Destination: Central America
Experts to Americans: Easy On the Tipping!
by Jim Benning | 05.21.07 | 8:11 AM ET
Sure, in some countries a generous tip for great service is appropriate. But not everywhere. “In Japan, for instance, tipping is viewed as insulting,” writes Rosemary McClure in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. “In other countries, it’s considered disrespectful to hand a tip to a waiter.” How to avoid being the ugly American shelling out too much money in tips overseas?
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Yahoo! BuzzThe Rise of Luxe Surf Travel (at Least According to the NY Times)
by Jim Benning | 02.12.07 | 10:53 AM ET
Anyone who surfs or knows people who do realized years ago that the sport had shed its dirtbag image—that doctors and attorneys now eagerly lay claim to the title “surfer” (even if they don’t much surf) and that big bucks are spent on travel to remote, uncrowded breaks in places like Central America and Indonesia. Now, the New York Times is on the case. In a front-page story yesterday, the Times breathlessly reported: “For $10,000 a day, you can have the ultimate surfing sojourn in Indonesia aboard the 110-foot Indies Trader IV, a sort of floating hotel with 15 cabins, a helipad and three-course meals with wine. A motorized tender takes you to the waves.” And about today’s surfers: “This new species of surfer contributes to a booming market for vacation packages, instruction, equipment and real estate near some of the world’s best surf breaks. Like golf, surfing has become an ideal activity around which to discuss business.”
Nouveau Sandalista on Venezuela: ‘There Is So Much Vibe and Passion’
by Jim Benning | 01.25.07 | 2:22 PM ET
We noted early last year that Venezuela was the new, hip Latin American travel destination for good sandal-shod lefties (or naive commies, depending on your perspective). Cindy Sheehan, Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte, among other famed agitators, had already made the trek. Now comes another breathless report on the phenomenon. “From a trickle a few years ago,” the Mail & Guardian reports, “there are now thousands, travelling individually and on package tours, exploring a left-wing mecca that promises to build social justice in the form of ‘21st-century socialism.’”
War Tourism Comes to El Salvador
by Jim Benning | 01.04.07 | 11:54 AM ET
Nearly every country has to have a little war tourism, right? The U.S. has Gettysburg. Cambodia has the Killing Fields. Now El Salvador wants in on the action. According to the AP, the country is making the most of its 12-year civil war, which ended in 1992 and left 75,000 dead. “For a fee, former guerrillas will take visitors on tours of former battlefields or mountain hideouts, while museums display war memorabilia,” a story reports. Among the top destinations is Perquin, a mountain town where FMLN guerillas once established their headquarters. Visitors can stroll the “Museum of the Revolution,” which features uniforms and what remains of Soviet weapons. El Salvador is apparently the first Central American country to build a tourism business around its civil war history. What’s the hold up, Nicaragua?
Vanuatu Tops “Happy Planet Index”
by Michael Yessis | 07.14.06 | 11:42 AM ET
And the nations with the world’s largest economies finished down the 178-nation list. Way down. Germany ranked 81st, Japan 95th and the United States 150th. The New Economics Foundation, which bills itself as a “think-and-do tank,” says its inaugural Happy Planet Index “moves beyond crude ratings of nations according to national income, measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP).” The new index, they say, produces “a more accurate picture of the progress of nations based on the amount of the Earth’s resources they use, and the length and happiness of people’s lives.” A BBC News story quotes Richard Layard, director of the Well-Being Programme at the London School of Economics’ Centre for Economic Performance, as saying that the index “was an interesting way to tackle the issue of modern life’s environmental impact.” Layard continues: “Over the last 50 years, living standards in the West have improved enormously but we have become no happier.” So which countries besides the island nation of Vanuatu are happiest? Colombia and Costa Rica round out the top three. Burundi, Swaziland and Zimbabwe finished at the bottom.
Soccer: Three Great Books
by World Hum | 06.12.06 | 1:16 PM ET
iStockPhoto Soccer is more than just another sport. It often reflects centuries-old ethnic, nationalist and religious tensions. It’s a global business. Its fans are wildly—and sometimes violently—passionate about their teams.
While some writers have explored the subject as part of larger works—Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Soccer War features (despite what its title might suggest) just one compelling chapter on the soccer-inspired war between El Salvador and Honduras, for example, and Paul Theroux’s “The Old Patagonian Express” includes a terrific passage about a soccer-related riot in San Salvador—other writers have devoted entire books to soccer and the culture that surrounds it.
Herewith, three great books about soccer:
How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization by Franklin Foer. Foer travels the globe, hanging out with soccer hooligans and exploring age-old rivalries to see how soccer reflects—or doesn’t—the forces of globalization at work. His insights are fascinating. For example, he traces the relationship between the Balkan Wars and soccer: how, early on, soccer fans at Red Star Belgrade stadium had chanted for secession from Yugoslavia; how Slobodan Milosevic’s interior minister had sat on the soccer team’s board; how Serb leaders recruited nationalist Red Star fans for paramilitary operations. And that’s just the opening chapter. In the prologue, Foer addresses larger questions about the world’s future, noting that many have embraced traditionalism out of fear that globalization will obliterate indigenous cultures. But soccer, he finds, suggests the future is not so simple. Local allegiances and identities continue to thrive.
He writes:
By the logic of both its critics and proponents, the global culture should have wiped away these local institutions. Indeed, traveling the world, it’s hard not to be awed by the power of mega-brands like the clubs Manchester United and Real Madrid, backed by Nike and Adidas, who have cultivated support across continents, prying fans away from their old allegiances. But that homogenization turned out to be more of an exception than I had anticipated. Wandering among lunatic fans, gangster owners, and crazed Bulgarian strikers, I kept noticing the ways that globalization had failed to diminish the game’s local cultures, local blood feuds, and even local corruption. In fact, I began to suspect that globalization had actually increased the power of these local entities—and not always in such a good way.
Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby. In his 1992 bestseller, Hornby explores the world’s fascination with soccer through his own obsessive relationship with Premiership powerhouse Arsenal. “While the details here are unique to me,” he writes in the introduction, “I hope they will strike a chord with anyone who has ever found themselves drifting off, in the middle of a working day or a film or a conversation, towards a left-foot volley into a top right-hand corner ten or fifteen or twenty-five years ago.” The great strength of “Fever” lies in Hornby’s recall of those details—the book is organized in short sections that take place at or are inspired by his memories of matches—right down to the noise in the stadium the first time he took his place in the jam-packed North Bank with Arsenal’s most passionate fans.
I loved the different categories of noise: the formal, ritual noise when the players emerged (each player’s name called in turn, starting with the favourite, until he responded with a wave); the spontaneous shapeless roar when something exciting was happening on the pitch; the renewed vigour of the chanting after a goal or a sustained period of attacking ... After my initial alarm I grew to love the movement, the way I was thrown towards the pitch and sucked back again. And I loved the anonymity: I was not, after all, going to be found out. I stayed for the next seventeen seasons.
The Miracle of Castel di Sangro: A Tale of Passion and Folly in the Heart of Italy by Joe McGinniss. On one level, “The Miracle” is a book about soccer—the highs and lows, the dreams and despair that a team from Castel di Sangro in southern Italy faced throughout its hardest year ever. They lacked skill, talent, organization and money, but played from the bottom of their souls. On another level, “The Miracle of Castel di Sangro” is about people—the players, their families and their fans (for many of whom this would be the most exciting year since World War II). It is a book about a nuanced Italy, complete with its bumps, warts and graceful curves; the paradoxical land, as one player remarked, of both Dante and Machiavelli, where there is always more beneath the surface. McGinniss is a master of his craft. His sketches of life in Castel di Sangro are so smooth and so vivid that you can easily find yourself lying awake at night worrying about the next day’s game.
—Jim Benning, Michael Yessis and Frank Bures contributed to this report.
No. 4: “The Soccer War” by Ryszard Kapuściński
by Frank Bures | 05.28.06 | 8:34 PM ET
To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1978
Territory covered: Africa, Central America, Cyprus and Israel
No. 27: “The Size of the World” by Jeff Greenwald
by Michael Shapiro | 05.05.06 | 1:22 PM ET
To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1997
Territory covered: Latin America, Asia, Africa
In 1994, to commemorate his 40th birthday, Jeff Greenwald decides to travel around the world without getting on an airplane. As the date approaches, he wonders if he should cancel the trip and focus on his magazine writing. But then he realizes that freelancing has become a “dead end” where “once-celebrated word wranglers on dark corners moon about their Precambrian cover stories for Esquire while they suck Night Train from brown paper bags.” So he places a personal ad seeking a female companion for the trip. He meets eight candidates, one at a time, at a Chinese restaurant, “a bow to the old Jewish proverb that you can learn everything you need to know about someone by ordering Chinese food with them.” One candidate looks promising till she blows her nose into the last mu-shu pancake. Then an old flame of Greenwald’s agrees to go. The couple moves by bus, boat and train, and after his companion has to leave, Greenwald completes the nine-month journey on his own. He has riveting encounters with the famous, such as Paul Bowles in Tangier, and with ordinary people, including Tibetans struggling for basic rights. Greenwald’s New York upbringing is evident in his savvy maneuvering at border crossings and in his sharp-edged humor. Included in the book are dispatches he filed for Global Network Navigator, an early online magazine that published Greenwald’s essays just hours after he wrote them. In a 1996 interview, Greenwald told me: “I had this sense of being almost on fire, that the excitement and heat of my journey was something I could broadcast in no time at all. It was a very giddy feeling.” Fortunately for readers, the heat of the journey still resonates on the printed page.
A Brief History of Adventure Travel
by Michael Yessis | 02.04.06 | 2:17 PM ET
Yahoo! adventure guru Richard Bangs covers the history of adventure travel in just 874 words today in a New York Times piece. I’ll summarize in 86 words: First adventure travelers were merchants on expedition. Many accidental discoveries. Ericson, North America. Columbus, the Caribbean. Modern adventure travel began 35 years ago. Treks in the Nepalese Himalayas. Maoist revolutionaries emerge. Adventurers go to Bhutan. In the ‘70s, Afghanistan, Algeria and New Guinea. In the ‘80s, the Nile, Mount Ararat and Bali. Religious-based terrorism drives out adventurers. In the ‘90s, the Alps. Euro rises. Everyone goes to Thailand. Tsunami hits. Libya, Mozambique, Nicaragua and Panama become popular. For now. When in doubt, there’s always Costa Rica.
Henry Rollins Hits the Road—With the U.S.O.
by Michael Yessis | 11.16.05 | 5:08 AM ET
How did anti-war punk-rock legend Henry Rollins end up on tour with the U.S.O., supporting United States military troops in hot spots around the world like a latter-day Betty Grable? “[T]here are reasons beyond sheer love of country that influence a performer’s decision to tour with the U.S.O.,” Susan Dominus writes in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. “For Rollins, the travel provides creative fodder, but it also gives him access to places he wouldn’t ordinarily visit, among them Iraq, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar and Honduras.”
Interview with Joshua Berman
by Michael Yessis | 11.03.05 | 3:28 AM ET
Rolf Potts has posted a Q&A with writer Joshua Berman, whose book on Belize won the 2005 Lowell Thomas Award for best guidebook. He tells Potts that travel writing isn’t the most lucrative gig: “The only way I’ve been able to live off my writing is by taking my relatively meager book advances and running straight for the border, preferably to a country like Nicaragua where my expenses are minimal to nil.”
‘Survivor Guatemala’: Reality TV With Roots in Antebellum Travel Writing?
by Jim Benning | 10.19.05 | 12:02 PM ET
How we love academic perspectives on American pop culture, especially when they relate to travel and travel writing. This interesting article, written by University of Pennsylvania associate history professor Amy S. Greenberg, argues that Survivor Guatemala: The Maya Empire has more to do with American empire than anything. She traces America’s fascination with the tropics back through history—back, in fact, to antebellum travel writing. “Survivor was a sequel from the start,” she writes. “The appeal of the tropics as idealized location for the triumph of American enterprise and individualism is nothing new and, in fact, is a reoccurring theme in periods of American imperial expansionism.”
Hurricane Stan and Guatemala, We Hardly Heard About Ya
by Jim Benning | 10.14.05 | 12:24 PM ET
In his essay Why We Travel, Pico Iyer writes that we travel, in part, to “learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.” I was reminded of that recently while traveling in Mexico. Aside from migration-related news, we in the U.S. see little coverage of life south of the border. But it seems that our newspapers don’t accommodate much news about Central America even when it involves a major disaster. That was brought into relief for some recently after Hurricane Stan hit Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador.
Investigating International Sex Tourism, Part Three
by Michael Yessis | 10.10.05 | 10:11 AM ET
Leonardo DiCaprio Buys His Own ‘Beach’
by Jim Benning | 07.28.05 | 9:51 PM ET
In the travel film “The Beach,” Leonardo DiCaprio plays a young backpacker in Thailand who ditches Bangkok’s Khao San Road in search of an idyllic island. That, of course, turns out to be a big mistake. But it looks as though DiCaprio himself is still itching for the island good life. According to reports, he has purchased a private island off Belize for $1.75 million.