Sounds like a nice idea. An amphibious bus that can travel on water and roads. Sadly (or comically if you prefer) it was grounded, less than an hour after it got wet.
The $1.5 million Dutch-made “amfibus” was being demonstrated for service between Renfrew and Yoker when things went pear shaped. Mechanics are hoping to have it swimming again by tomorrow.
In theory, it runs like a normal bus on land, but uses two water jets to carry 50 passengers at speeds up to eight knots in the water.
Australians are making a mark for themselves as creators of bold (or cheeky or raunchy) tourism campaigns. Following on the heels of “Where the bloody hell are ya?!” and “”Cairns – Great Up Top, Fun Down Under,” Queensland’s Mission Beach has decided to go for “Get high, get wet and get laid.” So much for taking the high road.
Sure there’s a Great Barrier Reef just off shore and popular white water rafting nearby, but why push those natural resources when you can promote sex and cannabis?
Scotty’s Beach House owner Boyd Scott said the signs have hit the mark. Really? Sex and pot are popular with backpackers? Go figure.
A British Airports Authority employee decided to circumvent the standard security screening and ushered passengers through a side door, according to The Sun newspaper (and supported by footage from CCTV). This allowed the passengers on a BA flight from Rome to collect their luggage and leave Terminal 5 without passport or border checks. The staff struggled to catch up with the unchecked passengers but 61 left the airport unaccounted for.
The security official in question is now reportedly unemployed.
A 37-year-old Brit was arrested in Sweden after a Ryanair staffer claimed he was secretly filming their security procedures — whatever those on-board security procedures might be (putting the seat back? stowing luggage overhead? seat belt demonstration?)
The crew reported this to the police, who were on hand to greet (read: arrest) the suspect when he arrived at Skavsta airport south of Stockholm.
“We’ll now have a look to see if he was just filming things that everybody already knows about, like locating emergency exits and putting on safety belts, or whether it was something else,” police investigator Svante Melin told The Local (an English-language Swedish newspaper).
Name Will Hide Who? London-based freelance travel writer with a weekly column in The Times. Find him on the web atwillhide.com and willhidetravels.blogspot.com Age 42 Countries Visited 50ish
Titanic Nominations 1. Worst Flight Scariest was flying Belgrade-London on JAT in November 2009 when we passed too close to the jetstream of a 747 somewhere over Austria. It’s the only time I’ve really thought “this is it”. 2. Worst In-Flight Meal I hate it on short, overnight flights from the US east cost to London when they wake you two hours before landing for “breakfast” and then just give you a muffin that has a sell-by date of June 2019 and a cup of luke-warm dirty water that they laughingly call coffee. 3. Worst City for Driving Cape Town. You expect it to be bad in somewhere like Tehran or Dhaka, but Cape Town in theory has more of an air of civility – so why are their drivers so selfish, never letting you in at junctions and cutting you up all over the place? 4. Worst Ride on an Animal On an elephant in Assam, India. Never, ever ride an elephant in shorts. Their skin is like industrial sand paper. The hair on the inside of my legs still hasn’t grown back. 5. Worst Museum There’s a Jesse James exhibition in Stanton Missouri, USA, which is basically a posh shed next to a highway. It’s devoted to the notion that JJ never died young in the 1890s but went into hiding, grew old and passed away peacefully in Texas in the 1950s, supported by a few pictures of an old guy with a similar nose and ears – except they’re not similar at all. It’s just so bad, it’s good. You’ve got to admire the belief of the people who run it.
A TSA officer decided to play a little prank on a college student at a baggage screening check point at Philadelphia’s airport. The TSA worker pretended to plant a plastic bag of white powder in her carry-on luggage.
The victim, a 22-year-old University of Michigan student, wrote in a column for her campus newspaper about the incident. The TSA officer reached into her laptop computer bag and produced the plastic bag with white powder and demanded to know how it came into her possession.
She struggled for an explanation in tears, unsure if it was drugs or explosives, before he told her he was just kidding.
True what they say about the last laugh. The officer has since been fired (or quit).
An Orthodox Jew wearing a little sacred box containing bible verses on his head — a phylactery, part of an Orthodox tradition — started a bomb scare on a Chautauqua Airlines jet (in partnership with US Airways) from New York to Louisville, Kentucky, which diverted the flight to Philadelphia.
The flight crew thought his loud praying and the “suspicious” box on his head were a lethal combo.
On her way back from Costa Rica a Continental Airlines agent noticed two names on her passport: Joan Rosenberg and Joan Rivers. This raised the security flags and was enough to get her booted off the US-bound flight, leaving her stranded at the airport with just $100. Not exactly a Haitian-level disaster… maybe a 5.9 on the celebrity scale.
Typically, it’s a good idea to let the flight crew open the doors of the place. But if you must do it yourself, probably a good idea to make sure the aircraft has landed first.
Might seem like common sense to you and me, but a traveler heading from Washington Dulles to Las Vegas on United decided to step out for a breath of fresh air before the plane was on the ground, according to the Denver Post.
Here’s a shocker: The FBI reports that the man had been consuming alcohol.
On the bright side, the DIA says that’s nearly impossible to open an exterior door while in flight.
The Holiday Inn hotel chain in Britain has just upped the weirdness ante with human bed warmers. That is, people (wearing “sleeper suits”) who get into your bed and warm it. Isn’t that why they clean the sheets between guests — because you don’t want to sleep in the same sheets some stranger has just slept in? And what could be stranger than a person who hops from bed to bed? Besides, it’s sounds like low-hanging fruit for sexual predators.
Name Clare Currie Who? Publishing Director of Rough Guides Age 38 Countries Visited 30+
Titanic Nominations Worst Airport Experience I was trying to go to Edinburgh for one day for a funeral of someone I didn’t know very well. Got snowed in at Luton airport — no one was allowed to leave the boarding area so we spent the night there with an Irish/Scottish/Polish cocktail of tired and emotional travelers. I missed the funeral, so I didn’t want to get on the flight when it finally left. The kicker was that EasyJet didn’t want to reimburse me for the return ticket because they said I could have figured out another way to get to Edinburgh by bus or train, despite quite clearly being trapped in Luton Worst Kind of Hotel Not fond of B&Bs. It’s harsh but I don’t think a single sane person runs a B&B. And who could possibly enjoy being forced to exchange pleasantries with strangers over a fried egg? Worst Flight Sri Lankan Airlines. We were on our honeymoon. One man was behaving suspiciously and it transpired he was shooting video of some cockroaches he’d found, so he could post it online. The apparent death of another passenger – heralded by a great, rattling last gasp for breath – served to distract our attention from the infestation issue, but didn’t improve our general enjoyment of the flight. Worst Airport Frankfurt is pretty bad… mostly because there are no seats. And they have the most aggressive security guards I’ve encountered. I had to redo the whole long security queue because I touched my bag too soon after it was scanned. Who knew there was a time restriction? Worst Visitor Experience The Red Fort in Delhi – not in itself a bad place to visit – but the body search at the gate was more than a little hair-raising. Not sure what they thought I may have been hiding in the region of my bra, but they were thorough in their investigations.
Cruise ships are still plying the waters beside Haiti. You don’t want to let a little earthquake suffering ruin your trip, do you? Indulge at the buffet, splash in the surf and happily ignore the tens of thousands without food, water, medical care or shelter. Sure the cruise lines could cancel a few cruises and help with humanitarian relief efforts, but what’s a cruise line company going to do with a bunch of great PR and a clear conscience? Naturally, they need to focus on the core business of pummeling local cultures into oblivion (via tourist invasion), overfeeding sunburned passengers and secretly dumping as much waste into the ocean as they can get away with.
Finally an even more kitsch alternative to visiting Hollywood homes: gang tourism. You can see the LA County Jail, Skid Row (home to 90,000 homeless people) and gang hangouts instead. Couldn’t get tickets to a game show? How about checking out the top crime scene locations instead.
On the upside, the tour hopes to create jobs for residents and hand back a percentage of the profits.
Just make sure you’re covered by travel insurance. To join the tour ($65 with lunch), you’ll need to sign the mother of all waivers.
Name Steve Keenan Who? Online Travel Editor of The Sunday Times Age 52 Countries Visited 44
Titanic Nominations 1. Worst Airline Delta – did it ever have any frills? 2. Worst Flight Cuzco – Lima: had to wait to offload passenger and a goat. 3. Worst Airport Luton. It charges to drop passengers off. It even charges for clear plastic bags. And it charges to fast track immigration. Morally bankrupt. 4. Worst Hotel Mendip Lodge, Frome, Somerset, UK – don’t think the sausage touched the pan. The egg bounced. Terrible decor. Sadly, it burnt down three years ago. 5. Worst Souvenir Fake five-foot palm tree from a restaurant in Miami. (It was a bet.) Customs at Heathrow were so astonished they never checked the suspicious coconuts.
This Discovery Channel diver decides to hitch a ride on the dorsal fin of a great white (about 2:30 min into the clip). Wonder if travel insurance covers for this.
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