Whole Travel Blog

London mayor Boris Johnson wants his city to lead the charge in making the UK the electric vehicle capital of the European Union. Less than a month after Johnson presented a 35-page plan to get the electric vehicle market going with government funding, London’s official foreign direct investment agency, Think London, pitched more than 50 cleantech companies at an event in San Francisco.

With London hosting the 2012 Olympic Games, there is a lot of capital flowing into infrastructure and technology improvements around the city, and to meet their 2025 goal of 60% carbon emissions reduction the expected capital requirement is £20 billion. This creates a nice incentive for many US and international companies to setup shop in London, and hopefully means we’ll get to a greener tomorrow faster.

Taiwan recently finished construction of an amazing solar-powered stadium that can generate 100% of its electricity from the sun. The dragon-shaped arena can hold 50,000 spectators and is made with over 8,000 solar panels.

Taiwan's solar-powered stadium can seat 50,000

The stadium will officially open in July for the 2009 World Games. In addition to the solar panels, the stadium integrates many other sustainable features such as permeable paving and maximum use of domestic materials and local labor. In addition, a plot of land adjacent to the stadium was set aside for development of public lands, including bike paths, sport parks, a pond system and green open spaces.

On days that the stadium is not being used, the government plans to feed surplus energy into the local grid, where it will meet approximately 80% of the neighboring area’s demand. This equates to approximately 660 tons of carbon dioxide per year!

Calling  Ocean Sports Lovers

You have all seen plastic on any beach you have every been to.  It is time to clean things up, but with a global movement to create change.  Please join us in the first ever, joint ocean sport World Ocean Day clean-up event, in honor of our oceans, and Project Kaisei which is setting off on a big mission this summer to the “plastic vortex” in the Pacific to help find solutions to our ocean/waste problem.  In the end, this all comes back to us on land, and our sports communities will be some of the leaders to bring about change in the ways we use, re-use or recycle plastics - so they don’t make their way to the vortex in the future.

This is a global problem, and the United Nations estimates there are over 100,000,000 tons of plastics in our oceans.  That is our playground!   Please help out.

You can take part with your club/team or individually by signing up on our site:  http://www.projectkaisei.org/world.html

Get out on the water for 3 hours on June 6th or 7th, and see how much waste you can pick up from the sea or shores.   You can have a local event after, and in the case of us in Hong Kong, we will sort the trash that is collected with a local school so that the children can see what was captured.  We will do this on June 8th, Monday, World Ocean Day.

We suggest that every group gather donations/pledges for your cleanup, and we suggest that 50% of these donations go to your local charity of choice, and 50% are given to Project Kaisei to help us get out on the water to the Plastic Vortex this summer so that we can film a National Geographic documentary, and test ways of cleaning some of this up.

We look forward to hearing from you!   Send us an email at   oceanday@projectkaisei.org  with the basic details we need from the website.   We also then hope you can get your own local PR from this.  We can send you a press release about the global event, and you can include your own segment on your local team/group, so that you can show your community what you are doing locally, and globally, with us.

Please feel free to pass this video clip around as well:

World Ocean Day - Ocean Sports Cleanup, June 6/7th, 2009

Thanks for your efforts, and we look forward to having you on board for this Inaugural World Ocean Day Event with all of the ocean’s sports lovers.

Sincerely,

Doug
Project Kaisei Team
www.projectkaisei.org

We have covered some interesting architecture projects at Whole Travel, but this one deffinatly takes the cake!  Morris Architects has made designs for a luxury resort based upon retired oil rigs.  The Rig Resort’s aesthetics evoke an ocean reef with modern flair. Views include ocean vantages – even through the lobby’s glass floor – as well as of the roof-top white sand “beach” and infinity pool beyond.

Rig Hotel

Like other projects we have covered, The Rig will be partially prefabricated from containers.  The guestrooms will be prefabricated modules built to withstand the harsh open water conditions.  Energy will be generated using a variety of sustainable methods.

Rig Lobby

I know we promised summer in winter. As it turns out if you visit the southernmost reaches of the Patagonia you can experience all four seasons in the course of an hour. The Whole Travel team experienced this as they visited the Perito Moreno Glacier, temperatures swung by thirty degrees with intermittent wind and rain. The glacier highlights the importance of sustainable travel. It is located on the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, the world’s largest reserve of freshwater. Perito Moreno is notable because it is one of only three glaciers in the area that are not retreating.

Perito Moreno Glacier

Rattray Head Eco-Hostel

With tough economic times, it makes a lot of sense to think about how you spend your money when you travel.  Many have learned how to stretch a tight budget and travel for months on hand.  Who are these masters of travel you ask?  Backpackers.  In a recent MSNBC article, a few tips for cheap travel are revealed.  Hopefully you can employ some of these on your next trip in order to make your dollar last a little longer.  A few of the tips are listed below, but click here to read the full article.

One of the major tips is to stay in a hostel.  There are many hostels on the Whole Travel Site, below are a few…

Rattray Head Eco-Hostel - Rattray, Scotland

Pululahua Hostal - Pululahua, Ecuador

Omagh Hostel - Tyronne, Northern Ireland

Sustainable travel no longer seems to be something that only the hemp-wearing, granola-eating crowd engages in, but rather it’s a concept that has gained so much traction that even the pope promotes it. At last month’s World Tourism Day 2008, Pope Benedict XVI called for sustainable and eco-tourism in which travelers respect the environment and the cultures they visit.

The pope, known as the “green pope,” declared that “experience teaches that the responsible management of creation is, or should be, a part of a healthy economy and sustainable tourism.”

In an effort to lighten its own carbon footprint, the Vatican is installing 2,700 solar panels on the roof of the Paul VI auditorium, which will conserve the equivalent of 35 tons of oil every week during the winter months. Read the BBC article to learn more about the Vatican’s solar power.

Led by the United Nations Foundation and with members including Condé Nast Traveler, Expedia, and Rainforest Alliance, the Global Partnership for Sustainable Tourism is a coalition of 32 organizations which have joined together “to foster increased understanding of sustainable tourism practices and the adoption of universal sustainable tourism principles.”

Its mission focuses on:

• uniting the tourism industry
• educating tourism businesses
• mainstreaming sustainable tourism
• encouraging sustainable business practices

Visit their site to learn more.

A new trend has emerged in Germany: converting old farms into “Heuhotels” or hay hotels, where guests literally spend the night on a bed of hay.

This trend isn’t just new, it’s also cheap and eco-friendly since guests bring their own sleeping bags and towels.

For a list of “Heuhotels,” visit www.heuhotels.de or check out this New York Times article about it.

While many travelers choose to visit the popular and often over visited landmarks of China, among them the Great Wall, the Yin Ruins, and the Forbidden City, more and more travelers are beginning to choose to travel off the beaten path to a more authentic and oftentimes more remote China. Fortunately, more eco-lodges are popping up to assist this new trend where supporting the local community is an inherent feature of a traveler’s stay. A good example is the Yangshuo Mountain Retreat which has committed to being sustainable through the creation of its own well which lessens its dependence on water resources, by hiring staff from nearby villages, and also by committing to replacing coal with alternative energy by 2009.

Two other ecolodges in China are Wenhai Ecolodge and Alou’s Tibetan Lodge.