In this episode Daniel Wood travels to Antarctica. Discover penguins, whales and more as he shares his journey to the last continent.
You can also read an interview between Daniel and Kerry Banks: Antarctica - South of Everywhere
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Mike Vaughan and Jason Minvielle were in a remote section of eastern Turkey when they decided to stop for the night by the roadside. As they began erecting their tent, a tank and armoured personnel carrier pulled up. The tank aimed its cannon directly at the two Regina travellers. “Soldiers with machine guns jumped out and surrounded us,” says Minvielle. “The major started yelling, ‘You can’t camp here!’” It turns out they had stopped in the middle of a terrorist zone. “He told us that Kurdish rebels hide above in the mountain caves and pick off people as they drive past. We could have been in their rifle scopes for a couple of hours.” Continue reading…
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Air travel has long been lambasted, particularly by environmental groups, for the amount of gas emissions that flights release into the atmosphere. A recent study for the European Commission found that aircraft travel currently causes from 3.5 to 7.4 percent of global warming emissions. However, there are predictions that this will rise to 15 per cent because aviation is one of the few sources of greenhouse gases that is growing. In fact, air travel has been predicted to triple in volume in the next 30 years.
If you fly, you are contributing to the problem. Let’s say you’ve just jetted from Vancouver to Toronto. Each passenger, including you, has just accounted for an additional tonne of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases per person pumped into the atmosphere. That’s twice as bad as driving the trip in a gas-guzzling SUV. Continue reading…
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Travellers motoring along the Trans-Canada Highway west of Revelstoke, B.C., are often astonished to see a large complex of red-roofed buildings suddenly appear like a scene from the Mediterranean. The 200-room hotel, called Three Valley Lake Chateau, is the creation of Gordon Bell, a hard-driving visionary, who made an indelible impression on every one he encountered. I met Bell two years ago, while writing a Westworld magazine piece about his hotel and adjoining “Three Valley Gap Heritage Ghost Town.” Although a senior citizen, Bell had the energy of two men. I can recall being startled to see him out in the parking lot at 7:00 a.m., hauling his guests’ luggage out of the hotel to a waiting tour bus. It was hard to imagine another hotel owner doubling as a bell hop, but then Gordon was a hands-on kind of guy.
I was saddened to learn recently that Gordon passed away in November 2007, at age 74. Fittingly, he died on the job–out on the road, attending tourism conventions. Gordon will be unreplaceable, but his four children: George, Carol, Melody and Rene, together with his wife Ethel, are continuing to run the business as they always have–as a family unit, which is just the way Gordon intended.
In memory of Gordon, I’m including the story that I wrote about him and the construction of his lifelong dream. Continue reading…
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Did you know that Canada possesses the world’s largest wildlife game sanctuary, or that mobster Al Capone once had a secret hideout located beneath the streets of Moose Jaw, or that Alberta boasts the world’s only official Flying Saucer Landing Pad? These are just a few of the surprising factoids that I discovered while perusing the Canadian Tourism Commission’s website (mediacentre.canada.travel/). Unfortunately, the site offers few details about these unusual pieces of Canadiana. Curious to know more, I’ve done some additional research. Here are 10 travel-related Did You Know? items, arranged in no particular order. Continue reading…
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At 3:30 a.m., I am rudely jolted from my sleep by a door-thumping wake-up call. Through the walls of my room I can hear the whinnying of horses–the Tenggerese guides have arrived. After donning several layers of clothing, I step out into the Javanese night. Although we are only 800 kilometres south of the equator, the mountain air is frigid. It is a short stroll to the top of the cliffs where the guides wait. Wrapped in blankets with only their eyes showing, they stand mute and still like great sleeping bats, the vapour rising from their horses’ nostrils wreathing them in ghostly halos. Continue reading…
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From time to time, travel publications such as National Geographic Traveller and Outside magazine publish lists of the greatest travel books of all time. Typically, these rankings include the exotic dispatches of Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin, Pico Iyer, Jonathan Raban and Wilfred Thesiger. Conspicuously absent from most of these lists is the travel book that I consider the most influential of all time–Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. It was certainly influential for me. I devoured the novel at age 16, and was immediately seized with a feverish impulse to hitchhike across Canada, an ambition that was rudely thwarted my parents. I was hypnotized by the book’s rhythmic language, descriptive beauty, chaotic exuberance and raw energy. As Kerouac wrote: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’” Continue reading…
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Comedian George Carlin once observed: “Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?” Here are a few more nuggets from Carlin’s repertoire:
“The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.”
”Ever wonder about those people who spend $2.00 apiece on those little bottles of Evian water? Try spelling Evian backward.”
“If a man smiles all the time, he’s probably selling something that doesn’t work.”
“The very existence of flame-throwers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, you know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.”
“I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older; then it dawned on me–they’re cramming for their final exam.”
Well, I wonder how George fared. As you may have heard, Carlin died on June 22 in Los Angeles of heart failure at age 71. I expect he is keeping everyone in stitches in the Great Beyond. Continue reading…
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We are sitting in a room, getting a dolphin anatomy lesson from a bronze-skinned Antonio Banderas lookalike in electric-blue swimming trunks. He points to a picture of the animal’s blowhole. “Don’t stick anything in the dolphin’s blowhole,” he says. “And don’t touch their eyes. They are very sensitive.” He then points to the creature’s underside. “This is where their genitals are located. We want you to be friendly with our dolphins, but not too friendly. Don’t touch their genitals.” Then he smiles and adds, “But maybe you call them up later and make a date.” Continue reading…
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Dive in with Fleur Bainger as she heads to Coral Bay and gets up close and personal with whale sharks and their 300-tooth smiles.
This podcast was produced in partnership with Lonely Planet.
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