Travel Blog
The Grateful Dead: Airplane Book Fodder?
by Michael Yessis | 03.04.10 | 1:14 PM ET
Loved this aside in Joshua Green’s terrific story in The Atlantic about the Grateful Dead’s business prowess:
It can be only a matter of time until Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead or some similar title is flying off the shelves of airport bookstores everywhere.
Turns out the members of the Dead were business visionaries and masters of social networking.
The band knew a little something about travel, too.
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Yahoo! BuzzLAX ‘Can’t Hide the Wrinkles Anymore’
by Jim Benning | 03.04.10 | 11:52 AM ET
Call me crazy, but I never tire of Thomas Friedman’s shots at the sad state of America’s airports. This week: LAX. Zing!
It’s worth noting (and Friedman doesn’t) that a major upgrade of the airport’s Tom Bradley International Terminal is underway. That’s at least some good news.
NPR’s Mile High Book Club
by Michael Yessis | 03.03.10 | 12:57 PM ET
When it comes to airplane books, Eva is open to vampires. Susan Jane Gilman isn’t. The author of Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven picked six great airplane reads recently for NPR’s Mile High Book Club, none of which she claims will insult her intelligence or embarrass her in airports.
You probably won’t be able to spot her book picks from three gates away, either, as it’s been said you can with John Grisham books.
So Long, Vancouver 2010
by Eva Holland | 03.02.10 | 7:48 PM ET
The medals have all been handed out and the flame’s been extinguished. Monday saw Vancouver International Airport have its busiest day on record as 39,000 visitors left the host city for home. As for me, I won’t forget joining in the massive red-and-white street party that consumed downtown Vancouver anytime soon—I think my favorite moment had to be seeing a crowd of turbaned Indo-Canadian kids dancing to a bhangra beat to celebrate our victory in men’s hockey, creating their very own wonder of the shrinking planet.
The Big Picture has a top-notch pair of photo essays for your final Olympic Games fix. See you in London?
2010 Solas Awards Winners Announced
by Eva Holland | 03.01.10 | 1:07 PM ET
World Hum contributors Darrin DuFord, Catherine Watson, Lola Akinmade and Joshua Berman are among the winners and honorable mentions. Here’s the full list—congratulations all around.
What We Loved This Week: Indie Asia, the Olympics and ‘99 Things to Eat in L.A. Before You Die’
by World Hum | 02.26.10 | 4:51 PM ET
Jim Benning
I loved 99 Things to Eat in L.A. Before You Die by the always compelling and intrepid Jonathan Gold. And I loved the cartoon we published by Tom Swick poking fun at such lists.
‘We All Suffer the Indignity of the Passport Photograph’
by Eva Holland | 02.24.10 | 1:17 PM ET
Yes, as the folks over at Very Short List noted when they linked to this fascinating Flickr gallery, even literary geniuses and Hollywood celebrities get saddled with unflattering passport photos. Everyone from Ernest Hemingway to Cecil B. DeMille and Frank Lloyd Wright is represented.
Video: After-Hours at the Pittsburgh Airport
by Eva Holland | 02.23.10 | 3:51 PM ET
(Via Boing Boing)
Tell Your Travel Story at TBEX ‘10
by Pam Mandel | 02.23.10 | 11:42 AM ET
It’s the hybrid offspring of a poetry slam and a reading. It’s a chance to share your remarkable travel story with a room full of people who really want to hear it—the bloggers attending the sold out Travelblog Exchange this summer in New York City. (As we’ve noted, World Hum is a media partner and will be there.) It’s the TBEX ‘10 Community Keynote.
The idea? A “best of the blogs” session that showcases amazing travel storytelling by independent bloggers. Your hosts and curators for the reading? SkyMall expert Mike Barish and ukulele enthusiast Pam Mandel. And no, you don’t have to be at TBEX to participate. Any other questions you might have are probably answered on the submissions form.
Great narrative about travel often gets lost in a market that calls for top ten lists, packing tips and deals, writing that’s more copy than story. But narrative makes us tick. It’s why we blog about travel. We want to tell stories. The TBEX Community Keynote will give the spotlight to the kind of writing we love to read and love to write.
Want to be part of it? Submit your story for consideration here.
From Beijing to Vancouver: A Very Different Olympics
by Eva Holland | 02.22.10 | 2:22 PM ET
REUTERS/Shaun Best It’s been nearly two years since I blogged from the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, and—as I thought I might—I now find myself on the Olympic travel trail again, in Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Games. I’ll be honest: The two host cities couldn’t feel more different.
I stepped off the train from the airport and surfaced in downtown Vancouver this weekend, expecting, perhaps, to feel some uniquely Olympic vibe in the air, familiar to me from my brief time in Beijing. But the scene on Vancouver’s streets has almost nothing in common with the one I encountered two years ago. My memories of Beijing are all broad boulevards, empty except for uniformed Chinese volunteers offering directions to clusters of wandering foreigners, and subdued subway cars full of commuters. Vancouver, in contrast, is a non-stop maple-leaf-painted street party—flag-draped young people careen through the streets, impromptu break dancing circles pop up on corners, and buskers work the crowds. The brightly-dressed foreigners that I remember from Beijing are here, too, but they’re wildly outnumbered by the revelers in red and white.
I suppose there are plenty of economic reasons for the contrast. The 2008 Games probably weren’t as accessible to the average Chinese citizen as these Games are to most Vancouverites, while the expense and difficulty of visiting China could explain why the many young Olympics visitors here were absent in Beijing. (The local high school students I rode the bus home with last night, for instance, weren’t likely to make a transcontinental Olympic trek.) But economics aside, I still feel like there’s a fundamental difference at work: Beijing’s Games, to me, were clearly aimed outward, at the world, while Vancouver’s, so far, feel more like an essentially Canadian party to which everyone else has also been invited.
New National Monuments in the Works
by Eva Holland | 02.22.10 | 11:53 AM ET
The federal government has drawn up a list of potential new national monuments, mostly in the southwestern states—and this New York Times story explains why some local politicians see the move as “a land-grab device for East Coast politicians.” Regional politics aside, shouldn’t “Lesser Prairie Chicken National Monument” be something we can all get behind?
What We Loved This Week: VQR, ‘The Reporter’ and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum
by World Hum | 02.19.10 | 6:11 PM ET
Frank Bures
I loved the new issue of VQR, with great stories from across North Africa. So far, I loved Joe Sacco’s graphic piece on immigration in Malta, Nicholas Schmidle’s story on the Somali community in Minneapolis, and Marco Vernaschi’s amazing story and photos about the coup last year in Guinea-Bissau. Brilliant photography, fiction, and lots of other stuff I haven’t gotten to yet.
Machu Picchu to Reopen April 1
by Eva Holland | 02.18.10 | 1:29 PM ET
The Peruvian Times is reporting that the iconic site will once again be open to tourists April 1—the first time since last month’s devastating floods. The story also hints at a new approach for Peruvian tourism going forward. Said the president of the Cusco region: “This disaster should give us an opportunity to redesign the tourism activity, we can’t focus everything on Machu Picchu.” (Via @laurably)
The Critics: ‘The Routes of Man’ by Ted Conover
by Eva Holland | 02.16.10 | 12:10 PM ET
Hard-traveling journalist Ted Conover’s latest, The Routes of Man: How Roads are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today, hit stores last week. The book sees Conover traveling six different roads, some official and some unofficial, from Peru’s mahogany export routes to China’s new superhighways, in an effort to understand the way they are “reshaping the world.”
The Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley is skeptical of the concept. He writes that “what we have here essentially are a half-dozen magazine pieces, stitched together in such a way as to resemble a real book but missing the thematic core that Conover strains to locate.” However, Yardley adds, “Conover’s six reports are variously interesting in and of themselves, and one shouldn’t expect any more from them.”
Over at NPR, Maureen Corrigan notes that the “vivid armchair travel aspect of Conover’s book is undeniably a great part of its appeal,” but wonders where the women are—the book, she writes, takes place in “a road warrior universe that is pretty much all male.” The Los Angeles Times’ Taylor Antrim is less conflicted, describing “The Routes of Man” as “refreshingly nonromantic road writing.” He goes on:
What Conover has brought back is a clear-eyed understanding that roads confine as much as they liberate, that they make the world more accessible but also infinitely more dangerous and exploitable. Perhaps the only certainty he offers is that these “paths of human endeavor” are inevitable: “They are the infrastructure upon which almost all other infrastructure depends.”
What We Loved This Week: Bill Murray and Bourdain, the Saints Victory Parade and ‘Finding Farley’
by World Hum | 02.12.10 | 5:25 PM ET
Frank Bures
I loved this story about Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” and “Karaoke-related killings” in the Philippines.
