A team of French archaeologists believe they have found a sunstone, a strange crystal that was said to help mariners locate the sun even on overcast days.
Some of the medieval Norse Sagas mention this device. In “Rauðúlfs þáttr,” King Olaf asks the hero Sigurður to point out the sun in the middle of a snowstorm. Sigurður points to where it is behind the gray sky. To test him, the king had a follower “fetch the sunstone and held it up and saw where light radiated from the stone and thus directly verified Sigurður’s prediction.”
One recent study suggests the “sunstone” was a double-refracting crystal, which allows light through when the light is polarized in certain directions. They brighten or darken depending on the polarization of the light behind it. Clouds block the sun’s visible light but let through a concentration of polarized light that can be detected by the crystal as it’s moved around. Double-refracting crystals such as cordierite, tourmaline and calcite are common in Scandinavia.
Some scholars have expressed doubts about the sunstone’s existence because “Rauðúlfs þáttr” is a highly allegorical tale full of magical events.
Now it appears the tale may not be all that fantastic after all. Archaeologists from the University of Rennes have been studying finds from a British ship that sunk in 1592 near the island of Alderney in the English Channel. They found a rectangular block of Iceland spar calcite crystal, a type known for its double-refracting properties. The crystal was found next to a pair of dividers that may have been used for navigation.
The researchers suggest that their discovery shows the use of sunstones lasted well beyond the Viking era.
As airport security checkpoints get more crowded and lines get longer, travelers are arriving earlier than ever to make that flight on time. Arrive late; miss the flight. Once at the gate, passengers may wait longer than normal as airlines juggle the start of boarding with actual anticipated takeoff time. Keeping passengers in the aircraft or on the ground too long may result in a hefty fine. While the aircraft may be ready and the flight crew willing, passengers may face delays beyond their control caused by budget cutbacks.
Frequently flying out of Orlando International Airport (MCO), I see crowds on most days at just about any time as vacationers come in town to visit Walt Disney World, Universal Studios or any one of a number of central Florida attractions. Frankly, the thought of the process being slowed down by budget cuts is terrifying to those who work out of that airport.
How terrifying? Enough to make frequent fliers re-think their game plans and look for new ways to expedite the boarding process.
Take The Express Lane
I recently re-joined CLEAR, the biometric fast pass through security at MCO. I had been a member in 2005 when the service had over 200,000 members. But shortly after a laptop with the names and detailed information of 33,000 CLEAR customers was reported stolen in 2008, the service shut down. Starting back up in 2010, I had thought about joining again but was a bit apprehensive about the whole program and lines seemed to move along pretty well at MCO anyway.
Then came talk of sequestering, budget cuts and TSA downsizing, which quickly reminded me just how much I hate lines, slow people and inefficiency. Example: On a rolling sidewalk at the Minneapolis/St Paul airport, clearly marked stand to the right, walk to the left, I made a point of educating our children that “there is no ‘mosey’ lane kids.”
Primed to take the bait of a LivingSocial CLEAR trial offer ($18 for three months, spouse included), we stopped by the CLEAR kiosk not long ago to complete registration. I answered a variety of security questions and gave prints of fingers and thumbs, along with a retina scan and a copy of my passport and driver’s license. The process took about five minutes. From what I could see, that was far longer than those observed going through the CLEAR security checkpoint.
Stopping briefly to verify their identity then right on through the normal x-ray scan without any wait has the potential to save passengers time. One TSA officer told me, without hesitation, that amount of time could be “hours if staffing is reduced.”
The main drawback with CLEAR is that it is only offered in a few airports. Besides Orlando International Airport (MCO), CLEAR service is available at Denver International Airport (DEN), San Francisco International Airport (SFO), Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) and Westchester NY Airport (HPN).
Will I keep CLEAR after the three-month trial? Hard to say; at an annual rate of $179 per person, frequent fliers working out of a CLEAR-enabled airport will probably have no trouble justifying the price. As reports of actual government cutbacks cause longer lines, even less-than-frequent fliers could suddenly become interested, as I was.
For travelers not based by a CLEAR-enabled airport, there are other options though. To get there, we need to start by thinking outside of the United States.
Global Entry Program
International arrivals can speed up the process of entering the United States by using automated kiosks at most major U.S. airports via the Global Entry Program. I signed up for this one too because I have several international flights coming up in the next few months. The $100 fee is good for five years.
One of several Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Trusted Traveler Programs, including SENTRI (expedites crossing between the U.S. and Mexico), and NEXUS (expedites processing between the U.S. and Canada), Global Entry requires a fairly detailed online application to begin.
You’ll need your valid passport, driver’s license and a clean criminal record to get conditionally approved. A face-to-face appointment at an airport processing center completes the application.
TSA Pre✓
The TSA Pre✓ program allows some frequent fliers, invited by their participating host airline (Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines or US Airways), along with those enrolled in a Trusted Traveler Program, to speed through the airport screening process for domestic flights.
Odds are that if you qualify for the program through an airline, you already know about it. Those who don’t make it via airline invitation can back up to the Global Entry Program, pay the $100 for five years and enjoy the benefits.
Once enrolled in one of CBP’s eligible Trusted Traveler Programs, like the Global Entry Program mentioned above, air travelers are automatically qualified to participate in TSA Pre✓ when flying a participating airline at a participating airport.
To make that work, once signed up for a Trusted Traveler Program, travelers provide their Trusted Traveler account number in the “Known Traveler Number” field when booking travel.
That number, along with reservation information goes into TSA’s Secure Flight system and enables access to the TSA Pre✓ line at participating airports by embedding a secret code in boarding passes.
In addition to a faster lane, TSA Pre✓-approved travelers can leave their shoes, light outerwear and belts on and keep their 311 liquids packed away. Laptops and small electronics no longer have to be removed either. The program is no guarantee of expedited processing, as TSA will continue random checks, but it sure can’t hurt.
Orlando International Airport where I am trying the CLEAR membership is one of those airports.
Observing both the CLEAR line and the TSA Pre ✓ line, CLEAR seems to be the winner for speed. We’ll find out as we test both over the next few months.
As Americans, we’ve been bred to believe that the way we do things should be a model for the rest of the world. But after spending a good chunk of my Friday, day one of the sequester federal spending cuts, at George Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH) in Houston, I have to admit that Nicaragua, the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, felt like a better run airport than that of our fourth largest city.
Comparing Augusto Sandino International Airport in Managua to George Bush is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison, because Managua is a much sleepier place, but here is what I observed. We arrived at the airport in Managua at 11 a.m. and despite the fact that it was relatively busy, we made it through immigration, customs and baggage screening and to our gate by 11:30.
Managua has free Wi-Fi that is fast and works flawlessly. Free as in no strings attached. You don’t even have to register, agree to any terms of use or sign up for anything. But even better than that, there is free espresso spiked with rum at the Flor de Caña booth. And I’m not talking about a tiny sample either. They made me a double shot of espresso with a healthy shot of their delicious rum, aged in oak barrels for 12 years. Awesome.Managua also had a shop with counterfeit Major League Baseball wallets for just under a dollar (but sadly they had just one team: the Yankees).
We arrived in Houston with a three-hour layover and needed almost every minute of it to get to our connecting flight to Chicago, which left from Gate C39, which felt like it was about 18 miles from where we arrived. There was no free Wi-Fi (though it may be coming soon), no free espresso and no free rum. And the officially licensed Astros, Longhorns and Rockets items were a lot more than a buck. Worst of all, though, was the line to get through immigration.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on Monday that the spending cuts have caused lines at some airports to spike by 150 to 200 percent and warned that travelers should budget extra time. We experienced that reality waiting to make it through immigration in Houston. I have never seen a line so long in my life and only about half of the dozens of lines were open, apparently because DHS has had to crack down on overtime. According to CBS News, John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) had approximately 56 flights with wait times in excess of two hours and 14 flights over three hours; Miami International Airport (MIA) reported 51 flights over two hours and four flights approached/exceeded three hours.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released a statement which stated that due to sequestration, “CBP reduced overtime this weekend at Ports of Entry around the country… Lanes that would have previously been open due to overtime staffing were closed, further exacerbating wait times at airports with typically longer international arrival processes.”
We waited in line for a little more than 90 minutes, just to go through immigration and when we boarded our flight it was half-empty. But the crew announced that it was actually going to be a full flight and we’d have to wait for others who were making international connections and were hung up in the long lines. We took off an hour late and some people on our flight complained that they waited in line for three hours (I assume they were exaggerating but perhaps only a bit).
A spokesperson for IAH stated that the airport didn’t experience the kind of unusual delays that other airports experienced over the weekend but with the start of the Spring Break season this week, they expect that lines could be longer than usual in the next two weeks. I’m not sure if that means that very long lines are the norm in Houston and I don’t know how long the impact of the sequester cuts will last, but I can say that on day one of the new reality, Houston was the airport that felt like the third world, not Managua.
Those were the words that I kept repeating to myself, sometimes replacing the word “hell” with more sinister, unpublishable expletives. I was sitting in the Rancho Marsella restaurant at Playa Marsella, a remote beach that is 20 minutes down a dirt track from San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua, wondering where Camilo, a local cab driver who had taken us to the beach and had my $1,200 camera in his trunk, had gone.
Camilo had told me that he planned to hang out at the beach and would be ready to take us back to our hotel whenever we were ready. He seemed eminently trustworthy, so I didn’t think twice about stowing my Nikon D7000 in his trunk after I had taken a few photos of the empty crescent shaped beach.
After an hour of lounging in the beach’s only tiny patch of shade with a group of Italian backpackers, I went to the beachfront restaurant to use the bathroom and noticed that Camilo wasn’t around. I assumed that he must have gone for a walk or a swim, but an hour later when we returned for lunch and saw that he still wasn’t there, I checked the parking lot and saw that his car was gone.
No!$#@!*
No one at the restaurant knew where he went or had his phone number. I had his phone number written in my notebook, which also had all my notes for the stories I planned to write, but that was inside my camera case – in his trunk. I knew his name but had no idea where he lived or what his license plate number was. We were too far from town, down a brutal, rutted track, for him to try to pick up other fares, and he had explicitly stated that he wasn’t going to leave the beach. Was Camilo off taking photos with his new camera somewhere?
I started to panic and curse myself. Bringing a $1,200 camera to a beach in a poor country like Nicaragua is a bad idea, but as a writer, I take my camera everywhere because you need good photos to accompany stories. Still, why had I given him the temptation of leaving the camera in his trunk? There were no more than a half dozen people on the huge beach, so even if I was in the water, what was the chance it would be stolen?
“He’ll come back,” said Jen, my wife. “He probably got bored sitting around.”
I hoped she was right but feared she was wrong. He wouldn’t be able to get $1,200 for my camera, but its value still probably represented a few months work for him. And something Camilo said on the ride to Marsella stuck in my mind. “We are poor people here in Nicaragua,” he said. The words just kept rattling around in my head. We are poor people.
After 15 or 20 minutes of fretting, one of the guys at the restaurant suggested that Camilo might have gone a mile or two up the road to watch a youth baseball game. But we had passed that game on the way to the beach and when I asked Camilo if he liked baseball, he said “no.”
Still, it was worth a try, and one of the men at the restaurant drove down to the game on his moped and five minutes later, returned with Camilo, who looked aggrieved. I have never been so relieved to see a taxi driver in my life.
“I just went down to check out the game,” he said.
I told him that there was no problem but clearly the guy on the moped must have explained that I looked pissed off because Camilo sat on a step near the bar looking angry while we ordered drinks. I bought him a drink but I could tell he was hurt by the fact that I had doubted him.
On the way back to town, he pointed out his house, a typically humble, working class affair that had a small store attached, and said, “That’s where I live.” He might well have added, “I may not be rich, but I am not a thief.”
Over the next few days, Camilo drove us on a few more outings – to Granada, the ferry to Ometepe and around town – and I even had a chance to visit his home and meet his son, Camilo Jr. (see photo). We became friends and I came to realize that he’s an honest man. My fear that because he came from a poor country he might seize the opportunity to take my camera was unfounded and wrong.
Five days later, we encountered a similar situation upon our return home to Chicago, but this time, Jen and I reversed roles. After a long, grueling day of travel from Granada, Nicaragua, to Chicago, via Houston, our little boys were asleep in the cab when we arrived home at 11 p.m. We were dressed for summer and the temperature outside was below freezing, so Jen and I decided to carry one sleeping child each into their beds and then return to the cab to get our baggage.
But by the time I got back outside after delivering my 3-year-old into his bed, our driver, a young man who appeared to be from East Africa, had what looked like all of our baggage out on the sidewalk and was getting ready to pull away. He mumbled something along the lines of “You’re all set,” and pulled out, just as my wife was bounding into the driveway warning that she had left her backpack and purse in the backseat.
I hadn’t realized that not all of our baggage was in the trunk and apparently our driver didn’t either but it was too late, he was gone. My wife had her work laptop, our passports, her driver’s license, cash, credit cards and more in the bags he had just driven off with.
Jen was on the verge of tears because only some of her work documents were backed up and the loss of this computer would be catastrophic for her. I recalled the young man’s name and we had an emailed receipt from him in my inbox. My wife wracked her brain and thought she remembered the name of the taxi company – Choice Taxi – but wasn’t 100% sure.
We called Choice and the dispatcher initially seemed less than helpful. She claimed that she had no list of company drivers and, even with the guy’s name and a description of the car, she was unable to confirm if he worked for them. She promised to make an announcement over their radio for him to contact her but said that since it was Friday night and their office was closed, we might have to wait until Monday, when the owner would be available, to track the driver down.
My wife kept calling her back every 30 minutes, pleading with her to make more announcements while I researched the cab situation at O’Hare airport. There are dozens of companies, perhaps more than 100, and without a cab number or license plate, trying to find a specific driver is like looking for a needle in a haystack. We called the police and all they could do was offer to take a report for insurance purposes. We found a website where you can email a complaint about a cab driver but that was it.
By 1 a.m., after we had waited two hours for the driver to respond to his dispatcher or return to our house, we called to cancel all our credit cards. My wife felt certain that the driver or perhaps a subsequent passenger had decided to pocket her stuff. But I felt like we’d get our things back. We knew the guy’s name, after all, so he wouldn’t risk his job to steal a laptop, passports and credit cards. And most people who are getting into a cab are unlikely to turn into thieves just because they see some valuable items on the floor of the cab.
Our prayers were answered at 1:30 a.m. when the dispatcher called us back to say that Yosief had (finally!) responded to her calls over their radio system.
“Please tell him to bring us our things tonight,” I begged. “We’ll give him a reward.”
We were overjoyed but also shattered from exhaustion and worry. Nonetheless, we stayed up until Yosief finally arrived at our home at 2:30 a.m.
All of our belongings were intact and I thanked Yosief, who said he was from Eritrea, profusely. I resisted the urge to ask him why he hadn’t responded to the radio calls sooner and felt I probably knew anyway – he spent most of our ride from the airport on the phone and was probably similarly preoccupied while my wife was crying and fretting over her laptop.
I asked Yosief if I could take his photo but he held the reward envelope up over his face and declined.
“That would not be good for me,” he said.
What did we learn from these incidents? Most taxi drivers, even poor ones, are honest. But it’s still a good idea to jot down a license plate number or cab number and know what company you are patronizing when you get into a taxi. And it’s an even better idea to back up your computer as often as possible.
Note: Camilo put the fear of God into me at Marsella Beach, but he charges very fair prices, speaks fluent English and is an honest, trustworthy person. If you want to hire him to drive you around while in Nicaragua, please contact him at (505) 886-72336.
On a recent Saturday, the streets were filled with bicycles. Bells rang and horns sounded as the cyclists wound their way throughout the city like a moving train of youth and energy.
This wasn’t in Portland, or Paris, or any of dozens of bicycle-friendly cities around the world. This was in Guatemala City, a city known more for its violent crime rates than its progressive bike culture.
But one group is trying to change that. Biketun is a new organization started by Javier Mata and Lucia Pivaral with the purpose of promoting a more sustainable way of life and transport in Guatemala.
The group’s signature event is a nighttime bicycle tour of Guatemala City. The first was held in December and drew around 250 people. The second, held in February, drew more than 500. The goal is to one day attract 10,000 cyclists to Guatemala’s streets.
According to Pivaral, Biketun’s mission is to show the country that a better lifestyle is possible – “a lifestyle in which Guatemalans own not only public spaces, but most of all, our freedom. A lifestyle in which we can go out on our bicycles, go to the park, walk on the streets, and interact with different people without any worries.”
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Pivaral says that public spaces in Guatemala City have been abandoned because of fear, which then leads to degeneration, negative perceptions and danger. Parents keep children at home because they are scared that they will be exposed to drugs and violence on the city streets.
“This is similar to a field with bad grass,” she says. “When we don’t use the field, bad grass grows and the only way of removing it is re-taking control of the field and making use of it. This is what this movement is about.”
Biketun events wind through different parts of Guatemala City. The December event was centered on the main avenues – Bulevar Liberación, Avenue Américas, Obelisco, Reforma, Plaza 30 de Marzo, Septima Avenida – with an itinerary designed to take in the Christmas sights and lights. The second event was organized in cooperation with the Municipality of Guatemala, which provided an educational tour of different sites in the Historic Center of the City, like the National Palace, Iglesia La Merced and Railroad Museum.
“Doing this regenerates my energy and soul, along with my hope for humanity,” says Pivaral. “I deeply believe that for a city to progress, we need to take into consideration sustainable ways of living. The best way to approach this, for me, was not talking about it, but starting to live it.”
The next Biketun event is scheduled to coincide with Earth Day in April. There is no cost to participate, and a limited number of bicycles are available for rent on the organization’s Eventbrite page. For more information, visit Biketun on Facebook.