In the spirit of holiday giving is a great story about a married couple of emergency physicians who plan on driving from Durham, North Carolina to Santiago Lake Atitlan, Guatemala to help reopen a small hospital. The Pages, according to the News & Observer, checked out several options for lending aid and seeking adventure in Central America before settling on the Santiago project. The hospital, which has been abandoned since 1990 due to civil war, was deeded to the locals in 2002. The Pages will be working and living for the next two to five years in a region which is “still largely populated by indigenous Mayans” and sits on the edge of an old volcano a mile high. They are very much looking forward to it.
Epic Effort in Antarctica
Patrick Woodhead and his team of explorers
reached the South Pole on Wednesday and became the first adventurers to retrace the steps of Norwegian pioneer
Roald Amundsen. They finished their epic trip in just 37 days. Really an amazing feat. Ballsy.
The team, consisting of three Brits and a Canadian (cold up here, eh?) are going to try to set a record for the
fastest crossing of all of Antarctica. You can read up on Woodhead’s other accomplishments at his site
here.
Endangered Species
Maybe I just have a soft spot for wild animals. I’ll never forget the wild moose we saw in Alaska or the bald eagles
swooping down and plucking fish from the surface of a lake.
Experience with naure is such a huge part of the travel experience. So I thought that
this
article listing the animals that have largely been saved by the Endangered Species Act pretty interesting,
not to mention long. From the Karner Blue Butterfly to the Florida Manatee to the Florida Panther, these are species
that we are better off having around…even if the manatee looks like a big fat person.
Passports and RFID?
I am honestly unsure how I feel about the matter of
RFID chips in passports now that it looks like
they concept is moving forward. Even right after 9/11, I
would have said that adding chips to passports was no big deal. I also think that national ID cards are no big deal. I
actually think national ID cards would, in a lot of ways, make life more convenient and would cut down on problems like
ID theft. But there are those who, perhaps justifiably so, are afriad that the government, if given an inch, will
always take a mile. This administration, even without Herr Ashcroft, seems particularly inclined in that way.
So it is little surprise that groups like the
ACLU are bent out of shape about the new
passport plan. The plan would possibly add RFID tags to passports that would include digitally encoded biometric data
(fingerprints, photos, iris scans). There are concerns
that the data would not be encrypted and so ID theives could “skim” your passport as you, say, stand in line at the
airport. This seems very odd to me, and I wonder if this is just an issue that has to get worked out. Again, perhaps I
give the government too much credit, but it seems to me they wouldn’t implement a system quite as stupid as the one the
ACLU and others are afraid of. Anyhow, I’d be curious to hear what othes think about this topic. Should they add RFID
chips to passports? What’s he big whoop?
Calakmul: Part of a Mexican Treasure Preserved
One of the most succesful threatened land deals the Nature Conservancy has worked of late
is the purchase of 370,000 acres of tropical rain forest in the
1.8 million acre Calakmul Biosphere
Reserve in Mexico. The breathtaking beauty of this area only hints at the amazing history and biodiversity. 350
separate bird species and 94 different types of mammals, including one of the largest jaguar populations, call this
place home, as once did a portion of the great Mayan civilization. The reserve is currently considered a UNESCO World
Heritage Site.
Ownership of the lands, funded in part by the Nature Conservancy, is now in the hands of the Mexican federal
government. The land will be added to acreage already protected.