Travel Blog
A Reunion in Arusha
by Eva Holland | 03.12.12 | 8:13 AM ET
More than eight years ago we published Test Day, Frank Bures’ story about teaching English in Arusha, Tanzania, in the mid-‘90s. Now, the Washington Post has Frank’s thoughtful story about his long-awaited return to Arusha. Here he is exploring the town after more than 15 years away:
When I got downtown, I spent several hours wandering around. The lepers who used to beg by the river had been kicked up the road by trinket vendors. The library was still a sorry, run-down affair, filled with books on Dianetics and other irrelevant subjects. The “Modern Supermarket” had evolved into a liquor store. The Metropole Bar and Restaurant was now the “House of Burgers.” People, in general, had gotten fatter, and they had cellphones. Hotels were going up everywhere. The clock tower by the post office actually worked—and was sponsored by Coca-Cola. The Air Tanzania office was open, but the company’s two planes were broken.
From time to time, as I walked around, waves of memory and sadness washed over me. Where were all the people I knew? Arusha was a big town, but not that big. It felt as though I had been forsaken by an old friend. I hadn’t even lived in Arusha that long—just over a year. An Italian acquaintance had told me at the time: “A year is like a breath.” But it was a deep breath, and things were never quite the same after I exhaled.
In the story, Frank reunites with some of his former students, now adults and members of Tanzania’s growing middle class. “Test Day” has always been a favorite of mine in the World Hum archive, so it was a pleasure to read about their lives today.
Email to friend
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Mixx
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Yahoo! BuzzTravel Movie Watch: First Trailer for ‘On the Road’
by Eva Holland | 03.10.12 | 5:26 PM ET
After years of stops and starts, it’s here: Walter Salles’ film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”—or an official trailer, at least. The movie is due out later this year.
Video: Chef David Chang on Thoreau, Creativity and Lucky Peach
by Jim Benning | 03.08.12 | 4:42 PM ET
Really enjoyed this 17-minute conversation with Paul Holdengraber—almost as much as I’ve enjoyed the spicy pork sausage and rice cakes at Chang’s Momofuku Ssam Bar.
How Bruce Chatwin ‘Saved Travel Writing’
by Eva Holland | 03.07.12 | 8:39 AM ET
I was catching up on some back issues of Harper’s a few weeks back, and this quotation about the author of “In Patagonia” and “The Songlines” caught my eye:
He saved travel writing by changing its mandate: After Chatwin, the challenge was to find not originality of destination but originality of form.
Among those who have followed Chatwin, the most interesting have forged new forms specific to their chosen subjects: thus Pico Iyer’s sparkily hyperconnective studies of globalized culture and William Least Heat-Moon’s “deep maps” of America’s lost regions. Perhaps most important were W.G. Sebald’s enigmatic “prose fictions”—particularly “Rings Of Saturn”—that likewise hover between genres, make play with unreliability, and fold in on other forms: traveler’s tale, antiquarian digression, and memoir. What Sebald, like so many of us, learned from Chatwin was that the travelogue could voyage deeply in time rather than widely in space, and that the interior it explored need not be the heart of a place but the mind of the traveler.
(It’s from “Voyagers: The restless genius of Patrick Leigh Fermor and Bruce Chatwin,” by Robert Macfarlane, in the November 2011 issue. It’s available online to subscribers only.)
The Official Kickstarter Page for Greece
by Jim Benning | 03.01.12 | 12:06 PM ET
If anyone could use some Kickstarter funding right now, it’s probably Greece.
From McSweeney’s: Welcome to the Official Kickstarter Page for Greece.
Greece is a small country in the south of Europe known for inventing democracy and western philosophy and for its national motto, “Release the Kraken!” Our shores are a popular destination for backpackers and tourists wishing to relax amid sun-drenched beaches by day and intoxicated British tourists by night.
We wish to continue this good work, but to do so our creditors are demanding €14.5 billion ($18.6 billion) by March 20. We do not have this money, nor do we think we can raise it in time: Our asset sales have gone nowhere, and the EU has nixed our plan to close shop and re-open a few blocks away as “Greeze”. And so we come to you, our friends, for help.
Solas Awards Winners Named
by Jim Benning | 03.01.12 | 11:38 AM ET
Travelers’ Tales’ editors announced the winners of the sixth annual Solas Awards for travel writing this morning.
The grand prize winner was Peter Wortsman, for his story Protected. Erin Byrne won the silver for Spirals: Memoirs of a Celtic Soul. The bronze went to Bruce Berger for Mysterious Fast Mumble.
The complete list of winners can be found here. Congrats to everyone.
A Travel Blog From the Netscape Era
by Eva Holland | 03.01.12 | 8:24 AM ET
Travel writer Jason Cochran looks back on his first travel blog:
It was 1998. People were still paying for Netscape. Few of us used the Web regularly, and all of us had dialup, but I was determined to try it: I documented my journey online as I went. I’m ashamed to admit I began by using Courier.
Everyone logs their trips online now, but no one was doing it then. I was a pioneer. It took real effort. Flashpacking didn’t exist. I had to seek out Internet cafés and without WordPress or Blogspot to rely upon, I had to hand-code everything in basic HTML, and I was forced to seek out crude FTP programs (Fetch!) to get my writing online.
I didn’t put my travels online for Web fame or to garner a following, the way so many backpackers do now. There were no affiliates or appeals for free lodging, and I was years away from collecting my first paycheck for travel writing. Then, it was simply so my family and friends could follow along and know I wasn’t lying dead in some South African ditch.
It’s amazing to think about how much has changed in the years since. Cochran’s blog is still live, in all its retro glory.
The Halibut Taco is Alaska’s Unofficial State Dish. Discuss.
by Eva Holland | 02.28.12 | 7:23 AM ET
I spent nine days traveling in Southeast Alaska last month, and as I went from one panhandle port to the next, and from bar to pub to restaurant, I noticed something: the halibut taco is everywhere. It’s even outstripping such traditional Alaskan standbys as king crab legs, beer-battered halibut fish ‘n’ chips, and seafood chowder. It’s the new normal.
I’m not World Hum’s designated taco expert, by any means—Jim’s the Mexican food addict around here—but I’ve been intrigued by unexpected Mexican-in-the-sub-Arctic offerings before. And I’m no less intrigued by the halibut taco seemingly conquering the last frontier.
Alaska isn’t a state that most people associate with cutting-edge cultural fusion (though if you spend much time there, you’ll see there’s more to the place than the Discovery Channel lets on), and it seems to me that the taco’s dominance there is just one more sign of our ever-shrinking planet. I say, bring on the tasty and fascinating cultural variations.
Paul Theroux Walks Into Mexico
by Jim Benning | 02.27.12 | 12:01 PM ET
Nogales, to be specific.
In a lifetime of crossing borders I find this pitiless fence the oddest frontier I have ever seen—more formal than the Berlin Wall, more brutal than the Great Wall of China, yet in its way just as much an example of the same folie de grandeur. Built just six months ago, this towering, seemingly endless row of vertical steel beams is so amazing in its conceit you either want to see more of it, or else run in the opposite direction—just the sort of conflicting emotions many people feel when confronted with a peculiar piece of art.
Theroux has written more about Africa, Asia and Europe than he has Mexico, so it’s nice to see his take on someplace closer to home. His story appeared in Sunday’s New York Times.
Yelping with Cormac McCarthy
by Eva Holland | 02.27.12 | 7:36 AM ET
A funny Tumblr has been channeling the author since last summer. From a recent entry, titled “Marias Cantina, Lordsburg NM, Three Stars”:
But the yelpers also had money. Gold dust by the sack. And pretty soon that little outpost was boomin. You see the yelpers had this hunger. To try ever little thing. Take its measure. Put it in the little book. As if they could take the chaos of that world and bring form to it. Corral it somehow. I’ll admit it was unnatural. But that’s how it started.
Sometimes I wonder what those townfolk was thinkin. All this strangeness around them. But they took the money. Hell I would of too. But I kindly doubt they knew the true cost. What was bein bought. What was bein sold.
And from “Tijuana Marriott Hotel”:
The hacendado whistled through his teeth and shook his head. You Americans, he said. Always the judge. This hotel is very good. That country is very bad. But when it is time for you to be reviewed you are begging please no. Please I can pay money. I will review you now. The hacendado snapped his fingers and a vaquero entered carrying a branding iron in the shape of a star, the whitehot tip sputtering and sparking like some wroughtiron incubus.
(Via @dougsaunders)
Russell Banks, Ernest Hemingway and Masculinity in America
by Jim Benning | 02.24.12 | 12:33 PM ET
The New York Review of Books explores Russell Banks’ novels and touches on Ernest Hemingway’s legacy in American letters.
When it comes to the anxiety of influence, American women writers seem to have an easy relation to their gentler and more urbane literary ancestresses; but men writing in America have to contend with the shade of Hemingway, and the longstanding tradition of manliness he tried to represent. They may reject that tradition but they can’t ignore it, though Henry James may have been trying to by making himself into an Englishman. Most of the ongoing mining of Ernest Hemingway’s character, sexuality, and personal history arises from our sense that he embodied the paradoxes and conflicts in masculinity as Americans have constructed it. Was he a bully or a baby, brave or cowardly, gay or straight, tough or weak?
That “shade of Hemingway” has colored American travel writing as much as any other genre, of course. The article is available online but only subscribers can read the piece in its entirety.
Mapped: The Complete Travels of ‘The Simpsons’
by Eva Holland | 02.24.12 | 12:00 PM ET
Slate has a clickable map, marked up by season and character.
Over 23 seasons, 499 episodes, and one feature-length movie, the Simpsons have become one of America’s most well-traveled families. Since the show debuted in 1989, they’ve travelled to more than two dozen countries and about two dozen U.S. states. By the end of the season, they will have travelled to all seven continents. The Simpsons are going to Antarctica!
Call me biased, but I always loved the episode where the Simpsons travel to Canada—and are joined on the bus to Toronto by a hockey player, a Mountie and a Sasquatch.
Video: Interview with Author Elizabeth Gilbert
by Jim Benning | 02.15.12 | 12:10 PM ET
A thoughtful 20-minute interview with the “Eat, Pray, Love” author covering MFA programs and her novel-in-progress, which she refers to at one point as “another travel book.”
Travel Story Hall of Fame: ‘The Lonely Planet Guide to My Apartment’
by Eva Holland | 02.14.12 | 11:57 AM ET
Today we introduce the Travel Story Hall of Fame, an occasional series in which we honor the best in travel writing new and old.
Title: The Lonely Planet Guide to My Apartment
Author: Jonathan Stern
Publication: The New Yorker
Date: April 24, 2006
Nomination Speech: I first read Jonathan Stern’s Shouts and Murmurs piece in “The Best American Travel Writing 2007,” but its tone, its language and sub-heads were all weirdly familiar, as though I’d read the story before. That eerie sense of recognition is a sure sign of a well-executed satire.
Meet the strange land of My Apartment, whose “vast expanse of unfurnished space can be daunting at first, and its population of one difficult to communicate with.” Under “Places to Eat,” Stern notes that “tourists often flock to the salvaged wooden telephone-cable spool in front of the TV as a convenient dining spot. More adventurous eaters might try standing over the sink, as the locals do. If you’re willing to venture off the beaten track, there’s balancing your plate on the arm of the couch or using the toilet lid as a makeshift table.”
Years later, “The Lonely Planet Guide to My Apartment” remains one of the funniest pieces of travel writing I’ve ever read.
Excerpt:
ORIENTATION
My Apartment’s vast expanse of unfurnished space can be daunting at first, and its population of one difficult to communicate with. After going through customs, you’ll see a large area with a couch to the left. Much of My Apartment’s “television viewing” occurs here, as does the very occasional making out with a girl (see “Festivals”). To the north is the food district, with its colorful cereal boxes and antojitos, or “little whims.”
Dispatch from the Yukon Quest Trail
by Eva Holland | 02.07.12 | 3:57 PM ET
I’m on the road this week, doing some writing and social media work for the Yukon Quest.
For those unfamiliar with it, the Quest is a 1,000-mile sled dog race that runs from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Whitehorse, Yukon (my hometown). I’m following along, and on the trail with me is a traveling crowd of volunteers, veterinarians, race officials, “handlers” (assistants to the mushers), and friends and family. We drive from checkpoint to checkpoint, meeting up with the dog teams whenever they intersect with the sparse road system. I’m writing this from Central Corner, an outpost on the Steese Highway just south of the one-time Gold Rush town of Circle City.
Never seen a long-distance dog sled race? Here’s a video that gives you a real sense of the scene at the start line back in Fairbanks:
