Destination: India
Dhaka Outskirts, Bangladesh
by World Hum | 03.23.09 | 11:37 AM ET
REUTERS/Andrew Biraj A woman and her child carry drinking water back to their slum house in the outskirts of Dhaka.
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Yahoo! BuzzSix Great Women Travelers in Asia
by Julia Ross | 03.20.09 | 10:57 AM ET
March is Women’s History Month, so this seems a good moment to call out a few of history’s great women travelers. Because so many 19th- and early 20th-century adventurers found themselves drawn to Asia, I’ve narrowed this list to women who made their mark on that continent, fording the Indus River or crossing the Tibetan Plateau, in defiance of social norms and often at great risk. These are the women I wish I’d been in another life. Herewith, my top-six list of the most intrepid Western female travelers to take Asia by foot, camel or donkey.
An End for Kashmir’s ‘Mughal Palaces on Water’?
by Joanna Kakissis | 03.19.09 | 2:17 PM ET
The beautifully carved wooden houseboats, which are area icons, date to the 19th century, when they shielded British officials from the subcontinent’s penetrating summers. Today, tourists rent the houseboats on Dal Lake, which, though seemingly lovely, is actually a dumping ground for untreated sewage.
To combat the pollution, Kashmir’s provincial government has asked houseboat owners to install pricey sewage treatment on the vessels within 90 days or face a shutdown, The Guardian reports. But the houseboat owners, many of whom live below the poverty line, say they can’t afford the units. “The government should pay for the sewage treatment units, or it should put all the 850 houseboats together and blow them up with one big bomb,” lamented Mohammed Azam Tuman, president of the Houseboats and Shikara Owners Association.
Sonamura, India
by World Hum | 03.18.09 | 9:50 AM ET
REUTERS/Jayanta Dey A farmer works in a Paan or betel leaf garden in Sonamura village, south of Agartala, capital of India's northeastern state of Tripura.
Slumming It: Can Slum Tourism Be Done Right?
by Eric Weiner | 03.16.09 | 11:57 AM ET
REUTERS/Punit Paranjpe Global Positioning: On the intersection of place, politics and culture
Hollywood Heads to Bollywood
by Eva Holland | 03.10.09 | 3:12 PM ET
Turns out, it really is a small world after all. Kylie Minogue has wrapped up filming for an upcoming Bollywood flick, “Blue,” making her one of the first big-name Western stars to land on a Mumbai sound stage. “I don’t feel that I’m necessarily at the forefront of a Hollywood-Bollywood crossover because I don’t consider myself Hollywood,” Minogue told the Telegraph. “But I do think this could be the start of something. The fact that I’m here shows it could be the start of something.”
Early signs suggest she’s right—Sylvester Stallone is set to do the Bollywood thing later this year. And—rumor has it!—Arnold Schwarzenegger will be joining him. Could the Bolly/Hollywood fusion become another wonder of our shrinking planet?
I’m all for it.
Morning Links: Bowie’s Clown Suit, Cute Penguin Overload and More
by Valerie Conners | 03.10.09 | 8:54 AM ET
- Take a gander at Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes” clown suit, or Jarvis Cocker’s glasses at London’s new British Music Experience, documenting 60 years of Brit pop and rock.
- West Virginia’s governor makes it his mission to save the state’s image, and let you know W.V.‘s got more to offer tourists than the Road Kill Cook-Off.
- Intelligent Travel offers a Q&A with Chris Way, cofounder of Reality Tours and Travel, a company specializing in slum tourism in India.
- One woman is dead and six others are missing after a tourist boat capsizes off Thailand’s Similan Islands.
- Take a listen to Nine Road Trip Songs You Never Heard Before—a catchy mix of Asian travel songs. (via nerdseyeview)
- World Hum blogger Alexander Basek visits Nashville and returns full of excellent tips on where to hear live music and ... Goo-Goo Clusters.
- I’m getting a serious case of cute overload as Andrew Evans reveals the best places to see penguins.
Rajasthan Gets Zipped
by Julia Ross | 03.09.09 | 11:00 AM ET
Move over Costa Rica, India is onto your game. The Neemrana Fort Palace hotel in Rajasthan now offers the country’s first zip line tour, which allows tourists to zip to five platforms and listen to local guides expound on the history of the forts and palaces below.
I suppose it’s a new twist on a long-running tourist money-spinner, though I doubt the history lectures are the main draw. More important, is the concept appropriate to the setting? This Guardian reviewer, who found the experience “fresh,” claims the environmental impact is minimal. It’s one thing to zip through jungles looking for howler monkeys; in this case, I think I’d prefer to explore the area by foot.
Uttar Pradesh, India
by World Hum | 03.09.09 | 10:54 AM ET
REUTERS/K. K. Arora People celebrate the Hindu festival of Holi (festival of colors) at Nand Gaon in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.
Hope for Clean-Energy Road Trips (Neil Young soundtrack included)
by Joanna Kakissis | 03.06.09 | 12:44 PM ET
I had to cheer when I read about the members of the Indian Youth Climate Network driving across 3,500 kilometers of the subcontinent in three electric Revas, a plant-oil-fueled truck, a van run on vegetable oil and another van with solar panels. They passed 15 major Indian cities to promote climate change awareness, while also advertising the effectiveness of clean-energy road-tripping. Hurray!
Momentum is definitely with them, and so is Neil Young, a master of great road songs who is transforming his 1959 Lincoln from a gas-guzzler into an electric vehicle. He’s even written a soundtrack for his electric-car project, which could inspire some clean-energy road-tripping on this continent. (Via Inhabitat)
What We Loved This Week: Food Tours, Traveling Through the Harper’s Index and More
by World Hum | 02.27.09 | 5:03 PM ET
Bakhat Singh in the Moonlight Our contributors share a favorite travel-related experience from the past seven days.
Michael Yessis
The searchable Harper’s Index. The magazine has been delivering pithy factual tidbits since 1984, and now you can search through all of them online by topic. Here are the 90 matches in my search for items about travel. One of my favorites comes from 1990: “Amount the U.S. Air Force spent this year to study the effects of jet noise on pregnant horses: $100,000.”
Joanna Kakissis
I’ve always wanted to host my own YouTube cooking show, because doesn’t the whole world really want to see me make my secret baklava recipe to the beat of “Chains of Love” by Erasure? But I doubt my show would ever be as awesome as the sensational “Cooking With Clara,” which features Great Depression-era recipes by 93-year-old Sicilian-American Clara Cannucciari.
All the ‘Slumdog’ News That’s Fit to Print
by Eva Holland | 02.27.09 | 11:25 AM ET
If I hadn’t already used the unstoppable Slumdog line a few weeks ago, you can bet I’d be putting it into play now. Since its big win at the Oscars, the name has been popping up everywhere, and frankly—despite the fact that I loved the movie—I’m reaching my saturation point.
Let’s briefly review the latest developments, and then (I promise) I’ll clam up on this movie-turned-full-blown-phenomenon. Here goes: the two young stars may or may not be the leads in a real-life love story, flats are being rented and trust funds set aside for the youngest child actors (who are slum-dwellers in their off-screen lives, too), and amidst all the media noise the film’s box office haul has just passed the $100-million mark. Oh, and did I mention that there’s a Broadway musical in the works?
Whew. With all the gossip flying around, it’s easy to lose track of the things that got everyone talking “Slumdog” in the first place—namely the movie’s unforgettable sounds and colors, and the universality of its fairy-tale story. So for my last word on this subject, I’ll call on rapper M.I.A. She’s got a video reminder, after the jump:
Cycling India’s Wildest Highway: Deliverance
by Jeffrey Tayler | 02.27.09 | 10:12 AM ET
In which Jeffrey Tayler pedals more than 1,000 miles along the Grand Trunk Road. Part five of five: journey's end.
Cycling India’s Wildest Highway: The Ganges
by Jeffrey Tayler | 02.26.09 | 11:03 AM ET
REUTERS/Arko Datta In which Jeffrey Tayler pedals more than 1,000 miles along the Grand Trunk Road. Part four of five: "Thou shouldst not mourn."
India: Three Great Books
by Eva Holland | 02.25.09 | 6:32 PM ET
The literature about India is as vast and diverse as the subcontinent that inspired it. In 60 years of independence, the country has produced a truly intimidating list of award-winning writers, from Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth to Rohinton Mistry and Arundhati Roy, R.K. Narayan or Anita Desai. Faced with the impossibility of choosing just three novels from an endless list of great post-colonial reads, I’ve decided instead to go back further in time, to the days of the British Empire. The colonial period produced a few classics of its own, and since then, with the passing of time, new books have started to arrive that capture the colorful lifestyles, the dark patches of history, and the many oddities and implausibilities of the British Raj. Three great books: