The 9/11 Anniversary: World Hum Looks Back

Five years ago, on the morning of the terrorist attacks in New York City, Washington D.C. and the air near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, World Hum was barely four months old. I was living in San Francisco, and Jim was making his way through Southeast Asia. “This isn’t the way you’re supposed to feel when you travel abroad,” Jim wrote in Terror in America: A Letter From Thailand, which we posted the following day. “You’re supposed to be immersed in the exotic, pleasantly buzzed, delightfully lost, happily, if temporarily, in exile. You’re supposed to shuck off your old self, lose track of the news back home and try on an utterly foreign way of life.”

He continued:

But that was before yesterday, before terrorists hijacked four American planes, toppled the World Trade Center and attacked the Pentagon. Now, here in southern Thailand, we search for Internet cafes and international phones. We share the horrifying news with fellow travelers. And, more than anything, we long for home.

The story was one of three successive 9/11-related dispatches we posted—Jim’s Sorrow in the Land of Smiles was the second, and Rolf Potts’s Islam’s Bloody Celebration followed—that looked at the day’s events through the prism of travel. Their dispatches captured the feelings so many of us had as a result of that Tuesday morning, and they weren’t the only ones who did so.

In the weeks and months following the attacks, we chronicled in our weblog some of the amazing stories being told around the world, including those of:

* The residents of Gander, Newfoundland and passengers of Delta Flight 15, which was forced to land in remote Canada in the hours after hijacked planes hit the Pentagon and the World Trade Towers. The passengers of Flight 15 were stranded for four days, and locals turned out in droves to comfort them with hot showers and home-cooked meals.

* Expat Americans in Italy, France, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico in the wake of the attacks.

* How travel publishers, including Lonely Planet, responded in the fearful climate after 9/11.

* How the rise of mass travel and globalization played a role in the global political situation of the times.

* The moment when in-flight laughter made a comeback.

For more related weblog items, check out our 9.11.01 category. Or to relive the entire day in real time, CNN.com will be streaming its original television coverage from that day beginning today at 8:30 a.m. ET.

When I woke up on 9/11 both towers had already fallen, so I will be watching.

Photo by Jim Benning.

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