May 9,08
House with a View: The patio of the Hilltop Camp, the least-expensive lodging at South Africa’s Hluhluwe Game Reserve.
By Christina Talcott
The Washington Post
As day broke over the rugged South African landscape, my only chance at survival was to follow the man holding the gun.
Eight of us trudged single file behind him on the rocky trail, dodging thorns and scanning the horizon for trees to hide behind in case an elephant or rhino charged us. We’d paid almost US$25 apiece to follow the guide on foot with wild animals roaming around — and I was loving every minute of it.
I’d gone to South Africa to visit my friend Abby, an American graduate student doing her fieldwork in anthropology in KwaZulu-Natal province. She mapped out our destinations: Cape Town, the Winelands, Durban, Johannesburg and Ladysmith, where she had lived for almost a year. But I wanted to visit a game park, too. Abby wisely nixed Kruger; South Africa’s renowned park in the north was too far away for us to squeeze into an already ambitious itinerary. She suggested instead Hluhluwe Game Reserve, about a two-hour drive north of Durban and one of 15 game parks managed by the KwaZulu-Natal’s park service.
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KATHMANDU, Nepal ~ The main climbing season on Mount Everest gets under way this month, but China’s Olympic torch relay and bad weather could keep scores of big-spending mountaineers from getting anywhere near the summit.
The upper reaches of the world’s highest mountain have been sealed off to private expeditions as China attempts to take the Olympic flame to the summit - in theory before Saturday.
But poor weather appears to be holding up the torch’s ascent, meaning that everyday climbers waiting on the Nepalese side of the mountain could be left perilously short of time for their own journey into the “death zone.”
Ang Tsering Sherpa, the president of the Nepal Mountaineering Association, said that if the Chinese torch climb drags on after Saturday, other climbers “will not have enough time to get to the top.”
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BANGKOK ~ Asian airlines and tourist firms are too complacent about the urgent need to address global warming, industry leaders warned at a conference on climate change.
Westerners rather than Asians dominated the first Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) conference on climate change, held in the Thai capital, organizers said.
“As far as Asian faces, there weren’t necessarily as many as we would have liked,” PATA president Peter de Jong said. “Not everyone is ready to commit time to this yet.”
Of the more than 200 delegates who met to discuss ways to make the tourism industry greener, regional airlines were noticeably under-represented at the conference, which wrapped up Wednesday.
Another senior PATA official, who did not want to be named, said the organization invited more Asian companies but faced overwhelming disinterest.
“Climate change is a duck-and-hide thing for them,” he said.
As world leaders attempt to work out a new accord to succeed the Kyoto Protocol on slashing greenhouse gases, industry and green groups estimate air travel accounts for between two and four percent of global carbon emissions.
Planes emit into the atmosphere the harmful gases responsible for climate change, a global problem that UN scientists warn could put millions of people at risk by century’s end.
However, industry experts said a lack of government action as well as a more profit-oriented business culture have allowed Asia to remain complacent.
“You talk to Thai or north Asian carriers and climate change is not even on the radar,” Peter Harbison, chairman of the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation, said.
“They’re preoccupied with a whole lot of other stuff going on like making a profit.”
Harbison said he expected airlines with connections to Europe and Australia to start putting peer pressure on other Asian countries.
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Americans ‘to Travel More despite Woes’
WASHINGTON ~ Americans will increase their foreign travel this year despite a soft economy and weak dollar, a survey showed.
The survey conducted by Global Insight for the American Automobile Association suggests 25.1 million Americans will be traveling internationally this summer, an increase of 2.6 percent over last year.
The report includes all travel outside of the United States, including Canada and Mexico. Spending is likely to increase for travel as well, although some of that is accounted by a weaker dollar, the report found. It predicted spending will rise 5.7 percent to US$30.7 billion while traveling internationally during the months of June, July and August.
EU Drops Maximum Carry-On Limit
BRUSSELS ~ The European Commission dropped plans this week to limit the size of carry-on bags allowed on airplanes after finding the measure would be too much of a burden for passengers.
As a result, the size of carry on bags allowed on planes will continue to be set by airlines and EU countries will have the right to impose stricter limits if they see fit.
“We must seek to balance security with passenger convenience,” said EU Transport Commissioner Jacques Barrot. “In this case it is clear that the inconvenience of additional limits would outweigh the advance in security.”
Sheikh Bans Booze at Cairo Hyatt
CAIRO ~ A luxury Cairo hotel has stopped the sale of alcoholic drinks on the orders of its Saudi Arabian owner, who is a practicing Muslim, the assistant manager said.
Owner Sheikh Abdel Aziz Ibrahim bin Ibrahim visited the five-star Grand Hyatt Cairo on Saturday and ordered all alcohol stocks be destroyed and banned its sale to conform with Islamic law, which forbids alcohol consumption.
A tourist official who spoke on condition of anonymity said the hotel could be stripped of three stars if it continued to not serve alcohol, as three-, four- and five-star hotels were obliged to serve alcoholic drinks.
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Parliament or Bust for Miss Great Britain
LONDON ~ Miss Great Britain vowed to “put the beauty back into politics” this week as she launched a bid to get elected to parliament that could get Prime Minister Gordon Brown sweating.
Gemma Garrett, 26, is standing for the newly formed Beauties for Britain party. And the busty Belfast blonde could get Brown all hot under the collar with her antidote agenda to “serious and boring” politics.
Garrett is standing at the May 22 by-election in the Crewe and Nantwich constituency in north-west England. The seat was held by Gwyneth Dunwoody, a stalwart in Brown’s governing Labour Party, who died last month.
Chair-Sniffing Aussie Politician Keeps Seat
SYDNEY ~ An Australian politician who admitted to sniffing the chair of a female colleague has survived a challenge to his state leadership of the conservative party, an official said on Monday.
Troy Buswell was endorsed as the head of the West Australian Liberal Party after a motion to depose him at a party meeting failed, spokesman Ray Halligan said.
“It was put to a ballot and the motion was defeated,” Halligan told reporters in Perth. The challenge arose after Buswell broke down at a news conference last week and admitted he had sniffed the chair that a female colleague had been sitting on at his Parliament House office in December 2005.
Don’t Get Drunk on Father’s Day, Minister Urges
BERLIN ~ On Father’s Day in Germany, which always falls on Ascension Day, men traditionally head out into the fields with a hand cart full of beer and schnapps - and get drunk.
But now Family Minister Ursula von der Leyen has had enough.
“I think it is awful. Men who want to be far away from their children are the final straw,” the mother of seven told Bunte magazine’s online edition on Wednesday, a day before Father’s Day.
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May 2,08
Home Sweet Home: Mao Zedong’s childhood home is in Shaoshan in south-central China. Mao and his brothers worked in the 13-room farmhouse under the sharp eyes of their father, a well-off farmer.
By Susan Spano
Los Angeles Times
SHAOSHAN, China ~ Like visitors at George Washington’s estate in Mount Vernon, Virginia, people come to Shaoshan village deep in the heart of China to remember and teach their children about their national hero.
He launched the Long March, an estimated 3,750-mile epic exploit as central to the story of China as the Boston Tea Party is to America. He fought warlords, the Japanese and the US-supported Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek. On October 1, 1949, he stood in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and proclaimed the birth of a new China.
He was Mao Zedong.
In the West, however, he is remembered as the instigator of bloody purges, disastrous agrarian reforms and that heinous episode of national self-violation known as the Cultural Revolution. The first sentence of Mao: The Unknown Story, a unilaterally condemning biography of the Chinese leader published in 2005 by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, puts it this way: “Mao … who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world’s population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other 20th century leader.”
There is no hint of this at his immaculately preserved birthplace in Shaoshan, the first stop on a trip across China I took last spring to try to resolve in my own mind the apparently irreconcilable contradictions that surround Mao’s legacy and modern China. If I were ever to understand why the Communist government acts as it does in matters as consequential as press freedom, the recent crackdown on protesters in Tibet and its vilification of the Dalai Lama, it seemed necessary to me, as a foreigner, to try see China’s recent past as the Chinese might see it.
Historians and political scientists have been analyzing these questions since Mao died in 1976. But travelers can also study politics and history by visiting places where important - and, in this case, still debated - events occurred that changed history in China and in the world.
The Chinese tourism administration encourages travelers to visit revolutionary war era memorials. In 2005, museums opened all along the route of the Long March, which ended in 1935. The arduous trek took the Red Army from compromised Communist strongholds in the south to the dusty town of Yanan in northeast-central China.
But few foreign visitors add these places to their China itineraries, partly because many of the landmarks are in remote regions. Then too, Westerners might know little about China’s long, bitter and - some would claim, ongoing - struggle for freedom.
Mao’s idyllic-looking childhood home nestles in a narrow green valley shouldered by rice paddies a two-hour drive southwest of Changsha, the capital of Hunan province.
A winding path leads to a tidy, 13-room farmhouse where Mao and his two younger brothers worked under the sharp eyes of their father, a comfortably well-off farmer. A steady stream of visitors - mostly old people and students - crowded into the room where Mao, the first surviving son, was born in 1893 on a now-fragile-looking canopy bed to a mother who practiced Buddhism and did housework on bound feet.
One of China’s countless heroic statues of the chairman stands at the center of a pavilion outside Shaoshan. Nearby is his clan’s peak-roofed ancestral temple, where Mao started a night school for farmers in 1917, an early effort to mobilize China’s rural poor whose hard, hopeless lives were dramatized in Pearl S. Buck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1931 novel, The Good Earth.
At a time when the Moscow-educated bosses of the fledgling Chinese Communist Party were trying to start the revolution in Shanghai, Beijing and other big cities, Mao saw that real change could come only from the countryside, supported by millions of Chinese peasants.
When I asked my guide what she thought about Mao, she repeated the official assessment rendered by the Communist Party five years after his death. Mao was 30 percent wrong and 70 percent right, a stunning moral quantification now taught to schoolchildren and parroted by the Chinese media.
In Changsha, a burgeoning city with a population of about 6 million, I caught glimpses of the as-yet-unquantified Mao, an unusually tall youth who loved to eat fermented bean curd, composed poetry and, according to local lore, mastered the neat trick of reading history books while swimming in the Xiang River.
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In March, the Airbus A380 made its inaugural commercial flight to Europe when Singapore Airlines’ super-jumbo jet landed at London’s Heathrow Airport. Although Singapore is still the only carrier flying the A380 (it has three), two airlines will add the world’s largest commercial passenger jet to their fleet by the end of the year.
In August, Qantas Airways will receive its first A380 and soon after is expected to deploy it on flights between Los Angeles and Australia. On October 1, Emirates Airlines’ first A380 will make its inaugural commercial flight from Dubai to New York. In total, 189 more are on order as of the end of March.
The A380, at about 239 feet long and nearly 80 feet high, can accommodate 525 passengers. With all that room, why just take people from Point A to Point B? Why not throw in a casino if you can fit it? Virgin Atlantic is thinking about it.
Besides Singapore, 13 carriers, an airplane-leasing company and a Saudi prince are slated to receive the A380 from Airbus. Here’s a look at what’s in store for people who will ride in these behemoths.
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