Is Travel Industry a Green Industry?

Green Industry

Human activities are fundamentally changing the globe’s climate through increased greenhouse gas emissions. These gas emissions allow large-scale worsened health conditions, and have social, economical & ecological effects. There is also an abundance of scientific evidence, that many predicted changes take place in the environment at the time of writing this very blog. What is not so clear, however, is how a change of climate affects the travel industry in particular, and exactly what hotels and also the travel industry and travel agencies could do against this. Shouldn’t they become a green industry?

One notices restricted water supplies, a decrease in snowfall, more rainfall during seasons that used to be dry, or a much longer rain season. These are all potential dangers that could well have a negative impact on travellers, and on their choice of destination. Asia is a case in particular. Especially in Asia, rain seasons seem to last much longer every year with heavier rainfall flooding the islands in Indonesia which is taking on dramatic proportions.

What I would like to suggest is that the travel industry could help out and contribute to reducing Co2 output. Because of the green image it gets, the lodging industry could well benefit. There are a range of possibilities. The benefits could range from reduced operating costs to an increase in energy efficiency. Not unimportantly, it will build goodwill among travellers.They love great travel tips and being green.

Firstly the lodging industry should become aware of its own gas emissions, and what possibility it has of reducing the green house effect. If the travel industry wants to become green and wants to know what it emits, there is a so-called ‘greenhouse gas inventory’. This inventory documents the sources and the quantity of the greenhouse gas emissions, counting carbon dioxide (CO2), hydroflurocarbons (HFC), sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), nitrous oxide (N2O), perfluorocarbons (PFC), and methane (CH4). Think of boilers and generators, cars and buses, electricity purchases and of course, the generation of waste. For guidance and methologies one can turn to the Climate Registry, which is a non profit organization and ‘The Greenhouse Gas Protocol Initiative’.

If you have such a survey, and adapt the systems according to their advice, you have cost-saving efficiency opportunities while managing the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, and gaining an advantage because you address greenhouse gas-emissions at an early stage, and, not unimportantly, get recognition by travelers as a leader in reducing Co2.

By cutting on energy use it will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but also lower energy bills! In case the travel industry also reduces its use of fossil fuel that is used in its vehicle fleet, by turning to more efficient vehicles and using alternative fuel, it will gain respect from visitors. And.. it  will pay respect to the wonderful globe we are all living on! The Travel industry should become a wholly green industry! I hope you like these great travel tips!

For  good, informative blogs on green energy and renewable energy please see: www.greenenergyplatform.net

Great travel tips when to travel to Asia

Travel to Asia

Here you find some great travel tips for Asia. Asia, as you know, is made up of many different countries with different weather patterns. If you want to travel to Asia, you will have to carefully consider  before you chose the best time to go on holiday. For instance, Hong Kong has a subtropical climate. It has hot, humid and wet summers with a cool, but generally dry winter. Hong Kong has a season with typhoons  which usually lasts from July to August. In Hong Kong the autumn season lasts from late Septem­ber to early December. This is generally the best time for visiting because the temper­ature and the humidity has fallen and you will have  many clear and nice, sunny days. Soem further great travel tips: If you consider to travel to  Macao: it  has a similar climate but the summers are a little more bearable because of the greater exposure to breezes from the sea. Macao also has lots of womderful trees that can provide  shelter during hot summer days!

Great travel tips for Japan

You might consider traveling to Japan. This country lies in the northern temperate zone in which spring and autumn are really the best travel times. Hokkaido excepted, the large Japanese cities are extremely hot during the summer. The island of  Hokkai­do is very cold in winter! If you have the time to yourself and can travel whenever you want, you should avoid  seasonal vacation periods, such as  school holidays. In those times, you will not be alone when  visit­ing temples, and palaces.

Soem further great travel tips. Let’s take another country in Asia: Korea. This beautiful country  is  located in the Northern temperate zone, characterized by a spring and an autumn that are really the best times for travel or holiday. In Korea, its  deep blue skies of late september or October and early november with its warm and sunny days and cool evenings are the best. Although it tends to be a little windy, the time of spring is also very pleasant for a holiday or traveling to Korea. There is a short but a very pronounced wet season that starts at the end of June and lasts into early August. More than fifty per cent of the yearly rainfall takes place in  this period, and it is usually rather humid and hot.

Thailand has a hot and tropical climate with a high humidity. The very best time for travel is between November to February. The period between March and May is extremely hot and the wet season comes with the southwest monsoon during June and lasts to October..

Malaysia has no marked wet or dry seasons. The time between October and January is the wettest period on the East coast.  For the West coast of Malaysia this is October and November. Sabah also has a tropical climate. Therefore  October and April-May are generally the best times for a visit. Sarawak is seldom uncomfortably hot, but on the other hand can be extremely wet. Luckily, the phenomenon of typhoons is virtually unknown in Eastern Malaysia.

The Philippines have a similar climate to Thailand, with its best time to travel during the dry season from November to March. The time between March and May is often dry and very hot. The Southwest monsoon always brings the rain from May to November. The islands north of Samar through Luzon can unfortunately be affected by typhoons during the period between July and September. The Visayas Islands, Mindanao and Palawan, are af­fected (but not so much) by the southwest monsoon. But it is still possible to travel comfortably during the wet season to the south of Samar Island, where long sunny periods are usually interspersed with rather heavy rain.

And the last one among great travel tips: Singapore. Singapore has no pronounced wet or dry season. The even, constant heat is mitigated by sea breezes while the frequent rainshowers have a small cooling effect.

Hopefully this article will be of use to you in case you are planning to travel to  Asia.

Realize how Easy Travel is?!

Modern technology has made travel easier!

In the series of great travel tips, a blog on easy travel. Traveling nowadays is incomparable to what it used to be only a few decades ago. We can barely imagine what it was like to travel without a portable telephone. We are fully accustomed to it – I’d say even addicted to it-  but I very well remember the days that I had to try and find some post-office in a tiny village Greece, Yugoslavia or Italy where I could phone my parents with a collect-call to say all was well (and that I needed some more money..). I just phoned on the off-chance they were in. If not, I had to try finding yet another local post-office to go through the same procedure. Often enough the post-office was closed for siesta, or –if open- it was impossible to get a connection, or the line was bad. I am talking of a holiday during the late 1980s only! How primitive we were at the time..! My two kids cannot imagine how life was then. Certainly no question of easy travel!

With a cell-phone and obviously a dependable, good provider you barely need to carry lots of maps with you, depending on whether the area you are travelling to. At least, maps of large cities are no longer necessary to put in your bag. And think of addresses of hotels or restaurants, Michelin guides and hotel guides! You can also leave your address book behind, your games, your cross-word puzzles, your little stereo or radio, and if you have an iphone or blackberry of some sort there is no need to go to an internetcafe. And, I am forgetting another very important device: large and heavy and in many cases fragile. Indeed, the video camera! Incredible that we are so much helped by one single device, the cell-phone! Am I getting old that I notice these changes, by the way..?! Having a cell-phone is just one of the many devices that enables easy travel! It makes modern traveling so much more comfortable and safer.

One of the devices I have only recently bought for holidays is a Kindle Fire e-reader for reading many hundreds of books. I usually carry around two or three books while traveling. No longer now!! Another great advantage is that my entire family can enjoy it!

All in all, travel is so much easier nowadays thanks to technology! I hope you liked this blog on great travel tips!

Highly recommended: the Kindle Fire, Full Colour 7 inch Multi-touch Display, Wifi!

Also great for traveling! The only Apple-approved I-phone solar charger! Whether you are backpacking or traveling on business:

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Holiday is good for the brain!

What holiday does to the brain

This is number one of the series great travel tips! Just sit back, close your eyes, and relax for a minute or tow and simply allow your mind to wander wherever it wants. Do not try to think of anything in particular. Did you ever wonder what’s going on inside your brain when your mind is in the relax mode like a moment ago? It turns out that the brain is rather active then! One of the astonishing qualities of a brain is its enormous appetite for energy which can account for a mere 2% of body weight, but burns an amazing 20% of the total number of calories that are consumed by the body. You may think that the brain in the relax mode would probably be conserving energy until it gets another task, but this is hardly the case..! Energy consumption of a brain that has been granted a rest decreases by 5% if compared to a brain at full swing. Recently, scientists named the energy consumed during a rest the dark energy of a brain. Why? Because the massive energy consumption during this ‘rest period’ is one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in neuroscience nowadays. Travel tips are so god to read!

What actually happens to the brain when on holiday?

The state of the brain at rest is called the default mode network (DMN). This can be described as a collection of brain regions that exhibit greater activity during rest periods than during performance in effortful cognitive tasks. This pattern of activity is associated with daydreaming as well as a light sleep. Whilst researchers did not determine the full range of processes that the brain undergoes at rest, recent evidence has revealed that resting brain abnormalities are associated with autism, schizophrenia, depression, and Alzheimers disease. In a recent study, which has been published in PLoS One, researchers in Japan at Tohoku University have found a link between general intelligence and creativity on the one hand side and the DMN on the other.

Researchers have scanned brains of 63 rather healthy volunteers during rest whilst using functional MRI to measure the cerebral blood flow (CBF) in different regions of the brain. Cerebral blood flow (CBF) is a good way of measuring brain activity since regions with greater activation are demand more oxygen delivery via the blood. In order to measure the general intelligence, researchers administered a standard psychometric test to volunteers. And creativity was assessed by using a divergent thinking test that assesses the ability to think in unique ways and generate novel ideas very quickly.

‘Brain imaging’ has shown that individuals who have scored higher on measures of intelligence have also showed higher blood flow in the gray and white mass of a brain at rest. Similarly individuals who have demonstrated greater creativity exhibited higher blood flow in regions of white matter at rest but not gray mass.

What exactly does this mean? Gray mass is the portion of brain tissue consisting predominantly of nerve cell bodies which may well be thought of as the processing centre of nerve cells. White mass (or white matter) consists of nerve fibers that are covered by myelin, a protein coating responsible for the white appearance, which transmit electrical signals from one nerve cell to another. If we use a computer network as analogy, the gray matter would be the actual computers and the white matter is the network cables connecting the computers. The authors of this research are speculating that more blood flow to gray and white matter in individuals with a higher intelligence may well be an indication that they have more active brains intrinsically. It is of course possible that brains which are more active at rest are undergoing specific biochemical processes to increase the integrity and the system’s efficiency.

Creative individuals have also showed more white matter blood flow, but no difference in gray matter. This makes sense because white matter is involved in the overall connectivity of the brain and a key aspect of divergent and novel types of thinking is greater communication among distinct regions of the brain.

These results do offer exciting findings as to the function of the brain’s mysterious dark energy. The brain is actually not a machine that has an off & on state!  Rather, the brain is a dynamic system that engages in integral processes on a continuous basis, especially when we are unaware of it as with day dreaming and sleep.
Findings from research on the brain’s DMN suggest an alternative to the old adage  of  ‘an idle mind is the devil’s workshop’. The great mathematician Henri Poincaré once observed regarding his own creative process:  ‘Often nothing good is accomplished at the first attack. One takes a rest; and then all of a sudden the decisive idea presents itself to the mind’. And indeed an idle mind may well be a very useful tool to solve a problem, while coming up with an innovation, or simply maintaining a very healthy brain.

I hope you like this blog on what travel and holiday does to your brain! want some more greta travel tips? Click here for some great travel tips!

The most enjoyable travel video ever: Where the Hell is Matt..! You should watch this when you feel low and need a holiday!

Why travel?! Why do you travel?

100-reasons-to-travel

Another blog on great travel tips! Traveling and going on holiday is as old as the world. Many people engage in traveling, some go on round-the world trips, others just take a breather and travel only a few miles outside their homes. The most fanatic among us already start planning the next holiday while still away from home, lazily lying on our beach towel in the lovely sun and enjoying the great sight of a sun setting. What is so magnetic about traveling? Can you imagine what a life would be without traveling? Why do we all feel we are fully alive when we are on holiday? I am sure we all have different reasons for traveling.  I have met people who have never traveled (one farmer who was fond of his own farm with his own beloved cows and sheep) and have no intention of ever doing do. Can you imagine? You are born on a planet that you have no intention of exploring outside of your area. It happens..! But what a waste of a life.  I think there is something fundamentally different in the mindset of those who love to travel and those who don’t. ‘Why travel‘ is not easy to explain.

Most people travel out of curiosity

A curiosity to see the world they live in, to travel to far away places and because they want to learn others cultures. They want to see the difference between their culture and others. Traveling is fun seeing and experiencing other cultures, other food, oter habits and meeting other people.  I travel because I am amazed at the world’s beauty and great variety of landscapes . It is immensely gratifying to enjoy the richness of our globe, and to be grateful of being alive and being able to see all this beauty. Interestingly, you view your own country with completely different eyes when you have traveled.  Usually you also get milder in your opinion. And.. you experience that we are all basically the same species, with similar longings and feelings.

Why travel? Other people travel not so much out of curiosity, but driven by a need to get away from their stresssful life. They wish to forget everyday tediousness and be free from routine by going on holiday. It indeed helps for a while..!

Traveling is not only for the rich and privileged.  Whether  poor or  middle class or wealthy, the world looks the same for all of us. The means of travel might be slightly different (..), but nonetheless  you can travel as long as it fits your budget. Travel and holidays are always fun, exciting, rewarding and a great learning opportunity. Want to read some more great travel tips? Click here!