blog.triptouch

We have a cool little storm here in Israel, and a couple of days ago we experienced some strong winds - they said it reached 100Km/h, which is a lot here in Israel (where the weather is usually calm).

They claimed that we’re gonna have 8m high waves - so we decided to go and have lunch by the sea to check it out. So we went to Tel-Aviv’s new port, which is a great place, and saw the waves first hand, splashing on the deck. I’m not sure about the 8m stuff but it was impressive and fun. Guy was a bit disappointed, to tell the truth.

But here are a few photos from that exciting event…

We have just uploaded a new version to TripTouch. The major changes are -

• Private photos! People are having fun uploading photos to TripTouch… now you can also upload your private photos, and not just public ones that appear on our travel guides.
• Better trip features. You can now add blog posts (text), and also view your entire trip in one page - including a map of your location, your blog posts, your status updates, and photos you took. It’s rather neat - although we are still working on perfecting this page and making it better looking.
• Many many small features and fixes.

People are starting to get notice of TripTouch. We’re getting several nice links from all sorts of blogs and website.

Today we got a nice mention in the Speigel - our own 10 seconds of fame in German. Click here to view the video, you can jump to 1:55 to view the part about TripTouch. Nice!

One of the bad effects of travel is on the environment - the carbon loads are high for planes and cars. In an interesting post, EcoGeek shows the difference in carbon loads for a plane, car and train ride from Toulouse to Paris (data from the French Rail System) -

• Train: 57.90 Euros; 5 hours, 13 minutes; 9 kg CO₂
• Plane: 222.20 Euros; 1 hour, 30 minutes; 180 kg CO₂
• Car: 201.47 Euros; 6 hours, 46 minutes; 272 kg CO₂

Obviously the Train is better, interestingly riding a Car is actually worse than an Airplane (I always assumed the opposite).

More and more companies allow you to offset your carbon loads, and hopefully as people get more aware the travel industry will get better at this. We in TripTouch encourage you to take less trips, but longer ones - it’s the short ones that are the worst in this regard (getting there is half the fun, but it’s also releases heaps of CO2…).

I just found out about the “Gap-Year”. It seems that the Britons (and other Europeans, actually) sometimes take a year off during their university studies, or after the end of their studies, before starting working.

We Israelis have it a different way - in age 18 we go to the army for 3 years (boys) or 2 years (girls). Then usually we take our gap between army and studies - and spend a little time traveling (usually to south america, SE Asia, India or AU/NZ).

But anyway I think it’s great to take some time off and spend a few months traveling. It really opens your mind up to new ideas and people. And it’s fun of course. I had my own gap-half-year in NZ and Samoa.

Anyway the web is offering some specialized places for people to hang out before their gap year with information. Obviously TripTouch is a good place to find information. Some sites go even further and give information about volunteering in some places, placements and jobs. One cool site is Gap Year World Wide which is worth a look if you’re thinking about a gap year yourself. I like the teaching and charitable projects bit. Good on them!

We have released a new version, which includes some new features -

• The ability to create different trips. There is also a new page for you to see your trips on a map, and you can share this link with your friends.
• A map to see where your travel mates are.
• You can now search for companions in your current or future destinations.
• TripTouch can now suggest trip mates for you under the ‘traveler’ tab, and you can also see the newest members joining our community.