Where are The World’s Dirtiest Cities? Forbes recently came up with a list. The 25 cities deemed the world’s dirtiest won their places on the list with disease-infested water supplies, life-threatening air pollution, plentiful raw sewage and rank public sanitation problems. Drum roll, puh-lease. The cities are:

1. Baku, Azerbaijan (pictured)

2. Dhaka, Bangladesh

3. Antananarivo, Madagascar

4. Port au Prince, Haiti

5. Mexico City, Mexico

6. Addis Abada, Ethiopia

7. Mumbai, India

8. Baghdad, Iraq

9. Almaty, Kazakhstan

10. Brazzaville, Congo

11. Ndjamena, Chad

12. Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

13. Bangui, Central African Republic

14. Moscow, Russia

15. Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

16. Bamako, Mali

17. Pointe Noire, Congo

18. Lome, Togo

19. Conakry, Guinea Republic

20. Nouakchott, Mauritania

21. Niamey, Niger

22. Luanda, Angola

23. Maputo, Mozambique

24. New Delhi, India

25. Port Harcourt, Nigeria

Upon perusing new-ish mapping site MapJack for the first time, I was pretty much blown away. Sure, the site only covers a bizarre coupling of cities right now - San Francisco and Chiang Mai, Thailand - but its imaging technology allows you to enter addresses or points of interest, locate them on high-resolution photographic maps and maneuver right up to the front of buildings, pan left and right, turn in circles, zoom in and out and easily switch to nearby vantage points marked on the maps by blue dots.

I was able to easily read building numbers, street signs and even the friggin’ credit card stickers on the doors of several local businesses. Not bad. It’s a cool tool on so many levels, but for travelers, it offers an easy way to view the area a particular hotel is in or the kinds of shops in a certain neighborhood you’re planning to visit on your next trip. It can also give armchair travelers a candid view of popular tourist destinations like Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco or Three Kings Square in Chiang Mai.

I’m not sure how often they update the images, but looking at several spots in San Francisco that I know well, they’re quite current despite not being in real time.

The company is working to make maps of the following destinations available soon:

* Lake Tahoe

* Yosemite National Park

* Pacifica

* Palo Alto

* San Jose

* Las Vegas

One word of caution: make sure you have a few minutes to spare before you start playing around with MapJack. I got sucked in and - bam - there went the morning.

SmarterTravel.com’s list of 10 Amazing Adventures Under $1,000 is a round-up that’s worth reading. They’ve hunted down some cool ideas for adventurous vacations that hit the inexpensive end of the spectrum. And six of the suggested trips (hiking, rafting, camping, sailing, biking) are outside the good ‘ole US of A (Peru, Canada, Croatia, Tanzania, Laos, New Zealand). Trips range in length from four to 10 days. Most are packages offered by tour operators, and none include airfare in the price.

Further proving that all-business class flights are as popular as ever (despite the demise of MaxJet), Singapore Airlines has announced plans to convert its Airbus A340-500 planes into all-business class flights outfitted with 30-inch-wide seats that double as flat beds. When they take to the skies in between June and September of this year, the newly configured planes will fly the airline’s Singapore to New York and Singapore to LAX routes.

Singapore Airlines to Launch First All-Business Class Flights From USA to Asia

If you’re going to be in New York this weekend and you love travel, consider checking out the New York Times Travel Show, a veritable smorgasbord of travel information from resorts, hotels, spas, cruise lines, tour operators, tourist agencies and adventure travel companies from around the world. Along with vendor booths and live entertainment performances representing a vast array of cultures, the show features a Taste of the World Pavilion filled with international cuisine and cooking demonstrations, a Spa Pavilion offering sample treatments and discounted packages at spa resorts, travel author appearances and special travel deals offered to folks brave enough to book their next vacation on the spot. And with travel experts Rick Steves, Arthur Frommer, Ian Wright and Stephanie Abrams - among many others - leading seminars, the show offers a rare chance for face-to-face learning from leading peeps in the industry. Cost: $15.

Yeah, last minute travel can be cool. But it can also leave you cash poor, especially when you’re talking high-season travel in major vacation destinations. But as with most things in life, a just little edumuhcation can go a long way. Case in point: Kayak.com’s Fare Alerts.

Create a Fare Alert (or 12) on Kayak.com or SideStep.com for the summer getaway(s) currently sequestered in your noggin by clicking on the “Get fare alerts for this trip” link on the top right-hand corner of the flight results page. You can track fares for specific dates, a flexible span of time (e.g. summer weekends or, say, the month of June) or an entire region (e.g. Europe). When your daily or weekly Fare Alert (you choose how often it arrives) touches down in your email inbox, you’ll be able to make informed travel decisions.

Depending on what you ask it to track (specific dates, flexible span of time or even top cities in a region), each Fare Alert can show you:

- How much the fare for specific dates has increased or decreased in dollars since the last alert

- The airfare history for your trip dates based on searches made by Kayakers over the past 90 days

- A snapshot of prices in Kayak.com’s matrix view, so you can quickly compare prices by carrier and number of stops

- The lowest fare available during a specific span of time (e.g. the next four weekends)

- The best fares available for popular destination cities in a region you want to visit (e.g. Africa)

Who knows, maybe you’ll still pay craptons to travel to the most expensive resort on the hottest island right in the middle of the high season. After all, it’s high season for a reason. But at least you’ll be pimping it out with full knowledge of your unbridled American excess. Just remember the wisdom of G.I. Joe.

(**Editor’s note: Yeah, Kayak.com owns us. You wanna make something of it? I’ll have you know I was surreptitiously using Fare Alerts to aid in making my personal travel plans long before Kayak.com bought our parent company SideStep.com in December. Nepotism, bias, blah, blah, blah. Fare Alerts just make good travel sense.)

Although no one we know can provide us with an eyewitness account, we hear tell that a new airline was spotted in the skies this week: Air Yeti.

Aiming to be the low-cost carrier of choice for travelers in Nepal, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the Air Arabia-owned airline has its hub in Kathmandu, Nepal and flies to destinations that include Bangkok, Delhi, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Sharjah and Doha.

And you thought snakes on a plane could only happen in the movies:

Thousands of Snakes on a Plane Seized in Vietnam

Air France has announced a partnership with the European Space Agency that will result in bringing satellite views inside the cabin on long-haul flights. Passengers will be able to view medium resolution images of the terrain 30,000 feet below from the seatback entertainment systems in the airline’s 777s (most operate on Air France Singapore and India routes). While the images aren’t real-time, they do change in accord with the plane’s progress and provide a detailed look at the world as it passes by below. Air France is the first airline to offer satellite imagery to passengers.

Air France Supplies Satellite Views of Flights

It may be a breezy 107 degrees at the Ritz Carlton Bali Resort & Spa in the wee hours of the morning, but at least you can order an iPod shuffle pre-programmed with tunes while you’re cooling off at the pool during the day. But perks like this are just the reason Travel + Leisure recently ranked the hotel second overall for customer service in the world.