Destination: China
It’s Called Shangri-La, But it Won’t Be Paradise for Long
by Jim Benning | 06.18.02 | 12:43 AM ET
What’s in a name? Gobs of tourists, it turns out. To lure travelers with disposable income, authorities in a Chinese town on the Tibetan plateau recently renamed the place Shangri-La. They’re arguing that the town was the basis for the Shangri-La described in James Hilton’s classic novel Lost Horizon. Evidence is sketchy, but no matter. According to the Los Angeles Times’ Henry Chu, who has been filing some great stories from China recently, the tourists are rolling in. In the novel, Hilton wrote that Shangri-La was a place “touched with the mystery that lies at the core of all loveliness.” Writes Chu, “Amid the current fanfare, and the proliferation of hotels and kitsch-filled souvenir shops trading on the Shangri-La name, little of that mystery appears to be left.”
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Yahoo! BuzzI Admire Eggs. They Teach Travelers About Packing in One Container, With No Loose Ends Hanging Out.
by Michael Yessis | 04.02.02 | 7:43 PM ET
Susan Spano has eaten eggs in Scotland, Scandinavia, Japan, France, Spain, China and many other countries near and far. Even at fancy resorts or on a cruise ship known for magnificent breakfast spreads, she goes straight for the eggs. Spano likes them for their nutritional punch, sure, but that’s not the only reason why. “I love finding the egg in some of the most outlandish places and seeing how differently it is prepared and served,” she writes in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. “The egg is global but no instrument of globalization.”
Judging Hong Kong by its Cover
by Jim Benning | 03.27.02 | 7:28 PM ET
If you can’t judge a book by its cover, can you at least judge a city by its cover? Hong Kong tourism officials hope potential visitors won’t. That’s because Lonely Planet’s latest guide to the city features not enticing junks and colored lights on its cover but the Bank of China skyscraper enshrouded in what looks like smog—not exactly an inviting image. Lonely Planet apparently isn’t talking, but CNN.com offers a report on the matter, along with a photo of the cover in question. According to the article, a local lawmaker recently lamented to a wire service, “Travel guides usually show pictures with blue sky, white clouds, clear water and fine sand.” Yeah! Where’s Hong Kong beach? Where are the curling waves? The girls? Now there’s a cover!
The Derailing of America’s Rail Service
by Jim Benning | 03.07.02 | 4:03 PM ET
Amtrak, America’s passenger rail service, is in a real financial mess, and its future is looking grim. If President Bush and Congress don’t agree to pitch in more money soon, long-distance trains could simply cease operating as early as this year. This is absurd. At a time when Americans are wary of air travel, they should be able to turn to top-notch high-speed rail service. Unfortunately, as the New York Times pointed out recently, under-investment in Amtrak has left Americans without this option. Even the new high-speed Acela trains aren’t running at full-speed for most of the trip from Boston to Washington. As for taking a quick train ride from Los Angeles to San Francisco, forget it. I tried last week. The scheduled 12-hour journey—double the time it takes to drive—took more than 15 hours counting the late start. The staff spent a good chunk of the trip joking about the slow service. I’ve had better rail experiences in Malaysia, Thailand and China. All of this leaves the automotive industry delighted, oil salesmen gushing and U.S. travelers as tethered as ever to their cars.
Would You Ride This Train?
by Jim Benning | 03.06.02 | 2:46 PM ET
Overland travelers moving between China and Tibet must brave harrowing drives through rugged mountains, but that could change. The Chinese government has approved the development of a railway linking the nation with the “Tibetan Autonomous Region.” As Tibetans fear for their culture’s future, Outpost Magazine examines the cultural, political and environmental consequences of “one of the world’s greatest engineering challenges.” Wonders writer Jon Link: “If you take the train - which will be an easier and more spectacular way to arrive than is available now - are you giving tacit approval to its existence?”
The Filipina Sisterhood
by Michael Yessis | 01.11.02 | 2:32 AM ET
The Economist examines the lives of Filipina amahs, the “domestic helpers” who often live in virtual slavery to Hong Kong’s elite. “[T]hose who should be Hong Kong’s most miserable are, by all appearances, its happiest. How?”
Chasing Monks
by Maria Möller | 12.28.01 | 11:51 PM ET
“I Saw Campbell’s Soup Being Eaten Straight From the Can on a Porch in Elk Grove Village”
by Michael Yessis | 10.24.01 | 8:46 PM ET
Aleksandar Hemon came to the United States from Sarajevo in the winter of 1992 to participate in a cultural-exchange program. He arrived with a love for American pop culture. “I fantasized about starting a band whose first album cover would be designed by Andy Warhol,” he writes in the October 15 issue of The New Yorker. “I imitated Holden Caulfield’s diction (in translation), and I manipulated my unwitting father into buying me a Charles Bukowski book for my seventeenth birthday.” The end of his trip coincided with the beginning of the war in Bosnia. Hemon stayed in the U.S., landing a job in suburban Chicago canvassing for Greenpeace. For two and a half years he went door-to-door, and his experiences form the backbone of an essay worth a trip the library (New Yorker archives are not available online). “After a while, my view of American culture changed,” he writes. “I began to understand the meaning of the Talking Heads’ songs, the anarchic pretentiousness of Altman’s movies…and the magnitude of America’s defeat in Vietnam.”
Dietary Aid Mission
by Maura Weber | 06.11.01 | 1:06 AM ET
Photo illustration by Jim Benning. A boy in Hong Kong missed his grape jelly. Maura Weber flew halfway around the globe to bring it to him.
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