Travel blogs cover variety of spots

At their best, travel Web sites can be nearly as diverting as your trip to a far-off locale.

Beyond the functional, timesaving travel sites providing airline reservations and hotel information, another breed of travel site delves into everything from the weirdness of Montana’s Testicle Festival to the safety of routes up Mount Kilimanjaro.

One minute, you may be reading a review of a quirky bar in Amsterdam, and the next you’re viewing glorious photos of Pacific tidal pools.

Produced by a creative hodgepodge of food writers, travel journalists and adventurers-turned-bloggers, these spots often focus on a particular travel niche – festivals, say, or airline food – and do so with lots of verve and enthusiasm.

Even if you have no plans for traveling on Nippon Airways or savoring the brews at Bar Fakers in Kyoto, Japan, you can have a fun time perusing what these offbeat travel spots have to offer.

Here are some of the best of them:

2camels.com: Think other cultures have cornered the market on off-the-wall customs? Think again. Consider Montana’s Testicle Festival, an event attracting thousands to Rock Creek Lodge for a day of revelry, usually involving lots of drinking and the consumption of countless beer-battered, deep-fried bull testicles. The 2camels.com site provides an international guide to such cultural bizarreness from Andorra to Zambia, describing and dissecting hundreds of festivals in a slick combo of amateur anthropology and grass-roots travel reportage.

airlinemeals.net: It may be hard to believe, but you will find 18,047 images (at last count) of airline meals. The spot’s obsessive attention to all things having to do with airline food is at once scary and compelling. All airlines are covered, from British Airways to Wizz Air, typically with reviews and photos. For the historically minded, you will also find vintage food photos from the ‘50s and ‘60s.

Notes from the Road: From the Great Plains to the West Indies, world traveler Erik Gauger documents his adventures with gorgeous photographs and written dispatches. While his photos appear in digital form, he works with traditional tools, such as a large-format Toyo AX camera. You can have a wonderful time just gazing at the images at Notes from the Road (www.notesfromtheroad.com).

Roadfood.com: From the husband-and-wife team of writers Jane and Michael Stern, Roadfood.com provides tips and reviews of hundreds of smokehouses, clam shacks and chili parlors for your cross-country road trip. You’ve got to love a food spot with “catfish parlor” and “pharmacy lunch counter” as categories.

The World’s Best Bars: This site (www.worldsbestbars.com) doesn’t simply tell you the top watering holes from A to Z – Antwerp to Zurich, that is – but highlights each city’s “bar of the moment” and provides a quick read on the local culture.

You can feel like you’re on a worldwide bar hop as you zip from Valencia’s Puzzle (“where the hip worlds of Spanish fashion and design collide”) to Kyoto’s Bar Fakers (“a cool and grungy loft bar that’s not as phony as the name suggests”) to other far-off spots.

World Travel Watch: This site (www.worldtravelwatch.com) aims to inform travelers of safety issues, but it also serves another purpose – essentially bringing together headlines about troubling developments around the globe.

If you’re wondering whether a virus outbreak, typhoon or guerrilla warfare is a concern at a would-be destination, this is the place to look. Then again, a few minutes at the site may be enough to dissuade you from getting on a plane.