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In "Life / Explore"
ABIDJAN - The seaside resort offers visitors a cool drink or tasty meal, a dip in a pool, a karaoke session or an overnight stay, all with a view.Nothing much new there, you may say -- creature comforts like this are pretty much standard in tropical hotels.The big difference, though, is that this mini resort is also a moveable island that floats on plastic bottles.Riding on the laguna in Abidjan, Ivory Coast's economic hub, the unusual complex floats on a platform made from 700,000 discarded bottles and other buoyant debris.Its inventor, Frenchman Eric Becker, says his creation can help greener, more mobile tourism -- something less harmful to seas and coastlines than traditional fixed, concrete resorts.His "Ile Flottante" -- French for "Floating Island" --...
August 25, 2019
Ivory Coast's 'Floating Island' points to greener tourism
August 20, 2019
Ghana cashes in on slave heritage tourism
August 16, 2019
Sinking city: Indonesia's capital on brink of disaster
LOISABA, KENYA - For most of his life as a Samburu warrior, Lesaiton Lengoloni thought nothing of hunting giraffes, the graceful giants so common a feature of the Kenyan plains where he roamed."There was no particular pride in killing a giraffe, not like a lion... (But) a single giraffe could feed the village for more than a week," the community elder told AFP, leaning on a walking stick and gazing out to the broad plateau of Laikipia.But fewer amble across his path these days: in Kenya, as across Africa, populations of the world's tallest mammals are quietly, yet sharply, in decline.Giraffe numbers across the continent fell 40 percent between 1985 and 2015, to just under 100,000 animals, according to the best figures available to the International Union for Conservation of...
August 16, 2019
Gentle giraffes threatened with 'silent extinction'
August 16, 2019
Afghan palace emerges from ruins as centenary nears
RIO DE JANEIRO - Luiz Pedreira walks with other hikers beneath the Atlantic Forest's thick canopy in Brazil, where an 8,000-kilometer trail stretching the full length of the country is being opened up.He says he hopes that the creation of the trail, one of the world's longest, will raise awareness about the fragility of the forest -- long devastated by loggers and farmers, and now facing a renewed threat under President Jair Bolsonaro."If you don't know something, you don't value it," says Pedreira.Inspired by long-distance tracks such as Canada's 24,000-kilometer Great Trail, the project will connect paths from the southern town of Chui on Brazil's border with Uruguay, to Oiapoque on its northern frontier with French Guiana.The result will be a continuous...
August 16, 2019
Trans-Brazil trail raises hopes for future of Atlantic Forest
August 11, 2019
In New Zealand, young Māori women lead the battle for indigenous rights
August 10, 2019
Medieval bridge faces troubled waters in Belgium
August 09, 2019
Hidden mysteries lie in wait inside Kenya's fossil treasury
BUZESCU, ROMANIA - With their soaring marble columns, turrets and pagoda-style roofs, elaborate mansions built by affluent Roma dot Romania's countryside in their thousands.Amid modest surroundings of fields or small towns, the so-called Roma palaces seem improbable, even outlandish, but reveal a quest for status within a marginalized and mostly poor minority.They began springing up in the early 1990s after the collapse of communism, when some in the Roma community came into money, they say, mostly by collecting and selling scrap iron or by doing petty trading.Now spread across one of the EU's poorest members, the imposing buildings, estimated to number several thousand, often stand several storys high, as neighbors add floors to outdo one another.Decorative flourishes such as a US...
August 09, 2019
Romania's 'Roma palaces', a status symbol for poor minority
