Tuvalu
Tuvalu will become a center for Climate Change Tourism. Photo from Timeless Tuvalu
Peering into my crystal ball for 2016 — which due to budgetary concerns is more like fiberglass this year — I foresee the following top ten developments in the ever-changing, sometimes wacky world of travel:
Try to pare this down to wallet size, please.
- A 747 will be diverted from Omaha to New Orleans overnight because passengers in seats A and B get into a spat over who can claim the middle armrest. Oddly, none of the hundreds of passengers aboard complain as they gobble down their jambalaya and beignets.
- Spurred by the success of a tour agency named “Toodle-oo Tuvalu” and a boutique hotel called “Sinking Along With the Breeze,” Climate Change Tourism will be huge, in which ghoulish travelers will journey to low-lying Pacific atolls soon to be inundated… Continue reading
The Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa — did she name all her daughters after herself?
The usual April 1 routine among publications is to write up some ridiculous story and try to convince readers that it’s true. Today I’m going to reverse that.
All of these 12 trivia items have appeared in some form on my blog over the past two years or so. Only one of them is false.
See if you can figure out which one is strictly for April Fool’s Day:
* You can fly to Mongolia from Beijing, China, in less than two hours.
* Some of the most coveted and prestigious student residences at the University of Virginia have no bathrooms.
* Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa had 16 children; her 11 daughters were all named Maria or Marie.
* The small South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu has made millions… Continue reading
The Tuvalu flag. The small island nation lucked into the countru code .tv. Photo from Dreamstime
Until I read about it in The New York Times, I had no idea that Tuvalu — a small South Pacific island nation previously best known as one of the most likely to sink below water as the oceans rise (“Toodle-oo, Tuvalu,” goes the sardonic refrain) — has been making millions of dollars by selling its Internet URL suffix .tv to companies that stream videos and the like.
Every country and a number of dependencies has been assigned a country code, usually based on its name, and Tuvalu lucked into the .tv designation years ago.
I salute their entrepreneurial spirit, even as their low-lying atolls threaten to become the next Atlantis.
It turns out Tuvalu isn’t the only country doing this sort of business.
According to The Times, Colombia has been doing boffo biz… Continue reading
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