Thai Airways, Thailand's national carrier, has announced that it will fly non stop from Bangkok to Los Angeles as of Dec. 1. The flight used to stop in Osaka, Japan en route but now, using an Airbus A340-500, the flight will be non stop.

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.

Source:

The US businessman and scientist Gregory Olsen is the third person to pay to be a space tourist, after American Dennis Tito in 2001 and South African Mark Shuttleworth in 2002. If you have something in the region of £11m ($19.3m) to spare and are fit, perhaps you could apply too.

You may have heard of the Paris – Dakar car rally, well, here's a slightly different take on the idea of driving a car across deserts and getting lost, but for those with less cash. The aim is to drive the route from Plymouth in the south west of the UK to Banjul in The Gambia (on a limited budget) with the principle aim of helping some charitable causes in Senegal and The Gambia. The rules include competing in a car that costs less than £100, not spending any more than £15 on getting the car ready and having no assistance whatsoever, once under way. If this sounds like your cup of tea, take a look at: http://www.plymouth-dakar.co .uk/

An Israeli couple were fined 500 Indian rupees ($11) each for embracing and kissing after getting married in a traditional Hindu ceremony in the northwestern Indian town Pushkar.

The Israeli Embassy in New Delhi confirmed the incident and identified the couple as Alon Orpaz and Tehila Salev, who decided to get married while visiting India.

A local newspaper said that priests at Pushkar's Brahma temple were so cross when the couple smooched as hymns were still being chanted that they filed a police complaint. A court in Pushkar then charged them with indecency and ordered them to pay the fine or face 10 days in prison, the newspaper reported.

The couple decided to pay, it said. “We will not tolerate any cultural pollution of this sort,” the newspaper quoted a priest, Ladoo Ram Sharma, as saying.

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

Need to convert currency?

Take a look at The Globetrotters Currency Converter – get the exchange rates for 164 currencies The Globetrotters Currency Cheat Sheet – create and print a currency converter table for your next trip.

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.

According to Forbes magazine, for the second year in a row, Seattle takes the top spot in our study. Why? The city does poorly on all counts, but was at the bottom when it comes to job growth, and the cost of living is very high. “It's true the housing prices here have just gone through the stratosphere,” says Charles Knutson, spokesman for the Seattle Chamber of Commerce. The city got hit hard by the tech bubble, and took a big employment dive. “We're coming out of that, but if you're looking at a line chart, there's a huge gap between income and housing costs.” Still, Seattle may become easier to afford should big local employers such as Microsoft, Boeing and Starbucks stay healthy.

The UK's longest-running holiday operator Thomas Cook is offering family tours of Amsterdam's red-light district. The package costs £12, though half-price for children. Thomas Cook claims the tour, which is free to under threes, offers a 'fascinating insight into the oldest profession in the world'. A press release on the two-hour tour says it leaves at 8pm and 'will take visitors deep into the famous red-light district, accompanied by a reliable and trustworthy guide'. The brochure says: 'Begin with a drink at a prostitute information centre where a former prostitute will explain the system and answer any questions you may have. Then head for the Wallen (the red-light district) and see for yourself.'