Travel Blog
Las Vegas’ Hooters Hotel to go Boutique
by Jim Benning | 03.06.08 | 11:19 AM ET
Photo by thenestor via Flickr, (Creative Commons)
Yes, despite the oh-so-clever do-not-disturb signs—not to mention that fact that Hooters and Las Vegas would seem to be made for one another—redevelopers have come a knockin’. That’s the word from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which reports that Hooters Hotel is being purchased by a developer who plans to transform it into a “lifestyle, entertainment-driven boutique hotel and casino complex.”
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Yahoo! Buzz‘When Adventure Tourism Kills’
by Michael Yessis | 03.06.08 | 11:11 AM ET
With that over-the-top headline, Time magazine begins addressing the safety of adventure tourism in the wake of the death of 49-year-old Austrian Markus Groh. He died last month during a shark-diving excursion off Great Issac Cay in the Bahamas. A shark bit his left leg, and he bled to death. Scuba Adventures, the Florida company that ran the trip Groh took, chummed the waters to draw sharks and eschewed cages for its clients.
A Visit to Burma’s Odd New Capital
by Jim Benning | 03.05.08 | 12:30 PM ET
That would be Naypyidaw, which Robert Reid writes in Perceptive Travel, “is already joining the ranks of intentional cities that must look good on paper, but are just awful to live in.”
Related on World Hum:
* Dispatch: Under the Banyan Tree
In Fort Lauderdale, ‘Where the Boys Are’
by Jim Benning | 03.05.08 | 12:03 PM ET
Tom Swick recently asked beach-goers in Fort Lauderdale if they were familiar with his “favorite Fort Lauderdale novel,” Glendon Swarthout’s spring break-themed “Where the Boys Are,” published in 1960—or the film or song of the same name. It’s not hard to imagine the response. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel has video.
Chuck Klosterman: ‘What is a Road Movie, Really?’
by Michael Yessis | 03.05.08 | 12:01 PM ET
More specifically, he asks, as the subhead of his rambling story in The Believer says, “What’s the difference between a road movie and a movie that just happens to have roads in it?” Klosterman’s attempt to get to the bottom of the question involves references to “non-dead author John Leland,” “The Wizard of Oz” and “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” It also includes equations, such as this:
A Traveler’s Open Letter to Airborne Supplements
by Jim Benning | 03.05.08 | 11:24 AM ET
Oh Airborne, you nickel-sized fruit-flavored tablets that dissolve in water and promised to keep me healthy on long flights; you shrewdly marketed vitamins developed by a school teacher who, you say, studied the benefits of herbal therapies used in Eastern Medicine. I saw you displayed near the other vitamins in Trader Joe’s, in your neon-hued boxes. You called out to me and my yearning to stay healthy. I purchased you and drank you up, looking the other way when you left an unappealing algae-like film on the inside of my glass.
Americans’ Most Favored Nations
by Michael Yessis | 03.05.08 | 9:41 AM ET
Heading…
Gallup surveyed Americans to find out which countries they liked best, with Canada taking the top spot. Ninety-two percent of respondents had a favorable view of their northern neighbors, with Great Britain (89 percent), Germany (82 percent) and Japan (80 percent) in the next three spots. Iran was the least favored nation, with only 8 percent of respondents giving it some love.
‘Sweeping Review of Airport Security Screening’ Underway
by Michael Yessis | 03.04.08 | 4:39 PM ET
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told USA Today that the Transportation Security Administration will review screening systems in the U.S. during the next month and a half.
Out: Ho Chi Minh Trail. In: Ho Chi Minh Highway.
by Michael Yessis | 03.04.08 | 1:34 PM ET
David Lamb’s terrific story in the Smithsonian chronicles Vietnam’s efforts to turn the former Ho Chi Minh Trail into a 1,980-mile “paved multilane artery” from the Chinese border to the Mekong Delta. “The transformation of trail to highway,” Lamb writes, “struck me as an apt metaphor for Vietnam’s own journey from war to peace, especially since many of the young workers building the new road are the sons and daughters of soldiers who fought, and often died, on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.”
Travelers’ Tales Announces Solas Awards Winners
by Jim Benning | 03.04.08 | 12:24 PM ET
The list of winning travel stories, which includes a couple of World Hum pieces, can be found here.
World Hum Travel Movie Club: ‘Into The Wild’
by Eli Ellison, Eva Holland | 03.04.08 | 11:44 AM ET
By now, you know the story. In 1990, a 22-year-old college grad named Christopher McCandless renounced his privileged upbringing, adopted the nom de drifter Alexander Supertramp, and turned to a new life of vagabonding. Two years later, Alaskan moose hunters found his corpse in an abandoned Fairbanks city bus outside Denali National Park. Jon Krakauer pieced together Chris’s odyssey and wrote the bestseller Into the Wild. Sean Penn‘s movie version of the book, which hit theaters last fall, arrives today on DVD. Eva Holland and Eli Ellison gave the disc a spin, exchanged e-mails and debated Hollywood’s adaptation of Into the Wild in the debut of the World Hum Travel Movie Club.
Bjork Shouts ‘Tibet! Tibet!’ in Crowded Shanghai Theater
by Jim Benning | 03.04.08 | 10:43 AM ET
The Icelandic singer’s bold public show of support for the “Tibet Autonomous Region”—she shouted “Tibet! Tibet!”—came at the end of a concert in Shanghai Sunday, capping her performance of the song “Declare Indedependence.”
Travel Writer, Meet Your Translator
by Jim Benning | 03.03.08 | 4:41 PM ET
Travel writer Daisann McLane recently met the man who translates her National Geographic Traveler columns into Mandarin for the magazine’s Chinese edition. At Intelligent Travel, she blogs about meeting Mr. Michael Zhang, “Translator of Many of Your Articles.” The Beijing translator told her over a dumpling lunch in Hong Kong, “When I sit down to translate your column, before I do anything else I try to imagine that I am you, visiting all these wonderful places. And then the words start to come…”
Are Women Who Read ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ ‘Kind of Dim’?*
by Michael Yessis | 03.03.08 | 1:43 PM ET
Charlotte Allen calls “Eat, Pray, Love,” Elizabeth Gilbert’s lightning rod of a travel memoir, “hysterical,” “superficial,” and “gooily sentimental,” and points to its success as an example of why women are “kind of dim.” She did all this in a Washington Post opinion piece this weekend called “We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?”, which, as of this posting, has 870 comments and counting.
Video: Jet Attempts Landing During 150 MPH Winds
by Michael Yessis | 03.03.08 | 11:56 AM ET
Hurricane-force winds battered the Lufthansa flight as it attempted to land during in Hamburg, Germany this weekend, causing one wing of the Airbus A320 to scrape the runway. The pilot pulled up and eventually landed on his second effort, providing relief to the 137 people on board and an amazing and scary piece of video:
