Men jailed for beating holy crocodile

by Sean McLachlan on

It’s generally not smart to bother a crocodile. Heck, an Israeli tourist nearly got eaten just for trying to take a photo of one! Thus two men in Bangladesh should count themselves lucky that after beating a crocodile, they landed up in a jail cell rather than the reptile’s stomach.

The men worked at the tomb of Khan Jahan Ali, a fifteenth-century Muslim saint whose resting place in Bagarhat is a pilgrimage site. In front of his tomb is a pool of water in which live about two dozen marsh crocodiles. Pilgrims offer chickens and goats to the crocs in the hopes of having their prayers answered, and donate money to their “caretakers”. This group have been reported for cruelty before, often beating the crocs if they don’t respond to their calls. When a pregnant female named Pipil didn’t do what they wanted, they beat it so badly with bamboo sticks that the animal lost an eye.

It’s illegal to mistreat crocodiles in Bangladesh, and now the pair face two years in jail with hard labor.

More travel deals for Black Friday and Cyber Monday

by Katie Hammel on

The folks over at the LA Times have rounded up a few more great travel deals for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And what better way to recoup from this most hellish of shopping weekends than by looking forward to a discounted vacation?

Shell’s Vacation Hospitality’s Black Friday Sale runs today with discounts of up to 50% off at 26 of its resorts located in Arizona, Hawaii, Nevada, New Hampshire, Texas, Wisconsin, California, Mexico and Canada. Sample deals include a $79 per night room in Napa Valley, $84 per night on the Big Island of Hawaii, and $64 per night in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. There are some blackout dates around the holidays and the rooms must be prepaid and are nonrefundable.

Gap Adventures’ sale runs from Black Friday to Cyber Monday and offers 20% savings on selected tours. 12 days in Laos can be had for $999 per person, 8 days in Thailand is just $479, and 20 days in India is only $1099. Over 25 tours are discounted, and include locations in South and Central America, Asia, Africa and Europe. Prices don’t include airfare and are only valid on select departures in December, January, April and May.

Sonesta, a resort company that operates two properties on St. Maarten, is also offering 50% off for bookings made through Monday. The discount is valid for stays from December 18 to March 31. Stays over Christmas and New Year’s require a 5-night minimum, but at just $138 (down from the usual $275), the total price is much more affordable.

Asian airline puzzled by mysterious mid-air toilet clogs

by Scott Carmichael on

Any time you put 300 people in a metal tube, the strain on the in-flight toilet system is going to be immense – but Hong Kong based airline Cathay Pacific is having more than just a bit of trouble.

The airline is actually dealing with a huge mystery. Their toilets are so unreliable that a Hong Kong bound flight had to make an unscheduled landing in Mumbai, India when all ten of the bathrooms became clogged and unusable.

The 278 passengers on the “crappy” flight were delayed for 18 hours. But to be honest, I’d rather spend 18 hours in Mumbai than 18 minutes on a plane with no bathrooms.

In other incidents, two other Hong Kong bound flights had to refuse boarding to a substantial amount of passengers when all the bathrooms on one side of the plane stopped working.

All these incidents are on the Airbus A330 and A340 aircraft, and Cathay Pacific is said to be working overtime to figure out what is causing the problem. A Cathay Pacific spokeswoman suggested that passengers may be to blame.

‘You would be amazed at what we find in the pipes when we clean the system – not just face towels but medicine bottles, socks and even children’s stuffed toys,’

Until the real reason is uncovered, engineers are carrying out deep cleaning treatment and replacing pipes.
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South by Southeast: Taunggyi Balloon Festival

by Jeremy Kressmann on

Daily life is a struggle in Myanmar. For the average local, working days are filled with long hours of backbreaking manual labor, meager pay and no weekends or vacation time. Considering this exhausting schedule, festivals and holidays are special times – a chance to kick back, relax and let loose. In Myanmar’s Shan State, one of the most important of these festivities is the annual Taunggyi Balloon Festival.

Over the course of this annual eight-day event, teams compete to design and launch the most impressive hot air balloons: some shaped like giant birds, zebras and cows; others filled with a potent mix of fireworks; still others elegantly lit by flickering candles. Each balloon’s launch is symbolic of Buddhist hopes for the purging of human sin, gently gliding off and disappearing into the heavens. More than 200 such entries are launched each festival season, continually rising throughout the day and night.

Surrounding this magnificent hot-air balloon spectacle is a chaotic and festive carnival sideshow: drunken men shout at giant gambling wheels, open cooking fires sizzle with pots of Mohinga soup and pig entrails and children scream with joy on huge Ferris Wheels (powered solely by jumping men). It’s as if the Fourth of July, Las Vegas and a giant refugee camp had suddenly collided in one huge, heaving, wonderful mass of humanity and celebration.

During my visit to Myanmar this past month, I had a chance to visit the Taunggyi Balloon Festival and get first-hand taste of this awesome event. Wondering what happened? Keep reading below for more…

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Getting There
Upon arriving in Myanmar, I immediately began planning my visit to Taunggyi. This was easier said than done: the event is among the most popular in all of Myanmar and hotels in Taunggyi are fully booked for weeks in advance. Even finding a bus to Taunggyi during festival time presents a problem: as many are jammed with eager locals.

As an alternative, I arranged to begin my Taunggyi visit from the nearby Shan State town of Kalaw. The town has its own smaller balloon festivities and is about a 3 hour taxi ride from Taunggyi. Many visitors also consider Nyaungshwe, the main city on Inle Lake, which has plentiful lodging options. Both cities make convenient bases to begin your exploration of the festival. A taxi to/from the event costs around $40-50.

The Balloons
Though Taunggyi is most famous for the nighttime balloons, the daytime balloons are equally impressive. Unlike the evening launches, which explode with colorful fireworks, the daytime launches show off Myanmar craftsmanship, with each colorful entry shaped like a different animal. On the large festival launching grounds, amorphous piles of fabric slowly rise into fantasy creatures of heat and shape: curious pigeons and lazy cows emerge and drift away, carried at the whim of the warm winter breeze. Some entries are not so lucky: an errant gust of wind or careless touch of the torch and the fragile creations are consumed by flame.

Soon the sun began to slip behind the nearby hills, bringing with it a growing anticipation for the evening’s main event: the fire balloons. Before launch each entry is brought to a judging station to be weighed. A typical balloon contains about 75 pounds of explosives, bringing with it the potential for both delight and catastrophe. Several days before my visit an errant balloon exploded too low to the ground, showering spectators with a bath of molten paper that injured 200. My guesthouse owner advised to bring a hat to protect my hair from catching fire.

Suddenly the evening’s first fire balloon began to rise from among carpet of tiny humans, a glowing, undulating mushroom of explosives silhouetted against the blackened sky. The crowd let out an excited gasp. The balloon inflated towards its maximum size, anxiously tugging at its tethering below. The handlers nervously gazed up at months of work and preparation, and released their offering to its fate. The balloon’s rise was unspectacular at first: lazily floating along, unsure of its purpose. Then suddenly, as if triggered by some celestial epiphany, the balloon’s base exploded in a massive powderkeg of light and sound and color and activity.

Nothing prepared me for that first explosion, bigger than any Fourth of July shell I had seen back home. It blanketed the sky and sent me running for cover, awed and delighted by what I had seen. Over the course of the next several hours another 6-8 balloons were slowly launched, but nothing compared to that first explosion. I spent the night lost beneath the festival’s many carnival tents, playing and drinking and celebrating with the locals until dawn. Then it was time to head home. All too soon, the vivid dream I had witnessed at Taunggyi was gone: floating off into my memory like the fragile fire balloons, slowly disappearing in the sky.

Curious to read more about visiting Myanmar? Read the initial post on my recent trip HERE.

Gadling writer Jeremy Kressmann is spending the next few months in Southeast Asia. You can read other posts on his adventures “South by Southeast” HERE.

New website, PublicEarth, shares hidden gems from around the globe

by Kraig Becker on

The new website PublicEarth may still be in beta, but it’s already showing plenty of promise for travelers looking to find hidden travel gems and inside information for their next trip. The idea behind the site is that it is set up in a wiki format allowing contributors to share their experiences and favorite locations with others in a unique and interesting format.

PublicEarth is the brainchild of Duncan McCall, an avid adventure traveler who has explored the far corners of the globe. While on those travels, he would often meet up with other adventurers, and swap stories over a few beers, sharing tips and secret destinations. Those conversations proved invaluable in getting the most out of those journeys, and upon returning home to the U.S., McCall wanted to come up with a way to create that same experience for travelers everywhere. PublicEarth was born from that idea.

The website’s concept is simple. The plan is to combine “location searching and place discovery” with well designed and easy to use tools that make it simple for travelers to not only sift through the content, but also share their own experiences as well. With nearly five million places already in the system, it is clear that the concept is already resonating with travelers, who are contributing as much as they are reading.Visitors to the site are able to find places in a number of categories, such as “food & drink”, “history & culture”, “outdoors & nature”, and more. The entries are then dropped on to a map, showing locations and general proximity to one another, making it a perfect tool to plan your next escape.

PublicEarth looks like it has the potential to be a very powerful and useful tool, and it is already growing quite quickly. It just might earn a spot in your list of favorite travel sites as well.