Surfing The Web: Roller Coasters, Baby Elephants, Tips For The Travel Weary

A Shiny New Ride Above the Sand at the Jersey Shore

The repercussions of the shocking destruction wreaked by Hurricane Sandy late in 2012, is still being felt along the eastern seaboard of the United States, with some damaged infrastructure still waiting to be permanently fixed. Just in time for the coming summer season, one of these rebuilt projects sees the replacement to one of the Jersey Shore's most famous attractions. Nick Corasaniti takes up the story for the New York Times.

SEASIDE HEIGHTS, N.J. — It was one of the indelible images of the wrath of Hurricane Sandy: a famous Jersey Shore roller coaster reduced to a twisted, mangled wreck in the surf off Seaside Heights, its decades-old iron and steel slicing the coming waves.

It was removed months later, but the gash along the coast remained for years, the emptiness above the rehabilitated pier an ever-present reminder of the worst natural disaster to strike New Jersey in decades.

Now, perhaps quicker than some expected, there is a new coaster where the old one once stood. And this one is different. Gone are the classic dips and turns of the rickety old Jet Star, the thundering vibrations of its cars rippling through the boardwalk wood.

In its place is a shiny new ride that looks as if it was plucked from the fields in nearby Jackson, where the Six Flags Great Adventure theme park sprawls for acres. Called the Hydrus, it is a twisted green behemoth, featuring a steep inverted drop, a full loop and two more inversions. The coaster’s new tracks run eerily silent, the faint hums of the rail car often drowned out by the high-pitched squeals of riders.

Read the full story here...

Kenyans Work To Save Baby Elephants

Back in March, in a piece about ending the slaughter of elephants I wrote about the ongoing campaign to protect these magnificent creatures from poachers. The following article from the HuffPost continues the positive news about this vital fight.

“We take care of the elephants, and the elephants are taking care of us.” Jesselyn Cook, World News Reporter, HuffPost

Had the members of northern Kenya’s Samburu tribe encountered an injured or abandoned baby elephant a year ago, they likely would have left it to die. Today, with the support of the Reteti Elephant Sanctuary, locals are working to save endangered calves.

Photojournalist Ami Vitale traveled to the baby elephant orphanage to document community relations with the animals for National Geographic. Reteti opened in August as part of a network of community groups in the region working to foster sustainable development and wildlife conservation. Elephant keepers there try to rehabilitate wounded calves and reunite them with their herds, when possible.

Elephants are ecosystem “engineers,” Vitale notes. They feed on low brush and bulldoze small trees, which promotes the growth of grasses and attracts other grazing animals.
But ivory poachers have caused elephant numbers to dwindle, with the African elephant population plummeting by more than 110,000 over the past decade, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. At least 33,000 elephants are killed for their tusks annually.

Read the full story here...

Travel Fatigue: 10 Tips for Road-Weary Travelers

My go to website for the Solo Traveller which I thought might be useful for those travellers who enjoy the luxury of extended travel.

To travel alone for two or three weeks is one thing. But to travel alone for two or three (or five or ten) months is quite another. It takes a different attitude and a different pace. And even when you do it well, it can result in you becoming road-weary.

Travel fatigue is a kind of rattled feeling. It’s a need for stability and a wish for home. Fortunately, there are things other than returning home that you can do to feel good. 

Among the eleven suggestions:

• Stay still: that is, settle into one place for a while.
• Settle where you can speak the language: the rationale is that you will feel more relaxed if you are not constantly struggling with language. Of course, if you are trying to learn the language of the country you are visiting, then the best way to do that is to immerse yourself in the life of the country you are in and work on those language skills.
• Repeat yourself: return to a city you’ve already visited and loved.

Read the full article here…

Ending The Elephant Slaughter

Intercepting poachers at Lewa Conservancy.

I have never understood the attraction of hunting, either for profit or for adventure. I do of course understand the need for hunting if your personal survival depends on it. I also understand that many native populations around the world still rely on hunting wild game to supplement their diets, even if they have access to modern food sources. However, it is rare, if not completely unheard of for native populations who hunt wild game to indiscriminately slaughter large numbers of wild animals simply for ‘sport’ or ‘adventure’.

I was shocked to read recently that the Convention on The Trade in Endangered Species estimates that at least 20,000 elephants were killed for ivory in 2015. In fact, there are now fears that more elephants are being slaughtered each year than are being born. Needless to say, it is impossible to know exactly how many elephants are dying each year at the hands of criminal poaching gangs.

In 2016, the Great Elephant Census indicated that poachers slaughtered nearly 30% of East Africa’s savanna elephants from 2007 to 2014, some 144,000 animals. Poachers also killed nearly two-thirds of central Africa’s forest elephants between 2002 and 2013. Currently, fewer than 400,000 elephants are believed to remain in 18 sub-Saharan countries. While this figure may seem large, when elephants are being slaughtered at the rate 20,000+ creatures a year, it doesn’t take a brilliant mathematician to work out that at the current rate of slaughter, Africa’s wild elephant population could be extinct in twenty years.

Thankfully, there are organisations and people prepared to do whatever they can to minimize—even if they cannot completely end—this wild life slaughter. One of these people is the philanthropist (and former co-founder of Microsoft), Paul Allen, who has funded a new high tech anti-poaching system known as the Domain Awareness System (DAS). Responding to the elephant poaching crisis in the Great Elephant Census report, Allen and his team of technologists and conservation experts are partnering with park managers across Africa to provide the new technology to help protect this iconic species and other wildlife threatened by human activities. 

(Stock image). Credit: © jhvephoto / Fotolia

The Domain Awareness System aggregates the positions of radios, vehicles, aircraft and animal sensors to provide users with a real-time dashboard that depicts the wildlife being protected, the people and resources protecting them, and the potential illegal activity threatening them.

Other high tech tools that are helping in this vital fight are satellites, drones, camera traps, animal sensors, weather monitors and eventually new technology yet to be invented. The new technology also helps take the guess work out of the anti-poaching fight. With real-time data at their fingertips, park rangers can respond quickly and effectively to catch poachers before they wreak havoc on elephant herds and other wild game. 

Sadly, however, it is not just the wild game that are threatened by poachers. Each year, heavily armed poaching gangs kill dozens of park rangers across Africa’s numerous game reserves. The Game Ranger website reports that, “More than 1,000 rangers have been killed worldwide and many more injured over the last 10 years.” Clearly, the stakes are high for both the wild life and their human protectors, so anything that can help reduce the human and animal death toll is to be applauded—which brings us back to the Domain Awareness System. 

The system has been installed at six protected wildlife conservation sites since November 2016. Working with Save the Elephants, African Parks Network, Wildlife Conservation Society, and the Singita Grumeti Fund as well as the Lewa Conservancy and Kenya’s Northern Rangelands Trust, a total of 15 locations are expected to adopt the system this year.

When the system is fully operational by the end of 2017, it will cover more than 90,000 square miles of protected area. An ongoing consortium of conservation NGOs, government partners, and technology companies, is working with Paul Allen's team to integrate DAS with software used in nearly 500 sites across 46 countries to measure, evaluate and improve the effectiveness of wildlife law enforcement patrols and onsite conservation activities.

One can only hope that the combined forces—human and technological—arrayed against the illegal trade in elephant tusks, can put an effective end to this criminal practice before it is too late.

Here is a short video outlining how the Domain Awareness System works in practice:

More Information

Great Elephant Census...

Convention on The Trade in Endangered Species... 

Study: Legalizing ivory trade won’t save elephants…

Game Rangers Association of Africa…