Travel Blog
The Book Passage Travel & Food Writing & Photography Conference Turns 20
by Jim Benning | 07.22.11 | 2:30 PM ET
I’ll be back on the faculty at the Book Passage Travel & Food Writing & Photography Conference Aug. 11-14 in Corte Madera, California.
Amazingly, the conference turns 20 this year. It has evolved in the digital age, to be sure, but it continues to be a four-day celebration of storytelling—a summer camp of sorts for wanderlust-prone travel and food writers and adventuresome photographers. I’ve met alumni who insist those four days changed their lives. Many return year after year.
What I love most about the conference, besides the fact that it takes place at a great Bay area bookstore, is that it brings faculty and students together during days for instruction and during evenings for meals, wine and conversation. There’s karaoke on Saturday night. I’m convinced the formal and informal gatherings are equally valuable.
This year’s faculty members include conference chair and editor extraordinaire Don George; Outside magazine founding editor Tim Cahill; “An Irreverent Curiosity” author David Farley; San Francisco Chronicle Travel Editor Spud Hilton; Los Angeles Times Travel Editor Catherine Hamm; Afar magazine Executive Editor Julia Cosgrove; Travelers’ Tales co-founder Larry Habegger; veteran photographer Robert Holmes; photographer and World Hum contributor Jeff Pflueger; and many, many others.
I’ll be co-teaching an online writing and blogging track with writer and ukulele evangelist Pam Mandel. We’ll cover both narrative writing and not-so-narrative blogging. We’ll dip our toes into multimedia waters, too. It should be good fun.
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Yahoo! BuzzWhat Does ‘Travel Games’ Mean to You?
by Eva Holland | 07.22.11 | 9:15 AM ET
I had a strange experience yesterday morning. I saw a headline in my feed reader—The Ten Best Travel Games, from The Independent—and I clicked, expecting a nostalgic list of childhood car trip time-killers. You know, low-tech classics like “I Spy.” Instead, I got a slideshow of modern, high-tech options: iPhone apps and, of all things, an electronic Rubik’s Cube.
I can’t be the only one who still thinks “I Spy” when I hear “travel games,” can I? Or has everyone else embraced in-car gaming and iPads for every passenger? What do you think of when you hear the words “travel games”?
Famous Writers Wrote Here
by Eva Holland | 07.21.11 | 12:02 PM ET
Over at National Geographic’s Intelligent Travel blog, Charles Kulander has a roundup of eight hotels where big-name writers—from Graham Greene to Louis L’Amour to Hemingway—did their work. Some of the entries even include specific room numbers for traveling writers looking to borrow some leftover inspiration.
He writes:
The greatest hotels—those places that summon up the culture, history, and character of a destination—are the modern equivalent of a muse, inspiring writers and guests alike to look at the world from a new perspective.
Happy 50th Birthday, In-flight Movies
by Michael Yessis | 07.19.11 | 10:15 AM ET
Fifty years ago today Trans World Airlines screened By Love Possessed starring Lana Turner on a Los Angeles to New York flight. It wasn’t easy. Given the technology of the time, it took David Flexer three years and $1 million to make it happen. Writes Angela Watercutter:
The airlines weren’t Initially interested in Flexer’s wares. But then TWA, which at the time was looking to increase its profile, agreed to give Inflight a shot. Flexer and his team took a Boeing 707, fitted it with their equipment and spent the early part of 1961 flying around and fixing bugs.
In July of that year TWA began offering films to first class passengers. The response was extraordinary, and soon flyers were paying huge fees to get into first class to catch the show. Before long, in-flight movies were everywhere.
To China’s Fangji Cat Meatball Restaurant and Beyond
by Michael Yessis | 07.18.11 | 11:18 AM ET
More travel-related hilarity from David Sedaris in China, though it’s not for those without an adventurous palate. And if you do have an adventurous palate, Sedaris salutes you:
Another of the dishes that day consisted of rooster blood. I’d thought it would be liquid, like V8 juice, but when cooked it coagulated into little pads that had the consistency of tofu. “Not bad,” said the girl seated beside me, and I watched as she slid one into her mouth. Jill was American, a Peace Corps volunteer who’d come to Chengdu to teach English. “In Thailand last year? I ate dog face,” she told me.
“Just the face?”
“Well, head and face.” She was in a small village, part of a team returning abducted girls to their parents. To show their gratitude, the locals prepared a feast. Dog was considered good eating. The head was supposedly the best part, and rather than offend her hosts, Jill ate it.
This, for many, is flat-out evil but the rest of the world isn’t like America, where it’s become virtually impossible to throw a dinner party. One person doesn’t eat meat, while another is lactose intolerant, or can’t digest wheat. You have vegetarians who eat fish and others who won’t touch it. Then there are vegans, macrobiotics and a new group, flexitarians, who eat meat if not too many people are watching. Take that into consideration and it’s actually rather refreshing that a 22-year-old from the suburbs of Detroit will pick up her chopsticks and at least try the shar pei.
Mother Jones Goes to ‘Culture Training’ at an Indian Call Center
by Eva Holland | 07.15.11 | 10:02 AM ET
In the latest Mother Jones, Andrew Marantz has a fascinating story about his brief stint as a worker at a call center in India. Here’s Marantz on the mandatory “culture training” that workers undergo before they hit the switchboards:
Indian BPOs work with firms from dozens of countries, but most call-center jobs involve talking to Americans. New hires must be fluent in English, but many have never spoken to a foreigner. So to earn their headsets, they must complete classroom training lasting from one week to three months. First comes voice training, an attempt to “neutralize” pronunciation and diction by eliminating the round vowels of Indian English. Speaking Hindi on company premises is often a fireable offense.
Next is “culture training,” in which trainees memorize colloquialisms and state capitals, study clips of Seinfeld and photos of Walmarts, and eat in cafeterias serving paneer burgers and pizza topped with lamb pepperoni. Trainers aim to impart something they call “international culture”—which is, of course, no culture at all, but a garbled hybrid of Indian and Western signifiers designed to be recognizable to everyone and familiar to no one. The result is a comically botched translation—a multibillion dollar game of telephone. “The most marketable skill in India today,” the Guardian wrote in 2003, “is the ability to abandon your identity and slip into someone else’s.”
(Via Where Am I Wearing)
Scenes From the ‘On the Road’ Movie
by Michael Yessis | 07.15.11 | 6:24 AM ET
Jerry Cimino, founder and curator of The Beat Museum, updates what’s going on with Walter Salles’ film adaptation of Kerouac’s classic.
The film was shot between August and December of 2010 in Montreal, New Orleans, Mexico, San Francisco and many other locations. But Walter Salles was searching for even more authenticity, so unbeknownst to just about everyone he and Garrett Hedlund took to the road for a second time in April of 2011. They spent two weeks along with a crew of five and blasted 4,000 miles across the back roads of the USA. They purposefully avoided the interstate highways not built until the 1950s, retracing as best they could the original route of the two lane roads Jack & Neal drove.
The purpose of this unpublicized trip was for Walter and Garrett to be involved in the “Second Unit” shooting themselves. True to their desire to make On The Road as authentic as they could they wanted to capture the images of the ‘49 Hudson roaring across the continent with the sights and sounds of the country in the background. The story of On The Road is also the story of America and the film makers wanted to capture the physical and human geography at the core of On The Road as part of the film.
The Huffington Post has photos.
Tunisia Tackles Tourism Shortfall with Dark Humor
by Eva Holland | 07.14.11 | 5:49 PM ET
Tunisia’s role in the Arab Spring wasn’t as widely reported as, say, Egypt’s or Libya’s. But word about the country’s revolution has still spread far enough to cut tourism in half—and the Tunisian authorities are hoping to regain some of that lost revenue through a series of ads poking fun at the unrest.
According to the Guardian, one ad shows a woman enjoying a massage under the caption, “They say that in Tunisia some people receive heavy-handed treatment.” Another depicts an ancient archaeological site, with the tag line, “They say Tunisia is nothing but ruins.”
Tasteless? I suppose if I was a Tunisian civilian who’d been shot at or abused by police during the uprising, I might not be amused. But I think tackling a country’s reputation head-on is a good thing—and hey, as Australia learned a few years back, a little controversy can go a long way.
Happy Third Birthday, Restless Legs Reading Series
by Jim Benning | 07.14.11 | 11:49 AM ET
I was happy to find myself at New York City’s Lolita Bar last night for another installment of the Restless Legs Reading Series. As usual, it was a good evening: About 50 travel writers and readers chatted around the bar before heading downstairs to hear Tony Perrottet and Elisabeth Eaves read from their new books.
As it turns out, the reading wasn’t just another date on the Restless Legs calendar. It was the series’ third anniversary.
David Farley had been organizing informal gatherings for years, but in July 2008 he decided to make the events official. He envisioned Restless Legs as “a reading series for the wanderlust stricken” that brings “travelers, travel writers, and the people who love them together for an evening of sharing tales from the road, gossiping, and general debauchery.”
He expected a good turnout for the first event: It was mentioned in local media and on travel blogs, and he invited all his friends. Lolita Bar’s little basement was packed as Tony Perrottet and Cullen Thomas read and answered questions. Farley was pleased, but he wasn’t necessarily optimistic about future readings.
“I thought by the fourth month it’d be dwindling to a handful of people, because that’s how a lot of readings are,” he says. “But after almost three years of doing it seven to nine times a year, I’ve been really surprised that it’s been almost full capacity every time.”
What are some highlights from the last three years?
“People who’ve done things other than read,” Farley says. “Mike Barish did 10 minutes of travel-themed standup comedy. Kim Mance sang a travel article that she wrote, accompanied by an acoustic guitar. David Grann read. He’s one of my favorite writers and he’s a pretty big deal.”
We teamed up with Farley for a World Hum-themed reading in October 2008.
The readings are the focus of the gatherings, but I suspect many come as much to hang out with like-minded travelers and writers. In fact, some wind up at the bar all evening and never make it downstairs for the reading. Farley thinks that’s a little disrespectful to the readers. “But then when I think about it, I’d like to be up there sometimes, too,” he says, “so I can’t give anyone a hard time about it.”
How long will Restless Legs continue?
“Who knows?” Farley says. “There’s no termination date. I think people really like it. if I decide to end it, someone else would start something similar. If I somehow perish, someone will decide to keep it going.”
Upcoming readers will include Dan Saltzstein and Brook Wilensky-Lanford Sept. 15, and contributors to Slate’s Well-Traveled series in November.
Long may you run, Restless Legs.
If Hemingway Were Alive, Which European City Would He Go To?
by Michael Yessis | 07.14.11 | 11:05 AM ET
Eight writers and academics make their pitches in the New York Times’ Room for Debate. The leading cities? London and Berlin.
Josef Joffe, the editor of Die Zeit in Hamburg, picks London:
By way of elimination, it is London—Europe’s global city, in the way New York, L.A. and Mountain View are global cities. London has the money (coming mainly from financial services). It is a city of a myriad nationality. It leaves you alone even as it offers a thousand points of distraction. Though no longer the capital of an empire, London draws the best and the brightest from all over the world—which highlights another critical condition: language.
When Paris was queen in the 18th and 19th century, every educated person in Europe spoke French, a trait that lasted into the 20th century. Today, everybody speaks English, or at least Bad English, which is the world’s fastest growing language. But who now has a command of German, let alone Dutch or Italian? If the rest of the world ever takes to Chinese as it has taken to English, Shanghai might join the roster. But the 3,000 signs of Chinese are a bit harder to master than the 26 letters of the English alphabet.
Writer and journalist Slavenka Drakulic makes a case for Berlin:
In more than two decades after the collapse of Communism, a flood of eastern Germans as well as citizens from other eastern European countries (refugees from the Balkan wars, Russian Jews), young Americans and other Westerners have moved to Berlin. Together with the old “guest workers”—Turks from Kreutzberg—they turned the city into an exciting mixture of people of which real Berliners are but a few.
But this alone would not be enough to make Berlin the center of cultural life. So many artists flock to Berlin because living there is cheaper than living in any other big city in Europe. It also helps that Germany is one of the few countries left that cares about the arts and sponsors culture through various institutions, grants, awards, festivals and conferences. Imagine, writers there get paid for their readings!
The Nuclear Age, as Seen on Postcards
by Michael Yessis | 07.13.11 | 4:37 PM ET
Slate built its eerie Postcards of Mushroom Clouds slideshow with images from the recent book, Atomic Postcards. Tom Vanderbilt writes:
There is something by turns comforting and disturbing in the fact that places like the Eniwetok Proving Ground—the Pacific atoll where tests like “Bravo” promised a thousand Hiroshimas—should have its own two-color lithograph postcard; and that the back of cards sent from places like the top-secret “City of the Atomic Bomb,” Oak Ridge, Tenn., should have little more to announce than: “Plenty hot.”
Video: Surfing One of the Longest Waves in the World
by Jim Benning | 07.11.11 | 1:59 PM ET
Waterman extraordinaire Robby Naish, perhaps best known as one of the globe’s best windsurfers, surfs one of the longest waves in the world at Pavones, Costa Rica.
(Via Adventure Journal)
R.I.P. Facundo Cabral, Argentine Folk Singer
by Jim Benning | 07.11.11 | 1:27 PM ET
Latin America lost one of its great folk singers over the weekend when Facundo Cabral was gunned down while on tour in Guatemala. He was 74.
The singer-songwriter in the nueva trova tradition railed against oppressive dictatorships in South America and wrote novels and non-fiction. He was riding in a car to the airport in Guetamala City when it was ambushed. Officials suspect a nightclub owner also in the car was the intended target of the attack.
From a New York Times story:
Many of Mr. Cabral’s songs mixed expressions of mystical spirituality with a desire for social justice, which gave him a reputation as a protest singer. That proved dangerous after the Argentine military seized power in a coup in March 1976, and he fled to Mexico, where he remained in exile until after the collapse of the Argentine dictatorship in 1982. On his return, in 1984, Mr. Cabral was more popular than ever.
His sold-out concerts were an unusual mixture of music and the spoken word, with songs preceded by long introductions in which he would muse on philosophy and religion and often quote from his favorite poets, including Borges and Walt Whitman, and spiritual masters like Gandhi and Mother Teresa.
Here’s Cabral performing one of his classics:
Dig This: ‘Man, Americans Love Big Stuff’
by Michael Yessis | 07.08.11 | 8:44 AM ET
Apparently there are people whose bucket lists include the phrase “operate heavy equipment.” Dig This is them. For a few hundred dollars, the Las Vegas “heavy equipment playground” allows people to operate Caterpillar bulldozers and other oversized construction equipment.
Owner Ed Mumm says the “good majority” of the customers are guys. However, he told NPR’s Ted Robbins, “he has been surprised at how many women are also interested, which is the reason Dig This offers a package called ‘Excavate and Exfoliate,’ a half-day at the park followed by a spa treatment at the Trump Las Vegas Hotel.”
‘Europe’s First Travel Guide’ Missing From Santiago de Compostela Cathedral
by Michael Yessis | 07.07.11 | 6:33 PM ET
The Codex Calixtinus was reported missing Wednesday by distraught staff at the Santiago de Compostela Cathedral. The 12th century illustrated manuscript was “compiled as a guidebook for medieval pilgrims following the Way of Saint James,” according to the BBC.
This is the oldest copy of the manuscript and is unsaleable on the open market.
Only a handful of people had access to the room in which it was kept.
This edition of the Codex Calixtinus is thought to date from around 1150.
Its purpose was largely practical—to collect advice of use to pilgrims heading to the shrine there. It also included sermons and homilies to St James.
The Guardian adds:
The local Correo Gallego newspaper reported that distraught cathedral staff spent hours searching for the manuscript before contacting police late that night.
“Although security systems have been improved considerably it is true to say that they are not of the kind one might find in a bank or a well-protected jewellers,” the newspaper reported.
Only five security cameras were used to watch the archive area, according to the newspaper, and none were pointing directly at the safe where the priceless manuscript was stored.
