16 Nov 2016

Should You Buy Carbon Offsets When You Fly?

child flying on suitcase
Yuganov Konstantin/shutterstock

If you’re one of the 100 million Americans who travel during the holidays, you might fret about the environmental cost. You might even think about buying carbon offsets to alleviate that guilt.

(Find seasonal recipes, inspiring imagery, and gardening tips every day inside the Rodale’s Organic Life 2017 Calendar!)

The idea behind offsets is simple: To compensate for the greenhouse gases your trip generated, you send money to a project that will reclaim carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or prevent it from being emitted at all. The cash might go toward reforestation in Brazil, an initiative to get cleaner cookstoves to people in rural Africa, or a methane-collection project. Dozens of organizations verify these causes, certifying that they’re actively reducing carbon and not just, say, protecting trees that would have been protected anyway.

Look for certification from Climate Action Reserve, the Verified Carbon Standard, or Gold Standard, all of which provide data that tell you how much carbon your dollars will offset. A wind-farm project, for example, averages about $1.90 per metric ton of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere, but improved forest management averages about $9.60.

Are carbon offsets worthwhile? It depends on how you think about them. Environmentalists liken buying offsets to taking statins for high cholesterol: It mitigates the problem, but the long-term solution is to exercise and eat more vegetables—in other words, to change your behavior. “Do all the things you can to reduce your carbon footprint directly,” says Peter Miller, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. Buy energy-efficient appliances and bike to work. Call or email whoever represents you in Congress and tell them to support solutions for climate change. 

So: This year, if possible, drive or take the bus to your holiday festivities rather than fly—traveling in a group if you’re in a car will emit less carbon, the Union of Concerned Scientists says—and then consider offsets. (We __like the Colombian reforestation project.) Next year, if you really want to make a difference, consider celebrating at home.

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14 Nov 2016

10 Secrets Hotel Employees Won't Tell You

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5 Oct 2016

10 Things Flight Attendants Won't Tell You

flight attendant
Matej Kastelic/Shutterstock

The last time you took a flight, you were probably worried about whether the plane was going to crash, right? Turns out, you should have been more freaked out by the coffee. You didn’t drink it, did you? Oh wow. Sorry to be telling you this now, but you basically drank toilet water.

How do we know? Because we sat down with three flight attendants, all currently employed by two different major airlines, and asked them to share the dirty secrets that happen on every commercial flight. Obviously, we changed their names to protect their jobs, and we’re not naming the airlines—let’s just say if you’ve flown from New York to LA, the odds are pretty good that you’ve flown on one of them. Prepare to have your airline innocence shattered, and remember, there’s always the bus!

Your Coffee Is Probably Decaf

Alison: There’s no way anybody is getting caffeinated coffee. We don’t need a flight full of fidgety passengers. We want you to sleep.

Brian: Quite a few flight attendants are pretty lazy about making separate decaf pots. I always did, but even the regular coffee only had half the normal caffeine.

Actually, You Might Want To Avoid The Coffee Altogether

Brian: The water we use for the coffee is pretty gross. It’s pumped from a big tank, which I don’t imagine gets cleaned very often, if at all.

Alison: We call it the “galley springs.” It’s basically the same water in the plane’s holding tanks that they use for the toilets. As far as I know, the tanks have never been cleaned. Ever.

Nancy: Don't even ask for water. I used to fill the water bottles with galley springs and serve it to customers. Unless you’re in First Class, nobody’s getting real bottled water.

You’re Sitting Near Body Organs

Alison: Most domestic flights have human organs on them. Not down below, but up in the main cabin, with the carry-on bags.

Brian: I’ve had passengers with coolers containing transplant organs in the cabin. Pretty regularly, actually. I don’t know what that’s about.

That Sleeping Passenger Next To You Might Be Dead

Brian: No one officially dies on a plane, because it would create too much red tape. They’re simply belted into their seat and covered with a blanket. Their seatmates have to sit next to a corpse for the remainder of the flight.

Alison: I had to do this once. I’m still traumatized by it. We told the other passengers he was drunk. It was insane! It was __like Weekend at Bernie’s!

Nancy: Even if there’s someone on board who’s authorized to provide a death certificate, we make sure nobody knows about it until we’ve landed and all other passengers have deboarded the aircraft.

You Can Totally Text Or Check Your Email During Takeoff Or Landing

Brian: I’ve done it __like a gazillion times.

Alison: Oh yeah, totally. Landing is the best time to check your email, because the passengers aren’t trying to get your attention.

Sometimes They Fart In Front Of You

Alison: We try to just target the jerks, but that’s tough. So there’s usually collateral damage.

Brian: There’s a name for it, when a flight attendant walks down the aisle and slowly releases a soft, stinky fart throughout the cabin. We call it “crop dusting.”

They'll Mess With Your Food If You’re Rude

Nancy: Here’s a motto I’ve heard a lot of FAs use: “Don’t get mad, get Visine.”

Alison: Never eat the dinner rolls. Never, ever, ever eat the dinner rolls.

Nancy: I’ve seen FAs wipe dinner rolls on lavatory seats. We call it the Pubic Sweater.

They Can Unlock The Lavatories From The Outside

Alison: It’s mostly a safety issue, in case somebody dies or gets hurt in there. Also, people are stupid.

Brian: One time some old lady couldn’t figure out how to unlock it and started freaking out inside.

Alison: But it’s mostly because of people thinking they’re being sneaky and having sex in there. Trust me, we’re not letting you finish. When we hear someone humping in a lavatory, we might open the door just enough to put in our iPhones and take a few photos. That usually stops them.

(Sex in an airplane? That's just the beginning. Learn more about The Risky Sex Trend More Couples Are Trying.)

Tipping Will Get You Extra

Alison: Nobody ever thinks to tip a flight attendant. We can make your flight experience so much better, if we want to.

Nancy: Free booze, hot cookies. That stuff isn’t just for the First Class passengers.

It Also Helps To Be Super Hot

Brian: If you’ve ever gotten free booze and you don’t know why, it’s probably because somebody in the fly crew thinks you’re [attractive].

Nancy: I’ve done that. I’ve totally done that. Not slept with a passenger, just gave him perks because he was hot.

Alison: They tell you that dressing nice improves your chances of being upgraded to First Class, and I guess that doesn’t hurt. But the best way to get upgraded from economy to First Class is to be really, really easy on the eyes.

This article was originally published by our partners at Men's Health.

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3 Oct 2016

The views as you cross Sydney harbour from suburban Manly to Circular Quay are unrivalled. You might even spot dolphins swimming alongside the boat or the occasional whale breaching in the distance. Fast ferries complete the route in just eighteen minutes, with an onboard bar providing beers to sip on the way home. In the city that brought us capsule hotels and shoebox apartments, it’s no surprise that space is at a premium on public transport. Tokyo’s inventive solution is to employ oshiya, white-gloved “people pushers” who cram as many passengers as possible onto the trains. Today they’re no longer ubiquitous, but the network still runs at up to two hundred percent capacity. Linking the port with the museums, castle and gardens on the Montjuïc hill, the Transbordador Aeri isn’t a prime commuter route, but it’s a sensational journey for those that use it. Red-and-white cabins judder between the pylons every ten minutes or so, though the lofty views are certainly not for the acrophobic. Built in the 1890s by an engineer called Eugen Langen, this suspended monorail runs for nearly fourteen kilometres across Wuppertal in western Germany, and has transported over 1.5 billion people since its construction. The sensation of the carriage movement is a little disconcerting, but lovely views along the Wupper tributary go some way to compensate. There are just four bridges along Venice’s 3.5-kilometre-long Grand Canal, but luckily for those who work one side and live on the other, there’s an alternative to taking a dip. Skilled oarsmen regularly ply traghettos to-and-fro, ferrying passengers for a small fee. If your balancing skills are up to it, it’s traditional to stand during the short journey. People commute from as far away as Antigua to Guatemala’s sprawling capital, with hordes of “chicken buses” plying every route imaginable. These brightly coloured rust-buckets are old Bluebirds, US school buses retired after ten years’ service. Daubed with multi-coloured designs and decked out with sound-systems, they are an undoubtedly distinctive way to get to work in the morning. Taking just fifteen minutes to whisk commuters across the Burrard Inlet from North Vancouver to the central Waterfront Station, Vancouver’s SeaBus fleet offers both glorious views and a speedy commute. Once the boat has docked, many hop onto the automated SkyTrain network, an elevated line that zips above ground across the city. Long an icon of Rome (think Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday), scooters are undoubtedly the best way to weave through the narrow roads of this ancient city. If you’re going to join the locals, make sure you have your horn at the ready and your wits about you. Dog-sleds were once Alaskans’ staple rural transport in winter, when many towns are inaccessible by road, but today the snowmobile rules. Across the USA, there are nearly 1.5million registered snowmobiles, or snow machines, as they’re known locally. You’ll need a good pair of mittens and preferably a helmet before you get on your way. A good commute doesn’t have to come at a price: a trip on the Star Ferry from Kowloon to Hong Kong Island costs just HK$2.50, about 20p. Window seats offer the chance to snap a shot of Victoria Harbour’s iconic skyline; it’s best viewed in the evening when the neon-illuminated skyscrapers are at their most magnificent. Stalin began construction of the Moscow Metro in the 1930s. He envisioned the stations as “palaces for the people”, a legacy of his rule of the communist USSR. Today the network might boast Wi-Fi and nearly two hundred stops, but the original architecture and design remains: high ceilings, socialist artwork and chandeliers. The world’s longest suspension bridge spans nearly two thousand metres, taking commuters and tourists a from Iwaya on Awaji Island across the Akashi Strait to the city of Kobe on Honshu. This feat of modern engineering took ten years to construct and has been built to withstand typhoons, tsunamis and earthquakes. Known to locals as norry, these bamboo platforms shoot along abandoned railway tracks at speeds of up to 40km per hour. The “trains” run on old tank wheels, powered by small electric engines. Routes from Battambang are open to tourists, but norry are still a key form of local transport. According to Visit Copenhagen, the city has more than three hundred kilometres of bike lanes, which provide more than thirty percent of the population with their route to work. You won’t just find Lycra-nuts zipping past the canals here though, well over half of the Danish parliament takes to two wheels each morning. San Fransciso’s cable car network was created by Andrew Smith Hallidie in 1873. Even though buses and cars have now made the hilly city easier to navigate, there’s no beating a leisurely journey to work on one of these historic lines. Around fifteen kilometres of pulley-system track remain today, and the iconic cars are a National Historic Landmark. Common in the Southern Philippines, habal-habal are modified motorbikes with planks of wood providing precarious seats to the side and rear of the driver. You might spot a group of four or five sharing a ride to work in rural areas, or as many as a family of eight crammed onto one spluttering bike. Inverie is the sole settlement on the isolated Knoydart Peninsula, accessible over land only by a two-day hike. The hamlet might be home to the UK The bus system in Chongqing at first appears any other. But in the summer of 2013, with soaring temperatures making commuting unbearable, the local government came up with an ingenious idea. They installed mist machines in 26 of the city’s bus stops to spray water vapour onto unsuspecting passengers, lowering the local air temperature by around five degrees. Mumbai, home to twenty million people, has an understandably chaotic and overcrowded train network. Yet your homemade lunch will follow you through the melee. The city’s four thousand or so dabbawallahs deliver more than 150,000 tiffins each day, loading them on and off trains using an astoundingly reliable system of colour-coded markings: they only lose one every few months. From this author’s one-time home in Borough, it was a thirty-minute stroll along the South Bank to Rough Guides HQ. Taking in some of the capital’s best-known landmarks, from the Shard and Somerset House to St Paul’s cathedral and the London Eye, this commute tops a ride on a Routemaster any day.
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  It’s strange to think that at the heart of one of the most densely populated places on the planet, just a stone’s throw away from the gleaming high-rises of bustling Insadong, there’s a quiet neighbourhood of traditional wooden houses, where locals chatter in tearooms and children play in the sloping streets. These charming hanokjip (literally, "Korean House") hark back to a time when every home in Seoul had paper walls and was crowned with an elegantly tiled wing-tipped rooftop. The medieval city at the heart of Cairo is a tangled web of narrow lanes, towering mosques and aromatic bazaars. Enter the warren at Khan al-Khalili, packed with goldsmiths, spice vendors, and traders hawking incense, then burrow your way south to the Citadel, a hilltop bastion with majestic views over the district’s minaret-studded skyline. The Hermitage quite simply has the largest collection of paintings in the world, and is set in one of the most beautiful buildings in Russia: the Winter Palace, an opulent Baroque confection that served as the official residence of the tsars until the revolution of 1917. The museum contains over three million treasures and works of art, from ancient Scythian gold to paintings by Picasso, only a fraction of which are on display at any one time. Crowded, cramped and rough around the edges, the Mercato covers several square miles of Ethiopia’s capital city. Reputedly the busiest market in Africa, it’s a fascinating place to explore, a shantytown of traders peddling their wares out of corrugated-iron shacks amidst a fug of incense, coffee and cow dung. This is very much a market for locals, with sections selling grain, vegetables, tyres and used white goods, but you can still pick up an interesting piece of jewellery or a traditional Ethiopian cross. Part of Luxembourg City’s impressive series of fortifications, designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1994, the dark, dank Bock Casemates were carved out of a sandstone promontory overlooking the Alzette valley in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.The extraordinary complex of underground passages and galleries ran for 23km (17km still remain), and at one time housed a 1200-strong garrison, along with bakeries, kitchens, stables and the . You won’t be the first person to get lost at the Palace of Knossos. Many of the visitors that wander amongst the courtyards, storerooms and royal apartments that made up the largest Minoan palace in Crete are tempted here by the legend of its labyrinth, and of the Minotaur, the creature it was built to contain. Whilst there’s no sign of the labyrinth today, you can still peer into some of the palace’s remaining rooms, which once numbered a thousand. The world’s largest covered market, Istanbul’s suitably named Grand Bazaar has been trading goods on the same spot in historic Sultanahmet for over 550 years. Browsing is an endurance sport here, all the more so given the enthusiastic sales techniques on display, and with more than 4000 shops crammed under one roof, you’ll need to pick your battles – try bartering with the shoe-sellers on Kavaflar Sokak or the gold merchants on Kalpakçilar Başı, or the carpet-sellers everywhere in between. Stand in the middle of the old town hall in Kolmanskop and you’ll find yourself knee-deep in sand. Kolmanskop sprung up when diamonds where discovered here in the early 1900s but faded just as quickly once the gems petered out, and it was abandoned to the mercy of the desert in the mid-1950s. Today, it’s an eerie ghost town, its once-grand buildings – including a ballroom, theatre and casino – slowly succumbing to the encroaching dunes. Founded in 1638 as the capital of Mughal India, Shahjahanabad (or Old Delhi) is the most intense and downright chaotic area of the city. Delhi is home to nearly 17 million people, and at times it can feel most of them are jostling along Chandi Chowk, the heaving main thoroughfare, or in the surrounding warren of streets, where rickshaws and handcarts hurry between bazaars selling everything from spices to wedding garlands to car parts. Perhaps only in Moscow can a lengthy trip on the underground become a journey of artistic beauty. The system was designed in the 1930s to showcase the glories of Mother Russia, and many of the first few lines to open employed the most renowned Soviet architects of their time. There are 195 stations to wander, neck craned, gawping at decor ranging from High Stalinist opulence (think red marble, gold-encrusted mosaics and bronze lamps) to the utilitarianism that defined 1970s USSR. Shinsegae Centum City is officially the largest shopping complex in the world – they’ve even got a certificate from the Guinness Book of World Records to prove it. This is three million square feet of retail therapy, with over 425 shops filling sixteen floors. Plus there’s a food market, an art gallery, an ice rink, a three-floor spa, a multiplex cinema, a gym, a roof garden and the world’s largest indoor driving range, of course. The biggest archaeological site on earth, the temples of Angkor are scattered over some four hundred square kilometres of countryside in northwest Cambodia. For six hundred years from the early ninth century, successive Angkorian kings constructed their royal cities and state temples here – the magnificent Angkor Wat is just the most famous of myriad monuments, among them the ancient walled city of Angkor Thom, and Ta Prohm, its crumbling ruins engulfed in a tangle of creepers and strangler figs. The extraordinary Medina of Fez el Bali is an addictive maze of blind alleys and dead-end lanes. You can follow Talâa Kebira, the main thoroughfare, down into its bowels, past goods-laden donkeys and ancient fondouks selling olive oils and a dozen types of honey. Metalworkers hammer away at immense copper cauldrons on Place Seffarine, brightly coloured yarns dry in the heat on Souk Sabbaghine, and workers toil knee-deep in the honeycomb of vats that make up the tanneries Chouwara. The largest religious gathering on earth, Kumbh Mela takes place every three years, alternating between Allahabad, Haridwar, Nasik and Ujjain. The cities are auspicious with Hindus thanks to their location at the confluence of holy rivers, and a staggering nineteen million pilgrims attended the last Maha ("Great") Kumbh Mela in Allahabad in 2013, when the surrounding floodplains were turned into a vast tent city and legions of naked sadhus, their bodies covered in ash, plunged into the waters each morning. If ever a building defined its builder, then the Palace of Parliament is it. The enormous centrepiece of Bucharest’s Centru Civic was constructed in the 1980s for Nicolae Ceauşescu, Romania’s Communist dictator, and is regarded as the concrete zenith of his megalomania. Allegedly the second-largest administrative building in the world (after the Pentagon), the "Madman’s House", as it was once popularly known, has well over a thousand rooms and took some seven hundred architects to put together. North of The Forbidden City, the labyrinth of twisting grey alleyways and half-hidden courtyards that surround Houhai Lake make up the last major hutong district in Beijing. Once the home of princes, dukes and monks, these ancient backstreets are being torn down to make way for modern housing. For now, though, workers still scurry around on rusty bicycles and old men sit quietly in the shade, attending their caged birds, in what has become an ever-dwindling outpost of traditional Beijing. The supersized collection of big-hitting museums and research facilities that constitute the Smithsonian spreads across a large swathe of Downtown D.C. The complex’s collection is so mind-bogglingly vast that if you were to spend a minute looking at every object on display, it would take you a hundred years to see everything – and that’s without stopping to sleep. Warning: this is not one for the faint-hearted. Lining the catacombs deep beneath Palermo’s Convento dei Cappuccini, on the outskirts of the Sicilian capital, are the gruesomely preserved bodies of some eight thousand Palermitans, each one occupying its own niche within the jagged stone walls. The deceased were interred here up until the early 1880s, row upon row of them, dressed in their finest and suspended ad infinitum in some sort of grotesque waiting room for the afterlife. At 8.30am at Churchgate Terminus, Mumbai, rush hour is in full swing. The trains pulling into platforms are swollen with suburban commuters, many of them carrying up to 3000 more people than they were designed to. When two trains empty onto a platform at the same time, disgorging their passengers in an explosion of colour, you need to stand still, take a deep breath and remember that there’s only another hour and half to go until things start to quieten down a little.
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One year on: Picfair’s best travel photography Travel Offers

If you’re a keen travel photographer, amateur or professional, and you’ve not heard of Picfair you’re missing a trick. As a platform for professional photographers it’s revolutionary, allowing them to sell their pictures at a price they want. Travellers with camera can get in on the action too. Since its launch in August 2013, 5,000 photographers (both amateur and seasoned pros) in 63 countries have uploaded 80,000 images, which can be licensed by anyone at the click of a button. Journalist and founder of Picfair, Benji Lanyado said:

“We’re the first direct route from photographer to buyer, cutting out the agencies who have taken the vast majority of fees for decades. We’re AirBnB for images! We’re also open to all – amateur photographers have never had a place to sell their images alongside pros, and now they do.”

So in celebration of Picfair’s first birthday, and in the beginning of a new series on RoughGuides.com, where we’ll showcase a selection of our favourite travel photos on Picfair with a different theme each month, here is the best of their travel photography so far:

Next month’s theme is “the locals”. Upload your photos to picfair.com and tag them with “Rough Guides” to be in with a chance of having your travel photography showcased right here. 

The Saltador, Castellón de la Plana, Spain

SINGLE USE ONLY - SALTADOR, Castellón de la Plana, Spain“Saltador” by DianaG / Picfair

The Echo Man at Angkor Wat, Cambodia

SINGLE USE ONLY - ECHO MAN, CAMBODIA“The Echo Man” by Iselin Shaw Of-Tordarroch / Picfair

Bondi Beach, New South Wales, Australia

SINGLE US ONLY - BONDI BEACH, AUSTRALIA“Bondi Beach” by George Coltart / Picfair

Chicken Hat, Cuba

Chicken Head, Havana, Cuba“Chicken hat” by Sarah Anne Hardy / Picfair

Balloons over Cappadocia, Turkey

Balloons, Cappadocia, Turkey - PICFAIR - SINGLE USE ONLY“ballons” by Ernst Furuhatt / Picfair

Port au Prince, Haiti

SINGLE USE ONLY - HAITI“All for One- Haiti” by Callan Murray-Hocking / Picfair

Death Valley, California, USA

SINGLE USE ONLY - DEATH VALLEY USA“Heat Haze” by Sarah Marie Leigh / Picfair

Sunset over a glacier in Iceland

SINGLE USE ONLY - SUNSET ICELAND“Iceland Sunset” by Martyn Day / Picfair

Monks shopping in Chiang Mai, Thailand

SINGLE USE ONLY - MONKS, CHIANG MAI, THAILAND“Monks Shopping” by Thomas Lhomme / Picfair

The Reichstag, Berlin, Germany

SINGLE USE ONLY - REICHSTAG, BERLIN“Reichstag” by simo / Picfair

 Graffitied staircase, Sau Paulo, Brazil

SINGLE USE ONLY - SAO PAULO, BRAZIL“Staircase” by Lourdes Siracuza Cappi / Picfair

A barber on the Varanasi ghats, India

SINGLE USE ONLY - VARANASI STREET SCENE, INDIA“VARANASI STREET SCENE” by Wilfred Seefeld / Picfair

A window cleaner on the Shard, London, England

SINGLE USE ONLY - THE SHARD WINDOW CLEANER, LONDON“The Window Cleaner” by JarmanPhotography / Picfair

Hong Kong, China

SINGLE USE ONLY - HONG KONG PANORAMA“Hong Kong in blue” by Chris Petersen-Clausen / Picfair

View from the 86th floor of the Grand Hyatt Hotel, Jin Mao Tower, Shanghai, China

SINGLE USE ONLY - Grand Hyatt Hotel inside the Jin Mao Tower in Pudong, Shanghai, China“86 from down” by Chris Petersen-Clausen / Picfair

Above New York City, USA

SINGLE USE ONLY - NYC, USA“High above NYC” by Dan Martland / Picfair

Ladies in Havana, Cuba

SINGLE USE ONLY - HAVANA SUBBATHERS, CUBA

 “Havana Sunbathers” by Sarah Anne Hardy / Picfair

Chicago, USA

SINGLE USE ONLY - CHICAGO“Looking Down on Chicago” by Jason Kessenich / Picfair

Udaipur street scene, Rajasthan, India

SINGLE USE ONLY - UDAIPUR STREET SCENE, INDIA “UDAIPUR STREET SCENE” by Wilfred Seefeld / Picfair

Timkat festival, Ethiopia

SINGLE USE ONLY - Timkat, Rooney, Ethiopia, Orthodox Festival, Epiphany“Timkat- Ethiopia” by Callan Murray-Hocking

Peaceful protest, Bangkok, Thailand

SINGLE USE ONLY - BANGKOK PEACEFUL RIOTS, THAILAND“Peaceful rioters of Bangkok” by Murrindie / Picfair

Don’t forget to upload your “the locals” themed photos to picfair.com before September for a chance to have your image showcased by Rough Guides. 

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