Destination: Asia
A Father-Son Journey Back to Vietnam
by Jim Benning | 12.01.04 | 5:51 PM ET
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Yahoo! BuzzCrossing Divides Into Cambodia
by Jim Benning | 12.01.04 | 5:50 PM ET
Tom Haines’ ambitious Boston Globe travel series “Crossing Divides” continued Sunday with a story about his journey through Laos and Cambodia. The story opens along Cambodia’s Mekong River. “[M]any living above and below the falls have witnessed the end of any illusions they may have had, not of colonial conquest, but of what to expect from life,” Haines writes. “A journey from Cambodia through the falls to Laos intersected time and again with this reckoning. An awareness of death was as vivid as life in a hilly jungle hamlet, below a thundering cataract, in a riverside temple, and in the farming village home of the sleeping newborn.”
The Headmaster, the Terrorists and Me
by Julia Ross | 10.05.04 | 9:37 PM ET
Photo by Julia Ross. Two years after the Bali bombing, Julia Ross recalls the attack's unlikely impact on her teaching experience in China
The Life of a Traveling Writer
by Jim Benning | 10.05.04 | 7:13 PM ET
He’s Really, Really, Really Trying to Like India
by Michael Yessis | 09.30.04 | 7:19 PM ET
The last time Seth Stevenson went to India he just “haaaaaaated it.” Yes, that’s seven As, which is a whole lot of hate. But he’s trying again, this time with his girlfriend. He’s chronicling his second effort in India all this week on Slate. So far he’s puked a little, sought a little spirituality, and been, in general, quite funny while doing it. “It seems there exists a sort of Hindu metaphysics known as Ayurveda, which aims to heal both body and spirit (and, most important, has been championed by Deepak Chopra),” he writes. “I figure this will do the trick. And since they happen to have an Ayurvedic spa at our beach resort, I also figure: Why not seek deeper meaning on a massage table?”
On the Bus with Hong Kong’s ‘Long Hair’
by Jim Benning | 09.15.04 | 11:26 PM ET
Journalist and travel writer Daisann McLane is filing dispatches from Hong Kong this week for Slate. The first article, which appeared yesterday, focuses on Sunday’s legislative council elections and “Long Hair,” a Che-T-shirt-wearing Marxist activist and surprise winner. McLane jumped on his press bus Monday, as soon as she got the invitation. “I used to be a staff writer for Rolling Stone, so I know the first rule of superstar journalism: If you’re invited on the tour bus, you go,” she writes. Today’s dispatch focuses on Hong Kong cuisine. McLane is at work on a memoir about learning Cantonese. If it’s half as engaging as the New York Times story she wrote a year ago about studying the language, it’s sure to be a good read. She was featured in a 2002 World Hum interview.
The First Rule of Visiting Thailand: Do Not Sit on the Buddha’s Head
by Michael Yessis | 09.14.04 | 11:27 PM ET
Thai government officials have had enough of culturally insensitive travelers to their country. To combat the problem, they plan to publish a book on Thai etiquette. A poster for a film called “Hollywood Buddha,” which featured a man sitting on a Buddha statue’s head, triggered the course of action, according to the BBC. “Some officials called for ‘malicious’ foreigners to be banned from Thailand,” the BBC reports. “But a government minister denied reports that it was preparing a blacklist to ban foreigners who had offended Thai culture.”
British Backpackers Slain in Thailand
by Jim Benning | 09.10.04 | 11:30 PM ET
A couple of young British backpackers in Thailand were apparently shot to death Thursday by an off-duty Thai police officer. The shootings followed an argument in the restaurant the officer owns northwest of Bangkok. The Independent has a report. The Bangkok Post has a story that requires registration to access. For those of us who’ve had the pleasure of traveling in Thailand, such violence directed at tourists is hard to imagine.
Hell No! They Won’t Buy Lonely Planet Guidebooks!
by Michael Yessis | 07.23.04 | 11:00 PM ET
An organization called Burma Campaign UK has called for a boycott of Lonely Planet because it believes that by promoting travel to Burma through its guidebook, the publisher indirectly supports the nation’s dictatorship. Lonely Planet answered the charges in a recent issue of the Guardian. “Lonely Planet supports the aims of Burma Campaign UK,” says Andy Riddle, sales and marketing director for Lonely Planet Publications Europe. “This is a disagreement about tactics, not objectives. We provide objective information to travellers so they can make informed decisions about the complex issue of whether to travel to Burma, including explicit condemnation of the abominable regime. We show people who decide to visit the country how they can travel responsibly.”
Thank You, Department of Homeland Security, For Protecting Americans from British Novelists
by Jim Benning | 07.12.04 | 9:18 PM ET
The author of “Amsterdam” and other acclaimed novels made the tongue-in-cheek remark in front of a Seattle audience after he was initially refused entry into the United States. Officials told him the $5,000 speaking honorarium he was to be paid disqualified him from a visa-waiver program. Unfortunately, he is but one of many writers who have been harassed by U.S. officials since the Department of Homeland Security took over border and immigration control last year, writes British journalist Elena Lappin in the New York Times. Lappin was handcuffed and detained for 36 hours after she arrived in the United States without a special journalist visa. Understandably, she wasn’t pleased. “American journalists working abroad, especially in free countries, are not accustomed to monitoring of this kind,” she writes. “By requiring foreign journalists to obtain special visas, the United States has aligned itself with the likes of Iran, North Korea and Cuba, places where reporters are treated as dangerous subversives and disseminators of uncomfortable truths.”
Ten Years of Travelers’ Tales
by Jim Benning | 07.12.04 | 9:16 PM ET
The San Francisco Chronicle’s John Flinn celebrates the publishing company’s travel anthologies in a column Sunday. “[T]hese rambling anthologies are like mosaics: Each piece might add only a single note of color, but combine them and step back, and a rich and multifaceted portrait emerges,” he writes. Travelers’ Tales editor Jen Leo liked Flinn’s column, writing in her weblog that it was “a well written primer for those who have never heard of Travelers’ Tales.” She also noted a few upcoming titles from the company, including a collection of China stories. For more on Travelers’ Tales, World Hum interviewed co-founder James O’Reilly in May.
Summer Travel Reading
by Michael Yessis | 06.07.04 | 9:45 PM ET
The New York Times Book Review’s annual summer reading issue takes a look at seven new travel titles, including Elinor Burkett’s “So Many Enemies, So Little Time” and Michael Gorra’s “The Bells in their Silence: Travels Through Germany.” Reviewer Brooke Allen likes the crop of tomes. “A handful of recent travel books, featuring subjects that range from the only slightly offbeat (revisionist looks at Germany and modern Greece) to the truly mind-stretching (Kyrgyzstan, the Gobi Desert, wartime Afghanistan, peacetime Iraq), have thoroughly trumped the standard travel literature this summer,” she writes.
The Atlanta Hotel: Accommodations for Writers Not on the Bestseller List
by Jim Benning | 06.07.04 | 9:42 PM ET
Thomas Swick’s excellent two-part series on Bangkok’s Atlanta Hotel concluded Sunday. “All over the world I have visited famous literary hotels—the Ritz in Paris, Raffles in Singapore—that today have rates prohibitive to any author not on the best-seller list,” he writes in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. “The Atlanta, in yet another cap feather, was a writers’ hotel that writers could actually afford.”
Honoring ‘Hearing Birds Fly’
by Jim Benning | 05.29.04 | 12:32 AM ET
Britian’s The Royal Society of Literature has awarded its inaugural Ondaatje Prize for a book that best captures the spirit of a place to Louisa Waugh, for her travel memoir Hearing Birds Fly: A Nomadic Year in Mongolia. The Independent has the details.
Utne on Travel
by Michael Yessis | 05.26.04 | 12:41 AM ET
The always interesting Utne magazine devotes a section to travel in its May/June issue. Several original and reprinted stories are featured, including one about organic farms that offer room and board for travelers, a snapshot of pre-3/11 Madrid and an excellent essay from Outpost magazine called “Misguided Guidebooks?” In it, Chris Turner contrasts his two favorite restaurants in Delhi, Karim’s and T.G.I. Friday’s. “[Karim’s] embodies practically everything the indie guides—your Rough Guides, your Footprint and Moon handbooks, and of course your Lonely Planets—stand for: tradition, value, authenticity.” But what about the American chain restaurant? “During the nightly happy hour, South Delhi’s T.G.I. Friday’s is the place to see the city’s new generation of yuppies ... The place is packed to overflowing with young Delhiites at play—decked out smartly in trendy casual wear, quaffing two-for-one drafts, chattering into cell phones. this is not the India of postcards but rather modern India as it actually is.” The piece explores the notion of what makes for an “authentic” travel experience and, unfortunately, it’s not available online. In fact, none of the stories are unless you’re a subscriber or want to spend $2.95 per story.