COVID Facts & Updates

As the UK prepares to open up its gates to all but seven countries, a few of you have been asking us - what’s the situation for people who aren’t recognised as fully-vaccinated?

Here’s our run-down of the current situation:

• The UK is currently only recognising people as “fully vaccinated” if they’ve received two doses of the Moderna, Pfizer, or Astrazeneca vaccines (or a single dose of Janssen), at least 14 days before their arrival into the country.
• You must also have been vaccinated in an approved country (the list of which has expanded dramatically as of Monday 11 October).
• However, there are still a number of other international vaccines that remain unrecognised - from Russia’s Sputnik V to China’s Sinovac. For anyone who’s had one of these vaccines, the usual quarantine rules will still apply.

The UK Government has acknowledged openly that there will need to be a plan for the currently unrecognised vaccines - but as yet we simply don’t know when this is likely to happen, or how they’d be judged. We'll keep you in the loop!

Still need help figuring things out?

• VisaGuide has a handy browser tool that lets you see which countries are accepting which vaccines.
• SherpaMap shows you which entry restrictions are in place across the world (including the countries that are currently accepting unvaccinated, COVID-negative travellers without quarantine).

In other news…

• As of Monday, Thailand has opened its borders to vaccinated travellers from ten ‘low-risk’ countries, including the UK, China and Germany.
• On Wednesday, Singapore followed suit with its own low-risk list - vaccinated travellers are now welcome from the US, UK, Canada and several EU countries (as well as South Korea in November).
• Meanwhile - you guessed it - Vietnam has announced its plans to open up travel from low-risk countries from December, in the hope of fully reopening by July 2022.

Our Top 5 Holiday Haunts (Part 2)

As Halloween approaches, we’re delving deeper into the world’s spookiest sightseeing destinations. (Last week, we checked out Dargavs in Russia and the Isle of Dolls in Mexico.)

Now, at numbers 3 and 2...

3: The Paris Catacombs

What is it? 

A hidden underworld far beneath the fancy shopping streets of Paris - a grotesque, mile-long cave network where the walls themselves have been intricately formed from the bones of over six million ancient corpses.

The Paris Catacombs date back to the 18th century - a time when the city’s cemeteries were literally collapsing under the weight of their dead. The local authorities decided to solve the problem by relocating millions of skeletons to the abandoned mining tunnels that lay beneath their streets (and then painstakingly turning them into wall decorations for reasons we can’t quite put our finger-bone on).

Why’s it spooky? 

As the sign over the door helpfully warns you, “Stop! This is the Kingdom of Death.” 

Ghost stories about the Catacombs abound, and legend has it that if you linger there after midnight, the walls themselves will begin to whisper to you, pleading you to lie down and stay with them...

But ironically, the creepiest (and perhaps most fascinating) sights lie outside the catacombs themselves. The old mining tunnels are 200 miles long beneath the streets of Paris - and while they’re officially off-limits due to their sheer size, at one time or another, they’ve hosted visitors ranging from WWII resistance fighters to urban explorers and illegal raves.

Those who venture down here will stumble onto signs left behind by previous adventurers - everything from pop-art graffiti to strange and frightening statues that leer at you from out of the walls.

How do I get there? 

Head to the appropriately-named Barrière d'Enfer, or ‘Gate of Hell’ in southern Paris, and you can buy a ticket to the main catacombs (masks must be worn inside, which might make the experience even creepier if your glasses keep fogging up). 

If you’re organised enough to set your alarm in the morning, there are also cheaper ‘on the door’ tickets available in limited numbers.

But it might actually be worth shelling out for a private tour - if you’re lucky, these can sometimes give you access to hidden areas and strange secrets that aren’t available to the average visitor...

2. Hoia Baciu Forest, Romania

What is it? 

In the depths of Transylvania, about a four-hour drive from the very pretty castle that could-have-but-probably-hasn’t inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula, you’ll find a riddle far weirder and spookier than any posh bloke with fangs and an unhealthy interest in necks.

The dark forest known as Hoia Baciu is gorgeous and eerie - and mystery has haunted it throughout human history. (It’s actually named after a shepherd who vanished in its depths and was never seen again, along with 200 sheep).

Why’s it spooky? 

If you’re asking us that question, we’ll assume you’ve never seen The Blair Witch Project. 

But if you need any convincing about why haunted woods might be creepy, we can reel off a ton of unexplained events that have reportedly taken place in Hoia Baciu - from Soviet-era UFO sightings to ghosts, dripping ectoplasm, and shadowy figures. 

Most famously, in the heart of the forest stands an oddly neat, circular clearing - it’s said that anyone who passes through its centre will vanish, transported to another dimension.

How do I get there? 

You’ll want to head for the nearby city of Cluj-Napoca, which the forest sits just outside - handily, you can catch a direct flight from 20 worldwide locations, including London Luton and Stansted. It’s a very pleasant medieval city, with trips available to nearby castles and sites of interest - so a good base of operations all around for your Transylvanian jaunt.

Get your timings right and you can even stop off at Electric Castle, an epic five-day music festival that takes place just outside the city during July (in 2022, acts will include Gorillaz, Twenty One Pilots and the Deftones).

Pick of the Clicks

All the other important (or silly, or strange) travel news from across the web:

• From desert draughts to mountaintop mocktails - Wine Enthusiast magazine has been tracking down the world’s most remote bars. 

• In Abu Dhabi, fans of the Netflix hit Squid Game have organised their own (less murder-y) version of the contest.

• Chinese citizens have been fighting back against groups of anti-social, aggressively-dancing grannies (yes, really).

• Ryanair faces criticism for refusing to refund its passengers during the COVID-19 pandemic - and then banning them from future flights after they took their money back via credit card.

• If you want to check out the trendiest place in town (or just want to know where to avoid visiting to dodge the overpriced drinks), Time Out has compiled a list of the World’s Coolest Neighbourhoods.)
• We can all sympathise with these two men who were lost at sea off the Solomon Islands for 29 days - and found it “a nice break from everything.”

Photo by @gavsgoneagain

Virgin On Ridiculous

You might have wondered - why do Virgin Atlantic run their big sales at exactly the same time as British Airways? 

We give you the inside scoop on the bizarre true story of the epic rivalry between the two airlines, and how it began...

The year was 1990. Nelson Mandela was being released from prison. The Hubble Space Telescope had just been launched. MC Hammer kept telling people not to touch this.

And British Airways, for the first time in history, was facing some serious competition - from Richard Branson’s newly-launched Virgin Atlantic.

Virgin had begun small back in 1984, with just a single Boeing 747 operating out of Gatwick. But it had just entered the big leagues with some prominent media attention, after its planes airlifted British citizens home during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

Shortly afterwards, they were awarded their first spaces at Heathrow runway

BA’s chairman, Baron King, was angry enough about all of this to tell his employees to “do something about Branson.”

And so, behind closed doors, began a year-long campaign of petty corporate sabotage, disruption and data-theft to try and knock Virgin down a peg or two.

It may all sound very cloak-and-dagger...but frankly, the BA employees weren’t exactly Jason Bourne.

Their tactics included:

• Wandering into Virgin waiting lounges and trying to encourage delayed passengers to switch to a BA flight
• Rifling through the bins of Virgin employees for incriminating documents
• Accessing unattended Virgin computers at flight terminals to steal passenger information
• Calling up Virgin customers and pretending that their flights had been cancelled (then encouraging them to book a BA flight instead).

Small wonder, then, that their ‘dirty tricks’ all became public knowledge in the end - after which the matter was settled in court. 

In 1993, BA were ordered to pay up a whopping £3 million to cover Branson’s legal fees, and an extra £610,000 in damages. A red-faced Baron King gave a public apology and resigned shortly afterwards.

Branson got his own back, too. 

Over the next decade, Virgin got a huge kick out of repeatedly running advertising campaigns designed to mock or embarrass British Airways - and it’s a rivalry that continues to this day.

In 1999, when the BA-sponsored London Eye wasn’t lifted into position on schedule, Branson immediately flew a blimp over the Thames. 

It simply read, ‘BA can’t get it up’. Ouch.

It's Always A Party Somewhere

Getting your calendar ready for 2022? 

In this column, we give you the lowdown on all the biggest bashes, celebrations, events and festivals taking place across the world every week.

The Procession of the Lord of Miracles, Lima (18th October)

In Peru, October is known as ‘Mes Morado’ - or ‘Purple Month’. 

It’s a time when Peruvians, as the name suggests, get a lot of use out of the colour purple (and while it is of course a very nice colour and also a great novel, purple is chosen here as it represents faith and sorrow within the Catholic Church). 

The whole month climaxes in a huge 24-hour religious parade and festival through the streets of Lima - the Procession of the Lord of Miracles.

The story is a fascinating one. In the 17th century, an enslaved Angolan worker painted a magnificent depiction of Jesus Christ on a cracked hut wall, using only the materials he had to hand.

Since that time, multiple attempts to paint over or destroy the painting have apparently ended poorly (apparently one plasterer mysteriously broke his arm as he tried to cover it up). In 1746, an earthquake levelled most of Lima, but the wall displaying the painting was somehow left standing - and from this time, the artwork was celebrated as an outright miracle.

If you ever find yourself in Lima during the festival, expect...you guessed it...a lot of purple. You’ll be dining on mazamorra morada, a pudding made from purple corn, as you sip on chica morada, a refreshing purple drink (it’s apparently rich in antioxidants!). The crowds that throng the streets during the parade will be wearing purple tunics, and releasing purple-and-white balloons.

• Where? Lima, Peru
• When? The public parade typically takes place on October 18th, with a replica of the painting carried through the city streets. (The real thing will then be displayed in a grand church service at the end of the month.)
• How do I get there? Don’t worry about rushing off to book flights just yet. Travel restrictions are in place for Peru right now for the usual COVID-y reasons. Meanwhile, the festivities have been scaled down for 2021 and the procession itself won’t be going ahead. Let’s just keep our fingers and toes crossed for 2022, right?

Once you eventually get to Lima, the festival will be hard to miss - the parade circles through the city, beginning and ending at the gorgeous Iglesia Las Nazarenas church and monastery, where the original painting is kept.

Vital information for your next trip to Cork or Munich - here’s how you should accept cake from Irish or German hosts.

Thanks for reading!