Kool Study

A trip back to your roots

Thousands of people flock to Salt Lake City each year, not for Utah’s skiing or national parks, but to search through endless records of births, deaths and marriages at one the world’s largest repositories of genealogy information on the planet.

There is a new breed of traveller focused on uncovering family narratives, as evidenced by the 1,500 visitors who visit the Family History Library every day. Run by the Mormon Church, it contains more than two billion names of the deceased, more than 2.2 million rolls of microfilm and 300,000 books.

Utah is not the only place focused on roots tourism. The newly opened £8.2 million Cumbria Archive Centre in England’s northwest, with records dating back to the 12th Century, is banking on the boom. The fact that Cumbria is home to relatives of three former US presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson fuels interest among genealogy tourists there.

source: bbc.com

Sydney’s gourmet food safaris

Gourmet Safaris are off-the-beaten-path culinary tours that explore Sydney’s diverse cultures through its unique and authentic restaurants, cafes and shops — particularly those that are fairly unknown to the general public.

On the United Flavours of the World tour, I was chauffeured with a bus of about 25 food lovers, led by Maeve herself, to Sydney suburbs I had never heard of on a quest to find the best South American butchers and pastry shops, Portuguese delis, Vietnamese restaurants and desserts of Lebanese, American and English origin.

The eight-hour tour included visiting various establishments, tasting their goods and hearing their stories. We met Jose and Maria Pereira ofSunshine Meats in Milperra, who worked for years to make their wholesale small goods meat business the success it is today, and tasted one of their bestselling products — a chorizo that Jose perfected as a young man living in Portugal. Another shop owner, Margarita Garcia, talked about running her husband’s Chilean butchery after he passed away, now called Margarita’s Cecinas (205 Hamilton Road, Fairfield West; 029-726-0673).

United Flavours of the World is one of 10 bus tours around Sydney, all focusing on specific food cultures and the neighbourhoods in which they are found. For example, Italian Classics takes you to the inner-city suburb of Leichhardt, where Italian immigrants settled, or explore The Exotic Flavours of Lebanon in Punchbowl in southwest Sydney. A local from each neighbourhood accompanies each tour, as well as a specialist guide – or if you are really lucky, Maeve herself.

Seven Sydney walking tours, covering similar themes to the bus tours, are also available for those that prefer to burn a few of the calories acquired during the day’s eating activities.

source: bbc.com

The ultimate New York City food tour

For Famous Fat Dave, aka David Freedenberg, this is his job: providing a mobile buffet featuring the best food you’ll never find near Times Square. Dave leads fun food tours made on the fly from hundreds of hand-picked sandwich shops, pizzerias, bakeries and noodle houses. Many are old-school dives in the boroughs, where accents run deep. How does he pick them?

“‘I’m not a foodie,” he admitted. “I just like food for its pure taste.”

I also like food for its pure taste, and on a recent tour of seven stops in several hours, I ate memorable meals at places that I hadn’t previously noticed on long-familiar streets. In SoHo, we started with a 90-year-old Italian butcher’s, picking up pepper sausage to snack on while criss-crossing Brooklyn’s back streets. At Defonte’s in nearby Red Hook, I wolfed down a delicious beef, aubergine and mozzarella sandwich. In Sunset Park – Brooklyn’s Chinatown – we squeezed into Yun Nan Flavour Snack, a cubbyhole serving an unreal cold noodle bowl of pork, peanuts and spicy chilli sauce. Read this post

Gorillas in the mix in Uganda

From its top to its tail, Uganda is rife with national parks. Chimpanzees play in the shadow of the snow-capped Rwenzori Mountains, elephants drink from the gushing waterfalls of Murchison Falls National Park, and lions and Ugandan cobb graze on the beautiful savannah grasslands of Queen Elizabeth National Park.

But delve deeper into the country’s southwestern corner, and you will find a different type of creature. Here, in the depths of the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, half of the world’s remaining wild mountain gorillas roam free, and you can trek through their disappearing habitat to see them at work, rest and play.

October 2012 marks the 50th anniversary of Uganda’s independence from British rule, and to help safeguard the country’s environmental future, a number of government initiatives have been pushed to the top of the political agenda. Coordinated patrols to curb poaching are increasing, and benefit sharing schemes — including the sharing of tourism revenue with local communities — have been rolled out.

Only 72 trekking permits are issued each day by the Ugandan Wildlife Authority, and each must be applied for through a registered safari operator. But staring in June, the Ugandan Wildlife Authority is expected to follow the Rwandan government in increasing the permit rate from $500 to $750 per person. While it is a fiercely debated political topic in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, many hope the move will help further restrict human-gorilla interactions and raise funds to protect the park’s boundaries from encroaching farm lands and ever resilient poachers.

Having similar DNA to humans, gorillas are highly susceptible to illness, and even catching a common cold could wipe out an entire group. Park visitors must keep a minimum distance of seven metres from the animals at all times, and visits are limited to one hour in the company of one of three habituated families.

Because of these restrictions, the future of this critically-endangered creature looks bright. Following decades of illegal deforestation and poaching, the number of gorillas at Bwindi has steadied at around 340, and for the first time in years, it is very slowly on the rise.

But gorilla tracking is no stroll in the park. It can take anywhere up to 10 hours to find the elusive creatures in the dense undergrowth. Guides lead trekkers up precipitous verges and across rivers, and rusty machetes are used to hack paths through the thick, thorny rainforest. It is the perfect place to live out a childhood Tarzan fantasy, with vast swathes of trees, vines, branches and bushes surrounding trekkers as they penetrate deep into the rainforest.

Treks begin with an early morning safety briefing. Depending on gorilla movements, you can spend a morning anywhere within the park’s 331sqkm forest with either the Mubare gorilla family, the Habinyanja or the Rushegura group. The biggest is the Rushegura, a 12-strong group of habituated gorillas, including what is believed to be the world’s largest silverback, named Mwirima and weighing nearly 200kg.

In his family troop is Karungi, Nyamunwa, Kibande, Nyampazi, Ruterana, Kalembezi, Buzinza and several young males, including a couple of babies. Each is so named because of their individual markings in the local Ugandan language. Their broad shoulders look menacing but their eyes show wariness and they are incredibly shy. Though the woods are dense and thick, the gorillas leave behind muddy prints the size of baseball mitts, and are easier to spot than you may think. Wherever their leader Mriwima goes, they follow, leaving battered trees with broken limbs and chewed pieces of bark and bamboo in their path.

So what is it like seeing a wild gorilla only a few metres away? Well, at first, there may be a fluster in the trees or a violent shake in the canopy above your head. Then there may be a bang and a clatter, or a snapped branch and dark shapes plummeting into a clearing in front of you. Expect your adrenaline levels to rocket and, in the warm, thin air, you will realise that cowering in front of an oncoming silverback is not something you could ever get used to.

source: bbc.com