We’ve brought you a number of diverse posts on WiFi opportunities for travelers, but the digital enabled donkeys is a first. An Israeli historical re-enactment village is now offering WiFi service for tourists at their Kfar Kedem attraction in the hills of Galilee.
The historic park’s operators have equipped five of their thirty donkeys with WiFi routers to encourage younger tech-minded travelers to get more involved in the unique environment.
Can the WiFi camel at the Pyramids be far behind?
I recently heard that the British Home Office is seriously considering a plan to introduce airport-style security screening at London’s major railway and tube stations. The plan calls for searching passengers for chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear materials.
Meanwhile, they can’t seem to handle a mouse problem at Farringdon tube station in Central London.
Urban Mapping is a San Francisco-based technology company that produces data and geographic research tools. But they also market a small series of way cool city maps that set a cartophile’s heart afflutter.
The Panamap series utilizes a brilliant, patented lenticular printing process that shows multiple layers of information in a single space by rotation of the viewing angle. The award-winning New York and Chicago maps show subway lines, landmarks, neighborhoods, a street grid, museums, tourist sights and restaurants.
The maps are only available at a few museum shops at the moment, but wider distribution should be in the offing for this nifty map series.
Created in 2009 by Carles Porta and Toni Tomas, Puck Cinema Caravan is the “smallest cinema on Earth”, and it’s fully portable too. The Lilliputian drive-in theater travels around Europe showing original short animated films to children of all ages. Many of the cinema offerings are created by the Puck Cinema Caravan founders.
During the 2012 Venice Biennale, the Berlin-based team of Julian Charriere and Julian von Bismarck collaborated on a project to change public perception of Venice’s ubiquitous pigeon population. Utilizing natural dyes and a specially built box-conveyor system, the duo’s “Some pigeons are more equal than others” projected glammed-up Venice’s much maligned pigeon flock.
Hat-tip to Nikos Loukas for this post from the very entertaining and informative site InFlightFeed.
There’s a new and potentially exciting trend in airline meals. A growing number of air carriers are offering a new “pre-order premium meal option” for travels in economy class. For example, US Airways has begun a pre-order meal scheme for international passengers traveling from Philadelphia and Charlotte. The “deluxe” meals are available for purchase ($19.99 with wine) on flights to 24 destinations in Europe, South America and the Middle East. There’s even a vegetarian option.
Other air carriers are planning to launch similar programs this year, while Air France, Austrian Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines and Westjet already have their own pre-order meal options in place.
This fascinating infographic on ebook reading habits is from Hip Type, a small company that collects detailed data and demographics for authors with a plugin for ebook publishers.
For the infographic, Hip Type examined the “DNA” of a successful book, along with reading habits of ebook consumers.
Do 82% of ebook readers really live in cities? That’s one stat that’s hard to believe.
As a collector and seller of antiquarian books, I often marvel at the astonishing binding and printing variants in old books. A favorite decorative feature in many 19th century volumes is the use of marbled paper and cloth for endpapers and bindings. This millennium-old technique was developed in Persia or Turkey, where it is known as “ebru”.
Both parents of Turkish photograper/filmmaker Oguz Uygur are expert practioners of the ancient art. He created this brief, but evocative film to help them promote their work.
Some unoriginal thoughts after reading The Age of Miracles…
“’I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.”
From a letter by Franz Kafka to his friend Oskar Pollak, January 1904
This guest post on Crete is from writer and journalist Richard Clark, who is the author of two books on Greece.
Samaria – The Longest Gorge
The early start had taken its toll and I was fighting with my eyes as we approached the foothills of the White Mountains in the west of Crete. I had walked the Samaria Gorge before, but the experience had been somewhat spoiled by my own bad planning. First I had gone on an organized trip, second it was the height of summer, neither of these factors proved an ideal way to experience walking what is claimed to be the longest gorge in Europe.
The walk in itself is not too taxing if you are reasonably fit but, as I discovered, a 10-mile downhill trek in 35 degrees heat is uncomfortable, and when surrounded by hundreds of other walkers it is difficult to ponder on this towering natural phenomenon.
This time I had experience on my side and was determined to enter the National Park the moment it opened at 7.00am. It was the end of September, when the sun, although still hot in the middle of the day, would be more forgiving.
My taxi had arrived to pick me up from my pension in Chania at 5.45am to ensure I was in good time to be ahead of the coach tours. I needn’t have worried, my driver put me in no danger of being late – that is if I was to make it at all. He swung the silver Mercedes enthusiastically around the hairpin bends in the dark as we threaded our way up into the White Mountains.
No longer able to doze, I was torn between staring out into the void of the sheer drops just inches from the car’s screeching wheels and closing my eyes in terror at my proximity to an early grave. And there were grounds for my nervousness, as born testament to by the increasing number of roadside shrines which appeared, caught in our headlights, as the going got steeper. At each little chapel erected in memory of previous motorists who had succumbed to the precipitous nature of our route, my driver would take one hand off the wheel and cross himself.
Now wide awake and in excellent time to start my walk, my taxi driver probably mistook my effusive thanks for gratitude rather than relief when we arrived at the head of the gorge at Xyloskalo. His haste to get me to my destination at least allowed me time to appreciate the most radiant sunrise which began to fill in the colors of the trees and rocks and played a breathtaking accompaniment to the silence which restored my composure and whetted my appetite for the walk ahead.
Right on 7 o’clock I paid my entrance to the park and set off along the path which almost immediately turned into a steep drop down steps into a valley densely forested with pines and cypresses trees. This is the start of a spectacular descent of some 4000 feet from the Omalos Plateau to sea level at the small village of Agia Roumeli on the south west coast.
Along with Knossos this is widely regarded as a must-see by many visitors to the island, and in the peace and quiet of this early morning in late September it was living up to its reputation. The gorge has been carved out of this spectacular limestone and granite landscape by a river that runs between the White Mountains and Mount Volakias.
Over thousands of years the chemical reaction between the water and the rock has created this wonder of nature in the shadow of the spectacular White Mountains, or Lefka Ori. The range is so named because its color never changes. The mountains are snow covered in the winter months and when the warmer weather comes they glow white as the sun reflects off the limestone.
The mountain range is massive, and the largest on the island, covering more than 300 sq miles. It is the most remote area on Crete and is home to the renowned Sfakiots, named after Sfakia, the capital of the region, a small port on the south coast.
Sfakia is famous for being at the heart of the evacuation of Allied troops from the island during the Battle of Crete in the Second World War. For the Sfakiots, living has been tough and this toughness is reflected in their temperament. Throughout Cretan history they have been at the center of the fight against oppression.
The Sfakiot qualities are typified by the man known as Yannis Daskalogiannis, after whom Chania’s international airport is named. His real name was Yannis Vlachos. The son of a wealthy merchant in the 18th Century, he was educated abroad and nicknamed Daskalogiannis, meaning John the Teacher because of his wisdom. He became a rich ship owner and chairman of the council of Sfakia.
In 1770, after being promised support by the Russians, he led a force that rose up against the ruling Turks and had many successes in liberating parts of the region. But, with the Russians reneging on their promise, he was eventually overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of Turkish troops and surrendered at Frangokastello Castle near the region’s capital of Horia Sfakion. Yannis was taken to Heraklion where he was skinned alive in public in front of the harbor fort.
The highest peak in the White Mountain range is Mount Pachnes, at 8045 feet it is just 12 feet shorter than Mount Psiloritis, the tallest mountain on Crete. I have not been to the summit but am told that there is an ever-growing pile of rocks there, deposited by proud locals in an attempt to make their mountain stand taller than its rival to the east.
The Samaria National Park was set up in 1962 to provide a protected haven for the significant numbers of species of plants and animals indigenous to the area. In the same year the last villagers of Samaria left their homes to accommodate the park that bears its name and which, in turn, was named after the small, white 14th-century church of Saint Mary or Ossia Maria.
There was still a chill in the air as I got into my stride, the smells of wild marjoram, pine and eucalyptus infused the atmosphere as I criss-crossed over the small burbling stream that runs through the gorge. It seems hard to believe that this benign trickle could have been partly responsible for creating such an imposing formation. But throughout the winter months, swollen with rainfall and melt waters from the snows on the mountain peaks it shows its true colors, and during this period the park is closed to visitors as the massive flow of water makes walking too dangerous.
Well before 9 o’clock I must have descended about half the height of the gorge as I passed the small stone church of Agios Nikolaos standing in solitary splendor beside the trickling river. Another hour and I was approaching the abandoned village of Samaria.
Here is a good stopping point to sit for a time and take on some food and water. This is supposed to be a favored haunt of the kri-kri or indigenous Cretan ibex, which is an endangered species and a major factor in the establishment of the National Park as a wildlife reserve.
On that occasion I was unlucky. I had seen some of these rare beasts higher up the Gorge on my previous visit when the park was heaving with people. But now, all alone, these allegedly timid creatures were nowhere to be seen. I don’t know what that says about me!
Despite the seeming attraction of the crowds for the kri-kri, I was still determined to stay one-step ahead of the guided tours. After a snack of bread, olives and feta from my backpack, I set off again downhill for the second half of the trek towards the coast. This is the most spectacular part of the walk as the gorge narrows, closing in on me and emphasizing the sheer nature of the vertical rock faces on both sides, stretching upwards and at times obliterating the sun.
I was approaching the famous sideroportes, or iron gates, where I felt I could almost touch both sides of the canyon at once. I reached out to try, and fell short by some six feet, looking upwards the rock faces towered above me for 1000 feet at least.
This was breathtaking. I stood in awe, breathing in the splendor; alone, a tiny dot at the bottom of this natural canyon.
From here the path flattens out as I followed the river out of the park along the course of its final few miles to the Libyan Sea. An elderly goatherd in traditional Sfakiot dress stopped to watch me, chin resting on his crook as his herd tinkled their way across the rocky lowland between the end of the Gorge and the sea. He nodded enigmatically at my greeting of kalimera.
It was the middle of the day and the sun was beating off the large rocks that gradate to stones before forming a pebble beach as my journey matched that of the river and reached the sea at Agia Roumeli. A regular boat service runs to Sfakia from here, there is no way out by road.
From Sfakia there are frequent bus services traveling back up into the mountains on one of the most dizzyingly dramatic routes in the country, which makes its way north across the 40 miles back to Chania. It is worth preserving enough energy to remain awake and, for those who travel well, try to get a window seat on the bus.
Richard Clark is a writer and journalist, and is the author of two books about Greece. Both are available in paperback or in eBook format from Amazon and other major retailers.
The Greek Islands – A Notebook, http://tinyurl.com/cv3j4jm
Crete – A Notebook http://tinyurl.com/6vbdn3a
Travel Between The Pages 