Interesting
Koen has completed his 35,000 kilometre around-the-world bicycle tour. Here are his highlights »
Koen cycle two years through some 30 countries and 4 continents. On his YouTube channel, The Sunday Ride, Koen has a 75-episode video series, if you wanted to dive a little deeper.
NY Times »
Chris Caputo stood on the tarmac at Burlington International Airport in Vermont in early October and looked to the clouds in the distance. He had piloted military and commercial aircraft over a long career, racking up thousands of flight hours, but the trip he was about to take would be very different.
That’s because the airplane Mr. Caputo would fly runs on batteries. Over the next 16 days, he and his colleagues flew the plane, a CX300 built by their employer, Beta Technologies, down the East Coast. They would make nearly two dozen stops to rest and recharge, flying through congested airspace over Boston, New York, Washington and other cities.
BBC »
Over the past three decades, Venice has become one of the most notable victims of overtourism. The city currently welcomes an estimated 30 million visitors per year, far above the 50,000 residents that actually call it home. And more than two thirds of visitors come just for the day.
This month, Venice’s municipal authorities announced plans to fight these issues with a controversial move: charging day trippers a €5 entrance fee. This will make Venice the first city in the world to charge visitors to enter its premises. News of the entry fee has sparked controversies, and with travellers eager to understand how the new measure will affect them, BBC Travel talks to authorities and locals to understand when it starts, who will have to pay and how people can visit the city in a more sustainable way.
Considering an average room rate of €175 per person, the increase will translate into an increase in the night’s cost, rising from €15.25 to €21.80 by 2024, reports SchengenVisaInfo.com.
Moya Lothian-McLean, The Guardian »
Why do we travel? Maui residents told media of their horror at seeing tourists “swimming in the same waters our people died in”. Surely, that level of compartmentalisation in dogged pursuit of a particular experience goes beyond the pursuit of “leisure”? That’s certainly the view of the anthropologist Dean MacCannell. His 1976 book The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class argues that in a post-industrial, increasingly secular world, travel occupies a ritualistic space. Modern western societies are defined by the “freedom” they offer us – but, he writes, this is accompanied by feelings of fragmentation and alienation. Sightseeing in far-off locales is, MacCannell observes, “a way of attempting to overcome the discontinuity of modernity, of incorporating its fragments into a unified experience” (albeit one “doomed to eventual failure”, he cheerily adds). How? Leisure travel gives us perspective, it makes us feel connected to history, and helps connect personal experience with other cultures, people and places – making us feel less isolated. Tourism gives us a sense of selfhood and purpose.
Added to this is the framing of travel as an “authentic” experience in an inauthentic world; a dichotomy that has only become more stark over time. Travel offers one-off experiences; things we can only do in one place. Modern life is marked by its impossible and contradictory obsession with the “authentic”, as any lifestyle marketing bod will testify to. We see travel, rather than our everyday existence, as the portal to “finding ourselves”.
Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity, the reusable rocket-powered space plane carrying the company’s first crew of tourists to space, successfully launched and landed on Thursday.
The mission, known as Galactic 02, took off shortly after 11am ET from Spaceport America in New Mexico.
Aboard the spacecraft were six individuals total – the space plane’s commander and former Nasa astronaut CJ Sturckow, the pilot Kelly Latimer, as well as Beth Moses, Virgin Galactic’s chief astronaut instructor who trained the crew before to the flight.
The spacecraft also carryied three private passengers, including the health and wellness coach Keisha Schahaff and her 18-year-old daughter, Anastasia Mayers, both of whom are Antiguan.
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