Adventure Travel

Michael Christodoulou asked:


Green is a word we constantly hear on a daily basis, and for a very valid reason. With all the environmental challenges that affect our planet, governments, companies and consumers are becoming more and more aware of the issues and the many ways to improve our current situation.

We all know that the Travel Industry is rapidly growing and at the same time changing. The impact it leaves on the tourist destinations and the planet in general is up to us and you, the travel consumer.

As a Destination Management Company, we at Olympus Tours are committed to promote and respect the most valuable assets Mexico has to offer: from the amazing diving in Cozumel, the spectacular turquoise waters and archeological sites of the Mayan Riviera and newly renovated Cancun, to Mexico City’s architecture and culture, and all the way to the perfect combination of Vallarta’s green mountains overlooking the Pacific, to the breathtaking sunsets of Los Cabos.

The following are some of the practices we implement as an Ecotourism and Sustainable tourism conscious company:

• Spread the financial benefits amongst local people and suppliers.

• Provide employment and leadership opportunities for local people.

• Respect and most importantly promote local customs and culture.

• Provide safe trips for our guests.

• Limit the physical impact of trips in all destination communities-particularly sensitive natural and cultural environments.

• Provide support to organizations and local communities.

• Promote opportunities for guests to interact with local people.

• Discourage the participation of our guests in activities which exploit animals – wild or domestic.

• Work to prevent the exploitation of children in tourism.

• Support and encourage fair employment practices.

• Promote activities and excursions with suppliers that share our philosophy on Social Responsibility – most of Riviera Maya tours, and some of Cancun tours offered are focused on Ecotourism.

• Recommend hotels and establishments with green practices – most of the hotels in Playa del Carmen and in general Riviera Maya hotels are eco-friendly.

• Recycle everything possible in all our offices through out Mexico

• Reduce energy consumption in all our offices.

We invite you to make a positive contribution to the sustainable future of travel, the environment, and local cultures and economies around the world.

make a difference:

be aware and respectful of the culture and traditions of the place you are visiting, as well as be conscious of how you can help protect any endangered species in the region you are vacationing. Here are some tips you might want to consider:

• Buy locally made souvenirs

• Help preserve local wildlife and habitats – do not damage flowers, plants or coral, and do not buy products made from endangered plants or animals.

• Do not have pictures taken of your self with animals of endangered species under captivity for commercial purposes such as monkeys, parrots and other exotic species.

• Use water wisely – showers instead of baths, and inform hotel staff if you are happy to re-use towels and linen rather than have them changed daily.

• Save energy – always turn off air conditioning, lights and TVs when not in use.

• Learn about the culture and customs of the areas you visit.

• Be sensitive about the cultural differences – in some cases very significant – of the locals

* What is Ecotourism?

Ecotourism is a type of Sustainable tourism that emphasizes conserving nature and improving the lives of local people in rural and wilderness areas.

** What is Sustainable Tourism?

Sustainable tourism is not just limited to areas of ecological significance, but actively aims to reduce negative impacts in general for urban, rural, and wilderness areas. Sustainable tourism looks at the needs of the present, but also focuses on current actions that can reduce negative impacts in the long run. It promotes economic viability, socio-cultural sensibility, and environmental sustainability at destinations of natural and cultural significance in both mass tourism and various niche tourism segments.



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Zeke Gervis asked:

A new live-action, high octane family adventure will soon grace the screen, courtesy of writer/ directors Larry and Andy Wachowski, the creators of the highly acclaimed “The Matrix” trilogy and producer Joel Silver comes the “Speed Racer”.

Speed Racer is a story about a young driver (Emil Hirsch) who is aggressive, instinctive, and above all fearless. His only real competition is the real competition is the memory of the legendary Rex Racer who happens to be the brother he idolized. The death of his brother in a race has left a desire on Emile Hirsch or Speed Racer to continue the legacy that his brother has left.

Speed as what he is lovingly called by his friends and family is true example of a son who loves his family. He has shown his dedication and loyalty to the family racing business which is headed by his father, Pops Racer (John Goodman) who is also the designer of Speed’s thundering Mach 5 which by the way could use some Merkur oxygen sensor. The story began when Speed turns down the lucrative and enticing offer from the Royalton Industries which has infuriated the company’s maniacal owner (Roger Allam).

Speed was also able to uncover a terrible secret—some of the biggest races are being fixed by a handful of unscrupulous tycoons who manipulate the top drivers to increase their profits. And since Speed has not agreed to drive for Royalton then it will see to it that the Mach 5 would never cross another finish line.

For those who are familiar with the Speed Racer cartoon series you of course know what happens next. Speed to save his family’s business and the sport that he loves, he has to beat Royalton at his own game. And together with his supportive family and ever loyal girlfriend Trixie (Christina Ricci), Speed teams up with his one-time rival, the mysterious Racer X (Matthew Fox) to win the race that was responsible for the death of his brother—none other than the cross-country rally known as The Crucible.

The Speed Racer is scheduled to hit theaters on May 9, 2008. This movie will also mark the Wachowski brothers’ first writing/directing collaboration since the “The Matrix” movies. Producer Joel Silver who has previously worked with the Wachowski brothers on huge projects like “The Matric” movies and “V for Vedetta” will once again take on the challenge of producing the film Speed Racer under his Silver Pictures banner.

The stars on the film are the following:

* Emile Hirsch (from the movie Alpha Dog) will portray the character of Speed

* Christina Ricci (from Black Snake Moan) as Trixie

* Matthew Fox(of TV’s Lost) will play as Racer X

* Susan Sarandon (Oscar winner and star of the movie Dead Man Walking) as Mom

* John Goodman (from the movie Evan Almighty) as Pops Racer

* Kirk Gurry (an Australian actor from the movie Spartan) as Sparky

* Paulie Litt (TV’s Hope & Faith) as Sprittle

* Roger Allam (from The Queen, V for Vendetta) as Royalton

* Ji Hoon Jung (Asian music star popularly know as Rain) will make his major film debut as a rival driver

Speed Racer is a Warner Bros. Picture presentation in association with Village Roadshow Pictures of a Silver Pictures Production.

gold detector

Fat Prophets asked:

“ …It is, in short, the only unquestioned and generally acceptable means of payment among nations, as dollars are the only unquestioned and generally acceptable means of payment among Americans, francs among Frenchmen, sterling among the British, and so on.”

Peter Bernstein, ‘A Primer on Money, Banking and Gold.’

Peter Bernstein is no gold bug. Rather, he is one of the world’s foremost authorities on capital markets and economics. A Primer on Money, Banking and Gold was first written in 1965, when gold was still the international currency. It is our contention that in the years ahead, gold will once again resume that role.

Prior to 1971, gold was effectively the commodity with which international payments were made. The flow of gold into and out of countries said more about a nations’ economic health than anything else. Indeed, the outflow of gold from the US in the late 1960s ultimately triggered President Nixon’s decision to suspend gold convertibility. In a fateful decision, the global financial system’s link to sound money was broken.

Ever since, the world has been on a US dollar standard, a monetary system where only one country has the benefit of borrowing and repaying debt in its own currency. In order for this system to prosper, the true international currency, gold, needs to be discredited. We believe gold has been held down for many years in order to allow the US dollar based international financial system to survive. But the official grip on the gold price is beginning to weaken, perhaps this time for good.

The smart money knows this and is beginning to move into gold. There is a silent gold rush taking place all around the world. Investors who understand gold’s role as an international currency are selling their surplus paper dollars and buying the yellow metal. This has led to unprecedented demand for bullion and coin dealers everywhere are struggling to meet this demand.

The Australian newspaper reported over the weekend that the Perth Mint is not taking any more orders for gold until January. Our guess is that the Mint does not want to expose itself to higher future prices given that it does not have the inventory to meet the demand for bullion. In a recent report, The World Gold Council said investment demand for the September quarter was $10.7 billion, double last year’s quarterly total.

Yet the price of gold in US dollars has been under pressure and gold producers have little incentive to increase output at these price levels. Even in Australian dollars, the price of gold is not high enough to encourage increased production. According to Bloomberg, Australian gold production was down 8% in the third quarter.

Strong demand and weak supply should be creating much higher prices. One explanation as to why this is not happening relates to the short term impact of hedge funds selling gold to meet investor redemptions. However, we do not see this as a major cause. Hedge funds are more likely to deal in gold futures rather than physical gold. We will discuss the futures market in a moment.  

More ominously, we believe central banks and bullion banks (basically large international banks) are attempting to keep the price of gold down to reflect the ‘strength’ of the US dollar monetary system the world has operated under since 1971. This theory has been convincingly argued for many years by the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA) in the US.

In summary, the argument is that central banks loan or lease gold to the bullion banks, who then sell the gold on the spot market and invest the proceeds in higher yielding treasury securities, earning a positive spread and easy money. In this way, central bank gold holdings are monetised and the proceeds are reinvested back into US government debt. More importantly, the additional supply of gold coming onto the market from the vaults of the central banks helps keep the price down.

Central bank officials certainly deny that they lease gold in order to keep the price low. Their explanation is that they simply lease gold to earn a small return on an asset that does not pay interest.

This is an ingenuous argument. Gold is an insurance policy – a wealth protector not a wealth generator. The benefit of earning a tiny return is more than offset by the risk of losing control over a country’s gold reserves. This fact will soon become painfully obvious to a number of countries.

The gold leasing and carry trade has in effect created a huge short position in the gold market. That is, the loaned gold must be paid back at some point. So central banks have considerable counter-party risks as they are relying on banks to repay the gold loaned to them.

How much gold is loaned out? That is an impossible question to answer, as there are no requirements for central banks to disclose this information. According to IMF (International Monetary Fund) accounting standards, central banks can include swapped or leased gold as a part of their official reserves, a practice that would lead to double counting of gold. So there is a decent likelihood that some of the world’s official gold reserves are not safely stored away, but have instead been leased and sold on the spot market.

This is certainly the contention of GATA and others. Recent efforts to obtain an updated audit of the US’ official gold reserves, stored mainly in Fort Knox, Kentucky, have been met with silence by the authorities. Despite the gold being the property of the US public, the facility is completely off limits and no official tours are conducted. Conversely, tourists and US citizens alike can see foreign central bank gold held in custody at the New York Federal Reserve in Manhattan.

If the market for physical gold is confusing and opaque, then so is the market for gold futures. The futures market is a way for investors, or more correctly, speculators, to gain exposure to the gold price without owning the physical metal. And futures provide leverage.

For example, the active futures contract at the moment is the December contract. One contract represents 100 ounces of gold. So the buyer of one December contract at US$820/oz will pay the seller US$82,000 in exchange for 100 ounces of gold. In practice though, most contracts are settled with cash rather than delivery of the physical metal.

There are increasing rumours that the COMEX, the exchange that runs the gold futures market, does not have the required physical metal should buyers of the contracts demand bullion as payment instead of cash. This is not surprising, as many of the players on the futures market are hedge funds. Such speculators look to capture leveraged price moves rather than buy contracts to receive physical delivery. 

The ‘open interest’ in the gold futures market reflects the amount of activity in gold futures and since peaking in early 2008, the amount of contracts ‘open’ have declined considerably.

Part of the decline obviously reflects lower participation from the hedge fund players. More importantly though, we believe the decline in open interest represents investor distrust in the exchange to deliver on its promises of gold delivery. If you really want to own bullion, why buy a futures contract? In the past, the gold futures price led the spot gold price. If participation in the futures exchange continues to decline, we wonder how long this will continue. 

Given the anecdotal evidence of physical accumulation around the world, we sense that investors large and small are beginning to wake up to the fact that the days of the US dollar as the world’s sole reserve currency are numbered. The fiat money experiment that began in August 1971 is drawing to a close.

Not that anyone in an official capacity wants to recognise this. In a recent meeting of the House Financial Services Committee in the US, Republican Senator Ron Paul asked Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke whether central bankers ever discussed gold in the context of a new international monetary system. Bernanke’s response was to the effect that they only discuss gold in terms of how much they plan to sell.

If this is true, the trade by central banks has so far been a poor one. Central bank sales (separate from the leasing of gold discussed earlier) have been co-ordinated since the Washington Gold Agreement was signed in 1999.

The agreement was precipitated by Gordon Brown, the country’s then chancellor, selling half of England’s gold reserves in 1999. The fact that Brown inexplicably advertised the government’s move prior to the sales saw the gold price plummet and threaten the gold mining industry, so a formalised gold selling agreement was put into place.

The first agreement, from 1999-2004, stipulated that the 11 member nations of the new euro, plus a few other European nations, limit their gold sales to 400 tonnes per year, or not more than 2000 tonnes over five years. The countries signed a second agreement in September 2005, limiting sales to 500 tonnes per year, or not more than 2500 tonnes in total.

There are a few points to note about these agreements. Firstly, the sales represent supply over and above annual production and the gold price has increased considerably since the agreements began. There is now less than one year left in the second agreement and sales in the first four years have all been under the 500 tonne limit. Evidence to date suggests that sales in the final year will be well down on the proposed limit, as banks decide to hold onto their remaining gold.

The fact that central bank sales have added supply to the market while the gold price has continued to rise over the past 9 years suggests the unfolding bull market is a powerful one. While unelected officials sell their citizens’ gold wealth, individuals are taking matters into their own hands and buying the gold back. We believe this will prove a great trade for the individual, and a poor one for the central banks, with major ramifications.

IMPORTANT: This message, together with the Fat Prophets website and all its contents have been prepared for general information only, and as such, the specific needs, investment objectives or financial situation of any particular user have not been taken into consideration. Individuals should therefore talk with their financial planner or advisor before acting on any information present on this message or the Fat Prophets website. Past performance is not a reliable guide to future performance, and investors should be aware that returns can be negative. For a full explanation of the performance calculation methodology, please visit the Fat Prophets website.               

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curiousmimi asked:

“5″ star boutique hotels or best accomodations, eco lodges, local markets, meet local people, good food, culture sites, suggest itineraries, highlights. Starting point Hanoi, ending Cambodia. Plan to hire driver/guides with excellent references and command of English language:(suggestions ?), take boats and trains. Any and all suggestions welcomed. We are seasoned world travelers and love to “wing it”, get lost, explore, take millions of photos and mostly avoid other tourists ! Please don’t send me shopping; I’ll do that in Paris !
Thanks all !

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Steve Gillman asked:

You may not know this, but there is a lot of buried treasure out there. We’re not talking about pirate treasure, although there is undoubtedly still some of that to be found. This is about the cash and valuables that are buried all over this country. For example, billions of dollars of cash is unaccounted for in bank accounts – far more than what is in our pockets. Some of it is in underground.

Why is there so much buried treasure? Because people like to hide things. There is probably more goodies stashed out there than ever before, for the simple reason that there are more people around. It’s a matter of the numbers. But why would so much remain hidden and waiting for a treasure hunter to find it? That has a simple explanation too: those who buried it are gone.

People forget that they buried things, and move. Some are not able to get at their stash because they’re in prison for a crime – perhaps for life. The most common scenario, though is the saddest: The man or woman who put that treasure in the ground is also in the ground now. We humans die all the time with many untold secrets, and some of those secrets have to do with what we have hidden and where we have hidden it.

Locations For Buried Treasure

It was common in the past, and probably still is common, to bury money and valuables under the edge of driveways, sidewalks and other cement or asphalt slabs. When you suspect such a stash, look for sagging asphalt. Cement won’t sag, but the loosening of the soil allows the softer asphalt to do so with time.

Look for areas that are out of sight of the road or the prying eyes of neighbors. People won’t bury a treasure in the front yard where they can be seen by everyone. Think about where could you dig a hole inconspicuously, and start digging, probing or scanning with your metal detector there.

The scenery may have changed over the years, though so look for evidence of that. Were some trees or bushes cut down? Are the next-door houses new? A location which is in the open now might have been secluded thirty years back.

It has always been common to bury things in gardens. A jar full of money or jewelry can be buried and dug up easily there because of the soft and loosened soil. Keep an eye out for evidence of old garden sites. Scan those areas with the metal detector. Though currency won’t give you signal by itself, it is usually in a jar or coffee can with a metal top.

As children we discovered it’s easy to forget where you buried a treasure after a year passes. This is why it’s common to bury things near easily-remembered “markers.” The classic criminal stash is buried near a sign along the road. There are many things which could be markers. Start with those before searching an open area where a burial spot could be easily forgotten.

Lumps or dips in the surface of a yard can indicate where something was buried. After a hole is filled and leveled off, the soil often settles a bit. A mound may be there if all the soil didn’t fit back in the hole. One thing you should know about this though, is that you might unearth a dead cat or dog by digging under the bumps and dips, so use the metal detector before digging up that buried treasure.

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