Need help? Want a travelling buddy or advice about a place or country – want to share something with us – why not visit our Mutual Aid section of the Website: Mutual Aid

Need to convert currency?

Take a look at The Globetrotters Currency Converter — get the exchange rates for 164 currencies The Globetrotters Currency Cheat Sheet — create and print a currency converter table for your next trip.

After a particularly rough landing during thunderstorms in Memphis, a Flight Attendant on a Northwest flight announced

“Please take care when opening the overhead compartments because, after a landing like that, sure as hell everything has shifted.”.

From a Southwest Airlines employee:

“Welcome aboard Southwest Flight 245 to Tampa. To operate your seat belt, insert the metal tab into the buckle, and pull tight. It works just like every other seat belt; and, if you don’t know how to operate one, you probably shouldn’t be out in public unsupervised.

In the event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure, masks will descend from the ceiling. Stop screaming, grab the mask, and pull it over your face. If you have a small child travelling with you, secure your mask before assisting with theirs. If you are travelling with more than one small child, pick your favourite.”.

Spotted by our webmaster, the BBC has an excellent on-line travel resource. It has country and mini guides, travel tips, basic travel advice, studying and travelling and how to make money while you travel. Well worth a look: BBC Travel

New European low-cost airline WIZZ Air plan to start flights from Budapest to seven European cities from June 24. Destinations include London, Barcelona, Athens, Rome, Paris, Prague and Katowice from Budapest. From July 1 it would add Paris, Munich, Athens, Barcelona, Dortmund and Stockholm to its destinations from Poland, it added.

Qantas, Australia’s biggest airline has announced that it plans to start a new low cost Asian airline in November 2004. The new airline will be called Jetstar, the same name as Qantas’s new low-cost domestic venture. The new airline will be the fifth budget operator to fly to and from Singapore, following Thai AirAsia, a joint venture between Malaysian budget carrier AirAsia and Thailand’s Shin Corp, and Jakarta-based Lion Air, which both already operate flights. Valuair, owned by ex-Singapore Airlines staff, has just started flying. Tiger Airways, a budget venture between Singapore Airlines and Irish discount airline Ryanair is expected to start operations this year.

European travel agent Thomas Cook has said that its airline Condor planned to offer cut-price flights on long-distance journeys. Proposed services include flights to the US, Caribbean, Africa and Asia with prices starting at EUR99 (USD$120).

Rwanda is marking the 10th anniversary of the 1994 genocide, one of the worst atrocities of the late 20th century – alongside what happened in the Balkans. A bit of background – it was triggered by the shooting down of a plane with Rwanda’s Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana onboard on 6 April 1994. By amazing coincidence the wreckage landed in the garden of the presidential residence. The crash served as a signal to Hutu extremists, supporters of the government, to start the systematic extermination of minority ethnic Tutsis and any Hutu opponents of the regime. The former UN commander in Rwanda said Western states were “criminally responsible” for the genocide. Canadian General Romeo Dallaire said France, which led the small international peacekeeping force at the time of the genocide, the UK and the US in particular did not care enough to stop the killing. The killing continued for 100 days before a Tutsi-dominated rebel army seized control.

A pilot for Japan’s All Nippon Airways fell asleep at the controls for several minutes while on a domestic flight and had to be awakened by a government inspector who was travelling in the cockpit. An official from the Transport Ministry, who was in the cockpit for a routine inspection, woke the pilot after he fell asleep as the plane was cruising at 12,000 metres (36,000 feet), but he dozed off again and had to be awakened a second time. “He was asleep for two or three minutes,” the spokesman said. The spokesman said there was no danger to passengers since the plane was on auto-pilot and the co-pilot was also present. The pilot, who has been suspended, is undergoing medical tests.

Take a look at modern day adventurer John Pilkington’s website. In this, you can see details of the latest and most exciting of John’s journeys which took him up the world’s twelfth longest river from the South China Sea to Tibet and beyond. Starting among the rice paddies of Vietnam, he made his way via Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Burma and through the gorges of China’s Yunnan province, meeting river-people of seven nationalities along the way. In a climax to the trip, he and two Tibetans reached the glacier on Mount Guosongmucha, north of Tibet, where the Mekong rises at over 17,000 feet.

MTV are looking for people who are planning to backpack around Europe this summer. If you are interested, see: and would like to be on the MTV show “True Life: I’m Backpacking in Europe” www.EuropeBackpack.com.

If you are in London in June/July you might want to check these events out, you can get free tickets from culturalco-operation.org, Cultural Co-operation is an independent arts charity that promotes cross-cultural contact, dialogue and understanding. Their main activity is the international summer Music Village, Europe’s longest running festival of world culture.

Are you passionate about photography?

Taking pictures of family, friends and places you’ve been? Maybe you’ve captured a magic moment, an unusual situation or some humorous, crazy slice of life? Whatever it is, if you have a photo you’re really proud of, you should enter the Amateur Photo of the Year contest and you could become the 2004 Panasonic Batteries Amateur Photographer of the Year and win one of their fantastic prizes!

See this link for more details: Panasonic Photo Competition

Under 30? A member of Globetrotters Club? Interested in a £1,000 travel award?

Know someone who is? We have £1,000 to award each year for five years for the best submitted independent travel plan. Interested?

Then see our legacy page on our Website, where you can apply with your plans for a totally independent travel trip and we’ll take a look at it. Get those plans in!!

Over 2,000 people are believed to have died or disappeared as a result of huge storms and an earthquake on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. Aid agencies say bad weather is hampering efforts to deliver supplies to the survivors of severe flooding in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Emergency teams are trying to recover bodies before they contaminate the water supply.

Be careful using the internet in Zimbabwe. President Robert Mugabe has suggested the internet, widely developed in Zimbabwe, is a tool of colonialists. The Zimbabwean government is in the process of asking the country’s internet providers to divulge details of e-mails deemed offensive or dangerous. They would be required, in the event of an investigation, to pass to government officials user details relating to material featuring anything from obscenity to “anti-national activities”. It is already illegal in Zimbabwe to “undermine the authority of the president” or to “engender hostility” towards him as well as to make abusive, obscene or false statements against him.

In China, looking for an internet café? There will be fewer around. China has closed more than 8,600 cybercafes over the last couple of months because of fears that the Net could corrupt the minds of youngsters. This latest crackdown on unlicensed Internet cafes began in February after authorities warned that cybercafes can affect the “mental health of teenagers” while spreading “unhealthy online information”. As part of China’s bid to protect youngsters, authorities also ruled that Internet cafes are not to operate in residential areas or within 200 metres of primary and high schools.

The Beetle is often asked for advice on how to go about getting a job teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) overseas. My best advice is to look up TEFL courses in your area and get qualified as an English teacher, and then get some experience. This website has a huge number of jobs for qualified TEFL teachers and provides career advice etc.

http://www.tefl.com

Police have busted a gang who used their jobs as baggage handlers at New York’s John F Kennedy Airport to avoid inspection of mail bags filled with cocaine and transported on commercial planes from South America. Police officers officials announced that detectives arrested 13 people and seized USD$400,000, five vehicles, three guns and 110 pounds (50 kg) of cocaine in a series of raids. They were part of a drug trafficking and distribution ring believed to have sold more than 1,300 pounds (600 kg) of cocaine a year in New York with a street value of USD$75 million. Last November, 23 mostly airport employees in the New York area were arrested on charges of conspiracy to smuggle tens of millions of dollars of cocaine and marijuana into the country on international cargo and passenger flights. Cocaine was bought in Guyana in South America and sent to New York on commercial airliners. The members of the gang who worked as baggage handlers circumvented inspection of mail bags containing the cocaine. Profits from the gang’s cocaine sales were returned to Guyana where other gang members laundered the cash.

It is now possible to take a train from Vienna airport to Wien-Mitte train station. The journey takes 16 minutes and runs every thirty minutes. Single tickets cost 8 euros and return tickets cost 15 euros. This makes life a lot easier to get to and from the airport. You can also buy a ticket on-line: Vienna city airport train_

South Korea has just launched its new bullet train service which travels at 300 kph (185 mph. The Korea Train Express will nearly halve the near five-hour trip, by conventional train, from Seoul to Korea’s second biggest city, Busan, in the southeast. A spur line connects the city of Mokpo in the southwest. After years of delay, the KTX is finally coming online when neighbouring China has built a high-speed Maglev train in Shanghai. Riding on a cushion of air and driven by magnetic fields, that train tops 430 kph as the world’s fastest. The government says that some day, the KTX will be a vital link to train services in China and even the trans-Siberia railway. However, before this happens, North Korea will have to cooperate to have tracks across its borders.

Spotted by our webmaster:

1. Does the crew sleep onboard?

2. What time is the midnight buffet?

3. Which elevator takes me to the front of the ship?

4. Do you generate your own electricity?

5. Is this island totally surrounded by water?

6. Is the water in the toilet salt or fresh?

7. What language do they speak in Alaska?

8. What do you do with the ice carvings after they melt?

9. How high above sea level are we?

10. How do we know which pictures are ours?