Rebecca Campbell has taken off from London's Heathrow for Singapore, at the start of the Skype Nomad challenge to travel non-stop around the World.
And by non-stop, they mean non-stop, continually moving for over 33 days; eating and sleeping while on the move. The additional twist is to use as many different forms of transport as possible, from jumbo jets to dog sleds, canoes to camels and in James Bond style, to include sky diving and revolving restaurants.
Take a look at the proposed route in this short video.
The project will demonstrate how easy it is to keep in touch using the Skype range of products, even when on the move, and is also taking the opportunity to raise awareness for the charity called Motivation, who help disabled people in poor countries to get mobile.
If you have a sense of adventure and want to stay somewhere different, try Unusual Hotels of the World. It is an interesting online guide that has been put together by a couple of friends, listing hotels around the world that offer their guests something, shall we say, out of the ordinary.
Typical hotels featured in the guide, might accomodate guests underground, inside an igloo, up a tree or even underwater. The website is a truly comprehensive resource for unusual hotels around the world, some of them are pretty famous but there are many hotels which will be new discoveries for the adventurous traveller.
Mark Beaumont, a 25-year-old man from Fife, Scotland, has broken the record for cycling round the world. He completed the trip in a staggering 195 days.
Mark Beaumont, from Fife, completed the 18,000-mile journey this afternoon, when he crossed the finish line at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris Read the full story.
Next month, American Daren Wendell begins an 18,000-mile, hike around the globe.
He begins his seven year walk along the Appalachian Trail, then travels across the Atlantic to trek through Europe. His adventure will then take him to the Great Wall of China, Siberia and Alaska. The hike is more than a backpacker's dream and aims to draw attention to and raise money for the charity 'Blood Water Mission', which is empowering Africans to build healthier communities through sustainable clean blood and clean water solutions.
The great French sailor, Francis Joyon, has regained the record for sailing single-handed around the world. He crossed the finish line off Brest onboard his 97ft multihull IDEC, in a time of 57 days, 13 hours, 34 minutes and 6 seconds. shattering friend and rival Ellen MacArthur's record by two whole weeks.
DaylightMap is a fun site, displaying the pattern of night and day on a Google map, for any area of the Earth, date and time. You can see at a glance where it is daytime and also get a good indication of any location's current local time, sunrise and sunset times, together with its length of day.
They are already starting to gather for the New Year's eve celebrations in Australia; half a million people are expected to be partying in a hot Melbourne.
Here are links to a few more webcams, including a webcam on Copacabana beach and a host of webcams from Vienna (Wien), which contains a link to the view from Saint Stephens Cathedral.
Stuart Robinson from Busselton, Western Australia, has launched blotanical.com, a directory of gardening blogs which offer gardening tips, gardening info and heaps of ideas to help gardeners of all experience get more out of their hobby and out of their gardens. Stuart describes himself as a non-academic but passionate gardener with a real love of gardening, and observes that like most people who potter around, he gardens because it gives pleasure, a sense of satisfaction and a retreat from an insanely busy world.
Blotanical.com has some particularly interesting mashups showing the location of gardening blogs around the world. All gardeners have to retreat from their garden at some time and they will find this a most browsable resource. Well done Stuart, I am sure it will grow :-)
Following on from Tuesday's post, today's end of week video just has to be this clip from Jobunltd about Nuna 3, the 2005 winner of the World Solar Challenge from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. This team also won the 2001 and 2003 events, so there was quite a bit of enthusiastic celebration at the finish and I guess that you should be warned that this includes a group mooning; I thought that mooning was quite an amusing thing to do at a solar event, kind of eclipsed everything else.
1 out of 5 people in our world lack safe, clean, drinking water. 20 runners from the Blue Planet Run Foundation, are currently circling the earth; running over 15,000 miles, to raise awareness and money for safe drinking water projects around the globe. They began in New York City, USA, on June 1, 2007, and will cross USA, Ireland, United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Belarus, Russia, Mongolia, China, Japan and Canada. Running in relays, 24 hours a day, they are joined by guest runners along the route and finish back in New York City on September 4, 2007.
Here is a clip of David Christof carrying the baton through his hometown of Prague, Czech Republic as the runners makes their way to Vienna, Austria and on to Krakow and Warsaw, Poland.
If you want to know how you can get involved or are able to make a donation, visit the Blue Planet Run Foundation website.
With the current interest in geo-positioning systems, it is interesting to reflect that people have needed to know their whereabouts and the location of different places, since the earliest times. The need to record this information and communicate it to others, has led to the development of maps; the history of which, has been summarised in a fascinating article by Angus W. Stocking of Colorado, USA.
He points out that maps do not necessarily have to be pictorial and that for generations, the Dreamtime songs of the Australian Aborigines have enabled them to travel vast distances through arid land. The system ticks all the boxes and the Aboriginal navigation skills are legendary, they never get lost, so possibly their songs should have the title of the World's Oldest Map.
Another Mashup that might interest the more paranoid adventurer. This one maps disease outbreaks around the world with data from organizations such as the International Society for Infectious Diseases, the World Health Organization and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
This is certainly a site that should carry a health warning for hypochondriacs but it is great for travel professionals who want to impress their colleagues by dropping a comment during social chat; "Four cases of human anthrax were found recently in Mongolia" or "Hantavirus infections have increased considerably in Germany since the beginning of the year".
The site is a mine of information about all sorts of viruses and bacterium that most of us don't get to hear about; look up 'humans infected with Cowpox after contact with cats'. However, thankfully most of us will never come across these nasties on our travels. No, I didn't mean cats! Happy traveling.
In Christchurch, New Zealand, there is an annual event which is described as organized pandemonium, uncontrollable laughter, non-stop chaos and absolute fun. It is the World Buskers Festival, one of the largest performance festivals in the world.
This year's festival runs from January 18 through to January 28, 2007 and offers visitors more than 450 street and stage shows presented by performers from Canada, USA, Brazil, Portugal, Japan, Italy, Netherlands, UK, Australia and, of course, New Zealand.
Last year I produced a post about New Year around the World and the different time zones. Here are some links to webcams at just a few of the places mentioned in the original post.
