Going for a stress-free travel

Whether you are going on business or pleasure,traveling can be very stressful. Tension can start from the planning stage up to the time you are leaving. However, stress does not have to ruin your business or vacation. These simple tips are guaranteed to help you get rid of that travel stress bug.

Plan ahead
There is no replacing good planning. To ensure that your travel will be stress-free, make sure that your flights and hotel accommodations are booked and confirmed. This will put you at ease knowing that delays are unlikely and there will be no surprises at the hotel desk.

If you arrange for transportation for the duration of your travel, all the better. In case, you will have to get around the city by taxi, it is good to ask the concierge to help you find a reputable taxi company.

Be prepared to get lost
Remember that you are on a foreign land and unless you have already traveled there a couple of time, you’ll have no way of knowing how to get around. Becoming lost is probably the biggest nightmare for travelers.

Before embarking on your trip, buy a travel book with maps and some useful phrases that you can use with the locals. Carry with you a credit card, identification papers and enough money to get around the city in case you get lost. It is also a good idea to ask your hotel for a business card which you can show to locals when you ask for directions.

By acknowledging that you can get lost, you can better prepare and be ready for anything.

Keep the communication open
Nothing can be a better stress-buster than staying connected with your family when traveling. With today’s technology, communication is increasingly more available. People who travel can now keep in touch through cellular phones, emails and text messages. Rates in international phone calls are also cheaper now than before.

Reward yourself
Do not procrastinate. If on a business travel, make sure that you have done all your work before you go sightseeing. Set aside a day where all you can do is travel to different sights in the city. If your schedule is spread out, make sure that you have ample time to go somewhere. It will also help to make out an itinerary of places to see. You can always ask the hotel to help you with that.

Eat local cuisine
Eating can minimize travel stress! So, treat yourself to local foods and stay away from your usual staple of burger, spaghetti and cola. Be adventurous and have fun in local restaurants. Before leaving, you can ask people who already traveled in the country if they can recommend any restaurants. Hotel personnel can also help you immensely. When you’re there, don’t hesitate to ask for the house specialty and enjoy!

Keep a travel journal
Writing down your experiences during your travel will not only preserves the memories, it will also help you relieve stress. Describe the sights that you have seen, the places that you have been to, even the people you have met. Get small keepsakes from each experience, a napkin from the restaurant where you have eaten, a receipt from a souvenir shop, a bus ticket going to a special place. This will keep the magic of your travel with you.

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Sherpa Tenzing Norgay

The world had its glory at any mountaineer, the first on the summit of the highest mountain in the world, but for Tenzing Norgay is a special honor for this achievement.

Over a period of about twenty years ago, they are part of each broadcast to bind a man at the summit of the mountain. Everest. He climbed as a gatekeeper and modest as a respected member of the team to climb. He had a total confident armies (1936 1953) 1947, on the likelihood that the same Could him the opportunity to focus on the summit. In 1953, he probably had more time on Mount Sinai. Everest than any other human being - and has at its peak. Only a few months before his successful ascent by Edmund Hillary, Raymond M. Lambert and the Swiss expedition of 1952, was up to 1000 feet of the summit - the highest point in the world, everything has achieved until then. Unlike most of his colleagues Sherpas from the time around, in the whole of the escalation was just a way of making a life difficult, Tenzing desperately wanted at the summit of the mountain. Everest and has spent most of his life to this goal. "Because in my heart," he said, "I need ... the attractiveness of Everest was for me more than any power on earth." If ever there was someone who deserved it, in the first place, he was Tenzing.

But there are other reasons why it was that the honor, along with Sir Edmund Hillary. Until the Second World War, most countries in Asia have been under the domination of the West. At the beginning of 1950, its residents finally felt their own strength and identity, and Tenzing, the achievement of a goal that everyone recognizes as one of the highest, if a convergence point for a new kind of pride and a new vision of the future . "For millions in the world today," wrote James Ramsay Ullman, shortly after the climb, Tenzing "is an event of divinity: an avatar of Lord Siva, a reincarnation of the Buddha. For millions of others still too high for the people to be confused with God, it is a mortal figure highest importance. Symbolically, so literally, Tenzing on Mount Everest was a man against the sky, almost modest, was the first in Asia in history to reach, the World Bank and stature of world renown . for other Asians And his masterpiece was not responsible for the escalation of a mountain, but a good omen for themselves and for the future of our world. "


Tenzing birth may have been modest, as Ullman says, but he also had the good fortune to portents. His parents lived in the high mountain village in Nepal Thame, but at the time of his birth, his mother was in the sanctuary in a holy place called Lha Ghang in eastern Nepal.
Tenzing, whose name has been changed, from a large Namgyal Lama Wangdi is the name that we know him today ( "Norgay" means "happiness"), himself a chance to have believed in favor. He knew the beginning of His life, no matter whether they are about their fate tend yaks in the high mountains, and in the moment when he was 13, already has a secret trip in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal. Five years later, he took over Relocated (again without the permission of their parents) in Darjeeling, India, where he hopes to be able to participate in one of the expeditions in the British Mt Everest was organized. Nepal at the time was closed to foreigners, which means that all the tests were on the north side of the mountain. 1921, the British drew on Darjeeling Sherpa's strong support of the population to get the Mount Everest and the 'climbing.


With a bit of a trématode, Tenzing is about Eric Shipton's Everest Expedition 1935. It was at the time 19 and newly married - Phuti Dawa, a girl who lives in Darjeeling Sherpa. His performance in its ascent was such that he had no difficulty, set to become next British Everest expeditions in 1936 and 1938. When the Second World War ended the series, the official Everest expeditions, he is convinced, is secretly Earl Denman affected by Tibet to do what he knew was a little wild and pressure to reach the summit.


Dawa Phuti had died in 1944, he remaria a year later, Ang Lahmu, another Sherpa. Big-time Everest climb had been suspended during the Second World War, but Tenzing not stop climbing. Although his name is indelibly with Everest, he also took part in the expeditions of the Nanda Devi India, Pakistan Tirich Mir and Nanga Parbat, as well as Nepal and India Lang Tang area of Garwhal, where he was teammates and make the first pitch. In 1948, he, together with the famous Giuseppe Tucci Tibetologist at the archaeological excavations in Tibet, and in all likelihood, was one of the few people they deal with the irascible and eccentric scientists.


Nevertheless, it was the Everest, in which he mainly was interested. In a world that at the end of the war, Nepal opened its borders to foreigners in the same time that the Chinese invasion of Tibet closed the northern road. The British had longer the monopoly on Mount Everest attempts and Tenzing in 1952, was asked to Switzerland to achieve, not only as a member of the crew of Sherpa, but as a fellow climber, the two trials are the first on the summit. This is the first of these Tenzing reached the 28250 feet (just 778 feet below the summit), with Lambert. The second, in the winter, the attempt failed because of bad weather.

The British believed that 1953 was the last chance to be adopted at the first summit of Everest, and threw their plans in the aftermath, with the less fortunate. Luck is of course a factor, but it is perhaps more of a willingness to look at the best chances of success has caused their place at the summit Tenzing team with Hillary. On one end, it is also a triumph for Tenzing (for Asia), as for the British, he won this honor with his crew in New Zealand.

After Everest, what? It is difficult to think that to a greater glory, whether in the field of mountain climbing and others. And after they conquered the highest mountain in the world, the objective is to the left with dreaming?


If he is elected or not, is now Tenzing world. He has received numerous awards and was celebrated, among other things, by the state and government leaders of the world and heads of state. (The Nehru family came to visit Darjeeling, and there's a photo of them at home - which includes three generations of a meeting of the Prime Minister and three future prime minister.) He was everywhere in the world and has much to travel. It will be the first director of the newly founded city Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, a position he held during 22 years. He called the big house Darjeeling, which was paid to him by drawing public "Ghang Lha", a name of the family is of particular importance because of his connection with his birth.

He has in his new life with grace, and yet it was not always easy for him. It was a political symbol, which he unverschuldet in the controversy is not understood or environment. He was a simple man who loved life and is a simple and direct. He has never felt uncomfortable in a world where people are accustomed to use, which are their own purposes.

After Ang Lhamu died in 1964, he married Daku, a girl from Darjeeling, whose family from his home in Nepal. One of her three sons, Jamling, was followed in the footsteps of his father, at the summit of the mountain. Everest in 1996.

Tenzing died in 1986. The procession, after his funeral bier has more than one kilometre long.

that same year he married his cousin Elsa Louvain Thal, death, in 1936. He died on April 18, 1955 in Princeton, New Jersey.

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Some beekeepers of the World Explorer

Sir Edmund Hillary, who was born in 1919 and grew up in Auckland, New Zealand. He was in New Zealand, he has concerned and mountaineering. Although his life as a beekeeper, he climbed mountains in New Zealand, then in the Alps, and finally, in the Himalayas, where he climbed 11 summits of more than 20000 metres. At that time, Hillary was ready to join the highest mountain in the world.

Mt Everest is situated between Tibet and Nepal. Between 1920 and 1952, seven major expeditions had failed to reach the summit. In 1924, the famous mountaineer George Leigh-Mallory, in the first trial. During the year 1952, a team of mountaineers Swiss was forced to return after reaching the southern tip, at 1000 metres from the summit.

Edmund Hillary and education was Everest expeditions in 1951 and again in the year 1952. These uses Hillary has attracted the attention of Sir John Hunt, head of a mission sponsored by the Joint Committee of the Himalayas Alpine Club of Great Britain and the Royal Geographic Society, for the attack on Everest in 1953.

The expedition reached the summit of the South in May, but all but two mountaineers, who most constrained by the exhaustion of height. Finally, Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, a native Nepali mountaineer who participated in five previous Everest-Tours, were the only members of the party, which is capable, the latest attack on the summit. The 11.30 on the morning of May 29, 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit 29,028 feet above sea level, the highest point on Earth. As notable, given that the performance of the achievement of the Summit was the climb treacherous resume his head.

Coincidentally, the conquest of Mount Everest was announced that the British public on the eve of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The triumph of a British expedition, conducted in conjunction with the inauguration of the young queen has done much to restore the confidence of a nation tired of long years of war and post-war needs time. Edmund Hillary returned to England with other climbers and Queen was awarded a knighthood.

Now famous, Sir Edmund Hillary was exploration of Antarctica and New Zealand began the portion of the Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1955 to 1958. In 1958, he took part in the first expedition to the South Pole mechanized. Hillary went to the mountains to organize more shipments, but as the years passed, he became increasingly interested in the welfare of the Nepalese people. In the 1960's, he returned to Nepal in the Help Center for the Development of Society, construction of clinics, hospitals and schools 17.

In order to facilitate these projects, two airstrips built. These airstrips had the unintended consequence will bring more tourists and aspirants remote mountain in the region. The Nepali put more of their forests for fuel for mountaineers. Edmund Hillary was concerned by the deterioration of the environment in the Nepali Himalayas, and convinced the government, laws on the protection of forests and explain the region around Everest National Park. The Nepali can not afford to finance this project, and he himself had no experience in the management of the park. Hillary took advantage of his great prestige for the government of New Zealand to the need for aid.

As a result of the success of the Expedition Everest, Hillary and Sir John Hunt has published his account of the expedition, the ascent of Everest. This book was published in the United States as "The Conquest of Everest. Sir Edmund Hillary's autobiography Nothing Venture, Nothing Win, in 1975, was published. In 1979, he published by the ocean to the sky, an account his expedition in 1977, from the mouth of his visit to Its source in the Himalayas.

Sir Edmund life has been overshadowed by the loss of his wife and daughter in a plane crash in 1975. He continued to occupy, environmental and humanitarian causes, on behalf of the Nepali people for the rest of his life. He died at home in New Zealand at the age of 88, betrauert of his compatriots and legions of fans all over the world.

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Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay

By today's standards, the 1953 British expedition, under the military-style leadership of Sir John Hunt, was massive in the extreme, but in an oddly bottom-heavy way: 350 porters, 20 Sherpas, and tons of supplies to support a vanguard of only ten climbers. "Our climbers were all chosen as potential summiters," recalls George Band, 73, who was one of the party. Fifty years later, Band's memory of the campaign remains undimmed. "The basic plan was for two summit attempts, each by a pair of climbers, with a possible third assault if necessary. On such expeditions the leader tends to designate the summit pairs quite late during the expedition, when he sees how everybody is performing." Anxiety over who is chosen for the summit team would be a hallmark of major Everest expeditions for decades to come. But never again would the stakes be quite so high.
By the spring of 1953, the ascent of the world's highest mountain was beginning to seem inevitable. First attempted in 1921 by the British, Everest had repulsed at least ten major expeditions and two lunatic solo attempts. With the 1950 discovery of a southern approach to the mountain in newly opened Nepal, and the first ascent of the treacherous Khumbu Icefall the following year, what would come to be known by the 1990s as the "yellow brick road" to the summit had been identified.
At first it seemed the Swiss would claim the prize. In 1952 a strong Swiss team that included legendary alpinist Raymond Lambert had pioneered the route up the steep Lhotse Face and reached the South Col. From that high, broad saddle, Lambert and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay then pushed all the way to 28,210 feet (8,598 meters) on the Southeast Ridge before turning back—probably as high as anyone had ever stood on Earth.
Now the British were determined to bring every possible advantage to their spring 1953 offensive—including hiring Tenzing, 38, as their lead Sherpa, or sirdar. Earlier British expeditions, though impressive in their accomplishments, were often charmingly informal in style. Hunt's intricately planned assault, on the other hand, was all business. "You get there fastest with the mostest," observes mountaineering pundit Ken Wilson. "You have a military leader who is totally in tune with that philosophy, and you don't dink around in an amateur sort of clubby way."

From the start, the 33-year-old beekeeper Edmund Hillary (not yet Sir Edmund) was a strong contender for one of the summit slots. "It was his fourth Himalayan expedition in just over two years and he was at the peak of fitness," Band says. The heavily glaciated peaks of his native New Zealand had proved a perfect training ground for the Himalaya. Hillary earned respect early in the expedition by leading the team that forced a route through the Khumbu Icefall. "A sleeves-rolled-up, get-things-done man," Wilson calls him.
Still, logistical snafus, the failure of a number of stalwarts to acclimatize, and problems with some of the experimental oxygen sets stalled the expedition badly. The team took a troubling 12 days to retrace the Swiss route on the Lhotse Face (in part, perhaps, because the British were not as experienced on difficult ice). In despair, Hunt began to wonder whether his party would even reach the South Col.
The expedition finally gained the col—the vital staging area for a summit push—on May 21. This was late enough to be worrisome, for the monsoon, whose heavy snows would prohibit climbing, could arrive as early as June 1.
Because they became the first men to reach the summit of Everest, Hillary and Tenzing would earn a celebrity that has scarcely faded in 50 years. Who today remembers Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans? Yet Hunt's plan called for Bourdillon, a former president of the Oxford Mountaineering Club, and Evans, a brain surgeon, to make the first summit bid.
Despite a relatively late start and problems with Evans's oxygen set, Bourdillon and Evans crested the South Summit—at 28,700 feet (8,748 meters), only 330 feet (101 meters) short of the top—by 1 p.m. on May 26. But Evans was exhausted, and both men knew they would run out of oxygen if they went on. They agreed to turn back. Says Michael Westmacott, Bourdillon's closest friend on the 1953 team: "It was a decision Tom always regretted."
So it was that three days later Hillary and Tenzing set out for the top. Their pairing was hardly an accident. "It had always been Hunt's intention, if feasible, to include a Sherpa in one of the summit teams, as a way of recognizing their invaluable contribution to the success of these expeditions," Band says. "Tenzing had already proved he had summit potential by his performance the previous year with Lambert.
In fact, he had been at least 4,000 feet (1,219 meters) higher than any of us!" Indeed, Tenzing (who died in 1986) was the most experienced Everest veteran alive, having participated in six previous attempts on the mountain dating all the way back to 1935. (To those who criticize the practice of leading paying clients on Everest, Himalayan Experience founder and longtime Everest guide Russell Brice has a barbed, half-joking response: "You know who the first guided client on Everest was? Ed Hillary.")
But Hillary, too, had proved his worth, seeming to grow stronger as the expedition progressed. Band notes that Hillary had also realized what a powerful team he and Tenzing would make. "During the expedition, with hindsight, one can see that he made a deliberate effort to develop a good partnership with Tenzing," Band says. "It paid off. Hillary and Tenzing were the logical second party for the summit. But this was not determined at the outset, only during the course of the expedition as it evolved."
With an earlier start from a higher camp than Bourdillon and Evans's, Tenzing and Hillary reached the South Summit by 9 a.m. But the difficulties were far from over. After the South Summit, the ridge takes a slight dip before rising abruptly in a rocky spur some 40 feet (12 meters) high just before the true summit. Scraping at the snow with his ax, Hillary chimneyed between the rock pillar and an adjacent ridge of ice to surmount this daunting obstacle, later to be known as the Hillary Step. The pair reached the highest point on Earth at 11:30 a.m. on May 29.
The men shook hands, as Hillary later wrote, "in good Anglo-Saxon fashion," but then Tenzing clasped his partner in his arms and pounded him on the back. The pair spent only 15 minutes on top. "Inevitably my thoughts turned to Mallory and Irvine," Hillary wrote, referring to the two British climbers who had vanished high on Everest's Northeast Ridge in 1924. "With little hope I looked around for some sign that they had reached the summit, but could see nothing."
As the two men made their way back down, the first climber they met was teammate George Lowe, also a New Zealander. Hillary's legendary greeting: "Well, George, we knocked the bastard off!"
Their fame was spreading even as Hillary and Tenzing left the mountain. "When we came out toward Kathmandu, there was a very strong political feeling, particularly among the Indian and Nepalese press, who very much wanted to be assured that Tenzing was first," Sir Edmund recalls today. "That would indicate that Nepalese and Indian climbers were at least as good as foreign climbers. We felt quite uncomfortable with this at the time. John Hunt, Tenzing, and I had a little meeting. We agreed not to tell who stepped on the summit first.
"To a mountaineer, it's of no great consequence who actually sets foot first. Often the one who puts more into the climb steps back and lets his partner stand on top first." The pair's pact stood until years later, when Tenzing revealed in his autobiography, Tiger of the Snows, that Hillary had in fact preceded him.
Neither man anticipated how much, in the wake of their success, the appeal of that patch of snow more than five miles in the sky would grow. "Both Tenzing and I thought that once we'd climbed the mountain, it was unlikely anyone would ever make another attempt," Sir Edmund admits today. "We couldn't have been more wrong."

www.nationalgeographic.com

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Gustave the Croc Surfaces to Strike Again

The last time we went looking for Gustave, Burundi's fabled man-eating crocodile, he was nowhere to be found. It was October 2004, and we'd set out to track down and radio-tag the so-called Monster of Lake Tanganyika, one of the biggest and most bloodthirsty Nile crocs on record ("Have You Seen This Croc?" Adventure, March 2005).
At roughly 20 feet (6 meters) long and approaching 2,000 pounds (907 kilograms), Gustave was reputed to have devoured scores, even hundreds of villagers in the war-weary central African country, picking off victims like some maniacal serial killer. A week before our capture team arrived, Patrice Faye, a self-taught naturalist who has been stalking Gustave since 1998, believed he had spotted him in the estuary of the Rusizi River at the head of the lake. But after leading us on a fruitless search, the expatriate Frenchman gave a Gallic shrug. Maybe rumors of Gustave's demise were true: He'd been shot and eaten by rebels in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo, or had died of old age. Or maybe he'd simply burrowed into the Rusizi's muddy banks to wait out Burundi's protracted Hutu-Tutsi civil war. We left on an uncertain note, with Gustave's mythology fully intact.
In fact, "Gustave is quite alive," Faye told us by telephone on the third anniversary of our aborted mission. "After a long absence he has come back to the Rusizi, and a lot of tourists have had the privilege of seeing him. He's in excellent health, and his prize list of victims has grown."

So, too, has Gustave's international renown. Our story, posted on Adventure's website, has received more hits than any other in the magazine's nine-year history. Web traffic soared after the January 2007 release of Disney's Primeval, a based-on-true-events gorefest starring a cheesy computer-generated giant crocodile named Gustave. Let's not dwell on whose story inspired the screenwriters (we were briefly thrilled when a top studio executive phoned in March 2005 to say that she'd read our article and proposed a deal, which subsequently evaporated in a feeding frenzy of lawyers and producers), but theirs involves a crew of American TV journalists dispatched to "one of the most remote locations on Earth" to hunt down and apprehend "the world's most prolific serial killer." Set in Burundi but filmed in South Africa, the movie, said Faye, "is an insult to purists and herpetologists but, above all, an insult to Burundi.
"It shows the country in a bad light, and the people of Burundi are made out to be savages, barbarians, thieves, and murderers," he told us. "The only good Burundian in the movie ends up being rescued and taken to the United States." The digitized Gustave gallops across the screen like "a champion of cross-country races who devours campsites and cars, climbs trees, and swallows boats," Faye wrote in an indignant letter to Burundi's newspapers. "In short, poor Gustave is a victim of fantasies and becomes more monstrous than ever."
The real-life Gustave is monstrous enough and not nearly as cryptic as we had thought. "I had a pretty clear idea of his movements for the past three years," Faye said. "I have a lot of sources—fishermen, pilots who fly over the lake—and even though I wasn't getting day-to-day information, I knew where he was."
Last spring, for example, Faye received regular reports from the village of Ruziba, just south of Bujumbura, Burundi's capital. At least one fatal attack there could be credibly pinned on Gustave, who apart from his sheer size bears distinctive bullet scars: one on his head, three on his right side.
A croc of similar stature and markings killed a fisherman near Ruziba in April. "He was standing waist-deep in the lake when the croc dragged him away and drowned him," Faye recalled. "There were a lot of witnesses. They raised such a commotion that the crocodile let him go. His widow showed me pictures of the corpse. He had a nasty bite in the stomach and one in the leg." Onlookers chased Gustave away before he could finish his bloody work, Faye said, noting that Gustave doesn't always eat his victims: "I think some of his attacks could just be hunting practice."
During our 2004 mission, the plan was to have herpetologist Brady Barr, the daring host of the National Geographic Channel's Dangerous Encounters, sneak up on Gustave at night in a pirogue, slip a wire noose around his prodigious neck, and wrestle him to shore. After taking measurements and tissue samples, Barr intended to implant a global positioning device beneath Gustave's armored skin that would have alerted villagers to potential danger.
Such warnings might still have gone unheeded, however, because the people who live around the lake depend on it both for life's necessities—food, water, bathing, washing clothes—and for recreation. After Gustave showed up again in the Rusizi, in mid-August, Faye cautioned residents in the nearby village of Gatumba to be on guard. "The fishermen and swimmers didn't interrupt their activities," he said. "It is wishful thinking that people will stay out of the water."
Gustave has yet to snatch anyone from Gatumba, but Faye has no doubt that he is the big croc responsible for these new attacks. When he's not lurking beneath the muddy waters of the Rusizi, fishing and waiting for opportunities for larger prey, he basks on his favorite sandbar, wearing what seems to be a sinister, self-satisfied grin. "I am 100 percent sure it's him," Faye said.
Whether we dust off our plans and head back to Burundi for Operation Gustave, Part Deux, remains to be decided. Barr
has almost fully recovered from massive bite wounds on his thigh, the result of a too-close encounter with a giant python on the Indonesian island of Flores. As this issue went to press, he and his field producers had just completed an expedition to Costa Rica and were digesting the news of Gustave's return.

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