tv The Travel Show BBC News May 9, 2021 1:30am-2:01am BST
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israeli forces injerusalem. they follow similar unrest on friday when 200 people needed medical treatment. tensions have been rising for weeks over proposals to evict palestinian families from their homes in a neighbourhood where israeli settlers are laying claim to the land. 30 people, many of them young girls, have been killed in a militant attack at a school in the afghan capital, kabul. reports say there were multiple blasts as they were leaving their school. the neighbourhood is home to the hazara minority, who are shia muslims. remnants of a large chinese space rocket are due to plunge back to earth in the next few hours. us and european tracking sites are monitoring the uncontrolled re—entry of the long march rocket, which was used last month to carry into orbit a section of the permanent chinese space station currently being built. major disruption on some of the uk's busiest rail lines will continue today
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after cracks were found in some of the high—speed trains. it's thought 180 trains made by hitachi had to be taken out of service. great western railway and london north eastern railway have advised passengers not to travel on sunday, and they've warned that disruption could continue through the week. katy austin's report contains flashing images. these high—speed hitachi 800—series trains weren't running this morning. they needed to be kept back for inspections after thin cracks were found in some, as the boss of hitachi rail told me. it's actually on the metal against the body where the passengers sit, with the underside of the train, which is what it actually runs on. and so, that area's critical for the operation of the train. and so, just to make sure that we are very safe, we took that decision to withdraw the trains while we just made sure that we fully understood the situation and that it is actually safe for the trains to operate with passengers riding on them. that led to major disruption
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on great western railway, lner, trans pennine and hull trains. yeah, it's a disaster for cos i'm actually going for my vaccine in cardiff. and, yeah, my appointment's at 3pm. i was going to go back to uni, i to exeter, and i can't go back, which is so annoying. these are fairly new. they've only been on uk railways for a few years. since last night's discovery, checks have revealed similar cracks in further trains, although hitachi won't say precisely how many. the trains that have been withdrawn are all the same design, and so that is the primary focus right now, to look at that design and to ensure we fully understand the cause, and also to make sure that we can, as quickly as possible, fix them and make them available back into traffic again. today, some have been cleared for use and put back into service, but lner has advised customers against travel tomorrow. great western railway expects disruption into next week.
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hitachi has apologised to passengers and rail operators. it's not clear yet when all the trains will be ready for use again. katy austin, bbc news. now on bbc news, it's time for the travel show. coming up on this week's travel show, we'll be finding out how tech could change the way we all travel in the future. glastonbury gears up for another online festival. and saving an underwater super plant in spain. and mike goes for a gentle afternoon bike ride in nairobi. this is a little bit crazy!
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hello, and welcome to the travel show, with me, ade adepitan. this week, we are in london's hyde park, where the sun is out and it's absolutely stunning here. even the ducks and the swans have come to say hello. now, in the uk, we are slowly beginning to come out of lockdown, so maybe we can start thinking about travel again. over the last few weeks, we've been looking at how the covid pandemic has affected things like our attitudes to sustainable travel, and how and where we spend our money when booking online. this week, we're going to look at how tech could, and probably will, change how we all travel in the future. it wasn't so long ago that travel was a very different experience. dramatic futuristic
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music plays. you'd probably flick through some brochures, pop into a travel agent and write a cheque before heading out to a place you barely knew anything about. of course, with little more to help you along your way than a paper map and a guidebook. today, technology has changed things. but what about in say, i don't know, ten years�* time? if technology can change how we travel so quickly, how different can we expect it to be when we explore the world in the near future? well, one big driverfor change will be what's known as the internet of things. it's predicted that by 2025, 42 billion devices will be capturing data on how we live and move through the world. some say the internet of things will play a big part
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in a fourth industrial revolution and that the covid crisis has accelerated technological advances. the internet of things is a way of describing how more and more objects will connect with each other in an increasingly interconnected world. our bags will tell us where they are in the world if they get lost, for example. it's what will enable us to open more hotel rooms with our phones and once inside, use a tablet or your voice to switch the lights on, change the temperature and control the television. but that's just the start. if you're smarter about how you move people around the city, public transport becomes much smarter, then actually you need less roads and less car parks to open it up to more green spaces, so actually the internet of things and getting different systems to speak to each other has a big knock—on effect for travelling in smart cities in the future. it's also a part of what will enable other technological changes to our travels that have been accelerated during the pandemic. imagine going through
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an airport and checking in with facial recognition. you continue on to baggage drop—off, authenticating in the same way, head on through facial recognition security, and then finally going through the boarding gates, doing it all completely contactless. in fact, even your passport might not be around for too much longer as you know it. right now, we're piloting digital passports with air europa for people travelling to spain, so they will have their digital information on their mobile in addition to their biometric information on their mobile as well, so i think it's really speeding up innovation because we need to have these technologies to make people feel confident to travel. it's just one example of how biometrics and contactless technology will change the way we travel. though, of course, this data—hungry world will mean giving more and more of our information, which could come with
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a risk to our privacy. thankfully now, lots of the technology in this biometric space stores a representation of your information. so not literally a reproducible copy, but a "recipe book" to enable you to validate it. so this, for me, is actually one of the positives to come through this period, that will improve people's digital security overall, but we have some education issues to work through so people can feel comfortable with this technology and the benefits that it brings. technology, like having global maps in our smartphones, makes exploring the world much more simple, and the technology of the future will look to make things even easier. but is that necessarily such a good thing? are we losing the spirit of adventure? whether you are in the us - or injapan, these online maps have exactly the same - interfaces, and i think this can give you the impressionl that the world is everywhere
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the same, it's the same pastel blandscape that you're - navigating using your mobile. but also, the virtual. places that we inhabit really are like places. if you have flown from london to new york but you spend . the whole time on facebook, it's as though you haven't - left your virtual environment, you're kind of cocooned - in the technology. but the technology of the near future will also open up new ways to see the world. during the pandemic, some destinations took the chance to show off their location in immersive virtual reality and some people think this will accelerate the take—up of this technology in the future, as well as things like augmented reality. technology might soon make the process of travel far easier, but what's really exciting is it might give us completely new opportunities for exploration that simply didn't exist before.
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a travel experience that reveals the history of our destinations right before our eyes. for example, imagine being able to visit ancient roman baths and seeing the history of the unique place unfold in front of you using your mobile phone. we've been working in collaboration with the bbc, r&d team up in salford, and the roman baths. we've been able to really get to grips with history and bring it to life. looking back through the roman era where there was the fall of the roof, so through the app we can actually see the roof fall down and cave down in front of you which is really exciting, where you get to see people actually react in front of you, it was lovely. some of this technology is already available in some form, but the question is, what will really take off to become the new normal of travel? well, tech has come to the rescue of many
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destinations and events over the past year or so as they've moved what they do online, but until we can visit them in real life, here's our latest global guide to the world of online travel. hopes are high that live gigs could return after successful trials in barcelona last month, and now in liverpool, a non—socially distanced festival has just been trialled. the event is being held as part of the government's events research programme with hopes of finding a way to open up venues again. fingers crossed for good results. it will be next year that we can hopefully return to the world—famous worthy farm, but until then, glastonbury is going online again. this year the event will see a range of artists performing in support of the festival.
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tickets are on sale with a number of timed streams available to accommodate audiences around the world. another sign that virtual travel could be around long after covid is the latest offering from amazon. they've recently started trialling amazon explore in the us. its aim is to offer real—time experiences with an expert local host from cities and sites around the world. and finally, one thing that virtual travel allows is time to enjoy the space all to yourself. the van gogh museum in amsterdam, which holds the world's largest collection of his paintings and drawings has provided a virtual tour, filmed in full 4k for stunning detail of the dutch master's work.
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0k, hopefully there's something there to keep yourfires burning. right, still to come on the travel show: we meet the marine biologist working to protect the vital seagrass around the balearic islands. and mike's taking to two wheels in kenya. a man with a gun just crossed in front. now it's time to head to spain and the waters around formentera to meet a man whose passion is the protection if some of the most oldest living organisms in the world. they play an important but little—known role in sustaining our planet's natural environment.
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the posidonia is maybe the most efficient carbon sink in the planet. i remember perfectly my first contact with the posidonia and it was in october of 1992 in this place, and i came here with a sailboat and the first thing i saw is this amazing posidonia seagrass, and i really fell in love, and since then i am completely dedicated to the study, filming and spreading the value of this plant. the water that we see is like this because of the contribution of a plant, a superior plant, posidonia oceanica is not a seaweed, it's not in algae, it is a real plant with roots, leaves, flowers, and this plant that
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arrived to this place 80,000 years ago conquered completely the underwater bottom around the shore. the posidonia is giving a lot of things to us. it's purifying the water, at the same time it's contributing to the beaches. most of the sand that we have on the beaches comes from the skeletons of millions of organic things that lives inside the posidonia jungle. formentera is a small island in the middle of the mediterranean, if we have stable beaches, it's thanks to the underwater reefs that the posidonia is building along centuries. in this 30 years, i'm witnessing how the posidonia is more and more in dangered. we are spilling millions
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of tons of sewage waters without enough preparation from our towns and our cities. so we are intoxicating the underwater world. another problem here in formentera is this is a main boat destination. thousands of anchors every day goes in the water, and the anchors dragging on the bottom. this is happening underwater and we don't see. i decided to do a detail of cartography, like a scan, of the bottom and to place this cartography on an app that you can download for free, the name is posidonia maps, so you know, if you are over posidonia and i think it is an easy way to see if you can drop the anchor. this inspired the balearic government to copy the idea, and they are doing the whole cartography of the entire balearic islands.
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the aim of the save posidonia project is notjust a matter of ecology, people from all around the world come to formentera island, to see this kind of sandy, white sandy beaches and just think one day, the posidonia dies, we will lose our main economy which is tourism. in autumn, the old leaves wash up on the shore and beaches and this is used for the houses, for isolation, because it's so clean that no insect, no parasite will go inside. the juice of the posidonia is a naturalfertiliser, it's something and you can see in the balearic islands since a long time ago. i think that education is really the way to change the future, and it is educating the youth and this is why in the summertime
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we have hundreds of kids, and they learn how to dive, they learn to do underwater photography, they are learning the things we are doing wrong and how to do in a good way. i don't like to be using an apocalyptic message. the option to change, it's in our hands. if we don't change, maybe in ten years, most of the posidonia here and many species, will be gone, but if we start changing we have the possibility to recover the nature in the mediterranean and in many other places in this planet. london has seen a massive boom in cycling. social distancing and largely empty streets has meant many of us have seen it as the best way to get around. hey, i'm not complaining, i've been a fan of wheels for years. even in paris they've managed to create hundreds of kilometres of new bike lanes.
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but up until now, this revolution has largely bypassed africa's great cities. mike is navigating nairobi's crazy streets to find out why. if you have been to kenya, chances are you were on safari or out on the beaches. the capital nairobi isn't well known as a glamorous city break destination. it's busy and it's congested, not exactly the peaceful sanctuary you'll see other places in kenya, especially now, we're all worried about social distancing as well. but what the city lacks in serenity it makes up for in charisma. check out these minibuses, called matatus. cheap, popular, beautifully decorated and serve pretty much everywhere you'd need to go. in normal times a really fun way to explore the city. ah, if it was two years ago i would so be on board one of those, it looks so cool.
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and given that the light railway only serves a limited number of destinations, you might imagine that cycling would be the next best way to get around. but the bike—sharing trend that's been massive all over the world in big cities like paris and rio, it hasn't really caught on africa's biggest cities. in the entirety of kenya there's only been one that has been opened — i guess i should say, was opened. nairobi's sole scheme is here, on a university campus. it began a couple of years ago as an experiment to see if bike sharing could work in africa. that's a shame. but it's all been locked away since the pandemic began. so, it seems like it's been a while since these bikes have seen the light of day. yeah, it's now almost a year now cos after covid everything was at a dead stop. so why do you think africans have been a bit slow to adopt bicycle as a mode of transportation? there are a number of reasons
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why the adoption of cycling has been a bit low. but in rural areas bicycles, you know, bicycles are commonly used, because bicycles are seen as a poor man's tool for transport, so i'd say 75% or 80% of the people in rural areas know how to cycle. but now when it comes to urban areas, it's a whole new ballgame, because even in nairobi, we don't have, you know, cycling lanes, so there's a huge problem in terms of your security and your safety, so you don't want to be knocked down by a car. all right. a little dusty. lately, enthusiasts like wekesa have helped drive through some of the small infrastructure improvements for cyclists. there's now a newish stretch of bike lane in the central business district, for instance. but there's one big consideration holding everyone back. nairobi is a city in which cars are king. cyprin, who's a committed cyclist, has spent the last few years fighting to make
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the streets safer for those on to wheels. ah, there's so many reasons why there's not that many people using bicycles in kenya and i think number one reason is definitely not having sufficient infrastructure. most roads don't have bike lanes and even when we're growing up, we are taught to aspire to own a car. you know, that's your measure of success. your measure of success is not a bicycle, that's not african way of thinking about success. we just need to change the culture and start telling our kids, bicycles are actually something good to own, and riding a bicycle does not mean you're poor or you're incapable of affording a car. cyprene leads a monthly protest ride through the city, an attempt to reclaim the roads. she's offered to lead me on a little guided tour to demonstrate some of the dangers. coming up next, we're going to go for a little ride, right? so what should i expect? well, number one is you can
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expect all types of drivers. some people, you don't deserve to be on the roads, so expect everything. but what i would advise is when you are riding in nairobi, is you have to be confident. you have to take your stand. 0k, all right. motorcycles, cars, people with carts. wait for me, wait for me! hold on! laughs. this problem isn't limited to nairobi. cycling in north america, europe and parts of asia has boomed during the pandemic, but that's not the case in the entirety of africa. experts at the world economic forum look at cities from lagos and accra in the west, to addis ababa and dar es salaam in the east, and raised concerns that cycling infrastructure is largely absent. this is a little crazy. laughs.
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the streets are dominated by cars, and as a result, the air quality�*s suffering. there's a man with a tv in our lane. and here in nairobi, cycling is hard work. all i see is a bunch of people in our bike lane. but also, yeah, the lanejust, uh, the lane just ends. oi, oi, oi, oi, oi, oi, oi! a man with a gun just crossed in front. i think i experienced the full spectrum, the yin—yang. this is really nice with here with the bike lane but also it was a little bit crazy over there with the buses and everything like that. i think the now national government has started noticing that there are cyclists in this city and they are coming up with laws that will protect cyclists and pedestrians, because traditionally cyclists have never been considered, we are the most vulnerable road users. we don't have a space on the road, but now as you can
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see, nairobi is slowly changing and it's amazing, and other cities in kenya are starting to notice the same, and, you know, they're playing their part in ensuring non—motorised transport is part of the infrastructure in cities. mike there in nairobi. that's all for this week. coming up next week: carmen's looking back at some of our best moments injapan, including the time she trained like a ninja. and rajan went to visit what has to be one of the strangest classrooms in the world. join us for that if you can, and in the meantime, don't forget you can keep up with all our adventures on the bbc iplayer. but until next time, from me, ade adepitan, and all the travel show team here in hyde park, it's goodbye.
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hello. after saturday's cloud and rain, somewhat brighter skies around during sunday, but there's every chance you're going to see some wet weather at some stage of the day. really due to the proximity of this area of low pressure, so either showers close to that or indeed along this weather front with still the chance for seeing some outbreaks of rain. certainly more cloud than there will be elsewhere if you're close to that. we're still drawing in some warmer air from the south, so if you do get to see a bit of sunshine, it will actually feel quite pleasant, particularly across south east england and east anglia, which will see the higher temperatures. but this is where we're starting the day. it's a much milder start than we've had recently, and particularly across england and wales. now, along the weather front i pointed out, some cloud from south west england,
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south east wales, the midlands and on towards yorkshire. just edging a little bit further east with a chance of a few spots of rain. doesn't look like much more than that for much of the day. close to the low pressure, northern ireland and scotland will see some quite heavy showers, thundery possibly, too. quite blustery, particularly in northern ireland. these are average wind speeds, but gusts here could be over a0 mph or so. and as for temperatures, it will feel a little bit warmer if you do get to see a bit of sunshine during the day, mainly 14—17, but a few spots in east anglia, south east england mayjust get above 20 degrees just depending on how much sunshine there is. but be aware — as we get into the evening, there could be some quite heavy and thundery downpours moving through here, whereas elsewhere overnight and into monday, we will continue with a few showers, particularly across western areas. and just to reinforce the fact that it's a bit warmer by day and it is overnight as well, these are the temperatures to start things off on monday morning, so there won't be any frost around. that area of low pressure is still, though, close by on monday. in fact, as it will be
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for the week ahead. and so that's going to mean that there'll be plenty of showers, and this is where we're expecting them to be during monday. some heavy with hail and thunder, particularly towards the west and north. and while some will reach across to eastern areas, it may well be there'll be quite few showers here around at least during the afternoon for the midlands, east anglia and south east england. temperatures are fairly close to average for the time of year. it will feel a bit warmer than it has done over the past week if you're in some of that sunshine. there will still be these heavy downpours around, but very noticeably overnight it's not going to be as cold. it will be largely frost—free in the week ahead.
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welcome to bbc news. i'm lewis vaughan jones. our top stories: more than 50 palestinians have been injured in clashes with israeli forces injerusalem — it follows similar unrest on friday. at least 30 people have been killed — many of them schoolgirls — in a militant attack in the afghan capital, kabul. sadiq khan wins a second term as london mayor in a result much closer than predicted. europe's leaders resist calls by india to waive patents for vaccines — despite the country's worsening covid crisis. and bits of a chinese space rocket are expected to plunge back to earth in the next few hours. so, should we be worried?
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