American teenager arrested after illegally flying to Antarctica
Authorities in Chile allege Ethan Guo, 19, broke 'multiple national and international regulations' after changing a flight plan without informing officials and landing in part of the Antarctic where it has a territorial claim.
'I want to become the first person in history to fly solo to all seven continents in a small aircraft and raise $1 million for cancer research,' Mr Guo writes on his website.
He adds: 'In 2021 my cousin was diagnosed with cancer. I admire him. He inspired me to take life more seriously and join the fight against cancer.'
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Telegraph
10 hours ago
- Telegraph
American teenager arrested after illegally flying to Antarctica
An American teenager who is trying to fly solo to all seven continents in order to raise money for cancer research, has been arrested after landing in Antarctica without permission. Authorities in Chile allege Ethan Guo, 19, broke 'multiple national and international regulations' after changing a flight plan without informing officials and landing in part of the Antarctic where it has a territorial claim. 'I want to become the first person in history to fly solo to all seven continents in a small aircraft and raise $1 million for cancer research,' Mr Guo writes on his website. He adds: 'In 2021 my cousin was diagnosed with cancer. I admire him. He inspired me to take life more seriously and join the fight against cancer.'
Times
12 hours ago
- Times
This is officially Europe's best cycle path
Many, many years ago, when I was just starting out along the travel writing path, I secured a berth on MS Juno, which murmurs along Sweden's Gota Canal between Gothenburg and Stockholm. This luxurious period piece has the reputation of being the Orient Express of sweetwater cruising, with a big emphasis on gastronomy, and I remember spending a lot of time at the dining table tucking into the likes of reindeer and Arctic char. I remember, too, being bewitched by the world beyond the portholes. Sweden's pastoral backyard was a storybook landscape of gossamer morning mists, of wildflowered meadows, of little Pippi Longstocking summerhouses, where apple-cheeked blondes sang to their babies while their dungareed menfolk tried to keep a handbrake on spring. At the locks, dusky red-painted wooden cafés served coffee and homemade cinnamon buns, children draped each other in daisy chains and families readied their kayaks for adventure. It was all rather charming and wholesome. At the time, I remember gazing at this unravelling landscape rather wistfully, wishing that I could freeze-frame the boat trip for a day or so and get off, to get to grips with the waterside in a less passive, more hands-on kind of way. Well, fast forward a couple of decades or three and I am back again on the Gota Canal, this time doing exactly that, and with my own apple-cheeked other half. Moreover, it's not just personal wish-fulfilment, because the canal's towpath has recently been declared the European Cycle Route of the Year at Fiets en Wandelbeurs, an annual Dutch cycling and hiking fair. The whole Gota route stitches together several big lakes. We had a plan to cycle over three days from its start at Sjotorp on the eastern edge of Lake Vanern to Karlsborg on the western side of Lake Vattern, roughly midway. We would be covering an average of 20 miles a day on sturdy hybrid bikes provided by our guesthouse for the first two nights, an elegant former vicarage called Prastgarden in the canalside town of Toreboda. • Discover our full guide to Sweden The canal is one of a tradition of nation-crossing waterways, like the Kiel Canal in Germany and the Canal du Midi in France, and when it was completed in 1832 it immediately had strategic significance in getting valuable freight and military hardware from one side of the country to the other without having to pass under anyone else's guns. These days, however, it is entirely given over to recreation, and is a considerable source of national pride, not least because digging out its 120 miles was a huge endeavour, involving 58,000 soldiers and an awful lot of wheelbarrows. The crew included a tough band of Scots brought over by our very own Thomas Telford, creator of the Scotland-crossing Caledonian Canal, whose expertise was engaged by the canal's driving force, the Swedish naval officer Count Baltzar von Platen. All of this can be gleaned from multilingual signposts along the canal's bank, and in historic buildings dotted along its length. • Europe's best active escapes We had our first fika — coffee and a cinnamon bun — in an antique wooden warehouse by the harbourside in Sjotorp, where the canal proper begins on the eastern shore of Lake Vanern, and where the good folk from Prastgarden had deposited us with our bikes. There's a canal museum upstairs, but the downstairs Café Baltzar feels like a museum piece too, sitting under chandeliers at a lace-covered table overlooked by a portrait of the count himself ( Fortified by the count's buns, we set off on the towpath, enveloped by birdsong, and ticking off the ells. When the canal was built, the ell was a common unit of measurement, and not just for cloth. Numbered stones are placed along the canal every 1,000 ells, which equates to about 600 metres — an ideal distance to convince cyclists that they are going 'ell for leather. • The best of adventure travel The canal winds through a mix of woodlands and wheat fields, celebrated at regular intervals by salvos of lupins in blues, purples and pinks. There are freshly painted roll-across bridges and lock systems, usually with a cluster of onlookers gathering to exchange greetings with boats passing through. Here too are the little wooden houses with summerhouses I remembered, although no more men in dungarees: instead robomowers graze slowly across the lawns, looking like fat rabbits, but that's about the only concession to the passing of time. After about 16 miles of canalside cycling we got back to Toreboda, welcomed into the town by a long gallery of paintings along the water's edge, backed by a succession of designer bungalows whose gardens were open to the towpath. When I mentioned to the Prastgarden's co-owner Yvonne Branfelt how unfenced-off everything seemed, she said people didn't need to lock their doors in Toreboda. Apart from when word went round that one particular well-known bad apple was out of prison. Next day we were back on the towpath for a couple of hours before the canal debouched into a smaller intermediary lake, Viken. Here the cycle route veers away into farmland, forest and fields of wheat, tracking the lake's outline from a distance along a network of gravel roads. • The UK's best cycling trails Secreted among the woodlands were holiday cabins, some elaborate, some primitive, but every one a private paradise. One had a little self-serve kiosk selling mostly knitted goods, which answered my unspoken question: what do people do here in the winter? That day was a tougher 40 miles, and my apple-cheeked companion was getting a bit Granny Smith by the time we reached Forsvik, where the canal does a short sprint between lakes Viken and Vattern. Here the drop between the two — and the resulting waterpower — has been instrumental to the success of a long line of industries, starting back in the 1400s with a sawmill and flour mill, and moving on more recently to smithy and iron foundry, all on the same patch of lakeside. They needed a lot of manpower, those industries, and today the Vandrarhem worker's apartments, where we stayed that night, have been transformed into tourist accommodation, in a timewarp of old coal ranges and period furniture. Walking out from here among the ghosts of old factories felt like a walk through Sweden's social history. From Forsvik it was a relatively short ten-mile ride on our final day to Karlsborg, a settlement originally created as Sweden's reserve capital, inland and up the canal, in case coastal Stockholm came under attack. There we were planning a visit to its castle, before setting off back to Gothenburg for our flight home. That short morning's cycle was different again from the previous day, being mainly through a pine forest completely carpeted in bilberries. The low sun shone stroboscopically through the trees, silhouetting deer that stood motionless as we passed, but bolted when we stopped to take a picture. At Karlsborg, it seemed a bit premature to bring the trip to an end with plenty of canal remaining, but it was a natural break, with more ungainly shaped lakes to be circumvented ahead before the waterway proper began again. All in all it was a very wholesome three days, along a carefully curated route, in a fresh climate that was neither too hot nor too cold. My only disappointment was that we didn't meet my old friend Juno somewhere along the way; she was plying her trade two days ahead of us. So I look forward to draping her with daisy chains when we eventually return to the Gota, having saved the eastern half of the cycle route for another Eames was a guest of West Sweden ( and Visit Sweden ( The Prastgarden guesthouse has two nights' half-board from £484pp, including bike hire ( Fly to Gothenburg then take the train to Toreboda and Karlsborg (
Daily Mail
19 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Race Against the World winner reveals paradise destination tourists 'don't know about' - and it's only 50 minutes from a major destination
A former winner of BBC One's Race across the World has shared his latest adventure - to a paradise island that is still off the tourist map. Alfie Watts, who won the 2024 series of the hit travel show with his St Albans pal Owen Wood, posted shots of azure blue ocean and swaying palms from his latest adventure. He captioned one of the dreamy holiday images with the line: 'I cannot believe more people don't know about this place'. Watts, who ended his triumphant reality show run by reaching Lombok in Indonesia, was back in the South East Asian country that helped shoot him to fame this week. However, this time he was on an island that gets just 10,000 British visitors a year - small fry if you consider 17.8 million UK tourists make it to Spain. He'd landed on Bindan Island, which has been dubbed ' Asia 's best kept secret' by those who've discovered its charms. Sharing snaps of himself in traditional dress and jet-skiing around the island's coastline, Alfie gushed about his latest pitstop. The backpacker said: 'From sea turtle conservation to some of the cheapest jet skiing in the world, I genuinely cannot believe more people don't know about this incredible place!' He added that the island, which is just a 50-minute boat ride from international travel hub Singapore, 'should ABSOLUTELY be on your travel bucket list!' Although more than three times larger in size than Singapore, around 5.4 million fewer people reside on this island, with most of its 340,000 population centred around the capital, Tanjung Pinang. Over the last few years, Indonesia has been promoting Bintan as its next big tourist destination after Bali. The island has beautiful beaches for bathing and lush rainforests for trekking and its capital city is a lively metropolis to explore. Other attractions included the mangrove forests of the Sebung River, hiking in Gunung Bintan, where you can spot rare breeds such as silvered leaf monkeys. There's also the option to take a boat to Senggarang, a Chinese fishing village with houses on stilts, which is home to a 200-year-old Banyan tree (a popular pilgrimage site for Buddhists). Meanwhile Penyengat has old Dutch forts and palaces, and the Sultan of Riau's Grand Mosque. One of Alfie's photos showed him spending time at a desert themed glamping resort close to Lagoi on the island Tourists can swap Bali for Bintan, pictured, which has beautiful beaches for bathing and lush rainforests for trekking Back in April, Alfie revealed his two favourite countries to MailOnline - Jordan and Malaysia. The travel content creator said: 'I took my Nan to Petra because she'd wanted to see it for her whole life, so that was really nice, and the whole feeling around the trip was just really positive. 'The people in Jordan are just so friendly as well. And Malaysia is also a favourite, because it's just a cheap paradise. 'But my single favourite place in the world has to be Angel Falls in Venezuela. 'They're the tallest waterfall in the world, but they're completely off grid, and a nightmare to get to.' When it comes to his least favourite country, Alfie finds it hard to single one out, but he admits Cambodia was the country he 'disliked the most', having stopped there during Race Across the World. 'I just didn't get along with it at all,' he says. 'I found the people quite unfriendly, and Cambodia is in southeast Asia, which obviously means that it's surrounded by Thailand and Malaysia, which are so top that I just don't think it comes close. 'But a lot of people disagree, and love Cambodia, so I think I'm objectively wrong with this opinion!' Another place many people love, but Alfie found to be overrated is Sydney. He says: 'Yeah, it looks all right, but it's very expensive, and I just didn't catch the hype. I was really looking forward to it, and it was just a bit average. 'Everywhere felt like it was trying too hard, and the whole hipster thing was just coming across a bit too much. 'I do need to go back and explore more of Australia though, because Sydney is the only place I've been.'
