Destination: London
Planet Theme Park: “Disneyland on the Ganges”
by Michael Yessis | 04.29.05 | 10:45 PM ET
Bye-bye Mickey, Minnie and Donald. Welcome Ram, Hanuman and Krishna! The latter trio will be the central attractions at Gangadham, the world’s first Hindu theme park. The BBC reports that the 25-acre theme park will open in 2007 on the banks of the Ganges, in the north Indian pilgrimage town of Haridwar. “If the project takes off, it will move on to an international level,” writes Kathleen McCaul. “The plan is to open parks in Trinidad, Bali, Fiji and Thailand - and perhaps even Orlando, Los Angeles and London.”
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Yahoo! BuzzThe Art of Tourism
by Jim Benning | 02.24.05 | 12:47 AM ET
Who Says Travel Isn’t a Competition?
by Jim Benning | 02.27.04 | 9:04 PM ET
Not 23-year-old British-Italian traveler Maurizio Giuliano. With his recent visit to Suriname, the freelance writer announced that he is the youngest person to have visited all 192 countries around the globe, according to an AFP news report on Yahoo. So what’s his next journey? He is heading to London with 40 stamp-filled passports to claim a listing in the Guinness Book of World Records.
Pico Iyer Reviews Jan Morris
by Jim Benning | 11.11.03 | 8:38 PM ET
Sunday’s Los Angeles Times Book Review features Pico Iyer’s thoughtful take on Jan Morris’ latest collection of travel stories. Iyer finds much to like. He writes: “One of the blessings of the new anthology—whose U.S. title is ‘The World: Travels 1950-2000’ and takes us chronologically through Morris’ career and across the world—is that it reminds those who had forgotten that Morris was a seasoned international reporter, for the Times of London and the Manchester Guardian, long before she became a master impressionist in words.” Throughout his review, Iyer compares Morris’ work with that of V.S. Naipaul. The two are contemporaries and master stylists, Iyer notes. “The principal difference between them,” he writes, “is that Naipaul carries his anxieties everywhere he goes, whereas Morris rolls seamlessly through even the most dramatic journey a human can undertake.” Iyer’s reviews, it seems, are appearing with increasing frequency in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Unfortunately, the article is available online only to subscribers of the print edition.
Jonathan Raban in London
by Jim Benning | 10.31.03 | 8:46 PM ET
Until weblogs came along, you didn’t hear much about author readings in bookstores. Newspapers rarely feature accounts of the events. At most, they publish a single sentence beforehand noting the date and time. (Most U.S. newspaper editors are convinced that their readers dislike reading, as absurd as that sounds.) All of which is to say that I was delighted when a friend pointed out a detailed weblog account of travel writer and novelist Jonathan Raban’s August reading in London. Raban focused on his new novel, Waxwings. “First up, Raban discussed his penchant for writing fictionalised non-fiction, and then fiction with real-life characters and events, blurring these boundaries,” according to the thoughtful City of Sound blog. Interestingly, Raban himself responded to the weblog’s account. “I was saying to someone (in Seattle) last night,” he wrote, “that your version of that evening corresponded strangely closely with my own…”
Farewell Concorde
by Jim Benning | 10.24.03 | 8:57 PM ET
After 28 years of service, the history-making British jets completed their final commercial flights today. CNN has a story. I never had the pleasure of flying on a Concorde, but I’ll never forget looking up at a blue sky over a London suburb 10 years ago and seeing the Concorde’s sleek profile pass overhead. Its shape is unmistakable. For a young traveler on a rare visit to London, it was a rush. I wouldn’t have been any happier seeing the Queen.
Travel Like Beckham!
by Michael Yessis | 06.17.03 | 11:28 PM ET
This David Beckham-themed item may seem like a shameless ploy to gain some readers from his legions of fans. We’re not above that sort of thing. Apparently, neither is the New York Times, which took some time away from legitimate issues of the day (the Middle East conflict, the elusive weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, etc.) to run an editorial about his rumored transfer from Manchester United to Barcelona. However, in this instance, we’ve got a legitimate reason to drop Beckham’s name. He is the subject of one of the more unlikely travel stories we’ve seen recently, a piece called “The David Beckham heritage trail,” which appeared in last Friday’s Guardian. Ed Vallance and Paul Hamilos have compiled a destination guide to 12 spots with Beckham ties, including the Walthamstow greyhound track east London (where he had his first-ever job collecting glasses), the Met Fair bar in Mayfair (where he met his wife) and Brooklyn, New York (where he and his wife conceived their first child). The piece has one serious omission: Where do we find the stylist who gives him those lovely hairdos?
Administering the Beer Test in Europe
by Jim Benning | 04.22.03 | 3:32 PM ET
James Gilden wondered how Americans would be received in Europe these days, so he went to Paris, Berlin and London to find out. He interviewed Americans about their experiences, and he ordered beer at bars in each of the cities and dutifully studied the bartenders’ responses. What did he find? Despite the controversy over the war, he writes in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, the Americans he talked with were having a grand time, encountering no ill will. As for the beer, “My beers were delivered with no more or no less aplomb or foam than in any of my previous visits to London,” he writes.
Whew. We’d hate to think that politics could get in the way of a good beer.
The Joy of Jet Lag
by Jim Benning | 04.02.02 | 7:45 PM ET
Jet lag gets a lot of bad press, but not in Sunday’s New York Times. In an essay, W.D. Wetherell writes that he rather enjoys it. Take the delightful bout he experienced after arriving in England: “The drive in to central London, dreary enough in reality, seemed incredibly splendid, a veritable yellow brick road, to the point that I stared at the nondescript bed-sitters and dreary industrial parks with as much excitement and interest as if they were Buckingham Palace, the Tower and Westminster Abbey combined.” We wonder if Wetherell has ever tried malaria. The fever-induced hallucinations, we hear, are fabulous.
Gnomes that Roam
by Michael Yessis | 03.19.02 | 9:47 PM ET
The prank of the moment—as seen in The Full Monty and Amelie—goes like this: One of your more mobile possessions gets abducted. It’s often a garden gnome, but it could be anything. Soon photos of the missing object begin appearing in the mail, postmarked from faraway locales. Los Angeles Times writer Susan Carpenter traces the history of the “roaming gnome” and unearths some exemplary executions of the gag. Dave Stockton’s running shoe, for instance, was taken from his balcony in Chicago. Eventually, he received snapshots of the shoe in St. Petersburg, Florida; London, England; and Hollywood, California, where “Righty,” as the wayward shoe began identifying itself, was laced-up on the foot of actress Neve Campbell.
She Travels in Time With Flaubert and Twain
by Michael Yessis | 03.11.02 | 4:20 PM ET
Caryn James has stopped reading modern travelogues. “Why taunt yourself reading about a place you’ll (wistful, martyred sigh here) probably never see?” she writes in Sunday’s New York Times. James hasn’t given up on the genre entirely, though. She copes by reading travel books from the past. “I found the perfect alternative by accident, when I spotted Peter Ackroyd’s thick anecdotal history, “London: The Biography,” while browsing in a store. The thought of struggling to Kennedy and landing at Heathrow may have been too much, but landing in London in the 17th or 18th century suddenly seemed irresistible. You can’t feel bad about not being in a place that doesn’t exist anymore. Armchair time-travel was the answer: a vicarious journey with no regrets.”
“Bridget Jones” Meets “The Beach”
by Michael Yessis | 03.08.02 | 4:12 PM ET
That’s what some reviewers are calling “Backpack,” Emily Barr’s debut novel. “Backpack,” a U.K. hit which was recently released in the U.S., follows the exploits of Tansy Harris, a Londoner who leaves behind a dead mother, a coke habit and a boyfriend, and backpacks through Asia. “Her journey is prosaic in the extreme, filled with hearty Aussie backpackers, haughty French, outwardly friendly but inscrutable native guides, beachside bars in Cambodia, beachside bars in Thailand, etc.” Bryan Walsh writes in a review for Time Asia. “Although Tansy enjoys it, the strongest sensation the reader is likely to get from her trip is the been there, done that ennui pervading the backpacking scene.” Barr, who traveled around Asia for a year and wrote a column about it in the Guardian, has her own say about the genesis of the book in an author essay reprinted at Bookreporter.com.
A Bench in London
by Michael Yessis | 11.12.01 | 9:27 PM ET
Paris was Marylin Bender’s town. Her husband’s was London. When he died nine years ago, Bender began visiting some of his favorite places. At London’s Berkeley Square, she noticed that plaques adorned the benches. Bender decided to try to secure one in her husband’s memory, resulting in an unexpected journey of errors, persistence, sweetness and heartbreak. “As a teenager, after my family had moved to Manhattan, I had a few park bench trysts with impoverished students in Central Park,” Bender writes in a New York Times essay. “None ended happily until, years later, a man I had met a few months before proposed that I accompany him on a business trip to Europe and Asia as his wife. I accepted instantly, we married, and thereafter we snuggled on benches in the gardens of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, in the Tuileries in Paris, along the Hofvijver in The Hague and regularly in Berkeley Square.”
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