At Yok Don National Park in central Vietnam, “Elephant Experience” day tours allow visitors to observe elephants without encroaching on their personal space. The four elephants, once ridden by park visitors, now roam freely. With an English-speaking guide, up to five tour members will ride mountain bikes or motor bikes, then hike in search of the elephants and watch and learn about them from a distance.
Travelers with smartphones can take walking tours of more than 150 cities and locales using the app VoiceMap (free on Apple and Android).
GPS on the phones track the walkers, and VoiceMap’s prerecorded guides tell them what they’re looking at and where to go next, alerting them if they’ve gone off track. Each tour must be downloaded separately and, once downloaded, can be used without a network connection.
For almost 500 years, the city of Alkmaar, Netherlands, has held a cheese market, in recent years each Friday morning in season. In 2020, the cheese market will be held 10 a.m.-1 p.m. each Friday, March 27-Sept. 25. New in 2020, there will also be an evening cheese market (7-9 p.m.) every Tuesday in July and August.
In Cornwall, United Kingdom, a footbridge over a rocky chasm now connects the ruins of Tintagel Castle, on a land-tied island, with the mainland. Opened on Aug. 7, the bridge restores a medieval crossing that fell into the ocean centuries ago.
Before the opening of the 223-foot bridge, visitors had to walk down a steep flight of steps on one side of the chasm, cross a shorter footbridge and then climb up stairs on the other side. Tintagel Castle, which dates to the 13th century, has long been associated with Arthurian legend as the castle of Uther Pendragon.
The Frank A. Perret Museum in Saint-Pierre, Martinique, commemorates the volcanic eruption of May 8, 1902, that buried much of the city and killed more than 30,000 people, leaving only three residents alive.
Closed for five months for expansion, the museum reopened in May 2019 as the Mémorial de la Catastrophe de 1902 (169 rue Victor-Hugo; phone +222 05 96 78 15 19, www.memorial1902.org [in French only]).
It displays more than 400 artifacts recovered from the buried city plus exhibits on life before and after the eruption. Open daily, 9 a.m.-6 p.m. €8 (near $9).
A museum and restaurant, La Cité de la Gastronomie (4 Grand Cloître du Grand Hôtel-Dieu; citegastronomielyon.fr/en), opened in a 15th-century hospital building in Lyon, France, in October 2019.
Two floors of the museum have exhibits focusing on the culinary history of Lyon as well as on international food traditions. On the third floor, the Gastro’Lab is a working space where chefs and researchers experiment with ingredients and cooking techniques. The fourth floor has an open kitchen where visitors can interact with international guest chefs and sample foods.
Scheduled to open in Vienna, Austria, on March 12, 2020, the Albertina Modern will be home to more than 60,000 pieces of post-1945 modern art by more than 5,000 artists. Housed in the newly restored Künstlerhaus, on Karlsplatz, the museum is just off the Ringstraße, a few blocks from the main Albertina Museum.
For info, contact the Albertina Museum (phone +43 1 534 83 0, www.albertina.at).
Transport for London (TfL), the board in charge of regulating taxis and ride-sharing services in the English capital, decided on Nov. 25 to not renew ride-share company Uber’s license to operate, citing “repeated safety failures.” These failures included the company’s allowing drivers to continue to drive for the company even after their licenses had been suspended or revoked.
A new budget Icelandic airline, PLAY (flyplay.com), is being launched in 2020 by executives of the former airline WOW Air, which ceased operation in March 2019. At press time, the company had leased two passenger planes that would serve an initial six European destinations (which had yet to be announced). The company expected to expand to four US airports by spring 2020.
Beginning in early 2020, visitors to the ancient temple complex of Angkor Wat, Cambodia, will no longer be able to ride elephants on the grounds of the site. Two of the park’s 14 elephants have been released in a nearby forest, with the rest to follow shortly.
Elephant riding in Angkor Wat was introduced in 2001. In 2016, one of the park’s elephants died due to a combination of heatstroke and exhaustion, leading to a petition to ban the practice entirely.