|
This Way Out
Paying your dues
So you
love your jet-setting lifestyle. But the next time you get on board a
plane, think about the carbon emissions your flight will produce to
get you to your destination. Air travel accounts for a large
percentage of worldwide carbon emissions, which causes more global
warming than any ground-based pollutants.
So if the preceding pages have tickled your conscience just a little
bit and you are contemplating doing your part to save the Earth,
British green group Climate Care (www.co2.org)
challenges you to “reduce your carbon footprint” by making donations
for the funding of sustainable energy projects around the world each
time you fly.
There’s even a carbon calculator to measure the carbon emissions from
your plane ride and the cost to offset this damage to the environment.
A one-way plane ride from
Jakarta to
New York,
for instance, produces 5.26 tons of
CO2 and the cost to offset this – £39.45 (Rp 630,000). It’s
payback time for your frequent-flying ways.
Cyber tours
It used to be that armchair traveling meant getting comfortable in
your couch and switching on the TV. Well, there are whole new worlds
out there and the gateway to them all is your computer. Believe it or
not, the online virtual world that is Second Life now features
virtual-reality travel agencies such as SL Travel and Tours, which
provide tours and personal tour guides for hire. You can get your
groove on in Spain, grab a Guinness in Dublin, then wing it to Rome –
all within two hours. You may even make a few friends on the tour.
More than 7million people from around the world now have virtual
identities in Second Life.
And since navigating new worlds should never be done without the old
trusty guide book, U.S. tech mag Wired came up with its own
Second Life Travel Guide recently. The online guide offers tips
and advice to SL players who seek to explore exotic SL destinations
like the island paradise Svarga or Wengen ski resort, or maybe even
Extasia, the virtual version of a more hedonistic Club Med.
Think that’s far out? The world’s first virtual-reality travel agency
which inspired it all is one Synthtravels (synthravels.com). It
doesn’t just offer netizens personalized tours within Second Life
locales, but almost 30 (!) online worlds, such as World of
Warcraft and Matrix Online.
So while you will never need melatonin pills for jetlag while
traveling the virtual-reality realm, we sure wish someone would deal
these cyber geeks a huge dose of reality already.
Underwater rescue
If Earth’s ailments are getting you down, and cyber space is just too
far out for you, perhaps it’s time to venture to the underwater world.
You don’t even have to be a scuba diver or even a swimmer to lap up
its all of its aquatic spoils.
Ithaa, the world’s first all-glass undersea restaurant, located at the
Hilton Maldives Resort and Spa on Rangali Island, lets you
survey the underwater sights of the
Maldives
without ever getting wet. Sitting five meters under the
Indian Ocean, this year-old restaurant features 270-degree panoramic
views of the hotel’s house reef and its inhabitants made up of ray
sharks, corals and schools of colorful fish.
And with a concentration on Western dishes infused with unique
Maldivian flavor, the nosh promises to be quite as spectacular as the
scenery. The restaurant seats only 14, promising the kind of
exclusivity and privacy fit for Poseidon himself.
Ah, but would it be rude to order the catch of the day?
No-frills frills
In the face of increasingly stiff competition, budget airlines are
pulling out the stops in offering travelers more value-added services.
If you’ve always had a beef with AirAsia’s free-seating system,
the airline recently announced its new ‘Xpress Boarding’ service. For
just RP50,000++, passengers get to board ahead of other passengers and
select their choice of seating.
Not to be outdone, Jetstar Asia, which erstwhile allocated
seats at check-in, also launched its own online seat selection service
in May. The free service lets passengers select their seats when
buying their tickets online and allows changes to seat selections up
to 48 hours before flight departure.
+ Chan Hse May
Home
| 
