If you can’t fly then run,
If you can’t run then walk,
If you can’t walk then crawl,
But whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.
â Martin Luther King Jr.
If you can’t fly then run,
If you can’t run then walk,
If you can’t walk then crawl,
But whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.
â Martin Luther King Jr.
Via Hyte Photography in Berlin
Six men, rowed their 29-foot (9-meter) rowboat for 13 days, to become the first to cross the Drake Passage unassisted.
Amanda Lee Myers, Associated Press via Time »
Six men fought for 13 days to make history, becoming the first people to traverse the infamous Drake Passage with nothing other than sheer manpower.
They dodged icebergs, held their breaths as giant whales breached near their small boat and rode building-sized waves while rowing 24 hours a day toward Antarctica.
The team of men from four countries finished crossing the Drake Passage on Wednesday in just under two weeks after pushing off from the southern tip of South America.
Michele Cohen Marill, writing for Wired »
The hazard isnât where you might suspect it is. Mingling in the airport with hordes of travelersâgrabbing empty bins in security, touching hand rails on escalators, ordering food at counters, and sitting near the gatesâis far riskier than breathing air near someone you hear sneezing or coughing a few rows away.
Airplanes have been designed to pump fresh, filtered air through the cabin ever since the days when smoking was allowed on board. (Otherwise all those planes would have been worse than the smokiest dive bar.) Commercial jets pull in half their cabin air from the high-altitude environment, where it is cold and sterile, while the rest of it is cabin air recirculated through HEPA filters.
Air exchanges occur 10 to 15 times an hour, and the air flows laterally across the row, not from the front of the plane to the rear. Because of the way the air loops, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigates potential infectious transmission on a plane, public health officers generally contact passengers in a zone just two rows in front of and behind the sick passenger.
Arthur C. Brooks, writing in the Washington Post »
But the pilgrims still come, in larger and larger numbers. If not explicitly the divine, what are they seeking? There are definite worldly benefits to pilgrimage. Almost everyone loses weight, for example (although not like I did â starting my Camino on the heels of a bout of stomach flu and thus in a radically fasted state, I lost 10 pounds in a week). Some treat it like a physical-endurance challenge, such as the shredded and tanned couple we met in Santiago de Compostela who had completed the entire 500-mile walk, starting in France, in just 24 days.
Some seek relief from emotional torment, and there is evidence they can find it: AÂ study published in the journal Psychological Medicine reported that those who went on a pilgrimage to Lourdes, France, (another major Catholic pilgrimage destination) experienced a significant decrease in anxiety and depression, sustained for at least 10 months after the pilgrims had returned.
Nancy Singleton Hachisu via the BBC »
Located in Tottori, Japanâs least-populated prefecture, Hot Air Ramen (formally named Tanreitori Ramen Hot Air) is the brainchild of Katsumi Yoshida, a mechanic and car salesman turned cook. In 2012, Yoshida, an amateur noodle enthusiast, added a tiny kitchen in an alcove of his small used-car dealership, placed some tables in the waiting room and began offering ramen to customers.
In 2015, he scaled down his auto shop and officially opened Hot Air Ramen to the public, so named for the famous hot springs in the area. And then last year, something rather unexpected happened: Hot Air Ramen was designated as a âBib Gourmandâ eatery (which designates a place that serves âexceptional good food at moderate pricesâ) in the Michelin Guide Kyoto â Osaka + Tottori 2019 edition.
Carola Vyhnak, writing in the Toronto Star »
The province says itâs cancelling the existing âinefficientâ program because of the $2.8-million cost of administering $9 million in emergency medical coverage abroad each year. OHIPâs reimbursements also tended to offset only a fraction of the actual expenses.
Without private insurance, travellers can face âcatastrophically large billsâ for medical care, warns Ministry of Health spokesperson David Jensen, who âstrongly encouragesâ people to purchase adequate coverage.
Justin Housman, writing in The Adventure Journal »
In a span of seven years, he paddled a series of 15-foot kayaks more than 30,000 miles from the Danube River in Europe to the tropical shores of far northern Australia. Even better, when he first set out, he was âmerelyâ planning to paddle to Cyprus for work, with no intention of traveling by kayak to the other side of the world. But the paddling proved irresistible and Speck did not stop once he reached Cyprus.
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Speck was 25 years old when he set out on his incredible journey. He was an unemployed electrician living in Hamburg. Work was scarce and prospects were dim after the 1929 stock market crash ripped through Germany, so Speck decided to seek work in the copper mines of Cyprus. With no other means to get there, and as a proud member of a kayaking club since his youth, Speck decided to paddle his way to, hopefully, a job.
In May, 1932, Speck shoved off from banks of the Danube in a collapsible and very much not seaworthy 15-foot kayak, and began paddling south. He arrived in the Balkans several weeks later and, lulled to boredom by the languid waters of the Danube, Speck made for the Vardar River, where soon fierce rapids dashed his boat nearly to splinters. While awaiting repairs, winter set in and the Vardar froze over, locking Speck in place for months.
Read the whole article in The Adventure Journal »
In November 2016, Western Australian woman Sandy Robson (aged 48), recreated Speck’s adventure, completed in some 5 years, having visited 20 countries and paddled some 23,000 kilometres.
Suzette Barnett »
My adventure in Patagonia has been an incredible one, primarily for the vast landscapes and diversity of the regionâs scenery with glimpses of every season within a period of just 13 days.
Guided by a National Geographic Expeditions Leader my time there was spent hiking, filming and shooting the time-lapses now used to create to this short film which has been graced by a stunning instrumental from musical geniuses. Please allow me four minutes of your time and turn your sound on.
I hope you can feel what I felt.
Travel to Syria is advised against by every western government.
There’s adventure tourism, and then there’s thoughtless and stupid shit like this »
As President Bashar al-Assad tightens his grip on the remains of the opposition in the north-west, a handful of tour companies and travel bloggers catering to English-language customers have started running bespoke trips to the country to âmingle with locals while also passing destroyed villagesâ, visit archeological sites âshrouded in a coat of destructionâ and âexperience the famous cosmopolitan nightlife that has returned to the centre of Damascusâ.
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Attempts to reopen Syria for tourism have been met with fierce criticism from some Syrians, however.
Bakri al-Obeid ran a small tourism company in Damascus before Syriaâs uprising began in 2011. He left his hometown of Aleppo when the city fell three years ago and now lives in Idlib, which is pounded daily by Syrian and Russian airstrikes.
âWhat the tourism companies are doing now has just one goal: normalisation with the regime. They are doing this to show the world that Syria is safe and fine and the war is over,â he said.
â[These trips] whitewash the regime and let the world forget the atrocities committed against Syrians. Itâs really depressing and painful to see tourists coming to your country from overseas when your house is confiscated by the regime and you can never go back home.â
Read the whole article at The Guardian »
More » Syria Country Profile
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