World’s longest cross sea bridge

The world’s longest cross-sea bridge, spanning 36.48 kilometres across the mouth of the Jiaozhou Bay in China’s eastern Shandong province, was opened to traffic on July1,2011, four years after construction started.

The bridge, connecting urban Qingdao with the city’s less-developed district of Huangdao, cost about 14.8 billion yuan (USD 2.3 billion).

Authorities expect the project to boost the development of an industrial zone in Huangdao and to facilitate the rise of foreign trade by increasing the port''s handling capacity.

The business community have been complaining of the inconvenience of the current, less-efficient sea transport, whose operation is at the mercy of the weather.

The bridge will shorten the route between Huangdao and urban Qingdao by 30 km, cutting the travel time down from over 40 minutes to around 20 minutes.

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GPS puts car into a lake

A rental car's GPS directed a motorist and her two colleagues into a lake.

Three young women escaped the sinking Mercedes-Benz SUV after the vehicle's GPS directed them down a boat launch and into the Mercer Slough in Bellevue, Washington.

The driver thought she was on a road while following her GPS unit just after midnight, but she was actually heading down the boat launch. The road was dark and the driver crashed the SUV into the water in Mercer Slough Nature Park.

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12 most beautiful lakes in the world

These 12 lakes go to all the right extremes—highest, deepest, clearest—and showcase nature at its most spectacular. Soak up the views from a boat, a cable car, a trailhead, or a castle tower.

Lake Malawi

Home to 1,000 species of fish—estimated to be more than anyplace on earth—Lake Malawi (also called Lake Nyasa) is Africa's third largest lake at 363 miles long and up to about 50 miles wide in spots. Located in a depression 2,300 feet below sea level, it's positioned at the crossroads of Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania, and supports hundreds of local villages with its rich underwater stock (which is, unfortunately, gradually being depleted due to over-fishing). The lake's southern portion—as well as a bordering nub of wildlife-rich land, Cape Maclear—represents the world's first freshwater national park; it was also named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1984. A star of the waters here is the mbuna, a native freshwater fish known for eating directly from people's hands. Bring your snorkel gear—as beautiful as the scenery is, the best part about Lake Malawi is what's swimming beneath you in the crystal clear water.

Peyto Lake

Peyto Lake

Alberta's Lake Louise is the famous one, on all the postcards and posters. But Louise's sister lake 29 miles north along Icefields Parkway, a two-laner that winds 142 miles through the Canadian Rockies, is even more picturesque. Thanks to glacial rock flour that flows in when the ice and snow melt every summer, the waters of Banff National Park's Peyto Lake are a brilliant turquoise more often associated with warm-weather paradises like Antigua and Bora-Bora. For the most dramatic views of the 1.7-mile-long stunner, encircled with dense forest and craggy mountain peaks, pull into the lot at Bow Summit, the parkway's highest point, and follow the steep hike to the overlook.

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Dal Lake to have a floating post office

Department of Posts planned to open a floating post office on the Dal Lake in Srinagar to enhance tourists' influx in the Valley.

The post office will work round the week and it will have all the facilities.

The special feature of this post office is that one will get a special design (special cancellation letter) while posting a letter.

Inside the post office, there will be special services for attracting the tourists in the form of picture post cards, special stamps, and they can also send letters, parcels and many other services. It will be more or less like a tourist shop where they can buy variety of things.

Complete news.

World's Best Ruins

Ruins reach across centuries to fire the imagination and fuel travel plans. The very best make you feel young, small, and utterly amazed by the architectural chops of the ancients. Among the many amazing ruins that still exist today, a few stand out as the trip of a lifetime.

Machu Picchu, Peru

The journey to Machu Picchu is epic even with relatively newfangled transportation like trains. But each year, about 25,000 people forgo the more direct routes and walk for days along the 27-mile Inca Trail to reach the ruin. Since its rediscovery a century ago, this treasure of the Inca set high in a cloud forest of the Peruvian Andes has captured imaginations worldwide. The massive stone blocks tell the story of both a sprawling agricultural zone with terracing and ancient food storehouses and an urban zone replete with temples, squares, tombs, and living quarters.

Acropolis, Greece

Waiting for the traffic to speed past at a crowded intersection in Athens, you're likely to forget that history keeps constant watch over the city. Glance up, however, and you'll catch the view Athenians and visitors alike have been admiring for the last 2,500 years. Time has battered the once-pristine temples and gates that crown the hill of the Acropolis, leaving stone ruins that retain a familiar splendor even after thousands of years of wear and destruction. The elegant proportions of the fifth-century B.C. Parthenon and the Temple of Athena Nike—both dedicated to the city's patron deity—are a reminder of how much we still rely on ancient Greece for our concepts of beauty.

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Lake Volta : the largest man-made lake in the world

Lake Volta is one of the largest man-made lakes in the world. It is about 250 miles (400 km) long and covers 3,283 square miles (8,502 square km), or 3.6 percent of Ghana’s area.

The lake is formed by the Akosombo Dam, which, begun in 1961 and completed in 1965, dammed the Volta River just south of Ajena and created a lake extending upstream from the Akosombo Dam to Yapei, beyond the former confluence of the Black Volta and White Volta rivers.

With a storage capacity of 124,000,000 acre-feet (153,000,000,000 cubic m) of water, the lake’s creation involved the inundation of 15,000 homes and of 740 villages and the resettlement of 78,000 people. The lake is navigable and provides a cheap route linking Ghana’s northern savanna with the coast. It also is a major fishing ground and provides irrigation water for farmland in the dry Accra Plains lying immediately below the dam site. The generating capacity of the dam’s hydroelectric power plant is 912 megawatts of electricity.

Rainbow town

Rainbow is a small town of several hundred people at the southern end of the Mallee region of Victoria, Australia. Travelling down the main street, with its attractive median strip and palm trees, one gets the feeling that little has changed here in the last 40 or 50 years. The town serves a large area focused largely on farming although there are a number of stud farms in the district and a butter factory.

Rainbow is located 392 km north-west of Melbourne and 57 km north of Dimboola. Once occupied by the Wotjobaluk people, the first land grant in the area was 'Halbacutya' station, established by John Coppock in 1846. It stretched from Lake Hindmarsh to the northern end of Lake Albacutya. Coppock lived at the north-eastern corner of the lake until a dispute with Robert von Stieglitz of the 'Pine Hill' run forced him to move his residence to Lake Albacutya. Bushranger Dan Morgan held up the station in 1868, after Coppock's death. A rabbit plague ate the station out in the late 1870s.

Closer settlement of the area began when the property was subdivided in the late 1880s for agricultural development. A railhead was established in 1900, around which a township grew. It was named after an old property called 'Rainbow Rise' which, in turn, was named after a crescent-shaped ridge nearby upon which colourful wildflowers grew.

More about the Rainbow town.

Mardi Gras Around the World

Mardi Gras is a celebration that is notorious for producing some of the biggest celebrations around the world in various eclectic ways. Traditionally a way of indulging before the penitential season of lent, Mardi Gras has many different interpretations, so take a look at how Mardi Gras is interpreted and celebrated throughout the world…

Check out some of the interesting pictures.

Futuristic Sleek Jets

Want to travel by jumbo jet or new sleek jet ?

Travelling by jumbo jets could soon be a thing of the past, thanks to new futuristic sleek jets that NASA plans to introduce.

The US space agency revealed designs for the quiet-running, energy-efficient aircraft that could be ready for service by 2025. These planes were designed for the US Air Force in the Fifties but never entered service.

The planes will be faster, bigger, more efficient and quieter than at present. The sleek jets require the aircraft to have a range of 7,000 miles at 85 per cent of the speed of sound while carrying between 50,000lb and 100,000lb of cargo or passengers.

(Source)

World’s Largest Hotels

20 of the 27 world’s largest hotels (by room count) are located in Las Vegas. Genting Highlands (First World Hotel) in Malaysia with 10,000+ rooms is the largest hotel of the world.

Check out the other hotels in the list.

Investigation Uncovers Hidden Stains in Hotel Rooms

Hotels are a place to unwind. They're like our home away from home. And whether we go there for romance, relaxation or business, there are certain things we come to expect when we check in and the most important of which is cleanliness.

But with thousands of people having possibly slept in the same bed before you, how do you know what's really under those covers?

In an ABC News Primetime investigation, producers discovered bodily fluid stains in all 20 hotel rooms surveyed, no matter the price. Most of these stains are not visible to the naked eye, but they were found everywhere – on the beds, carpets, walls….

Despite the alarmingly gross results, these stains are completely harmless – no microbes are growing on them because they are dried and sterile. Fortunately, the survey’s results convinced many of the hotel managers to train their cleaning staffs to use black lights.

Check out the full Primetime investigation story.

Ice Hotel

ICE HOTEL is a hotel built of ice and snow. Ice hotels are oversized, extravagant igloos. Solid blocks of ice make up their barrel-shaped structures. But inside, ice hotels glitter with elaborate ice furniture and ice sculptures. Colorful lighting makes the structures look more like magical snow castles than frigid arctic dwellings. All of the ice hotels are reconstructed every year, and are dependent upon constant sub-freezing temperatures during construction and operation. The walls, fixtures, and fittings are made entirely of ice, and are held together using a substance known as snice, which takes the place of mortar in a traditional brick-built hotel.

The hotels are built near rivers where workers can draw water, freeze it into ice and cut the ice into large blocks before trucking it into place. Extensive, large-capacity ice hotels take about five to six weeks to build. But when spring comes, all the hard work melts away, and the hotels must wait until winter to rebuild.

The first ice hotel was built in 1989 in a village called Jukkasjärvi in northern Lapland, Sweden, 200 km north of the Arctic Circle. It started as a modest, 60-square-meter igloo and now it is the world's largest hotel of ice and snow of about 5500 square meters.

 

The ICEHOTEL Sweden has a different design every year, built from blocks of ice gathered from the Torne River. Creating the ice hotel each winter takes 10,000 tons of clear river ice, plus 30,000 tons of snow. The Ice Hotel Sweden offers different kinds of accommodation to choose from for about 100 guests and also have other features like a sauna, a reception hall, a multimedia theatre, an ice chapel for weddings and ABSOLUT ICEBAR.

The Sweden Ice Hotel is open for business beginning in December (depending on the weather) and ending in March. Not only is the entire Sweden Ice Hotel structure made totally of ice, but all of the furniture and most of the décor found within is also made from ice. Beds at the Sweden Ice Hotel are slabs of solid ice, and chairs are carved from blocks of ice. Statues and other forms of art are carved throughout the hotel, in rooms and in hallways, and tend to be quite ornate. For comfort, reindeer skin blankets are draped over beds and chairs to offer (moderate) warmth.