Nokia Green Explorer — discover a new way to be an eco-friendly traveler

by Scott Carmichael on

During my visit to the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show, I came across an interesting eco-friendly product from mobile phone maker Nokia. Their “Green Explorer” site is part destination guide, part eco-friendly guide, and part mobile guide service. The site covers all continents, and offers content from Lonely Planet, the WWF, UNESCO, routeRANK and TripSketch.

The end result of these 5 companies working together is a single “portal” of eco-friendly travel information, user submitted guides and photo galleries of each destination. The guides cover the basic things you’d expect, but adds information like the UNESCO world heritage locations, WWF eco facts and a green trip planner which allows you to calculate the most eco-friendly way to get there.

Because the site is part of the Nokia OVI labs, you can even tag locations and routes, and save them to your Nokia phone. Combined with the recently announced free navigation service and Lonely Planet guides from Nokia, you can turn your phone into an eco-friendly GPS unit. Add the Nokia CO2 offset application and you can create a pretty impressive green travel companion.

The user submitted content on the Green Explorer site is pretty limited, but the site is still quite new (and in beta phase). Once more people start adding their own content, the Nokia Green Explorer has the potential to turn into something very impressive.

Up next in airplane design: Donut planes?

by Grant Martin on

Should the airline industry begin designing donut shaped airplanes? It’s a suggestion posed by the folks over at Lonely Planet, who after running an informal survey discovered that over 60% of respondents preferred sitting in the aisle over the window on an airplane.

Problem is, few seats on an aircraft are actually adjacent to a window. And that’s where the crafty design comes in.

In jest, LP put together a few different concepts to engineer more window-room into an aircraft. Their most adventurous? The donut shaped airplane, where a hole in the middle of the body allows passengers on the inside of the cabin to look down (and across) out into the blue sky.

Another option proposed was the glass bottomed aircraft, so that all passengers can see directly below them at all times. Yikes.

Admittedly LPs sampling for their study is probably a bit skewed — anyone reading their guides or site is probably already more adventurous than three quarters of the world (and thus might have a higher probability to stare out the window) but the survey is an interesting study in “what if.” For now, passengers will have to settle with watching the nose and belly cam of their aircraft on the right In Flight Entertainment.

You can check out the designs crafted by LP over at their travel blog.

Gadlinks for 1.6.2010

by Katie Hammel on

Looking for more nuggets to satisfy your hunger for travel news and information? Check out some of these links from around the internets.

  • National Geographic’s Intelligent Travel Blog team found this one, but I had to pass it on. Check out Fun with TSA for a list of “travel safe activities” that you can still do on a plane, even in that last hour of flight. Some in-flight college courses anyone? [via Intelligent Travel]

More Gadlinks here.

South by Southeast: New directions in Southeast Asia

by Jeremy Kressmann on

What is it about Southeast Asia that so captivates our attention? For many Westerners, Southeast Asia has attained an identity of exoticism and escape, enchanting travelers as a destination “off the map” of global tourism. It’s a myth readily fed by popular culture. From Graham Greene’s The Quiet American to Alex Garland’s The Beach we’re painted a picture of a magical world, unsullied by the realities of real life – and we’ve taken the bait, hook, line and sinker.

Southeast Asia, we’re told, is where we’ll go to forge new identities. We’ll quit our jobs back home, find a bungalow on the beach in Thailand, and live out our days drinking 25-cent beers, sunning ourselves under a palm tree. Our problems back home? Distant memory. For anyone struggling with the vagaries of career and post-collegiate life, it’s a powerful fantasy, bandied about during late-night drinking sessions or anytime life becomes “too much of a drag.”

But what’s it really like to travel through Southeast Asia, circa 2009? Does our fantasy match the reality? Though plenty is left to explore, the romanticized destination of deserted beaches and bumpy bus rides is experiencing a dramatic shift, further connecting itself to global tourism and the world economy. Luxury boutiques dot the streets of “communist” Vietnam. Thousands of travelers show up for Full Moon Parties on the beaches of Koh Pha Ngan. Even Lonely Planet’s hugely popular Southeast Asia on a Shoestring, the defacto “bible” for independent travelers, is nearly 25 years old and 14 Editions in print. How does the region today look after this huge influx of new money and visitors?

It was these very questions that had me thinking. Was there still adventure to be found in Southeast Asia? And how did it match with the visions of escape and personal reinvention I had in my mind? Encouraged by books like Rolf Potts’ Vagabonding, I left behind my full-time job in New York and created a plan. I would spend the next few months traveling through the region. After a stopover in Seoul, I head to Bangkok and then on to wherever luck will have me. Not only is it a chance to reinvent the direction of my own life, it’s also an opportunity to observe the rapidly changing direction of this fascinating destination.

Over the next few months, I encourage you to join me as I investigate Southeast Asia with a fresh eye. We’ll return to familiar stops on the “Southeast Asia tourist trail” to survey the terrain, and introduce you to places you never knew existed. We’ll also be taking a closer look at the art of long term travel, and some of the rewards and challenges encountered along the way. We hope through our mistakes and successes you’ll have a chance to truly understand what traveling through Southeast Asia is all about. Ready to go? Let’s chart a course, South by Southeast…

You can read future posts from Gadling’s travels “South by Southeast” through Asia: HERE.

Fake Canadians go home

by Sean McLachlan on

I’m as mad as a polar bear reading about global warming. Everywhere I look I see Canadian flags on backpacks. A maple leaf seems to be as important an item of budget travel gear as daddy’s credit card, but there’s one problem–many of the people flashing the good old red, white, and red aren’t Canadian.

I am.

I’ve taken to asking people their nationality when I see them sporting a Canadian flag and only about half turn out to be Canadian. The other half are American. No Brits, no Aussies, no Latvians. It seems the fake Canadians all come from south of the border.

Are they illegal immigrants coming to steal our heath care and eat all our maple syrup? No, they’re pretending to be Canadians because their guidebooks have told them they’ll be safer in all those scary foreign countries. Americans are targets, the guidebooks warn, so it’s best to lay low. Lonely Planet started this ridiculous trend, but I’ve spotted the advice in other guidebooks too. It’s stupid, and here’s why.

First off, it’s hypocritical. I’ve seen these sunshine patriots screech with rage when anyone says anything the least bit negative about the U.S., but they’ll gladly give up their identity on the advice of some random guidebook writer. If you’re proud to be American, that’s great, the U.S. has a lot going for it, but then show you’re proud by wearing an AMERICAN flag.
Secondly, the idea that a Canadian flag will protect you overseas is simply untrue. Thieves see you as a rich Westerner, and don’t care whether you come from Manitoba or Montana. Terrorists see you as an evil Westerner, and don’t care either. Some of the biggest attacks against travelers have been against British and Germans, not Americans. Besides, while the Canadian flag is a glorious national emblem, sublime in its simplicity and beauty, it is not bomb proof. Suicide attacks don’t discriminate and usually take out more locals than foreigners.

Thirdly, Americans aren’t as hated as they think. Oh, there are the jokes about fat, ignorant Americans that unite the world from Egypt to Ecuador, but few people really mean Americans any harm. I know, because I am regularly mistaken for one. When I worked and traveled for a couple of years in the Middle East, nobody threatened me. I even witnessed the 14th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Isfahan, Iran, and didn’t have a problem. In fact, the entire month I was in Iran people constantly assumed I was American (or British, equally bad according to government propaganda) but I was never threatened. Instead I was treated to embarrassing levels of hospitality and the only danger was the very real possibility of being fed to death on massive dinners and cloyingly sweet desserts. The Iranians, it seems, can distinguish between people and governments. Oh, I occasionally had to endure odious lectures on the evils of Israel or how Zionists run Washington (snore) but I was never treated to even so much as a harsh word. It was the same in Palestine, Egypt, Morocco, Syria, and Turkey.

So Americans, please, show some love for your country and wear your own flag. The world doesn’t hate you as much as you think it does. But I wouldn’t suggest wearing a t-shirt saying “Employee of the U.S. Government”. That’s what most people are really ticked off about.

And if you are truly that embarrassed by your own country, I suggest one of two things–either stay home and work on fixing it, or move to Canada. We’re underpopulated, so there’s plenty of room.