Travel-Links

Overview

Links on traveling are available on the following topics:

At Reiseberichte aus aller Welt you can browse through lots of travel reports from all over the world.
TravelShop has assembled lots of information on different counties in its Länderlexikon
The page of The Rozylowicz Family is full of interesting reports and photos of their own trips.
At Foto-Reiseberichte you can find travel reports and photos from many places around the world.
Another site with travel reports from around the world is Ingrid's Welt.
Many places in the world can be discovered through photos on Dominique's page.
Travel reports and photos can also be found at States of the Art.
PhotoLinks is similar.
On Karstens Heimseite für Weltenbummler you can find useful information and reports from trips to America, Asia and Australia (despite of the strange name of the site).
Travellerspoint is a website that helps planning trips in various ways.
At Flightstats you can check at which airport in the world planes arrive with which delay.
The German site Fotoreiseberichte.de gives useful and very detailed information about lots of countries the author had visited.

At PBase.com also lots of beautiful image from all over the world can be found.
The "Reise" (travel) section of fotocommunity allows to find great images from all over the world fairly well organized.
The photo community site 500px also has great images from all over the world - you just have to use the search function.
Similar is the worldwide image database TrekEarth.
The site Where-Is-This? allows you to upload photos of places and have the community identify where the photo was taken. You can also browse through the images that had been identified (and those that still wait for being identified).
The site ShotHotspot is a community based site that collects great places to take photos (including their GPS location).

photo.net has a very informative Travel section.
And of course the Travel Photography section of the forum at photo.net.
The Minolta Forum has a section where members can share information about interesting photo locations.
Similarly the DSLR-Forum has a section about interesting photo locations.
The internet site of the US magazine Outdoorphotographer has a section featuring Photo locations. Please note: They tend to annoy the visitors of their site by frequently changing the URLs!
Fodors Focus on Photography has tips for shooting photos while traveling.
On travelphoto.net you can also find a list of photography tips for travelers.
At Thirty Thousand Feet they also have a list of resources for travel photography.

There are two different German travel guides I usually use (depending on where I go and which one has the most up to date information):

The German travel guides form Michael Müller Verlag are generally great.
Another German publisher of excellent travel guides is Reise Know How. Depending on the destination they are often very good.
The third excellent German publisher for travel guides is Stefan Loose. They offer guide books for less destinations then the others but those that are available are just great.
Lonely Planet is probably internationally the best known guide for individual travel.

Any kind of outdoor travel equipment can be found at Lauche und Maas in Munich (Pasing). This shop is really amazing. If you happen to be in the area, do not miss the opportunity to go there. The staff is very helpful and knowledgeable. Their catalogue is very informative with very honest comments to each of the products they sell. They are also in Ulm and Jena.
A GPS receiver is a very useful piece of equipment (especially for an outdoor photographer). A lot of information concerning GPS can be found at Canadier und GPS Info-Seite von Ralf Schönfeld
Another source of GPS information is Trimble - All About GPS

You are looking for lighthouses? Go to Cyberlights
Another lighthouse page is The Lighthouse Directory.
Are you looking for waterfalls? Go to the World Waterfall Database.
Another site on waterfalls of the world is Michele's Waterfall Page.
The website The World of Castles lists numerous castles (including images and links to their location on Google Maps) from Europe.

For online maps the standard for most is probably Google Maps. I prefer the "classical" google maps as it is fatsre and allows showing images from Panoramio.
Maporama lets you seach for (almost) every town in the world. Thy also give you GPS coordinates ofeach place. In addition you can get driving directions.
Mapblast, Mapquest and Yahoo! Maps are similar but do not offer GPS coordinates
A great collection of online map services, especially for use with GPS is Die Welt der Karten
Looking for detailed maps of Bavaria with GPS coordinates? Go to Bayerische Vermessungsverwaltung
Maps of all kinds can be found at Weltkarten.com

Weather.com from The Weater Channel is very reliable and informative for weather around the world.
The German site Wetter24 has nice and useful flash animations showing the weather forecast for Germany and Europe.
The German site Wetter.info is similar. Their animation is not flash based and it does not extend as far in the future.
The German site WETTER.NET does not have animations. They just show maps with pictograms.
On the German site wetter.com you can easily click find cities. The site offers weather predictions up to 16 days into the future.
The German site wetter.de also offers nice and easy to use flash animations that aloow clicking through maps to find the location you are interested in.
The German site Der Wetterbote also allows clicking through maps. Their prediction only covers four days.
Wetter Online is a very good German online weather service

I think there are three essential sites one has to look at before traveling:

At GSM World you can see how good the GSM mobile phone coverage is in every country you ate traveling to. I think that GSM is a fantastic system. You can use your mobile phone almost everywhere on the world, you can be reached via a single mobile phone number everywhere and you can send short text messages at any time.
If you want to stay connected to the internet away from home it is often best (and cheapest) to get a local prepaid SIM card with data support. The Wiki Prepaidwithdata collects information about prepaid SIM cards with data support in many countries in the world.
Another important information you want to know regarding your travel destination is the kind of mains plug they use so that you bring the correct adapter along This information is available at Stefan Neudeck's page.
At the Länderliste on heise mobil you can find bundled information regarding mains plug, telephony (mobile and fixed network) and internet for a huge list of different travel destinations.
At timeandday.com you can (among many other things) calculate sunrise , sunset, moonrise moonset for any location in the world.
SunriseSunset is similar but the location database provided covers only north America.
The German site General Aviation is similar. Here the location database provided covers German Airports.