Category: Life & Style

Cruise company Life at Sea Cruises is now accepting bookings for its 3-year-voyage on the MV Gemini, which sets sail from Istanbul on November 1, said a CNN report. The Rs 25 lakh per person cruise will take people to as many as 135 countries, covering 375 destinations, including the Caribbean, Antarctica, Hawaii, Asia and other places.

The package of the three-year World Cruise, starting from $29,999 per year (around ₹24.5 lakh), includes access to all dining venues and alcohol with dinner, a state-of-the-art wellness centre, sundeck and swimming pool, high-speed internet, entertainment, “enrichment seminars” and housekeeping with a 24-hour on-call hospital with free medical visits. The cruise offers travellers to live, work and explore, all while being onboard the ship. It will visit 13 out of 14 ‘Wonders of the World’, with packages starting from $29,999 (₹24,51,300) to $109,999 (₹89,88,320) per person for a year.

The MV Gemini vessel, which has 400 cabins and room for 1,074 passengers, will have pick-ups in Barcelona and Miami. At each port, the vessel will stay docked for multiple days to allow its passengers to explore at their leisure. The cruise will stop by 100 islands, including numerous Caribbean and Central American visits. It will also spend 98 days in South America and Antarctica.

Saudi Arabia is set to introduce yoga in its universities due to its significance for mental and physical health. Several agreements will be signed with major universities in Saudi Arabia to support and promote yoga over the next few months, according to Saudi Yoga Committee President Nouf Al-Marwaai.

Al-Marwaai said that the committee was striving hard to introduce yoga to universities. “Yoga gives its practitioners many health benefits (for) both physical and mental well-being… One of the most important pillars of achieving Vision 2030 is to enhance participation in sports activities, and to achieve sports excellence locally, continentally, and internationally,” she said.

She added that yoga is not just meditation and relaxation as some might believe, but “includes Asana posture practice, Pranayamas breathing techniques, Bandhas muscle control (and) then comes Dhayan and Yoga Nidra meditation and relaxation.” She added that the committee “aims to discover the talents of distinguished yoga practitioners in all types of yoga in general or Yogasana sports, to hone their talents, and support them to participate and represent the Kingdom in local and international tournaments.”

The announcement was recently made in Riyadh during the forum, The Role of University Sports in Supporting the Kingdom’s Vision in Sports, organised by the Saudi Universities Sports Federation in cooperation with the Ministry of Education.

Passenger traffic at Changi Airport should return to pre-pandemic levels by 2024, or possibly earlier, said Singapore’s Transport Minister S. Iswaran in the Parliament.

S. Iswaran told the House that passenger traffic volumes, flights and city links at Changi are now at about 80 percent of pre-Covid-19 levels, while flights at Seletar Airport have recovered fully since January 2023.

In 2019, 68.3 million passengers passed through Changi Airport, with 3,82,000 commercial flights taking off or landing at the airport. Passenger traffic fell to a low of 0.5 percent of this total during the pandemic in 2020.

Singapore’s aviation sector has made a strong recovery from the debilitating impact of the pandemic. The weekly flight services from Singapore to China have more than doubled from 38 in January to nearly 100. As this is a quarter of the weekly flights to China compared to those in 2019, the Chinese and Singapore carriers are expected to resume more services in the coming months. The aviation workforce – currently at 90 percent of pre-pandemic levels – is also expected to recover fully by 2023.

The authorities are working with consultants to update the upcoming Terminal 5’s design so that it is more modular, resilient and energy-efficient. Scheduled to be operational in the mid-2030s, T5 will serve 50 million passengers a year.

Dubai International Airport (DXB), a major international hub, registered a 127% jump in annual passenger traffic to 66.1 million in 2022. The DXB, the hub of airline Emirates, is forecast to welcome 78 million passengers this year, as the United Arab Emirates gets ready to host major international events, including the COP28 climate conference.

Dubai Airports, the airport’s operator, in November forecast DXB passenger traffic to reach 64.3 million in 2022. About 60% of people travelling through DXB are origin and destination travellers, while 40% are transfers, said Dubai Airports Chief Executive Paul Griffiths.

While the figures are still below volumes reached before the COVID-19 pandemic, Griffiths expected to exceed pre-pandemic monthly levels during the second half of this year. The state-owned operator maintains its expectations for passenger levels to restore to pre-pandemic level by 2024.

Griffiths said China’s reopening after it ended pandemic restrictions is expected to feature strongly in the airport’s growth figures in the next few months. The Dubai International Airport has 25 flights a week to seven cities of China on five different airlines.

Saudi Arabia organised Al Liwan cultural event in Riyadh on February 22 to commemorate its foundation day. The event highlighted the three centuries’ history, tradition and growth of the country. February 22 was declared a national holiday last year, following a royal decree by King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.

Al Liwan was organised at King Abdullah Financial District in the Saudi capital, showcasing the dynamism of Saudi Arabia’s traditional markets and the originality of its traditional attire. Celebrations were held in 14 locations to mark the foundation of the country by Imam Mohammed bin Saud. In addition to interactive exhibitions, cultural seminars and historical theatrical performances were organised.

People dressed in traditional attire and their families and visitors from other countries were seen celebrating in the event. Parade, balloon flights, painting competitions, melodies and family events were the other engagements held across the nation during the four-day holiday. The Ministry of Culture held a musical theatre performance highlighting the history of Saudi Arabia in Princess Nourah University’s Red Hall. The show premiered on February 20, and will continue till February 27. A popular family festivity was the Majlis, an educational event spotlighting the heritage and culture of the First Saudi State through lectures, panel discussions and workshops hosted in King Fahd National Library.

India has surpassed France to become the United Kingdom’s largest Scotch whisky market in terms of volume, with a 60% hike in imports in 2022 over the previous year, says the latest figures released by industry body Scotch Whisky Association (SWA).

The data revealed that India imported 219 million bottles of Scotch compared to France’s 205 million last year, growing more than 200% in the past decade. However, despite the double-digit volume growth, Scotch whisky only comprises 2% of the Indian whisky market. SWA pointed out that the hike in volume still makes up only a fraction of the Indian whisky market due to high tariffs. It is one of the key sectors of focus for the UK in the free trade agreement (FTA) talks with India, which is now in their seventh round of negotiations.

SWA analysis shows that a UK-India FTA deal which eases the 150% tariff burden on Scotch whisky in India could boost market access for Scotland’s whisky companies, allowing for an additional GBP 1 billion of growth over the next five years, it noted.

The value of the Indian market for Scotch exports comes in at fifth worth GBP 282 million, up 93% in 2021 and behind France, Singapore and Taiwan. In 2022, the Asia-Pacific region overtook the European Union (EU) as the industry’s largest regional market, with double-digit post-pandemic growth also witnessed in Taiwan, Singapore, China and India.

A study published in the journal Risk Analysis says that Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu as the island countries are most capable of producing enough food for their populations after an “abrupt sunlight‐reducing catastrophe” such as a nuclear war, super volcano or asteroid strike.

In the new study, Professor Nick Wilson from the University of Otago, Wellington, and independent researcher Dr Matt Boyd, from Adapt Research, said that these five island nations would “likely be pockets of survivors around the planet in even the most severe” scenario. The authors compared 38 island countries on 13 factors they said could predict success as a post-apocalyptic survival state, including food production, energy self-sufficiency, manufacturing and the disaster’s effect on climate.

“Australia’s food supply buffer is gigantic,” the study concluded, “with potential to feed many tens of millions of extra people.” Its relatively good infrastructure, vast energy surplus, high health security, and defence budget all aided in pushing it to the top of the table. The second country on the table, New Zealand has the advantage of its longstanding nuclear-free status, besides being able to sufficiently serve its people.

The study also predicted that in the event of a nuclear apocalypse, China, Russia and the US could see food production fall up to 97% under nuclear winter models and would be forced to rely on new food production technologies.

Twelve South African cheetahs arrived in India on February 18 as part of an ambitious project to reintroduce the spotted cats in the south Asian country. It is the second batch to arrive in the country after eight cheetahs from Namibia last year. The latest arrival is part of an agreement signed between India and South Africa in January to transfer more than 100 cheetahs to the Asian country over the next decade.

The South Africa cheetahs will join their Namibian cousins at the Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh. Quarantine enclosures have been created at the reserve for the newly arriving cheetahs, officials said. Their resettlement “provides space for the expansion of the cheetah within its historical range,” said the Environment Ministry.

India was once home to the Asiatic cheetah, but the animal was declared extinct in the country by 1952, primarily due to habitat loss and hunting. Efforts to reintroduce the animal gathered pace in 2020 when the Supreme Court ruled that African cheetahs, a different subspecies, could be brought into the country on an experimental basis.

The planet’s fastest land animal is also one of the oldest big cat species, dating back about 8.5 million years. It once roamed widely throughout Asia and Africa in great numbers, with around 7,000 surviving today in the African savannahs. It is listed globally as “vulnerable” on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species.

Climate change and more intense and frequent weather events have been cited by Singaporeans as the top challenge facing the South-east Asian region in 2023. This meanwhile is different for their Asean counterparts, who suggest unemployment, inflation, a commodities crunch, and rising cost of living to be the biggest worries in the era of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The findings of the survey were published in the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute’s The State of South-east Asia 2023 report. The survey results indicated that 59.5% of the 1,308 survey respondents polled across the 10 Asean member states ranked unemployment and economic recession as a more pressing concern than climate change – the second-biggest challenge at 57.1%. The widening of socio-economic gaps and rising income disparity is the third most tied challenge.

More than 60% of the Singaporean respondents called climate change the biggest problem, after the United States-China decoupling, and widening socio-economic gaps and income disparity. The respondents had people from academia, think-tanks, research groups, businesses, civil society, media and non-governmental organisations, besides governments.

A key finding was that 82.6% of the overall respondents saw Asean as a slow and ineffective body unable to cope with fluid political and economic developments, making it irrelevant in the new world order.

South Africa became one of the top tourist destinations for India in 2022 due to its strong recovery efforts and promotion of a variety of destination options. The African nation exceeded its target of bringing 33,900 or more visitors set at the beginning of the recovery year by receiving about 50,000 Indian visitors last year through November. The tourism board wants to surpass last year’s goal by 72% this year.

India has become South Africa’s sixth-largest foreign source market as the two countries commemorate 30 years of diplomatic relations. South African Tourism expects a 35% rise in MICE visitors in 2023. To capitalise on this momentum, the tourism board held consumer events at DLF Mall in Saket on February 11 and 12 and roadshows in important Indian cities including Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Mumbai between February 13 and 16.

At the annual travel and tourism exhibition, SATTE2023, Neliswa Nkani, Hub Head – Middle East, India and South East Asia, South African Tourism expressed her gratitude to the Indian trade fraternity for their support which helped the country to achieve a 200% increase in Indian arrivals to South Africa. She said, the board is optimistic that India will maintain its recovery trajectory and continue to be one of the source markets for travel to South Africa due to enhanced connectivity, alluring travel deals, and a wide range of experiences available in the country.