Bill Wiatrak is a travel author, entertainer and video producer of travel content. He is visiting every country in the world.
BillsPlaces.com: Where the Stay Is Part of the Adventure Most places you stay while traveling are forgettable. A bed, a television, maybe a coffee maker if you’re lucky. You check in, you sleep, and you move on. BillsPlaces.com was created on the opposite idea: the place you stay should be part of the story of your trip. Founded by traveler and host Bill Wiatrak...
Mexican Food Was Never Supposed to Be Fancy (And That’s Exactly Why It Works) Mexican food didn’t come from chefs. It came from people who were hungry, annoyed, occupied, invaded, broke, or late. If you’re imagining a calm abuela gently perfecting recipes in a sunlit kitchen for centuries, let me ruin that for you right now. Most of Mexico’s most famous dishes were...
How many Ukrainians can you fit into a trunk? It wasn’t a joke when we asked the question. Oleksandra shifted her body under the seat and we piled a few blankets over her. That definitely wasn’t going to work. How were we going to get her across the border? She had initially had her Ukrainian passport turned down for a visa by the Indian government, but in the...
“This is the nicest cruise ship I’ve ever been on” said my 85 year old mother as she surveyed the promenade area of Royal Caribbean’s Navigator of the Seas. The Navigator is loaded with lots of luxurious light fixtures, bronze statues, beautiful nautical themed areas and a funky sofa that frames the person sitting in it. The main deck is kind of like walking...
Malawi made big news when Madonna adopted kids from there in 2017, but I first heard about this East African country while hitchhiking from Kenya to Botswana on a crazy overland trip through the continent. Over half of Malawi’s eastern border is a massive sea of fresh water, named appropriately enough, Lake Malawi. The lake is beautiful, full of tropical fish and...
CLICK HERE FOR AIRBNB LISTINGS. We’ve all rented an Airbnb that has us scratching our heads of how we ended up there. There’s few things that are as depressing as being stuck in a room with a non-working AC, bare walls, and bedspreads that look like they came from someone’s Grandma’s garage sale. I try not to book such places, but on those...
The Rise and Fall of Le Chat Noir “What is up with the man holding the umbrella over a cat?” “It’s Banksy. And the large cat on the door is the 19th century logo of Le Chat Noir, a famous night spot in Paris.” The room was full of Pearland residents who had come to oppose my zoning change. Their glazed-over eyes indicated that they’d never heard of this Banksy fellow...
The greatest book ever written! (lately). Do you like to hear about other people's miserable vacations? This might be the book for you.
Visiting Santa Claus’s lair while traveling in Finland was one of the highlights of my arctic trip but a refrigerator magnet just didn’t seem like a sufficient memoir for such an amazing stop. I settled on buying a fur of one of Santa’s “former workers” when the opportunity presented itself. For $130, it turns out that one can purchase a full reindeer hide at...
It was Sunday again. Like in the movie Groundhog day, I had lived an entire day that was being repeated all over again. Such is the paradox of crossing the international date line from New Zealand to Tahiti. I had half expected to find myself in a place that looked like a Gauguin painting, but the area near the international airport didn’t feel like a tropical...