When: Saturday 18th June, 10.30am-4.00pm

Where: The Newsroom, The Guardian

60 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3GA

Cost: £85.00

A day of two intensive workshops:

Travel Writing – How to do it and how not to with Dea Birkett, the Guardian’s Travelling with Kids columnist and author of Serpent in Paradise and Off the Beaten Track

Fact, Fiction and Creating a Traveller’s Tale with Rory Maclean, author of Falling for Icarus and Stalin’s Nose

The workshops are followed by practical writing sessions. Participants should bring pen and paper – they will be expected to write! The emphasis is – whether you are a beginner or already have some writing experience – on developing skills which can be applied to both articles and books. Our aim is that, by the end of the day, each of you will have the tools to produce a publishable piece of travel writing.

For further details and application form contact: travelworkshops@deabirkett.com

For further information:

• www.deabirkett.com
• www.rorymaclean.com
• www.guardian.co.uk/newsroom

The Health Protection Agency say that tourists need more advice about how to protect their health while they are away. They say, while many companies do tell travellers to get health advice about their destination, others do not. But a spokesman for the Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA) said members did offer advice if people were travelling to more exotic destinations. Up to 2,000 Britons die abroad each year, most of them from natural causes, according to figures from the HPA.

If you have a travellers tale that your aching to tell. Then why not visit the “Travel Sized Bites” section of the Website and share it with the world. Travel Sized Bites

Google, the search engine can help you access satellite photos of North America’s most significant landmarks and locations, including the Grand Canyon, Alcatraz and Mount Rushmore. You need to enter in a zip code and a photo from space of that location – if available – is then shown. At the moment Google only offers satellite images of locations in the US and Canada but Keyhole Corporation, which Google bought last year has data for the whole globe so the service could be rolled out for other countries. The detail in some of the Google photos is impressive – putting zoom at the highest level lets you pick out individual houses and even cars. The catch? There’s a fee to use the service though a free 7 day trial is available. See:

The Beetle has bad memories about sharing a room with what seemed like a thousand cockroaches in Gilgit in Pakistan a few years ago and was afraid that they would fly on to her bed. (Before you ask, no, Beetles are not friends with cockroaches, they are sworn enemies, but we try and live and let live.)

Did you know that most cockroaches have wings, but they can only fly when temperatures are quite high. And what’s more, cockroaches are omnivorous, i.e. they will eat anything, including each other if there is nothing else available.

One internet source, maybe urban myth, states that a cockroach can live up to nine days without its head before it starves to death. They have amazing scuttling abilities: one US study showed that cockroaches are capable of running at 50 body lengths per second on a treadmill – the equivalent of Carl Lewis doing the 100-meter in 1.09 seconds!

Unesco has warned Peru that the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu might lose its world heritage status if they do not act to protect it. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people visit Machu Picchu. Experts say unrestricted tourism and landslides have damaged the 15th Century citadel and the nearby Inca trail that leads to it. In response, the Peruvian authorities have submitted a 400-page report $130m plan to the UN’s cultural arm which is believed to include satellite monitoring to measure earth movements and a daily limit of 2,500 tourists, to preserve the site.

Whilst we are talking about insects: spotted by webmaster Paul, US Entomologists Quentin Wheeler and Kelly B. Miller recently had the task of naming 65 newly discovered species of slime-mold beetles and named three species after the US president George W Bush, vice president Dick Cheney and defence secretary Donald H Rumsfeld. The newly found beetles are respectively called: Agathidium bushi Miller and Wheeler, Agathidium cheneyi Miller and Wheeler, and Agathidium rumsfeldi Miller and Wheeler. Naming the beetles after Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld was intended to pay homage to them, said Wheeler, who taught at Cornell University for 24 years and now is with the Natural History Museum in London.

The bodies of 30 British soldiers and sailors and their families, who died during Nelson’s Nile campaign more than 200 years ago were discovered on the small island by an Italian archaeologist looking for Greek and Roman artefacts. The old graves were in danger of being washed away as the sea eroded the island. The remains were reburied at the Military and War Memorial Cemetery at British families cemetery, Al-Shatby in Alexandria with full families honours during a recent ceremony. One of the dead’s descendent Gordon Watson, 87, from Hampshire, and his 83-year-old wife, Joan, travelled to Egypt for the ceremony. After the ceremony, Mr Watson said: “It’s marvellous to be related to this man … It makes you proud to be English.”

Did you know that there are estimated to be around 300 snail farms in former war torn Bosnia? One kilogram of snails is sold for four around euros (£2.70). France is the number one export destination, followed by Italy. The aim is for a snail farmer to produce around 3,000kg of snails in a year. That means an annual income of around 12,000 euros (£8,100) – around four times the national average wage. The British chief international envoy to Bosnia, Lord Ashdown, has made a priority of trying to encourage small businesses. He set up a so-called “Bulldozer” committee to smash through the red tape and old-style communist legislation that hindered the setting up of new companies. “Small and medium-size firms, like snail farms, represent the future of this country rather than the old pre-war industries, which are not coming back,” says Vedran Persic from Lord Ashdown’s office.

A joint A US and Egyptian archaeological team say they have found the largest funerary complex yet dating from the earliest era of ancient Egypt, more than 5,000 years ago in the Kom al-Ahmar region, around 600 km (370 miles) south of the capital, Cairo. Inside the tombs, the archaeologists found a cow’s head carved from flint and the remains of seven people. They believe four of them were buried alive as human sacrifices. The complex is thought to belong to a ruler of the ancient city of Hierakonpolis in around 3600 BC, when it was the largest urban centre on the Nile river.

Did you know that Nepal is home to a quarter of South Asia’s rhino population. The latest count of the population has shown that rhino numbers have dropped to less than 400 from nearly 600 animals in three parks in 2000 due mainly to poaching blamed largely on inadequate security caused by the long-running Maoist insurgency. Trading in the horn of the rhino is internationally banned, but experts say that poachers are encouraged by the big profit margin.