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If you're looking for a life-changing adventure, look no further than Remote Area Medical (RAM ). RAM is a nonprofit, volunteer, airborne medical relief corps providing free health care anywhere in the world that it's needed. They are constantly in search of doctors, nurses, E.M.T.s, pilots, veterinarians, support workers, drivers, mechanics, and other related workers. If you have any skill that could be used to support an expedition your services could probably be used.

In return for your services RAM will offer the adventure of a lifetime. Parachuting into the middle of the rain forest and providing emergency medicine (or support services for our readers who fancy themselves in the MacGyver role), and then hiking, canoing or 4x4ing it back out of the country is a common experience. For those not experienced in skydiving RAM now also offers training through the nonprofit school called "Airdrop Assist".

If working in the Airborne division of RAM sounds too intense, RAM also offers several expeditions that use conventional means to get into a country, however, all locales are remote areas and will require significant skill and dedication to reach a destination even once inside the country. It's not called Remote Area Medical for nothing.

RAM offers several videos of expeditions in action as well as promotional content.

For more information (and applications) visit Remote Area Medical directly.

OnStar announced today a new partnership with MapQuest that will enable drivers to plan and design their route with the popular website and transfer the route to their in-car OnStar navigation system. A brilliant idea indeed as I despise the built in navigation interfaces on most in-car systems. They typically only allow point-to-point driving directions with no ability to modify your route or add multiple points of interest easily, especially while driving.

Using this new system, users can preplan their own routes via the MapQuest interface and have it sent to their in-car nav system. MapQuest allows for additional functionality not present in most in-car navigation systems. Features such as the ability to string together several points of interest or choose multiple point-to-point routes, as well as the obvious ability to see your route highlighted on a map prior to getting in the car.

The system will start via a pilot program this summer, with a full roll-out slated for late 2007.

Additional information available via the OnStar Press Release.

Last year Virgin Atlantic assembled a team of individuals and technical power houses, including Scaled Composites, to perform the first solo, first jet-propelled, non-stop circumnavigation in history. Now they've upped the stakes and want to do it again, only at an even more impressive distance. Virgin Atlantic now intends to set a record by performing a non-stop, solo 26,000 mile journey. This is compared to last years 22,877 mile jaunt.

After fixing a fuel leakage problem that grounded a previous attempt, the team observed conditions acceptable to launch the Global Flyer from the Kennedy Space Centre at 7:22am local time. The aircraft is slightly past the mid-way point across the Atlantic Ocean on the first leg of the circumnavigation. Piloting the Global Flyer is Steve Fossett, who will forego sleep for up to 80 hours while flying the 26,000 mile minimum required for circumnavigating the world and holding the record for the longest solo flight ever.

Visit the Global Flyer Flight Tracker to view his current progress, updated every five minutes.

Also be sure and check out his live current and cumulative radiation dose via Solar Metrics.

I was looking around for information recently on foreign travel, stumbling upon a great site in the process. Walkabout Travel Gear has an amazing resource up in which various world travelers have submitted extremely useful tips; assembled all on one page with-out any flashy graphics or page layout. Most "tips" pages I've traversed contain a measly ten or so tips, typically of the "Don't drink the water" type. I assure you this is not that kind of information. Jump over to Walkabout Travel Gear and take a read.

Everyone has been hiking once or twice with what seemed like a super human biological freak leading (or dragging) us to the summit. Even if you haven't been tortured by such an experience, everyone needs to read what Doghouse Reilly experienced on a recent hiking excursion with an Army Ranger.

From the article:

We scrambled up the mountain, always thinking that the summit was just over the next ridge. However, by the time we reached that next ridge, the earth had belched up another mound of rock for us to scale. Even G.I. Joe was getting a little disheartened at times; this wasn't good. I had elaborate plans for a celebratory heart attack upon reaching the summit, but I was beginning to have my doubts.

An outstanding and very funny read.

Treknologies is now a member of the travel blog network at Blogads, a group of independent travel blogs.

Fridays we'll be bringing you headlines from some of the other blogs in the group. Here are this week's batch:

Rockefeller roof decks reopen (NewYorkology)
de Young Gala Opening in San Francisco (Jet Set Lara)
Gaviota, The Last Cowgirl in Cuba (Travel Blogs)
This week in reviews (A Guy in New York)

Many of us have dreamed of some day racing in the Dakar Rally, but few of us can afford the price of a vehicle plus the hefty entrance fee (€11,700). The Plymouth-Banjul Challenge is aimed at those of us who might not be able to afford the Dakar but still want to do something similar, with every bit as much adventure. The Challenge lays down few rules, and two of them are there to limit the amount of money spent on the race. Vehicles must not be worth more than £100, and racers must not spend more than £15 in preperation. All of the vehicles are auctioned off in Gambia at the end of the race to raise money for Gambian charities. If you have the time and are lacking in the adventure department then you may want to look into the Plymouth-Banjul Challenge.

In Dakar news, a broad overview of the route has been released and you can now view the 2006 Dakar route map online. 2006 will be the first year a Mauritanian motorcyclist will participate in the Dakar and the rally will cross a new country by starting in Portugal in the capitol city of Lisbon. The motorcycle category has been filled, with 320 total entrants outnumbering the 230 possible spots. This year also marks the adoption of a 150km/h (93mph) speed limit for motorcycles and trucks, with organizers currently researching a speed limit for cars. Interested parties can view Dakar registration information but are warned that it may lead to excessive dreaming.

Google Sightseeing--whose motto is "Why bother seeing the world for real?"--allows those of us without the wherewithal or ability to take time off work to see the world. It's a frequently updated blog that highlights interesting satellite imagery using Google Maps satellite data. The site is very well designed and browsable by location, category, and through a map interface.

I believe most of the Google Maps satellite data comes from Google's acquisition of Keyhole last year. Now Google is almost ready to unveil the updated version of Keyhole, called Google Earth. The screenshot makes me very excited, as it looks capable of overlaying driving directions and has many other enhancements over the original Keyhole software. No word yet on whether it will be free or join the stable of Google's few pay offerings.

[Sergey] Brin demonstrated how in the new release, he could "fly"--in a virtual sense--through the Grand Canyon, a landmark he's never visited in person, and view the canyon's peaks and valleys.

"Now I don't have to go," he said.

There's currently a beta version of Google Earth available that you can play around with as well as the official Google Earth website.

If you'd like a completely free alternative there's NASA's World Wind software, the opensource equivalent to Keyhole and Google Earth. World Wind is setup to access some of NASA's scientific data, and users have been udpating it to show data of interest to many. World Wind is also useful for checking out global news in a novel new way--it allows the user to view alerts on the globe. Forest fires, flooding, and earthquakes can all be seen soon after they happen. The connected traveler could use this data to make updates to their route in realtime, avoiding delays or rushing in to document or help out in a disaster.

Finally, for a pictorial travelogue from a place that few travelers will ever go, see Elena's Kid of Speed website. She takes her Kawasaki Ninja through the ghost town of Chernobyl in the irradiated zone, Geiger counter and camera in hand. It is an amazing and sobering look at the aftereffects of a nuclear disaster:

I have ridden all my life and over the years I have owned several different motorbikes. I ended my search for a perfect bike with a big kawasaki ninja, that boasts a mature 147 horse power, some serious bark, is fast as a bullet and comfortable for a long trips.

I travel a lot and one of my favorite destinations leads North from Kiev, towards so called Chernobyl "dead zone", which is 130km from my home. Why my favorite? Because one can take long rides there on empty roads.

The people there all left and nature is blooming. There are beautiful woods and lakes.

In places where roads have not been travelled by trucks or army vehicles, they are in the same condition they were 20 years ago--except for an occasional blade of grass that discovered a crack to spring through. Time does not ruin roads, so they may stay this way until they can be opened to normal traffic again... a few centuries from now.

You can now listen to Erden on the Entreprenuer Hour's final show (in Windows Media Audio). The show is titled Making your Dream a Reality and Erden "will share how far he has traveled, how far he has to go, and the challenges and rewards of living a dream."

Erden Eruç will be on the Entrepreneur Hour Radio Show this Monday between noon and 1:00pm EST (11am CT, 9am PST).

The show title is Breaking Free: Making your Dream a Reality.

From Erden:

The career changing aspect of the Six Summits Project and my reasons for embarking on a new path also drew attention, and became the focal point of many media interviews. Similar interest remains in the US for this latter topic. For example, I will be interviewed live on radio on Monday, June 13th at noon EST (that is at 22:00 on Monday in Turkey).

Should be some great stuff, hopefully it inspires some of you to start saving so you can quit your day jobs and go on the road.

Need to know where the world's terrorist hot spots are? Check out Aon's 2005 Terrorist Risk Map (brief registration required).

From the press release:

This year 31 countries have received higher terrorism risk ratings than last year, almost half (48%) of which are in Western Europe. Among these, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and Denmark have all been marked as higher risk because of increased Islamic extremist activity. The most recent manifestation of this was the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in November 2004 by a Dutch Moroccan Islamic extremist.

You can also check out the 2005 Risks in Global Filmmaking map (no registration required).

The USGS recently unveiled a program that makes predictions about earthquake shaking in California. The program is designed to increase earthquake awareness and preparedness. The site has maps of California, updated daily, which predict the probability of shaking within the next 24 hours. While not claiming the ability to predict the future, they do state the following:

Neither the USGS nor Caltech nor any other scientists have ever predicted a major earthquake. They do not know how, and they do not expect to know how any time in the foreseeable future. However based on scientific data, probabilities can be calculated for potential future earthquakes. For example, scientists estimate that over the next 30 years the probability of a major [earthquake] occurring in the San Francisco Bay area is 67% and 60% in Southern California.

[You can also see current Pacific tsunami advisories. -ed.]