Coronavirus reopening: more beaches and parks

Planning a little solo jaunt across the land? If this is your first time planning your virgin solo adventure, I understand completely how excited and nervous you are. I was once in your shoes.

Before you slap on your backpack and march out that door, here’s a small checklist of things you might want to do to ensure a better trip.

Research, Research, Research

It doesn’t matter if you’re headed into uncharted territory or a bustling metropolis, it only helps if you already know what to expect when you set foot in your destination. A quick google search should give you enough information on things like the local culture, geography, weather and political climate to start with. Oh, and do not forget to check out the local laws, either-written and unwritten. People have in the past gotten into trouble for using the wrong gesture or for looking the wrong person in the eye. Did you also know that shaking your head can be interpreted as ‘yes’ in India?

“Hi, would you like to buy some drugs?

– Nervously shakes head –

“Great! Here’s two kilograms of cocaine!”

Kuh-Myoo-Nick-Ashion

Learn a few words and phrases from the local language and the appropriate situations to use them in. You would be surprised at how much a ‘Yallah’ or a ‘Habibi’ can get people to warm up to you in the Middle East. Also, knowing the language makes ordering food that much easier. Just saying.

Who Ya’ Gonna Call?

It’s very useful to have in hand a bunch of contacts that you can get in touch with if-knock on wood- you should ever find yourself in trouble, eg: Your home country’s Embassy/Consulate(stolen passports are a thing in some countries you know?), local emergency numbers etc. If you have friends or relatives in the country/area, make sure you have their numbers as well. There’s no telling what kind of emergency you might encounter on the road.

Link Up With Other Travellers And Locals!

This is for many people, the single greatest reward of solo travel-meeting new people. There’s so much you discover from engaging with people from different cultures and backgrounds. Yes, I’m being captain obvious here, but it’s a point that just had to be reiterated.  Being alive in the internet age has its perks.

A slew of apps and websites have made it that much easier for travelers to get in touch with people at their destinations. It doesn’t matter if you’re just hanging out with your host from ‘AirBnB’ and ‘Couchsurfing’ or finding fellow travelers to share in your adventure from ‘Penroads’, you’re guaranteed to meet some cool people on your journey. As a matter of fact, Penroads is the best way for you to connect with international travellers coming in from all over the world, so it’s definitely a useful tool to have (It’s a shameless plug. I am so sorry. But it really works!).

Stay Healthy!

Last but never the least, take care of your body. Stay hydrated. It’s no good if your mind yells “Onward!” and your body groans “Hell no!”. Find out if you need to get vaccinated before setting off. Carry some basic medicines and bandages if you can, especially if you’re venturing into the wilderness. On occasion you might have to be careful about where and what you eat as well. Talk to someone who has travelled to India and you just might hear the story about how the delicious chicken Tikka from a street vendor gave them a bad case of ‘Delhi Belly’.

Happy tripping!

Parag Murali is the Marketing & Happiness Manager at penroads.com. He combines his love for travelling and people into a daily passion for bringing travellers together. You can contact him at parag@penroads.com for just about anything, so feel free!

My flight was booked! My dream of hiking the Inca Trail, and walking through the sun gate to Machu Picchu was finally becoming a reality. But then, the reality hit me. I have never done an overnight hike before! What do I pack? How do I get into shape? Is it safe? Do I go alone or with a group? As excited as I was, I realized I had a lot of planning ahead of me, but every moment of preparation (and sometimes extreme anxiety) was all worth it. Here are a few tips and tricks that helped me not only survive the Inca Trail, but have the trip of a lifetime!

1. Find an Incredible Tour Group

Before booking my trip, I was not sure how I felt about going with a tour group. I was worried that traveling with a group of strangers would take away from the trip. However, after plenty of research, I decided to go with Active Adventures on the Ultimate Peru Adventure.

Our trip leader was not only full of helpful and interesting information, but became a friend who gave local tips, and made me feel comfortable and safe. I became close friends with my small tour group of 10 people, and still keep in touch with them. Picking a quality tour group like Active Adventures not only helped take the stress out of travelling logistics, but is truly what made my trip an enjoyable experience. (And for all the foodies out there, our Inca Trail chefs were incredible).

2. Get Fit

On the Inca Trail we had people of all ages, sizes, and fitness levels. However, I highly recommend preparing your body a little, and familiarizing yourself with how your body reacts to high altitude. But, don’t worry, you don’t need to an extreme amount of training. To prepare, I went on one to two hikes a week, and did plenty of dog walking. My hikes on average ranged from 3 to 7 miles.

However, as fit as you are, everybody reacts differently to altitude. Try finding a hike in your area that has somewhat of a higher altitude. I only had the opportunity to do one higher altitude hike. It was not as high as the Inca Trail, but it still gave me an idea of how my body feels in high altitude. But don’t stress out too much! Your tour leader has helped many people hike the Inca Trail, and will be there to help you if you start to feel sick, or simply need a little extra motivation.

3. Technology Tools

I am a firm believer in digital detoxing when traveling, but when hiking in the wilderness, it is comforting to know that I have helpful resources at my fingertips if I ever need it. When hiking or traveling, there are always a few resources and apps I like to have on my phone or iTouch to stay safe.

As a traveler, we are more vulnerable to security threats or identity theft on public computers and Wi-Fi. I choose to use a VPN when traveling for Wi-Fi security in hotels, to avoid computer viruses, and to gain access to content that is geo-blocked. For my Inca Trail trek I downloaded the MotionX GPS app. The app supports GPS navigation without the need for cell service. Thankfully our guides kept us on track, but it was comforting knowing that if anything happened, I could use my phone as a backup for navigation help.

4. Make a Visit to Your Doctor

When traveling anywhere, it is important to check in with your doctor. Different regions of the world may require various vaccinations, or medication. Before visiting your doctor, it is also helpful to do a little bit of your own research as to what medications or vaccinations are needed for travel. Your doctor may be familiar with vaccinations needed for Peru, but you are the only person who knows what your trip will consist of. Be sure to mention to your doctor if you are going to the Peruvian Amazon, or high altitude.

For the Inca Trail I recommend packing the following medications:

-Altitude sickness medication (Acetazolamide)

                       -Imodium

                       -Antibiotics (Ciprofloxacin)

                       -Bug spray (not technically a medication, but important to bring as well)

                       -Ibuprofen (always good to have)

This list is most likely what your doctor will recommend as well, but be sure to do your own research as well. You may need malaria pills or certain vaccinations depending on where else your trip is going, or personal previous medical history.

5. Pack Light

The hardest part of my trip (aside from trekking up the stairs of the Inca Trail) was packing! There are several limitations on how much you pack on the Inca Trail in order to maintain that porters are being treated fairly and respectfully. Each porter is limited to carrying 20kg. This includes all blankets, clothes, and the porter’s personal belongings. Talk to your Active Adventure tour guide before leaving on your trip to find out up to date information on how much you are able to pack, and information on sleeping bags and pads.

Aside from packing light, there are of course certain items you will want to pack, depending on the time of year your trek is. I used Her Packing List, along with the information provided by Active Adventures to help me in packing everything I need.

6. Have the Time of Your Life

Last, but not least, be ready to have incredible experiences and memories that will last a life time. When I first booked my trip to Peru and the Inca Trail I had certain expectations and ideas of what the trip would be like. I was looking forward to seeing Machu Picchu, but what I found was that the most memorable and exciting parts of my trip were not necessarily seeing the big tourist spots like Machu Picchu, but the journey getting there, and the unexpected surprises that came along the way. Peru and its people exceeded all expectations, and opened my mind in ways I did not know were possible.

Hi, my name is Jess Signet. My parents were travelers since before I was born. Even in the womb, I was able to travel all over the place! Boy, did things NOT change as I grew older!
Knowing there’s more to the world than the bubble I live in made me want to travel even further. Traveling is my drug and I’m addicted. (Please, no intervention!)

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Filed under: Food and Drink, North America, United States

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Filed under: History, Blogs

A recently-released program called Mosaic was revolutionizing what might be possible on the World Wide Web. "What we hope you'll do," the editor [at O'Reilly Media] said, "is write columns for us - from the road. We'll publish them live, on the GNN [Global Network Navigator, O'Reilly's website], where people can read them as you travel." The Travelers' Center, he told me, would include a feature that sounded miraculous: A map would be displayed on their website, with dots showing the locations from where I'd sent back posts. People would simply click on those dots - and see the story I'd written from that location!

Continue reading Travel Blogging Turns 20 Today

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With their reputations on the line, travel agents Joanne and Gary will tackle any request, no matter how impossible, and any client, no matter how unreasonable. Full of overzealous travelers, overbooked flights, and hoteliers who are just over it, Craving for Travel reminds us why we travel-and everything that can happen when we do.

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Filed under: Asia, Japan, Airlines, News

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• This week's most popular movies on Netflix include its original thriller "Dangerous Lies" and "Den of Thieves."
• Netflix introduced daily top lists of the most popular titles on the service in February.
• Streaming search engine Reelgood keeps track of the lists and provides Business Insider with a rundown of the week's most popular movies on Netflix every Friday.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The Netflix action movie "Extraction" is pacing to be the streaming giant's biggest movie premiere ever, but it was dethroned this week as the service's most popular movie. Another Netflix original, "Dangerous Lies," stole the crown.

Netflix introduced daily top 10 lists of its most viewed movies and TV shows in February (it counts a view if an account watches at least two minutes of a title).

Every week, the streaming search engine Reelgood compiles for Business Insider a list of which movies have been most prominent on Netflix's daily lists that week. On Reelgood, users can browse Netflix's entire movie library and sort by IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes ratings.

This week's list also includes "Den of Thieves," another movie starring Gerard Butler after his "Angel Has Fallen" enjoyed a few weeks on the list.

But the real winner this week is Netflix itself, as five of the seven movies on the list are Netflix originals. 

SEE ALSO: Insiders say major questions hang over DC Universe as its parent company prepares to launch Netflix rival HBO Max

7. "The Willoughbys" (2020 — Netflix original)

Netflix description: "Four siblings with horribly selfish parents hatch a plan to get rid of them for good and form a perfectly imperfect family of their own."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 89%

What critics said: "Though the film-makers are indebted to Edward Gorey and Lemony Snicket — and pay musical homage to Mark Mothersbaugh's work on The Royal Tenenbaums — they find their own voice, when it counts." — London Evening Standard

6. "Murder to Mercy: The Cyntoia Brown Story" (2020 — Netflix original)

Netflix description: "After 16-year-old Cyntoia Brown is sentenced to life in prison, questions about her past, physiology and the law itself call her guilt into question."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 75%

What critics said: "A moving reflection of what criminal justice reform means in personal terms." — New York Times

5. "Arctic Dogs" (2019)

Netflix description: "When he stumbles upon evil Otto Von Walrus's scheme to melt the Arctic, ambitious delivery fox Swifty assembles a ragtag crew to protect the planet."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 13%

What critics said: "There's really not much to recommend about this film: the animation lacks texture, the score is overwrought, the plotting is scattershot, and the character design is uninspired." — AV Club

4. "Den of Thieves" (2018)

Netflix description: "A highly skilled crew of bank robbers plotting a heist at the supposedly impenetrable Federal Reserve faces off against an elite unit of L.A. cops."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 41%

What critics said: "It often resembles a men's rights bonding weekend more than it does a movie." — Guardian

3. "Extraction" (2020 — Netflix original)

Netflix description: "A hardened mercenary's mission becomes a soul-searching race to survive when he's sent into Bangladesh to rescue a drug lord's kidnapped son."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 68%

What critics said: "Illustrates an important principle in escapist entertainment: you don't have to one-up your predecessors. Sometimes, it's enough to replicate what made them successful." — Newsday

2. "All Day and a Night" (2020 — Netflix original)

Netflix description: "While serving life in prison, a young man looks back at the people, the circumstances and the system that set him on the path toward his crime."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 56%

What critics said: "'All Day and a Night' lingers and sometimes meanders in that gray zone, where the story can accrue texture and feeling and emerge as more than the sum of its plot mechanics." — Los Angeles Times

1. "Dangerous Lies" (2020 — Netflix original)

Netflix description: "A broke caregiver unexpectedly inherits her patient's estate, but dark secrets swirl around her newfound wealth, tangling her in deceit and danger."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 39%

What critics said: "Looks like it cost the amount of your monthly Netflix subscription and is as satisfying to watch as it is paying that particular bill." — Globe and Mail

Many companies use the term artificial intelligence, or AI, as a way to generate excitement for their products and to present themselves as on the cutting edge of tech development.

But what exactly is artificial intelligence? What does it involve? And how will it help the development of future generations?

Find out the answers to these questions and more in AI 101, a brand new FREE report from Business Insider Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, that describes how AI works and looks at its present and potential future applications.

To get your copy of the FREE slide deck, simply click here.

Join the conversation about this story »

• NASA engineers are continuing to drive the Mars Curiosity Rover while working from home.
• The job is highly technical and delicate, but the team has already managed to complete a successful operation under lockdown.
• Business Insider asked two of the rover team how they manage their work-life balance now the rover has colonised their living space.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Life during lockdown has meant millions of people having to adapt to their home and work lives colliding. But what's that like when your work involves driving a nuclear-powered robot on the surface of Mars?

Business Insider spoke to two of the NASA technicians currently piloting the Mars Curiosity rover from home. It's a delicate operation that takes careful planning between a team of roughly 75 NASA engineers and scientists. Even while working remotely, the team was able to rig up their home workstations well enough that the rover has already completed a successful drilling operation while its human operators are in lockdown.

Despite doing the most otherworldly job imaginable, the Curiosity rovers are having to contend with familiar stresses of lockdown working life. They told Business Insider their personal tips and tricks for staying focused and healthy as they work from home.

Get comfy

Matt Gildner is the planning team lead for the rover, which means he directs a team of about 20 people who build the commands to send the rover to tell it where to go and what to do. Gildner's day involves staying permanently teleconferenced in to conversations using two headsets, one in each ear. A few times a day he also uses red-blue 3D glasses to examine images sent back by the rover.

His first change to his work-from-home set-up: Get a better chair. "The first week I got here I had an old wooden bank chair that while it looked really nice next to my desk, [was] not very comfortable," said Gildner. He quickly swapped this out for a more comfortable ergonomic chair. He and his wife are also making cold-brew coffee every night, ready to go in the morning.

Make sure you're seeing some kind of change

Gildner's also trying to make sure he doesn't stay glued to his ergonomic chair, making it a point to get up and moving around. "It's really about just getting up and stepping away from the desk for a while," Gildner said. This could be to just go to the kitchen to get a snack or, in Gildner's case, tend to some home baking projects.

"I was already baking some bread before this all happened, but I did kind of up my game in that area," he said. Specifically Gildner (a fan of the YouTube cooking channel "Bon Appetit") has started experimenting with overnight dough fermentation.

"It's nice to go and have something new to see every morning that changed overnight, or you get to see something progress," he said. "That's an important part of mental health and this point in time — to make sure you are having something in your life that is life-changing and dynamic despite your being in the same place."

He draws a parallel between this and his work on the rover. "That is one of the big draws of working a spacecraft operation, especially on Mars, is that every day we're driving to a new place and I get to look at images that no human has ever seen before. And Mars is always throwing us something new."

Keep a firm line between work time and downtime

"I also tend to really shut my computer down and put my phone away for work at the end of the day, just because I want to still try to keep some good separation between work life and home life, even though they're happening in the same place right now," Gildner said.

Project lead Alicia Allbaugh, who oversees the entire team of 75, also likes to draw a clear line between home and work life. She also recommends "not blending home tasks during your work time."

"I try not to deviate too much from what I would've done at work. Because then it can get you distracted and you start pulling away," she said.

Allbaugh also had to divvy up parts of the house with her husband, who also works at NASA. The two didn't want to work in adjacent rooms because they might hear each other's teleconferences through the walls, so Allbaugh works upstairs while her husband gets the kitchen, along with the couple's two rescue bunnies Oreo and Grayce.

In her free time Allbaugh has been tinkering with home improvements, and finished a long-standing project of painting and varnishing some linen-closet doors.

Respect other people's rhythms

As manager of a large team, Allbaugh also has to be sensitive to the fact that everyone has different daily rhythms working from home, especially those with children. Sudden mutes in meetings for children talking and clocks chiming have become the norm.

"We're all very empathetic for each other. I mean we find this adorable. We're not frustrated, whereas if someone came in and interrupted your meeting when you were in the conference room, you may have been like, 'What was that about?'" said Allbaugh.

Keep up the social side of the office

Allbaugh's team has also tried to keep social elements of their office going through virtual happy hours, and she has set up open-office tea break meetings so her team can just come in for a chat, which she thinks is important to keep up even as the lockdown drags on. "Because at first it's novel, and then it's okay — now it's a marathon," she said.  

SEE ALSO: NASA engineers explain what it's like to drive a nuclear-powered Mars rover from home during the pandemic

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: A cleaning expert reveals her 3-step method for cleaning your entire home quickly

Members of the Joint Operational Committee in Tshwane is in self-isolation after one member tested positive for Covid-19, spokesperson Brigadier Vishnu Naidoo has told News24.

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