According to a report from Reuters, Britain plans to submit a claim to the United Nations to extend its Antarctic territory by a million square kilometers. However, the claim could cause tension between Britain and a few South American countries -- Argentina is working on a ...Click on a label to read posts from that part of the world.
Antarctica
Who owns Antarctica?
According to a report from Reuters, Britain plans to submit a claim to the United Nations to extend its Antarctic territory by a million square kilometers. However, the claim could cause tension between Britain and a few South American countries -- Argentina is working on a ...Thin Green Line
I go on and on here about how much I love our country's national parks. I don't have a particular fondness for the National Park Service's parent agency, The Department of the Interior (where I worked for two years and which, under the Bush administration has become, ...On the Road, Cold Coffee Is a Good Thing
Struggling to find a good cup of coffee while traveling to remote areas? There is hope for us!
I am a huge iced-coffee fan in the summer time. A friend recently introduced me to a great new thing: cold-pressed coffee. Instead of using hot water and adding ice cubes (often ...International Polar Year
Remember that song by Donald Fagan IGY? Probably only a few of you do. The older ones, like me. OK, I'm not THAT old, but I'm old enough to remember Steely Dan before anything they'd done was remixed. Anyway, I bring up IGY, which stands for International Geophysical Year, ...The Extreme List
Sure, there are the 1000 Places to Go Before You Die. That's a fine list and one that can help the average traveler see the best places in the world before drawing your terminal breath. But is there such a thing as Extreme Things to Do Before You Die. I mean, there seems to ...Top 10 Causes of Travel Deaths
To date I'd like to think I've been pretty lucky in dodging death on some of my travels abroad and at home. Seeing how I got dumped on by two different birds on two different occasions last year in Tajikistan, for the first time in life and walked away without avian flu I'd ...Photo of Every Country
The Century Club is an organization we've blogged about here before. The group is made up of people for whom traveling the world might be called an obsession. Century, or 100, is the operative term, as the group restricts membership to you if you have NOT been to at least ...Strange Statues
There is a statue in Central Park from Alice and Wonderland that is delightfully odd. It features the well-known assortment of characters from the Lewis Carroll book, but the face on the Mad Hatter is, well, mad. I sometimes walk by a find myself looking into his bronze ...Karl Bushby's Goliath Expedition
There are epic trips and then there are...well, there is Karl Bushby's Goliath Expedition. Bushby, an ex-paratrooper is in the midst of undertaking one of those trips that truly flabbergast. He's trying to walk around the entire globe. The self-declared stats he has on his ...Driving Orientation Map
Heading to another country? Going to be doing some driving? Then you might want to check out Strange Maps' strange map of driving orientation. Plotted by whether a country engages in left-handed or right-handed driving, the map looks vaguely like a map of the former British ...Worldmapper
A very cool use of technology, geography and demographics can be found over at the site Worldmapper. They have developed a really amazing algorithm that allows you to see the world and the various sizes of the country therein, through various statistics. Countries look ...The World's Coldest Cartwheel
Few people get the chance to visit the south pole, and even fewer are thick-skinned enough to celebrate their arrival by donning a swimsuit to cartwheel across the snow in a -44.7°F wind chill. A girl by the named of Sandwich (she got her nickname from a sandwich-shaped ...National Geographic's Genographic Project
Having just gotten the results of my ancestor's genetic journey from the National Geographic Genographic project I can't say that I'm all that surprised about my findings. However, before I dive right into the details of what my own DNA sampling revealed perhaps I should ...Protecting Antarctica from Tourists
Chinese government officials have asked Chinese citizens to avoid Antarctica as a travel destination. Officials cited the fragility of the continent's ecosystem as the driving force behind the request. The country has not made this an official travel restriction, but the ...High Seas: Prefer Murder or Suicide?
We're not ones to fear-monger, but this story was surprising. Thursday's The Guardian ran a story about the numerous passenger disappearances from cruise ships over the past few years. It turns out that at least 30 people have simply vanished from cruise ships in the past ...License Plates of the World
The other day I ran across this website, LICENSE PLATES OF THE WORLD, which has got to be the largest collection of – you guessed it! – license plates on the Internet (and not just because the title is in all caps, but that helps). If it's not, well, then please ...Tip for Tipping
We have covered the very fragile topic of tipping outside the US before...it is a tricky one. I have seen a few website and guides which instruct tourists on tipping and I have never felt comfortable with any of them. Ehow.com for example, has a tip for tipping in the Czech ...Yearning for Antarctic Adventure
I saw this technical piece written a while back by a guy stationed in Antarctica. The article is more about writing code for a weather monitoring station than a description of life at the station, so you might want to pass on it if you're not the programming type. Anyway, ...Food Poisoning: Meet the Bugs
There is nothing like an episode of food poisoning that can wreck one's trip, change priorities, or--if it takes more than two days--even reconsider one's view on euthanasia. I have been there many times, either myself or in spirit with other people. Yes, there was the cheap ...World's Most Aggressive "Queue Jumpers"
One of the things that annoy me to no end when traveling are people who cut in front of you when waiting in line or as the British say "Queue Jumpers".
Part of the problem is that I never know whether I should just relax, ignore it and let everyone get ahead of me (I am on ...
