The US continued to report more than 100,000 new coronavirus cases a day over the holiday weekend, as experts warned that widespread Thanksgiving travel could fuel a surge in coming weeks.
Related: Moderna Covid vaccine has 94% efficacy, final results confirm
Continue reading...Germany, Italy and France in favour of resort closures but Austria and Switzerland fear economic damage
Governments are at odds over a Europe-wide plan to bar ski holidays over Christmas and new year, with Germany, Italy and France in favour but Austria and Switzerland reluctant to damage a sector worth billions to their economies.
The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, on Thursday joined Italy’s prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, in calling for a Europe-wide shutdown of winter sports until 10 January to avert a fresh coronavirus wave.
Continue reading...Recent surveys show a meaningful minority of Americans intend to go ahead with travel and gatherings for the holiday
Millions of Americans are traveling and gathering for the Thanksgiving holiday, in spite of dire and urgent warnings from US doctors, nurses, health authorities and hospitals not to do so.
The travel raises the possibility of a “surge superimposed on a surge,” in the words of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, and of a wave of deaths as Christmas arrives.
Continue reading...Some literary minds crave a full-throttle rush. For others, it’s the peace in birdwatching, kayaking or finding refuge in the trees
Before lockdown, I occasionally got uneasily into a sea kayak with my kids – usually unbalancing it and tipping us all in the water. Then they exchanged the big multi-seater kayak for two lighter two-seaters, which I can actually lift.
Continue reading...SNP hopes to emulate Spain’s lucrative paradores in a drive to boost jobs, tourism and heritage preservation
Just outside Stonehaven in Aberdeenshire, on the side of a steep cliff overlooking the North Sea, sits Dunnottar castle. Once a medieval fortress, the picturesque ruins are open to the public for days out but have not boasted overnight visitors since the likes of Mary Queen of Scots and her son James VI in the 16th century. Now, under new proposals to be debated at the Scottish National party conference next weekend, Dunnottar could become one of a number of Scottish castles to be transformed into high-end but affordable hotels.
The plan is based on the model of Spain’s paradores, government-run historically significant buildings such as churches, castles and stately homes, often in areas underserved by tourism. They have existed in Spain since 1928 and include iconic sites such as Parador de Santiago de Compostela, which began life in 1499 as a hospital for pilgrims travelling to Santiago and is considered to be the oldest hotel in the world. Today, Spain has nearly 100 paradores, including fortresses, convents, monasteries and even a former prison and asylum. In 2019, they generated a turnover of €261m (£230m) for the country’s economy.
Continue reading...With British skiers nervous about booking holidays in Europe, travel specialists are predicting an exodus to the north
The Scottish mountains may be an unlikely beneficiary of the Covid-19 pandemic. With British skiers nervous about committing to a package holiday with a tour operator in one of the main European destinations, travel specialists are predicting the rise of the DIY ski trip, which could be good news for the Cairngorms.
“There’s clearly still an enormous amount of uncertainty about what will happen across the winter season,” said Rob Stewart, founder of Ski Press PR, who represents clients in the ski industry. “The general view is that December – and I’m talking about for UK skiers – will be a write-off in regards to skiing. This is mainly due to uncertainties on when resorts will really start to open up and, of course, the quarantine and Foreign Office advice against all but essential travel.”
Continue reading...It’s there and back again for our writer, who takes in Hobbiton, the mill, the Old Forest and the author’s childhood home – all in the suburb of Sarehole
‘It was kind of a lost paradise,” JRR Tolkien told the Guardian in an interview in 1966. “There was an old mill that really did grind corn, with two millers, a great big pond with swans on it, a sandpit, a wonderful dell with flowers, a few old-fashioned village houses and, further away, a stream with another mill.”
Four miles south of central Birmingham in the Hall Green area lies the inspiration for Tolkien’s Shire – the former hamlet of Sarehole. Tolkien lived here from 1896, between the ages of four and eight. “I loved it [Sarehole] with an intense love,” he said. “I took the idea of the Hobbits from the village people and children.”
Continue reading...Travel bloggers have flocked to Pakistan in recent years – but have some of them become too close to the authorities?
Long before she became headline news in Pakistan, Cynthia Dawn Ritchie was simply a tourist. In 2009, Ritchie, an American woman living in Houston, Texas, took a trip to Karachi, the sprawling megacity in southern Pakistan. At the time, Pakistan was beset by terrorist violence, and the travel advice of most western countries could be summarised as “don’t go”. But Ritchie had been persuaded by friends who knew the city. “My Pakistani friends said: ‘Cynthia, you’ve travelled much of the world, but you haven’t been to Pakistan, why not come?’ I was like: ‘Sure, why not?’,” Ritchie told me.
After a couple of weeks eating seafood and sightseeing, Ritchie went back to Houston, where she worked in communications and other roles for local government. The next year, she made a few more trips to Pakistan, funded by various Pakistani-American organisations. Houston is twinned with Karachi, and Ritchie told me that back then she “represented the city as an informal goodwill ambassador”. As foreigners in Pakistan often are, she was immediately offered exciting opportunities – working with local NGOs, advising the health department about social media, giving lectures. That year, she decided to move to Pakistan permanently. “I just felt a kinship here, that I belonged here and had a sense of purpose,” she said when we first spoke earlier this year. She settled in the leafy, relatively secure capital city, Islamabad, where most westerners in Pakistan – diplomats, journalists, aid workers – also lived.
Continue reading...In an extract from her new book, the Kenyan writer reflects on how guidebooks to Africa, with their warnings of danger, instilled fear in her – until a solo trip to Burkina Faso
The pitch-black night of the Sahara does not yield to the sunlight until it is good and ready, and when it does, it flees so fast you would think the place is constantly bathed in blinding light. Stark sunrises turn the giant dunes dull brown for a scant few seconds; for a handful of minutes, as the sun is creeping up the sky, the sand glows.
Then the sky cracks open and turns brilliant blue, and everything around you will shimmer in response. Until that moment when the blue scares off the dark, the dusty roads leading from Gorom-Gorom to Oursi, a small town outside a small town in northern Burkina Faso, are shrouded in the desert’s secrecy, blanketed by inscrutable darkness and breathtaking silence. Six nights a week, that is.
Continue reading...Exclusive: public health and environment at risk as water companies overuse emergency overflows, says pressure group
Water companies discharged raw sewage into bathing water beaches almost 3,000 times in the past year, polluting the environment and risking public health, new analysis shows.
Related: Face masks and gloves found on 30% of UK beaches in clean-up
Continue reading...Holidays to the Spanish islands will be on sale in time for half-term. The Maldives, Mykonos and Denmark also added to list
Last-minute holidays to the Canaries will be back on sale in time for a half-term getaway after the islands were added to the UK travel corridor list.
Holidaymakers will be able to visit any of the eight main islands in the archipelago without the need to quarantine for 14 days on their return. The move comes into effect from 4am on Sunday (25 October), the transport Grant Shapps confirmed on Twitter on Thursday.
Continue reading...A hotel in Thailand has agreed to drop charges against an American guest who faced up to five years in jail for posting negative reviews – as long as he issues a public apology for his comments.
The hotel, on the holiday island of Koh Chang, filed a complaint against American teacher Wesley Barnes in August after he posted what the hotel said were false and defamatory write-ups after a row over a 500 baht ($16) corkage fee.
Continue reading...City state follows Qantas in offering jaunts with no destination with ships half full and masks mandatory
Singapore is launching Covid-secure cruise holidays to nowhere, in the latest attempt to offer a long-distance travel experience with no stops.
Australian airline Qantas drew criticism from environmental groups last month after advertising a seven-hour round trip from Sydney including fly-pasts of famous sights including Uluru and the Great Barrier Reef.
Continue reading...Coronavirus has hit few sectors harder than air travel, wiping out tens of thousands of jobs and uncountable billions in revenue. While most fleets were grounded, the industry was forced to reimagine its future
When an airline no longer wants a plane, it is sent away to a boneyard, a storage facility where it sits outdoors on a paved lot, wingtip to wingtip with other unwanted planes. From the air, the planes look like the bleached remains of some long-forgotten skeleton. Europe’s biggest boneyard is built on the site of a late-30s airfield in Teruel, in eastern Spain, where the dry climate is kind to metallic airframes. Many planes are here for short-term storage, biding their time while they change owners or undergo maintenance. If their future is less clear, they enter long-term storage. Sometimes a plane’s limbo ends when it is taken apart, its body rendered efficiently down into spare parts and recycled metal.
In February, Patrick Lecer, the CEO of Tarmac Aerosave, the company that owns the Teruel boneyard and three others in France, had one eye cocked towards China. Lecer has been in aviation long enough to remember flights being grounded during the Sars epidemic in 2003. This year, when the coronavirus spread beyond Asia, he knew what was coming. “We started making space in our sites, playing Tetris with the aircraft to free up two or three or four more spaces in each,” he told me.
Continue reading...A Key West team is expected to enforce a new mandate allowing people to go maskless outdoors if they are 6ft apart – an impossible task among partygoers
Key West code enforcement officer Paul Navarro was halfway through his shift and beginning to see signs of trouble. The crowds on lower Duval Street swelled just after 9pm, and social distancing quickly became impossible on the sidewalks.
Navarro is the last line of defense against the high-risk behaviors which spread Covid-19 and is one of the principal enforcers of the Florida city’s mask mandate – an effort to protect public health and the local economy. Until 16 September part of that balancing act had included a strict mask mandate, now that rule has been loosened.
Continue reading...Grant Shapps says Lesvos, Tinos, Serifos, Mykonos, Crete, Santorini and Zakynthos will be added on Wednesday
The Department for Transport press release about Grant Shapps’ announcement has now arrived. This is what it says about the inclusion of the seven Greek islands on the quarantine list for England.
The first changes under the new process were also made today, with seven Greek islands to be removed from exemption list – Lesvos, Tinos, Serifos, Mykonos, Crete, Santorini and Zakynthos. People arriving in England from those islands from Wednesday 9 September 04.00am will need to self-isolate for two weeks. Data from the Joint Biosecurity Centre and Public Health England has indicated a significant risk to UK public health from those islands, leading to Ministers removing them from the current list of travel corridors.
At the same time, the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) has updated its travel advice for Greece to advise against all but essential travel to Lesvos, Tinos, Serifos, Mykonos, Crete, Santorini and Zakynthos. The rest of Greece remains exempt from the FCDO’s advice against all non-essential international travel.
Shapps says he is not lifting quarantine for Spain’s Canary or Balearic islands.
He says there might have been a case for this when quarantine was imposed on Spain. But the number of cases in country has risen sharply, he says, and now it has 127 cases per 100,000. He say it is not safe to reduce quarantine for those islands.
Lesvos, Tinos, Serifos, Mykonos, Crete, Santorini and Zakynthos removed from air corridor exemption list.
Continue reading...At least 6,000 people say they caught coronavirus in Ischgl, dubbed ‘Ibiza on ice’, and their class action is gaining pace. Those who were there recall a terrifying week
In the first week of March, Charlie Jackson had an argument with his wife. The recruitment agent, 53, from Pangbourne in Berkshire, was due to catch a flight to Innsbruck for a three-day “boys’ holiday”, skiing in the Tirolean Alps. Jackson’s wife, Carol, felt Ischgl, the resort booked by the group, was a bit too close to the parts of northern Italy that had recently been shut down to contain the spread of a mystery flu-like illness. But Jackson threw caution to the wind: he had already spent more than £1,000 on the trip.
Ischgl, one of the most popular ski resorts in Europe, is what Jackson calls “a boyish kind of place”. He and his friends had been visiting the town in the Paznaun valley, Austria, for the past nine years. The snow is reliably powdery from November to May. The compact nature of the place means you don’t need a car to get around. The facilities are well-run: Ischgl has 45 state-of-the-art ski lifts, three of which take you directly from the edge of town to the mountain.
Continue reading...With flights on hold, airline caterers have pivoted to selling direct-to-public, so how does an airline meal taste without cabin pressure?
“If you’re going to a cafe and paying $25 for a meal you have certain expectations. If you’re doing a 10-course fine dining degustation you have expectations … It’s one of those things where you have to set your expectations accordingly.”
Related: Grounded beef? Airlines sell in-flight meals to earthbound travellers
Continue reading...Campaigners say unprecedented levels of littering and fly-camping are partly due to ignorance of behavioural guidelines
An unprecedented rise in litter, damaging fires and “fly-camping” across the English countryside is partly a result of the government spending less than £2,000 a year over the past decade on promoting the Countryside Code, campaigners say.
The code, a set of simple guidelines to help rural visitors respect wildlife, local people and landscapes, was relaunched in England in 2004 after the new “right to roam” law increased access to the countryside.
Continue reading...Travel industry pins hopes for an end to 14-day isolation on new two-stage testing scheme at airport, with results delivered in hours
A new Covid test centre is ready to start rapid testing of inbound passengers arriving at Heathrow airport’s Terminal 2, as soon as the government gives it the go-ahead. Arrivals would find out results within 24 hours of being tested, replacing the need for a 14-day quarantine.
More than 13,000 passenger tests a day can be carried out in the facility, launched by aviation services firm Swissport and the Collinson Group, which runs airport lounges. A second test centre will be ready at Terminal 5 by the end of August, and operators say both centres are scalable according to demand.
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