks and their families to live in. Near to the Alley you can find Elfreth’s Alley Museum that includes restored homes of a chair maker and dressmaker.
3. The Liberty Bell is another greater symbol of American history, a symbol of freedom and the place of historic importance that attracts lots of tourists round the year. The Bell is housed in a massive glass pavilion that was earlier placed in Independence Hall; it was moved to its current location in the 1976 Bicentennial. It is also popularly known by the name State House Bell.
4. Philadelphia Zoo is located near Fairmont park, it is one of the oldest America’s zoo that was opened in the year 1874. It was the time when country was celebrating first hundred years of independence. The zoo accommodates over 2,000 animals and also includes many attractions inside the zoo. The notably greater attractions inside the zoo include the Reptile House, Bird House, Primate Reserve, Carnivore Kingdom, African Plains, Amphibian house and children’s zoo.

Other Philadelphia tourist attractions include places like Fort Mifflin, Rodin Museum, City Hall, Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Society Hill historic district, Germantown historical society museum, Congress hall, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts museum, Franklin Institute Science Museum and many other attractions.

By Articlepinch

Philadelphia , the birthplace of US independence.

As the safari industry follows the global trend to go green, one company has been leading the charge toward sustainable tourism in Africa for over 40 years. Hopefully, other outfitters will follow in their footprints.

Peering out of the Jeep window at the savannah flats extending south to the Serengeti in the Great Rift Valley, we spotted the curved horns of water buffalo, baboons, impalas, a mother and baby giraffe, a field of zebras, four lions sleeping peacefully under an acacia tree, and a big and brawny 35- to 40-year old elephant with long tusks. Unlike the Serengeti, the Masai Mara, a park reserve in southwestern Kenya named for the Maasai people who traditionally inhabited the area, offers a place where you can drive off-road to get a close-up glimpse of a lion on her back, rubbing her belly with one powerful paw.

“It’s the Discovery Channel without the remote control,” says John Neva, a safari guide who’s been leading guests into the African bush for the past 15 years. He’s refering to the intimate experience available at Masai Mara, where you can view a wild animal in person from the same distance that you would view one on the TV from your couch.

Mara is Swahili for dotted hillside, and if you glance around the Mara triangle inside this refuge, you can’t help but be enamored by the wealth of wildlife peppering the valley, especially during early summer and fall, when vast hordes of wildebeests make their way to and from the Masai Mara and the Serengeti. Yet only two decades ago this same wilderness area was rife with poachers hunting rhino, Maasai warriors spearing male lions as a ritual gateway to manhood, villagers killing ostriches and impala for their meat, and mass tourism allowing 20 to 30 safari trucks to corral a lone leopard.

It was during this time, when hunting and poaching were climbing at an alarming rate and park rangers were shot and killed on a regular basis, that Jorie Butler Kent, co-owner and President of sustainable travel company Abercrombie & Kent, discovered a dead black rhino less than a mile from her camp. The tusks had been removed, likely ground into a powder that makes the cocaine trade look like chump change—to this day, one rhino horn, used as an aphrodisiac in China, Taiwan, and Thailand, can fetch upwards of $100,000 U.S. on the black market.

Soon, Butler Kent formed a rhino conservation program, which morphed into the Friends of Conservation (FOC) in 1982, long before “green” was a travel trend. Geoffery Kent, her husband at the time and business partner to this day, had implemented the John Muir principal to leave only footprints at Abercrombie & Kent back when he took over his father’s company in the mid-1960s. He also masterminded the high-end tented safari concept so that guests could get up-close and personal with the wildlife. More than 40 years later, Kent remains committed to eco-friendly practices, making such efforts as using solar lighting in tents, providing locally harvested produce during meals, and encouraging guests to get on horseback and leave the safari trucks behind.

Butler Kent’s work with the FOC has become the blueprint for ecotourism in Kenya and East Africa. In 1999, Abercrombie & Kent unveiled Olonana, a permanent tented camp on the banks of the Mara River—the sinuous waterway that snakes through Masai Mara all the way to Lake Victoria, the world’s largest lake. The walls may consist of canvas, but the 14 tents on the property are decidedly upscale in flavor, with queen-sized beds, mosquito netting, indoor and outdoor showers, and flush toilets. The veranda overlooking the rushing river is a real highlight. Upon request, the front desk will wake you up with hot Kenyan coffee and muffins at sunrise; head to the veranda with your cup-o-joe and you might glimpse a mother hippo teaching her young child to swim upstream.

Solar-powered lighting and a small vegetable garden used by the African-themed restaurant add to the environmentally conscious allure, as does a wetlands project behind the tents that filters the toxins from waste water, and returns it to the Masa River cleaner than the actual water found there. A series of three ponds slowly purify the wastewater using vegetation like lily pads that naturally absorb nutrients. Each guest can also plant a tree on the property—not to be used as firewood, but for much needed shade.

By Stephen Jermanok

MASAI BY TWILIGHT: A view of the Masai Mara as darkness envelopes the savannah (Stephen Jermanok)

Go into the wild and discover acres of untouched backcountry

“I’ve been in wilderness all around the world, but Wrangell-St. Elias was something new,” says Stewart Lee, a 35-year veteran Boy Scout leader from Pennsylvania who has visited all but a handful of the national parks.

Even his deep experience with and passion for the outdoors couldn’t prepare him for his first visit to the 13.2 million–acre Alaskan park in 2008. “It was like going back to the period of discovery, well before industrialization or even civilization. I suddenly felt like a babe in the woods.”

There are 58 national parks in the United States, many of them unsung natural oases full of majestic beauty. And while the marquee parks—Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Yosemite—are well worth visiting, there are drawbacks, namely high admission prices and enormous crowds. An average of 26,542 people visit Yellowstone on a typical July day—nearly twice as many as Wisconsin ’s gloriously isolated Isle Royale National Park gets in an entire year. The famous park also charges a $25 entrance per adult—much more than Isle Royale’s $4 admission price.

Fewer park-goers simply mean a better out-in-the-wild experience. Barely 200 miles from the Great Smoky Mountains—which, with more than 9 million annual visitors, ranks as the nation’s most popular park—lies Congaree National Park, where the total visitorship for all of 2008 didn’t quite break 105,000, or less than a third of what the Smokies saw in its slowest month (January) that year.

What those lucky 105,000 visitors experienced, though, was a pristine tract of old-growth forest creating an unbroken hardwood canopy that has survived virtually unchanged since the days before Columbus.

The other parks on our list may also be little known, but they too are singularly spectacular, each incorporating special features. North Cascades National Park, for example, has the highest concentration of glaciers in the lower 48 states, and Utah’s Capitol Reef, deep in the heart of Utah’s former bandit country, is renowned for its colorful layer cake of mountains.

“Somebody looked at our aerial footage of Capitol Reef and said it was computer generated,” said Ken Burns, creator of the popular documentary The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, in an interview last September in the Salt Lake Tribune. “They can’t believe there is still a [pristine] place in the United States that looks like that.”

Burns is far from the first to sing the praises of these inspirational but little-known national parks.

“I never would have been president if it had not been for my experiences in North Dakota,” said Theodore Roosevelt of his frontier ranches now incorporated into the park that bears his name. Buffalo, bighorn sheep, and wild horses still roam these Dakota badlands just as they did in Teddy’s day.

So strap on your boots, follow in the footsteps of Lee, Burns, and Roosevelt, and get ready to hit the nature trails of some of our least-known national treasures.

By Reid Bramblett

Alaska's Wrangell-St. Elias National Park is the largest U.S. park — six times the size of Yellowstone and larger than nine U.S. states.

Ten million more people visited national parks last year than in 2008, but the numbers fell short of the all-time record for park visitation from 1987.

More than 285 million people visited national parks and other units of the National Park Service during 2009, up from nearly 275 million in 2008, according to statistics the agency released Tuesday.

The record for visitation to national parks was set in 1987 at 287.2 million.

Still, the 3.9 percent increase in 2009 visitation compared to 2008 was a triumph for the park system in a year when many sectors of the travel industry suffered a downturn due to the weak economy.

“People both here and abroad know that our national parks are America’s best idea, even during an economic downturn,” U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar said in a statement. “Our national parks are treasures that tell the story of our country and celebrate its beauty and culture, and they provide vacation bargains for families living on a tight budget.”

Factors that may have contributed to the increase in numbers in 2009, according to the park service, include three weekends last summer when park entrance fees were waived; visits by President Obama and his family to Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon; publicity from Ken Burns’ televised series about the national parks; lower gas prices; and the strong value of the euro against the dollar, which encourages European tourism to the U.S.

Although the system overall did not set an attendance record, some individual parks had their best years ever in 2009, including Yellowstone, which saw 3.3 million people.

Overall, Yellowstone was fourth on the list of most-visited national parks in 2009. The National Park Service said Great Smoky Mountains National Park “continued its reign” as the most popular park, with 9.5 million visitors last year. Grand Canyon was No. 2 on the list, followed by Yosemite, Yellowstone, Olympic, Rocky Mountain, Zion, Cuyahoga Valley, Grand Teton and Acadia.

The Blue Ridge Parkway was the most-visited unit of the park system with nearly 16 million visitors. Home Security Systems.