China has announced the completion of the first railway line from Golmud in China's north-western province of Qinghai to Lhasa, in Tibet. The line is expected to start taking passengers in 2006. This is one of the world's highest train routes, at 5,072m (16,640ft) above sea level. Trains travelling on the line will have to have carriages that are sealed like aircraft to protect passengers from altitude sickness. The workers who built the line had to breathe bottled oxygen in order to deal with the high altitudes.

Skytrax have conducted the world's “largest” passenger survey, was conducted over an 11 month period (June 2004 – May 2005) to find the world's Airline of the Year. The results are as follows:

AIRLINE OF THE YEAR 2005

1. Cathay Pacific
2. Qantas Airways
3. Emirates
4. Singapore Airlines
5. British Airways
6. Malaysia Airlines
7. Thai Airways

Beetle: I don't see Ryanair in this list.

A 9-year-old boy, wanting to help Hurricane Katrina victims, swam from Alcatraz to San Francisco, raising $30,000 in donations in the process.

Fourth-grader Johnny Wilson made the mile-and-a-half swim in the choppy, 53-degree water of San Francisco Bay in under two hours.

Wilson called the swim tiring, but said he kept telling himself, “I'm almost there, I'm almost there.” The 9-year-old boy said the beginning was the hardest because that's when he was the coldest. His classmates on the shore, cheered: “Go, Johnny! Go, Johnny!”

Alcatraz prison closed in 1963 and is now a tourist attraction and not a single inmate ever successfully escaped.

Europe From a Backpack travel book series are now accepting submissions for Italy From a Backpack and Spain From a Backpack. They are looking for first-person must-tell stories. If you have a story to tell, visit www.EuropeBackpack.com for details.

Length: Stories average 800-2,000 words. While we will accept stories up to 3,000 words, shorter stories have a better chance of being accepted.

How to Submit: Send your story by MS Word attachment to submit@EuropeBackpack.com with the following information (make sure to include all information in the Word Document):

• name
• story title
• story location
• address
• phone
• primary e-mail
• secondary e-mail
• College or University you graduated from
• Include a fun and brief bio after them story

Deadlines: The following are the deadline dates for submitting stories for Italy From a Backpack and Spain From a Backpack.

• Round 1: January 31, 2006
• Round 2: March 28, 2006

Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic has collected $10m in deposits from people wanting a quick journey beyond Earth's atmosphere. More than 34,000 would-be astronauts have registered for rides aboard a commercial version of the experimental Ansari X Prize winner SpaceShipOne. If you are wondering about how much this may cost – BBC reports say that between four to five minutes of weightlessness will set you back around $200,000 (£113,242). Test flights are on schedule to begin in 2007, with commercial operations to begin a year later.

The spaceships will be about the size of a Gulfstream Five business jet and like SpaceShipOne, will be attached to a larger airplane before its rocket engines ignite to travel beyond the atmosphere. The joyrides are being designed so that passengers should be able to witness views of Earth-in-the-round. The seating compartments on SpaceShipTwo are being designed so that passengers can float around weightless while still connected to their seats.

Hong Kong International Airport is named Best Airport worldwide in 2005 passenger survey. For the 5th consecutive year, passengers have rated Hong Kong International Airport as the world's Best Airport. Singapore Changi Airport takes the Silver Award, rated 2nd in the world.

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If you happen to be near Lubeck in Germany, there is a huge ice and snow sculpture festival opening 9th December. Forty ice sculptors will create sculptures for the “Kingdom of Animals” under supervision of Dave Willé. Artists from the United States, Canada Great Britain Belgium, Russia and the Netherlands carve icy animals within the coming weeks. The sculptors use a variety of methods to carve out their figures; some use chain saws, some draw a draft on ice cubes. Beginning on top of the cubes, artists always carve down to the bottom using an array of ladders and scaffolds. All in all, some 350,000 kilos of ice and 150,000 kilos of snow will be processed for the Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival.

Travel Facts

• One in three adults aged 15-49 are infected with HIV/AIDS in Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Swaziland.
• If you thought Antarctica was inhospitable, think again – its land area is only 98% ice. Reassuringly, the other 2% is categorised as 'barren rock'.
• The Mall in Washington, D.C. is 1.4 times larger than Vatican City.
• Moldova has one of the lowest rates of movie-going of any nation, and the highest rate of death by powered lawnmower. Coincidence? Surely not.
• In 2002, every 1000 Swedes made a bus.
• Looking for geniuses? Head straight to Iceland. There are more than 3.5 Nobel Prize Winners for every million Icelanders.
• People might eat oats when they're hungry, but people from Hungary don't eat oats.
• Japan's water has a very high dissolved oxygen concentration – but not enough to prevent drowning in the bath.
• The four largest nations are Russia, China, USA, and Canada.

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