Presentation via www.sec.gov.
Airliners.net extensive discussion.
The demise of Midwest into AirTran will be a dark day for travelers….
Category: Travel
Vietnam Faces
This is an interesting image, taken from a slow boat on the Thu Bon River, just south of Hoi An, during a recent trip to Vietnam.
Australians, Americans? What might be on their minds – the War, friends, travel? Their faces seem to imply many, many words. A few more notes and links on Vietnam can be found here.
China’s Online Population Explosion
There are now an estimated 137 million internet users in China, second in number only to the United States, where estimates of the current internet population range from 165 million to 210 million. The growth rate of China’s internet user population has been outpacing that of the U.S., and China is projected to overtake the U.S. in the total number of users within a few years.
The influx of tens of millions of new online participants each year can be expected to have far-reaching consequences for the Chinese population, for China itself and for the larger world. At the very least, the internet will offer ever greater numbers of Chinese a much more sophisticated information and communications world than the one they currently inhabit. And because the Chinese share a single written language, despite the multiplicity of spoken tongues, it could have a unifying effect on the country’s widely dispersed citizenry. An expanding internet population might also increase domestic tensions that could spill over into China’s relations with the U.S. and other countries while the difference between Chinese and Western approaches to the internet could create additional sore points over human rights and problems with restrictions on non-Chinese companies.
Lufthansa Pondering an Economy Class Sleeping Area
Via Airliners.net:
To increase the travel comfort on intercontinental night flights, Lufthansa is thinking about a separate sleeping area within Economy Class. There, you would have the possibility to sleep in beds with an angle of 180? (Full Flat). This option could be booked instead of a seat.
In the future, when booking a night flight with Lufthansa from Johannesburg to Frankfurt, would you generally be interested in booking into the sleeping area instead of a seat in Economy Class?
Notes from Bora Bora
A dream landscape emerged as our dinghy sped through turquoise waters toward the uninhabited South Seas islet of Tapu. Here, on a triangular speck of sand and coconut palms at the bottom of the world, red hibiscus, white gardenia and yellow plumeria blossoms were strewn on the water at land’s edge. As we stepped from the boat, a sommelier offered flutes bubbling with Dom Perignon. Behind him, china and crystal sparkled on a dining table positioned in shallow water at the edge of the lagoon. A French sous-chef, wearing a tall white toque, worked nearby, partly hidden behind a grill disguised by palm fronds.
It was just another day in paradise for the staff of the St. Regis Resort, Bora Bora, where producing dream scenarios is part of the job. On this April afternoon, staffers were helping a couple celebrate an anniversary, and I had tagged along.
Beautiful Turkey VR Scenes
Keith Martin posted some beautiful VR scenes from Turkey.
Lonely Planet founder scopes out sensationally bad places
In nearly four decades of incessant globe-trotting, Tony Wheeler, the co-founder of Lonely Planet, has seen nearly all the planet’s sensationally wonderful places. He’s also seen the great places, the pretty good places, the so-so places and the not-too-bad places. There wasn’t much left to do but to start collecting passport stamps from the really bad places.
The result is one of the most oddly compelling travel books in recent years, “Bad Lands: A Tourist on the Axis of Evil — With Additional Excursions to Places That Are Slightly Misguided, Mildly Malevolent, Seriously Off-Course, Extraordinarily Reclusive and Much Misunderstood.”
Wheeler pulled off the Axis of Evil hat trick: Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Then he moved on to Afghanistan, Burma/Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and George W. Bush’s new favorite country, Albania, for a nostalgic look at the bad old days under Enver Hoxha.
The obvious question is, uh, why? I asked Wheeler this over lunch in San Francisco recently.
Into Middle America (Wisconsin), but Staying on the Fringe
As Paul tinkered, his friends sat around drinking beer while heavy metal played on the radio. “This is your truest Wisconsin experience,” mIEKAL said, “hanging out in an auto garage in the middle of nowhere.”
Wisconsin, however, announced itself with no such subtlety. After a weekend in Chicago, I’d driven west across Illinois, finally turning north amid the big estates near Forreston. Once I was over the state line, hills swelled up from the prairie, the sweet smell of manure wafted from dairy farms, and advertisements urged me to indulge in Cheddar cheese and frozen custard, bratwurst and ButterBurgers.
By the time I drove through New Glarus — a surreal town modeled on a Swiss village complete with chalet-style buildings and street signs in German — I knew I hadn’t simply entered a new state, but a new state of mind.
As culturally distinct as Wisconsin is, I was heading for a place that sat at yet another remove from mainstream America: Dreamtime Village, an intentional community of artists situated in the driftless hills of southwest Wisconsin (so called because they escaped the rough, cold touch of ice age glaciers).
Once known as communes, until the word became overly associated with hippies and other cultural relics of the 1960s and ’70s, intentional communities have a long history in this country, going back to the Shakers and even, I suppose, the Pilgrims. I’d long wanted to visit one, to see how utopian ideals were surviving in the more cynical America of today, and so I logged on to www.ic.org and searched for intentional communities in Wisconsin and Iowa. At first, I found what I had expected: devout Christians, pagan farmers and a polyamorous “family” (my wife, Jean, vetoed that one). Almost all, however, wanted serious members, not casual visitors like me.
Rory Stewart in Kabul
Stewart, who now heads a nongovernmental organization called the Turquoise Mountain Foundation (TMF), had come into Aziz’s good graces by way of his ongoing efforts to save the Old City from imminent destruction. One could be forgiven for assuming that, in Afghanistan, such a threat might be related to Taliban missiles or suicide bombers. But in counterintuitive fact, the culprit is a real estate boom. Everywhere in Kabul, bulldozers are flattening whole city blocks of traditional Afghan mud architecture to make room for modern glass-and-concrete buildings, fueled by billions of dollars in aid money and opium profits.
Stewart and I had spent the morning slogging through the mucky, trash-strewn lanes of the Old City, specifically a quarter called Murad Khane on the north bank of the Kabul River. Initially I had a hard time appreciating exactly what it is that’s worth saving. Murad Khane is a warren of boxy, flat-topped, one- and two-story mud buildings laced with winding passageways so packed with decades of uncollected garbage that street levels had risen seven feet (two meters) in some areas, forcing residents to contort themselves to enter their front doors. There was no plumbing, no sewage system, no electricity. Residents relieved themselves in the open. Loitering men smoked hashish.