You know you have a problem with your city taxis when NYC's cab system is lifted up as a role model.
Indeed, New York cabbies offer charming, sanitary and justice-based services, at least perhaps compared to the taxi drivers in San Francisco. According to a Bay Area publication, San Francisco's complaint line got 1,733 calls last year related to the city's cab drivers; it was a 13 percent uptick from the previous year, and almost double the 900-complaint goal put forward by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.
So—you've resolved to eat healthier in 2013? We salute you. But if you're worried that the only way to stick to your new strict diet is stop traveling—too many temptations out there!— here's some good news: Your diet is safe in Chelsea, Mass.
That's because, as of New Year's Day, the Boston suburb instituted a tough ban on trans fats in restaurants. That means a serious dearth of French fries, gravy, pies, cookies or anything really good to spread on your morning toast. It's reportedly a tougher ban than either Boston or NYC's similar laws, which allow trace amounts of trans fats—and it makes the Big Apple's impending ban on jumbo sodas seem downright restrained.
It would seem to be a classic man-bites-dog story of the travel world: Crocodile jumps innocent Swedish tourist who’s taking a dip in a lagoon, but no one is hurt.
Watch the video, taken at Australia’s Litchfield National Park. (Unlike a certain viral eagle video, this one would seem to be quite real.) While the reports indicated that the croc was merely relaxing on a rock and perhaps wanted to refresh himself in the cool water, he does seem to make a rather intentional beeline toward the swimmers, and reportedly slapped said Swede in the face. Was he perhaps annoyed that, yet again, tourists were filming him while sunbathing?
“The pair were so unfazed they carried on swimming in the lagoon,” one report says of the laughing tourists. (If this were a movie, we all know what would have happened next: Momma Crocodile would have come looking for junior, and then ordered Swedish meatballs for dinner.) Either way, it’s a nice reminder to keep a safe distance from the local wildlife.
Looking for a relaxing place to spend the holidays?
Two spots in Europe may offer some respite from this year's holiday stress—if, that is, your major concern this season is the possibility of the ancient Mayanprophesied Doomsday on Dec. 21, 2012.
Indeed, while the rest of us are out vainly shopping for Furbies and iPads, other travelers are making long-term plans. UK travel search site Skyscanner recently announced that searches for one-way tickets to Turkey, for travel on the days leading up to Dec. 21, have spiked by nearly a third, while similar searches to the South of France have gone up by 41 percent.
It’s been a bad year for Donald Trump when it comes to elections.
His latest voter-based imbroglio, however, has less to do with Washington, and more to do with hotel bars, golf and feisty farmers.
The real estate and resort mogul recently banned Glenfiddich whisky at all of his properties, reportedly after taking offense at some implied opposition to his new Trump International Golf Links in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. (The resort has no hotel yet: one obstacle is Trump’s dispute with a neighboring wind farm project, but that’s a whole other drama.)
Here’s a shoo-in for the 2012 Darwin Awards, travel edition: On Monday, an EgyptAir flight, en route to Beirut, had to make an emergency landing at Egypt’s Hurghada airport. The reason: a Jordanian passenger had been bitten by a snake. It was his own snake, mind you, which he smuggled through security in a bag under his clothes. Reportedly, after the crew heard him screaming, the pilot was able to land, and the passenger was rushed away for medical treatment, while the authorities confiscated the snake. Some reports have indicated that the snake was a cobra, and stomped to death after the incident; while we can’t confirm either of those (or unfortunately, the status of the passenger) we can easily confirm that this was the most bone-headed idea we’ve heard in awhile.
In a world where free wifi is increasingly seen as a basic right, the bar for enticing tourists gets higher and higher. "Rwanda Bores Tourists," a recent African newspaper headline declared, and the article detailed how plenty of people come to this nation, once ravaged by genocide, but they don't stay very long.
Granted, in 2011, tourism brought 900,000 visitors and $250 million to Rwanda, and 2012 will likely reflect a nearly 20 percent uptick in visits. Plus, web site GlobeSpots just ranked Rwanda as No. 6 in their Top 10 global destinations. After all, Rwanda offers cool gorillas that live in the Virunga mountains, world-class bird-watching, hiking trails, as well as a lot of coffee and tea—and, for better or worse, a heavy sense of history.
Call it another miracle of technology: You don't have to be a bathrobe-clad buzzkill anymore, who squints out from your hotel-room door in the wee hours to give a dirty look to some partier loudly staggering down the hall. There's now a machine to do that for you.
Thanks, that is, to Premier Inn. The UK-based budget hotel chain guarantees guests that they'll get a good night's sleep—and gives them a refund if they don't.
Ask the typical person what Romania is famous for and you’ll likely get two answers: Olympians and Dracula.
But while gymnasts have the depressing tendency to grow up and retire, Dracula at least has the advantage of immortality, especially since he’s mostly fictitious.
So we have to give credit to the Romanian National Tourist Office for making the most of an old association: According to a recent report, the tourist board is planning to promote the historically true Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia—the 15th-century monarch who supposedly inspired the fictional Prince of Darkness—as a distant cousin of that can’t-get-enough-of-them British Royal Family.
Black Ivory coffee claims to be one of the rarest, most refined coffees in the world, and retails for a whopping $1,110 per kilogram. And now, it's being offered at the Anantara Resort properties in Thailand,the Maldives, and Abu Dhabi.
How could this wonderful coffee be so luxurious, you might ask? Its proteins—and their associated bitter taste—are broken down during a "refining" process. That process, it turns out, involves a rescued street elephant chomping a huge load of the Thai Arabica beans, digesting them, and then, let's just say, jettisoning the remnants from his or her anterior region.
