Travel Blog
What We Loved This Week: ‘Swingers,’ Boy Scout Base Camp and Scratch and Sniff Cartography
by World Hum | 10.09.10 | 8:38 PM ET
Eva Holland
I loved re-watching one of my longtime movie favorites, “Swingers.” I’ve only visited Los Angeles once (discounting a few extended visits to LAX) but this movie always makes me want to go back and get to know it better:
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Yahoo! BuzzWhat was the World’s Tallest Building in 1884?
by Eva Holland | 10.08.10 | 3:09 PM ET
The Washington Monument. Kottke has a lovely graphic contrasting the monument with its 1880s competition. We’ve come a long way from the Mall to the Burj, huh?
How Will Space Tourism Look (and Feel)?
by Eva Holland | 10.08.10 | 1:30 PM ET
With Virgin Galactic’s planned launch drawing nearer, World Hum contributor Terry Ward takes a look at the aircraft that will soon be carrying the first paying civilians beyond Earth’s atmosphere:
In order to imagine how Virgin Galactic’s brand of space travel will work, you have to get images of a classic NASA shuttle launch out of your head. Instead of a land-based launch, Virgin Galactic’s system involves a mothership, called the Virgin Mothership Eve (VMSEve). The innovative aircraft, also designed by Rutan and built by Scaled Composites, is the largest all-carbon composite aviation vehicle ever built and, according to Virgin Galactic, the most fuel efficient of its size.
The VMSEve, a twin fuselage aircraft with one enormous wingspan that stretches 140 feet across, is the vehicle that will carry SpaceShipTwo into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. SpaceShipTwo will be positioned under the wing, between the mothership’s fuselages, for the ride up. From an altitude of over 50,000 feet, the spaceship will be launched from the mothership, using its own rocket power to reach its destination of 68 miles above the Earth’s surface. The most recent test flights, Attenborough says, had a pilot inside the spaceship “taking the last preparations for the first solo flight of the spaceship.”
There’s no firm date set yet for Virgin Galactic’s debut, but 2012 looks likely. When they do launch, we hope they’ll remember our advice about the five songs that have no business being played in space.
The Fight Against Online Ticket Fraud
by Michael Yessis | 10.08.10 | 12:20 PM ET
Airlines have been losing big bucks to people exploiting security holes. One poll “estimated total losses at $1.4 billion in 2008,” according to USA Today.
“Common sense on this issue limits a discussion of what we do to track, prevent and seek prosecution of such occurrences,” says Tim Smith, a spokesman for American Airlines. “We’re just not interested in providing a ‘how to’ lesson on the subject.”
Still, Smith says, “I can tell you, in a very broad sense, that we have seen some increase in fraud and attempted fraud the last couple years.” The airline’s corporate security team deals with credit card fraud, he says, and often works with financial services companies and law enforcement when making inquiries.
In the travel sector, companies such as Orbitz were hit first and hardest by fraudsters, resulting in millions of dollars in lost revenue a month.
After those companies took action to plug their holes, criminals took aim at airlines.
Twitter, Travel Apps and the Fate of the Guidebook
by Eva Holland | 10.07.10 | 2:44 PM ET
In The Guardian, Benji Lanyado outlines his transition over the last few years from traditional guidebook user to travel blog junkie and, finally, to Twitter-traveler. Here’s his take on the next phase—the rise of travel apps like Foursquare:
What once required hours of rifling through guidebooks, or Googling into the provincial nooks of the internet, is now attainable in an instant. And increasingly we don’t need to find the information. It can find us.
Having convinced the online public to reveal who they are (through social networking sites such as Facebook) and what they are doing (via Twitter), the web’s latest question is significantly more zoomed in: where are you? Location-specific information is what we want, especially when we are travelling.
Lanyado notes that roaming fees remain a serious obstacle to widespread app use. There’s also a (mostly) thoughtful and civilized follow-up discussion in the comments.
Marilyn Monroe’s Forgotten Banff Vacation
by Eva Holland | 10.07.10 | 1:51 PM ET
Move over, Crasher Squirrel: Banff just got a new tourism mascot. In 1953, Marilyn Monroe injured her ankle on a movie set in the Canadian Rockies and wound up at the Banff Springs Hotel to recuperate. A photographer from Look magazine documented her visit, but only two of his photos ever appeared in print—until last week, when they were released in a new book, Marilyn, August 1953. The Globe and Mail has a selection of photos from the book, all of Monroe in full tourist mode—posing with a taxidermied grizzly or riding a chairlift. They’re very cool, take a look.
The No-Baggage Challenge: That’s a Wrap
by Eva Holland | 10.07.10 | 11:28 AM ET
A few weeks back we wrote about World Hum contributor Rolf Potts’ latest trip: a round-the-world spin with no baggage. The trip’s complete now, and he has posted some final thoughts about traveling bag-free:
Once I got into a travel rhythm, the no-baggage aspect of the trip was pretty simple. Two-a-day showers kept me as clean as I’ve ever been on the road, and daily clothes-washings (of my socks, underwear, and t-shirt) kept my wardrobe fresh and odor free. In fact, one of the reasons I started doing these weekly field reports is to have a pretext to comment on the no-baggage aspect of the trip—since it became apparent quite early that not having luggage wasn’t going to add a lot of drama or complication to my day-to-day activities (which meant, happily, that I could focus my journey on the joys of travel instead of the idiosyncrasies of packing light).
So does this mean I’ll spend the rest of my life traveling without bags? Probably not—bags do serve a purpose, they make some aspects of a journey easier, and one can still travel ultra-light while carrying a small bag. Moreover, the No Baggage Challenge was an experiment in traveling light—not an edict that luggage-free travel is a universally superior way to go. That said, I’ll probably continue to experiment with no-luggage travel—if nothing else because it’s fun and liberating and not all that hard to do.
The No Baggage Challenge site has an archive of posts and video updates for anyone who didn’t follow along.
Foreign Policy Tackles the State of Modern Travel Writing
by Eva Holland | 10.06.10 | 1:16 PM ET
The magazine lines up three perspectives. First up, Bookslut‘s Jessa Crispin emphasizes the greatness of the travel classics, in contrast to today’s offerings. Here’s Crispin:
There’s a reason why you still find so many dusty paperbacks of In Patagonia stuffed in the back pockets of travelers in Argentina. Chatwin’s book is not simply the story of one man’s journey—it reveals the timeless nature of the land and its people by rooting his adventures in the odd and surprising history of the place. But somewhere down the line, that sort of thing went out of fashion. Both travel and writing have changed dramatically in the past 50 years, with the result that it’s been ages since we’ve seen a work that lasts beyond the remaindering season.
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro cites recent works Suketu Mehta’s “Maximum City” and Rory Stewart’s “The Places in Between”—both on our list of the 100 most celebrated travel books of all time—in his rebuttal, arguing that travel writing, with its frequent focus on the lives of distant “others,” is more relevant than ever:
The signal geopolitical event of our time—9/11—was enabled by globalization’s emblematic technologies (the Internet, jetliners) and carried out by a small group of individuals raised in “remote” cultures. Increasingly, it’s an obvious truth that choices made by peoples and nations everywhere may transform the planet’s societies in cataclysmic ways. And so the traditional domain of travel writers—the texture of everyday life; cultures, belief systems, and personal climes—has suddenly become interesting to a whole new audience.
Graeme Wood, meanwhile, sees a lot to dislike in today’s travel writing—but also reason for hope. He starts out arguing for a “catastrophic turn” in travel writing, picking on “Eat, Pray, Love” as symbolic of that turn. He writes, it’s “a whole memoir premised on the notion that even the most decadent, boring, and conventional kinds of travel somehow heal the soul and can turn a suburban ninny into a Herodotus or a Basho.” Ouch. But then Wood eases up, saying that this “doesn’t mean the generation of widely roaming travel writers is finished. Many know that a plane ticket is no guarantee of wisdom and that what one sees on arrival is both more and less than the full story.”
I find this last approach most compelling. Sure, there’s a lot of bad travel writing out there, and it’s never been easier to publish or to find, but there are also plenty of thoughtful, talented traveling writers committed to telling great stories about the world they move through.
Atlas Unveiled as ‘World’s Biggest Book’
by Michael Yessis | 10.06.10 | 12:24 PM ET
Australian publisher Gordon Cheers debuted a six-by-nine-foot atlas at the Frankfurt Book Fair. He’s pretty cocky about it, too. From the AFP:
“It’s all about creating a legacy,” the Sydney-based publisher said. “Today, everything is digital and it’s gone in a second. This will still be around in 500 years.”
The book took around a month to produce and Cheers is limiting the print run of his monster Atlas to 31. He has already sold two volumes to museums in the United Arab Emirates and is confident he will sell the whole lot.
But is it really the world’s biggest book? As of this post, Wikipedia disagrees!
Airplane Air: ‘No Worse Than the Office You Sit in Every Day’
by Eva Holland | 10.06.10 | 9:37 AM ET
That’s from a New York Times story about recent studies showing “that, in general, an airplane is no more a health threat to occupants than any other enclosed environment, like a theater or subway.” Dr. Mark Gendreau, an “aviation medicine expert,” explains:
Cabin air, he said, is refreshed about 15 times an hour, compared with less than 12 an hour in an office building. On most full-size jets, the air is also circulated through hospital-grade HEPA filters, which are supposed to remove 99.97 percent of bacteria and the minuscule particles that carry viruses. The cabin air is also divided into separate ventilation systems covering every seven rows or so, limiting the ability of germs to travel from one end of the plane to the other.
The story also notes a couple of caveats, like the possibility of germ-laden bathroom doorknobs or tray tables, so don’t ditch your travel-sized hand sanitizer just yet.
Venice Faces Backlash Over ‘Grotesque’ Billboards
by Eva Holland | 10.05.10 | 3:16 PM ET
I don’t get it. Why would a city that’s banned shirtlessness, pushed back against souvenir vendors and fought a war against pigeons—all in the name of preserving the urban scenery—allow its most famous views to be obliterated by building-high billboards?
But that’s just what Venice has done, and the results are hideous. And the Mayor’s response to criticism over the ads? “If people want to see the building they should go home and look at a picture of it in a book.” Nice.
‘Is Civil War Tourism Fun?’
by Eva Holland | 10.05.10 | 1:41 PM ET
This coming spring marks the 150th anniversary of the onset of the Civil War. John Swansburg, anticipating an upsurge in Civil War tourism as a result, is getting out ahead of the pack—and he’s documenting his jam-packed ten-day Civil War road trip in a series of dispatches for Slate. He begins the trip with a series of questions:
Over the next four years, scores of fathers will use the sesquicentennial celebration as an excuse to don their safari shirts and trundle forbearing wives and irritable children off to Gettysburg or Spotsylvania or Chickamauga. What will they see? Will they learn something they couldn’t have picked up from watching Ken Burns or reading Battle Cry of Freedom? Can visiting these places turn a layman into a buff? Is Civil War tourism fun?
‘Departure is a Central Fact of Ascension Life’
by Eva Holland | 10.05.10 | 11:08 AM ET
The Economist offers up this compelling five-part series from Ascension Island, a remote British overseas territory located just south of the Equator, in the middle of the Atlantic. Part one explains the ways in which Ascension has drifted back and forth, over the years, from being a useful mid-point to being “on the way to nowhere”:
Ascension Island turns on its head the old sailors’ folklore about islands that move from place to place. It sits still, but the world shifts around it in a way that sometimes, unexpectedly, put Ascension Island between an A and a B that people want to get to. Such a realignment happened at the onset of the Falklands war; similar ones have shaped the island’s whole history.
Discovered in 1501 by the Portuguese, Ascension Island was on the way to nowhere and deemed uninhabitable, so it was left uninhabited, most of the time, for centuries to come, though goats were introduced to give anyone with the misfortune of being ship wrecked something to eat. Then in 1815 the British decided to exile the most important man in the world, Napoleon, to St Helena, further south in the Atlantic. Now the island was on the way back to Europe from St Helena, and it was pre-emptively garrisoned lest it be used by vile Buonapartists to ease his escape. After Buonaparte died in 1821, it took on a new role as a base for the navy’s actions against the Atlantic slave trade. As the garrison developed better (though still meagre) water supplies, and gained expertise in the slaughter of turtles, deemed a delicacy, ships on the way back from the Indian Ocean called in more often; the way the trades blow mean that while Ascension is not on a sailing ship’s way from Europe to India, it is on the way back.
(Via The Daily Dish)
David Byrne: ‘Don’t Forget the Motor City’
by Eva Holland | 10.05.10 | 10:13 AM ET
The musician and World Hum contributor recently spent a week in Detroit, and he’s posted a lengthy, thoughtful item about the visit on his blog. Much of it focuses on the origins of Detroit’s infamous urban decay:
This is a city that still has an infrastructure, or some of it, for 2 million people, and now only 800,000 remain. One rides down majestic boulevards with only a few cars on them, past towering (often empty) skyscrapers. A few weeks ago I watched a documentary called Requiem For Detroit by British director Julian Temple, who used to be associated with the Sex Pistols. It’s a great film, available to watch on YouTube, that gives a context and history for the devastation one sees all around here. This process didn’t happen overnight, as with Katrina, but over many many decades. However the devastation is just as profound, and just as much concentrated on the lower echelons of society. Both disasters were man-made.
(Via The Daily Dish)
Hunter S. Thompson and the Vancouver Sojourn That Could Have Been
by Eva Holland | 10.04.10 | 4:11 PM ET
Fifty two years ago, Hunter S. Thompson applied for a job at the Vancouver Sun, then under the direction of an ambitious new editor. The application letter—apparently written in a “frenzy of drink”—appears in full in this Sun article, and it’s a remarkable read. Here’s Thompson on the state of modern journalism:
As far as I’m concerned, it’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity. If this is what you’re trying to get The Sun away from, then I think I’d like to work for you.
For fans of Thompson as a travel writer, the letter closes on a tempting note: “It’s a long way from here to British Columbia, but I think I’d enjoy the trip.” (Via @AllisonCross)
