Content tagged with “travel” under “The Interesting List”

“ For a couple of decades, there was a bus service from London to Calcutta, India. It took almost two months. ”

“ Uber drivers in London are embarking on a multi-year journey to pass the black cabbie test, whcih requires them to memorize most of the street in London. ”

“ Wales has a library combined with a hotel, so you can sleep next to the books. ”

“ Twice a week, a van makes a 16-hour, 500-mile drive from Fairbanks, Alaska, north to the Prudhoe Bay oil fields. ”

“ Josip Tito, the former ruler of Yugoslavia, had a opulent luxury train built for his personal use. ”

“ In 1977, a German tourist accidentally de-planed in Bangor, Maine, and spent three days thinking he was in San Francisco. When the truth was discovered, he become a brief sensation. ”

“ In 2015, shipping rates were so low that it was cheaper to move your belongings around the world on a container ship than store them in a local facility. ”

“ A travel agency for ‘ultra high net worth’ people reveals some of the absurdities involved with planning vacations for people with a lot of money. ”

“ With COVID having devastated the cruise industry, many companies are selling older ships off for scrap, thus clogging up ‘ship-breaking’ yards. ”

“ The longest contiguous train ride in the world is from Porto, Portugal to Saigon, Vietnam. Unsurprisingly, it takes a long time, and costs a lot of money. ”

“ There is a ‘tourist gaze,’ whereby history and cultural heritage is packaged for what the locals believe tourists want to see, and what tourists believe is ‘authentic.’ Local economies perpetuate this overemphasis and misrepresentation in exchange for tourist dollars. ”

“ There’s a waterslide in Poland that rotates, so different sections of the slide become ‘down’ at different times. It’s calculated to get you to the end in a full rotation. ”

“ The story behind a viral photo of climbers waiting to summit Everest earlier this year. Multiple people died, and questions are being asked about the future of climbing the mountain. ”

“ An argument that the Louvre should remove the Mona Lisa because it causes enormous logistical problems and disappoints almost everyone. ”

“ Over-tourism is a new word to describe throngs of people clogging destination sites around the world. The larger trend at work is that more people are economically able to travel, especially the Chinese, which is a significant part of the world population. ”

“ A profile of The Explorer’s Club, which is exactly what the title implies: a century old group of adventurers that have a headquarters in NYC. ”

“ Ingress is a AR game from the people who would go on to make Pokémon Go. But it’s much more serious, and has people flying all over the the world to complete missions. ”