Yosemite National Park is located in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Eastern California. You can drive there by following the Central Valley south from San Francisco or north from Los Angeles. Take Route 99 until you reach the cities of Modesto, Merced or Fresno then turn east into the foothills of the mountains. Yosemite is 50 to 75 miles east of those cities, but it can take two or more hours to drive to the park entrance. The roads are good but they are mountainous secondary roads that require some slower speed driving. In the winter, heavy snowfalls can make them trecherous and you may be required to use tire chains.

There are several small villages in the mountains near the entrances to the park. Most of them offer some limited facilities providing food, fuel, groceries or accommodations. Within Yosemite Valley, the park service offers a good variety of restaurants, groceries and accommodations.

Accommodations in Yosemite Valley
The finest accommodations in or near Yosemite National Park are at the historic Ahwahnee Lodge in Yellowstone Valley. This grand hotel offers beautiful architecture and outstanding service set in the midst of some spectacular scenery. The price for accommodations is about $350 per night but it is a first class luxurious hotel.

Ahwahnee Lodge Reservations
The National Park Service offers a wide selection of other accommodations within Yosemite Valley at more modest prices. Yosemite Lodge is a more traditional motel with nice rooms at a price of $100 to $140 per night. Curry Village has a variety of accommodations ranging from canvas tent cabins at $50 per night and wooden cabins from $75 per night to standard hotel rooms at $100 per night. Additional tent-like accommodations are located at Housekeeping Camp for around $56 per night.

The Park Service also supports some accommodations within the park but outside of Yosemite Valley. Wawona Lodge is a fine old historic inn located within the park near the South Entrance. It offers spacious accommodations for around $100 with shared bath or $150 with private bath. For the more adventuresome, the Tuolome Meadows Lodge and White Wolf Lodge are located in the high country along the road to Tioga Pass. They offer tent cabins for about $55 and some cabins with baths for near $88.

Accommodations fill up early
You can book reservations on-line at the web site of the National Park Service Yosemite Concessioner: Yosemite Lodging. Unfortunately, most of these facilities are fully booked many months in advance and some summer dates are reserved as much as one year ahead. The most popular times for tourists to visit Yosemite are during the months of June, July and August or on weekends throughout the year. If you can avoid these dates, your chances of reserving a choice accommodation will be much better.
Private Accommodation in or near Yosemite Park
Apple Tree Inn is a motel located just outside of the South Entrance to Yosemite Park near the village of Fish Camp. Rooms with private bath and fireplace are in the $100 – $150 per night range. You can book reservations here: Apple Tree Inn Reservations

Tenaya Lodge is a first class mountain resort located just two miles from Yosemite south entrance near the village of Fish Camp. It features three restaurants, two swimming pools, a fitness center any many other amenities. Rooms average $169 to $300 per night. You can book reservations here: Tenaya Lodge Reservations

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Yellowstone National Park contains some of the strangest and most interesting geological features found anywhere in the world. This vast caldera or volcanic basin is the remnant of a giant volcano that blew its top many millennia ago. The area still sits atop a hot spot in the earth’s crust and provides us with a unique opportunity to view a fascinating assortment of highly active geothermal phenomena. It is one of the few places on our planet where hot water and steam come bubbling, fizzing, gurgling, hissing and even exploding out of the earth at thousands of colorful mineral-encrusted hot springs and vents. Cauldrons of mud bubble and splat their colorful liquid plasters to form large volcanic cones. Hundreds of geysers sleep in placid hot springs for hours or days, then at semi-regular intervals erupt into great plumes of hot water and steam rising hundreds of feet overhead before retiring to their tepid hibernation. You can find geysers in a few other locations around the world, but there are more active geysers in Yellowstone National Park than there are in every other location combined.

Yellowstone was the first National Park created by the US government in 1876 to preserve the natural beauty of this strange and beautiful place. In addition to preserving its multitude of geothermal attractions, Yellowstone National Park serves as a refuge for a wide variety of native American wildlife. The last remaining herd of wild bison (buffalo) in the USA still peacefully roams the meadows of Yellowstone along with vast herds of wild elk, deer, moose, coyotes, eagles, bears and wolves. You can easily spot many of these wild creatures from your car as you drive through the gorgeous scenery of Yellowstone.

Located in northwestern Wyoming
Yellowstone National Park is located in the northwestern corner of Wyoming along the borders of Montana and Idaho. It is not quite in the middle of nowhere, but it comes pretty close. Yellowstone is 75 miles north of Jackson Wyoming, 50 miles west of Cody Wyoming, 75 miles southeast of Bozeman Montana and 100 miles northeast of Idaho Falls Idaho. Each of those cities has an airport that can take you within a few hours drive of the park, but you definitely need a car to see all the attractions. At the western entry to the park, the village of West Yellowstone offers a nice selection of accommodations, stores, service stations and restaurants. At the northern entrance, the tiny town of Gardiner offers a few such amenities. Fortunately, the Park Service has provided a good selection of lodgings, restaurants, convenience stores and service stations at various locations within the park. Aside from that, there are not many signs of civilization in this part of the country.

The roads within the park are laid out as a double loop configuration (like a figure eight) with access roads entering from all major compass points. Each of the two intersecting loops is about 25 miles (40 km) in diameter with roads entering from the north, east, south and west, plus an additional entry from the northwest. There are six villages or service areas located near the intersections of the park roads. Each of the service areas has a park information center, a service station, a convenience store or grocery, a hotel or lodge and one or more restaurants. Some of them also have riding stables or boat launches. There are more than a dozen campgrounds scattered along the roads throughout the park and there are scores of picnic sites.

Sightseeing is the major attraction
Sightseeing is the number one attraction in Yellowstone National Park. As soon as you enter the park, you should slow down and drive carefully, because you will likely encounter other vehicles stopping in the middle of the road as they spot nearby wildlife. It may be a herd of elk grazing beside the road, a coyote prancing through a car park or even a gigantic bull bison meandering down the middle of the highway. The local wild animals are so accustomed to visitors that they no longer fear humans. Unfortunately, this can be dangerous when naïve tourists approach within a few meters of a 2000 pound (1000 kg) bison. Yellowstone National Park is not a zoo and the animals are not tame. You must exercise caution when approaching the wild animals.

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Maldive Islands, officially the Republic of Maldives, is an island country consisting of a group of atolls stretching south of India’s Lakshadweep islands between Minicoy Island and the Chagos Archipelago, and about seven hundred kilometres (435 mi) south-west of Sri Lanka in the Laccadive Sea of Indian Ocean. The twenty-six atolls of Maldives encompass a territory featuring 1,192 islets, of which two hundred islands are inhabited.

The original inhabitants were Buddhist, probably since Ashoka’s period, in the 3rd century BC. Islam was introduced in 1153. The Maldives then came under the influence of the Portuguese (1558) and the Dutch (1654) seaborne empires. In 1887 it became a British protectorate. In 1965, the Maldives obtained independence from Britain (originally under the name “Maldive Islands”), and in 1968 the Sultanate was replaced by a Republic.

The name “Maldives” may derive from Maale Dhivehi Raajje (“The Island Kingdom [under the authority of] Male”), the local name for the Maldives. The island nation was synonymous with its capital “Maale” and sometimes called ‘Mahaldeeb’, and the people were called Maldivian ‘Dhivehin’. The word Dheeb/Deeb (archaic Dhivehi, a corruption of Dweep in Sanskrit) means ‘island’ and Dhives (Dhivehin) means ‘islanders’ (ie: the Maldivians). During the colonial era, the Dutch referred to the country as Maldivische Eilanden in their documentation, while “Maldive Island” is the anglicized version of the local name used by the British, which later came to be written as Maldives.

The ancient Sri Lankan chronicle, the Mahawamsa refers to an island called Mahiladiva or ‘Island of Women’ in Pali. The Mahawamsa is derived from an even older Sinhala work dating back to the 2nd century BC.

Some scholars theorize that the name “Maldives” derives from the Sanskrit mālādvīpa, meaning “garland of islands” . None of the names are mentioned in any literature, instead classical Sanskrit texts dating back to the Vedic times mention the “Hundred Thousand Islands” (Lakshadweepa); a generic name which would include not only the Maldives, but also the Laccadives and the Chagos island groups.

Some medieval Arab travelers such as Ibn Batuta called the islands “Mahal Dibiyat” from the Arabic word Mahal (“palace”).” This is the name currently inscribed in the scroll of the Maldive state emblem. Although the classical Yemeni name for Maldives is Dibajat.

Philostorgius, an Arian Greek historian who relates (circa AD 354) about a Divoeis (the Divaeans, pronounced Divians) hostage after fulfilling his mission to the Homerites, sailed to his island home known as “Divus” (Maldives).

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