Travel Blog
An Atlantic Crossing on the Queen Mary 2
by Eva Holland | 02.18.13 | 7:25 AM ET
In the New York Times, Dwight Garner has a lighthearted dispatch from a January cruise on Cunard’s enormous QM2. He starts by outlining the ground rules:
The first rule about traveling between America and England aboard the Queen Mary 2, the flagship of the Cunard Line and the world’s largest ocean liner, is to never refer to your adventure as a cruise. You are, it is understood, making a crossing. The second rule is to refrain, when speaking to those who travel frequently on Cunard’s ships, from calling them regulars. The term of art—it is best pronounced while approximating Maggie Smith’s cut-glass accent on “Downton Abbey”—is Cunardists.
The third rule, unspoken, is to not fling your Champagne flutes into the roiling North Atlantic. My wife, Cree, broke this one. It was our second night aboard the ship. We were crossing, in January, from New York to Southampton. I was in black tie. She was in an extraordinary little black dress. We’d been flailing about, in the ship’s ballroom, to an adroit orchestra. We were happy, and tipsy.
We pushed open a door to the promenade deck. The icy wind heartlessly X-rayed us, but it was impossible to pull away from the railing. The North Atlantic in January is no joke; its heaving beauty is mesmerizing. It’s a volcano of sorts, one that seems to demand an offering. Better a Champagne flute than to leap over the railing yourself.
The piece meanders a bit, but it’s laced with funny and thoughtful observations about the cruise—er, crossing. (Via The Best of Journalism)
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Yahoo! BuzzTravel Story Hall of Fame: ‘As Long As We Were Together, Nothing Bad Could Happen To Us’
by Eva Holland | 02.04.13 | 9:49 AM ET
The latest installment of the Travel Story Hall of Fame, an occasional series in which we honor the best in travel writing new and old.
Title: As Long As We Were Together, Nothing Bad Could Happen To Us
Author: Scott Anderson
Publication: Men’s Journal
Date: August 2000
Nomination Speech: I just plain love this story. I first read it in “The Best American Travel Writing 2002,” and then again (and again and again) in the excellent Men’s Journal anthology, “Wild Stories.” It’s an old-fashioned adventure story about Scott Anderson and his brother, fellow writer Jon Lee Anderson, taking a Honduran river trip on a makeshift raft, at the tail end of their decidedly unconventional childhoods, but the yarn is spiced up by the contemporary frame: The brothers, now adults and reporters specializing in conflict zones and high-risk stories, being drawn back into danger again and again. It’s a great story about family and trust and risk—oh, just go read it.
Excerpt:
I imagine that everyone’s childhood, no matter how unconventional or exotic, seems absolutely normal while it’s being lived. By the time I arrived in Honduras, I was only beginning to comprehend the downside of how we had grown up, the hidden cost that comes with not being from anywhere in particular. Jon, it seemed, had figured it out a little bit sooner. In the years ahead, we would both be caught up in a seemingly endless cycle of trying to fit in, failing, moving on. In a funny way, I think we both drew a certain comfort in the other’s inability to settle down—proof that there was at least one more misfit in the family.
Men’s Journal doesn’t have it online, but you can read the rest via Google Books.
Video You Must See: The Airplane Boneyard
by Eva Holland | 01.31.13 | 9:39 AM ET
This gorgeous timelapse of the planes in Arizona’s massive U.S Air Force ‘Boneyard’ also includes short, moving interviews with a handful of retired pilots. Wreckage never looked so good.
(Via The Atlantic)
Introducing ‘The Introvert’s Way’ by Sophia Dembling
by Eva Holland | 01.24.13 | 8:21 AM ET
Nearly four years ago, we published Sophia Dembling’s Confessions of an Introverted Traveler on World Hum. The essay was a huge hit: It generated more than 100 comments and became our most-read story of the year. (A follow-up piece, Six Tips for Introverted Travelers, landed second on the most-read list.) It also launched what Dembling calls “the beginning of my career as a professional introvert.” She went on to blog about introversion for Psychology Today, and in December, Perigee published her book on the subject: The Introvert’s Way: Living a Quiet Life in a Noisy World.
As a fellow introvert, I couldn’t be more (quietly) thrilled.
Travel Dispatches From a Hidden Mumbai
by Eva Holland | 01.23.13 | 8:44 AM ET
I’ve been working my way through Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo’s much-lauded book about life in a precarious Mumbai slum. It’s an incredible work of reporting, and beautifully written too: The book tells the story of a group of families in Annawadi, a semi-legal settlement whose economy revolves around recyclable garbage.
It’s not what most people would call travel writing—Boo is absent from the story, which reads like a novel with an omniscient narrator—but as I read it, I’ve been thinking about how it might fit into the genre. It’s drawing me into a part of the world I’ve never visited, and likely never will; it’s teaching me about lives led on the other side of the world, lives that are both wildly divergent, and yet not so different, from my own. Isn’t that one of the tasks of great travel writing?
Interestingly enough, Annawadi is located right next to the Mumbai airport, which means its dramas have unfolded under the noses of every tourist and travel writer who’s ever visited the city.
NPR has a short excerpt.
What’s on Paul Theroux’s Travel Wish List?
by Eva Holland | 01.21.13 | 8:33 AM ET
In the New York Times, he ponders all the places he has yet to see:
“You’ve been everywhere,” people say to me, but that’s a laugh. My wish list of places is not only long but, in many cases, blindingly obvious. Yes, I have been to Patagonia and Congo and Sikkim, but I haven’t been to the most scenic American states, never to Alaska, Montana, Idaho or the Dakotas, and I’ve had only the merest glimpse of Kansas and Iowa. I want to see them, not flying in but traveling slowly on the ground, keeping to back roads, and defying the general rule of “Never eat at a place called Mom’s, never play cards with a man called Doc ...”
...Places I have not been, that I would love to go to in my car include a trip north, starting in Cape Cod and taking in Quebec, and continuing until I run out of road, then turning west, seeing the rest of Canada, land of my fathers. I have seen only a small bit of it, but the rest of it beckons, the very names: Great Slave Lake, Yellowknife, Moose Jaw, down through Alaska—months of it, maybe a year, and why not?
You know, I think the Great Canadian Road Trip Memoir has yet to be written. I wouldn’t mind at all if Theroux decided to step up to the plate.
The Trouble With the Michelin Guide
by Eva Holland | 01.16.13 | 9:02 AM ET
In Vanity Fair, the always-caustic A.A. Gill offers a short history of the Michelin restaurant guide—and how it all went wrong:
The Michelin guide also created a new type of customer, the foodie trainspotter, people who aren’t out for a good meal with friends but want to tick a cultural box and have bragging rights on some rare effete spirit. Michelin-starred restaurants began to look and taste the same: the service would be cloying and oleaginous, the menus vast and clotted with verbiage. The room would be hushed, the atmosphere religious. The food would be complicated beyond appetite. And it would all be ridiculously expensive. So, Michelin spawned restaurants that were based on no regional heritage or ingredient but grew out of cooks’ abused vanity, insecurity, and fawning hunger for compliments.
Being French, of course the guide has always been the subject of conspiracy theories regarding the allocation of stars, the number of inspectors, and their quality and disinterest. Having made the hierarchy of chefs, the guide found that it was in its interest to maintain it. A handful of grand and gluttonous kitchens seemed to keep their rating long after their fashion and food faded. Michelin evolved from the wandering Candide of food to become the creeping Richelieu: manipulative, obsessive, and secretive.
Has Technology Killed the Tall Travel Tale?
by Eva Holland | 01.15.13 | 7:28 AM ET
In a recent issue of Outside, Ian Frazier offered a lament for the outdoorsman’s yarn. “A truth about the outdoors is that it causes people to lie,” Frazier writes. “Strange forces out there in the wild have always conspired to corrupt human honesty.” But nowadays, between satellite imagery and the ubiquity of digital cameras, between GPS units and cellphone tracking, everything, Frazier argues, is fact-checkable. He goes on:
A favorite word for the technological fishbowl effect is transparency. Anything you do in far places, and anything that exists out there, can, in principle, be seen. Transparency is one of those words whose real meaning is its opposite, the way that countries with ministries of culture haven’t any. Of course, all the technology known or yet to be known won’t see even a part of everything or stop people from making things up. It’s just that the realm of colorful prevarication has moved inside, where the heart does its sneaking. Most of the gods and demons and fairies and windigos who used to inhabit their own particular outdoor places died off long ago, and modern technology has zapped the survivors. If you want to spin a yarn, it will be about something inward and private…
I’m not sure I’m convinced, but—much like the questionable tales Frazier is worried about—it’s an entertaining read nonetheless.
Ian Frazier’s “Travels in Siberia” made our roundup of The Best Travel Books of 2010, while “Great Plains” landed on our list of The 100 Most Celebrated Travel Books of All Time.
Rick Steves on Legalizing Pot in Washington
by Jim Benning | 11.11.12 | 10:31 PM ET
A few days before voters in Washingston state legalized marijuana for recreational use, Rick Steves wrote an op-ed in the Seattle Times in support of the measure.
Initiative 502 is not pro-pot. Rather, it’s anti-prohibition. We believe that, like the laws that criminalized alcohol back in the 1930s, our current laws against marijuana use are causing more harm to our society than the drug itself.
Marijuana is a drug. It’s not good for you. It can be addictive. But marijuana is here to stay. No amount of wishing will bring us a utopian drug-free society.
Not surprisingly, in the days since the passage of these laws in Washington and Colorado, some have wondered if we’ll see the dawn of American marijuana tourism.
Welcome to Escobarland
by Eva Holland | 10.15.12 | 9:09 AM ET
The one-time home of notorious Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar has been transformed into a theme park—and, says the Daily Mail, it’s “an attraction not to be sniffed at.” Visitors to the park can view Escobar’s private bullfighting ring, a derelict hovercraft, and a plane once used for smuggling drugs. Can’t make it to Colombia anytime soon? The Daily Mail story includes an array of photos. (Via @DavidGrann)
World Hum Writers Honored in ‘The Best American Travel Writing 2012’
by Eva Holland | 10.09.12 | 7:37 AM ET
The newest edition of the annual The Best American Travel Writing anthology was released last week (though I’m still eagerly awaiting my copy way up here in the Yukon Territory). This time around, it was guest edited by William T. Vollmann, and three World Hum stories were included in the notable selections: Our Own Apocalypse Now, by Haley Sweetland Edwards; David Farley’s Bad “Carma”; and Greek Paradise, Lost, by Dan Saltzstein.
Several World Hum contributors, writing elsewhere, were also honored in this year’s collection: Tom Swick had a story included, while Leigh Ann Henion, Pico Iyer, Daisann McLane and Tony Perrottet were among the notable selections. Congrats, all.
Video: Interview with Pico Iyer on the Joy of Quiet
by Jim Benning | 09.16.12 | 11:14 AM ET
Pico Iyer’s December 2011 New York Times essay The Joy of Quiet became an instant classic, making the site’s “most e-mailed” list, prompting debates and discussions and generally, well, making a lot of noise.
The author and World Hum contributor sat down with “Radio Shangri-La” author Lisa Napoli last winter in Los Angeles for Live Talks discussion on the topic. This video of their conversation was just published.
A Visitor’s Guide to ‘Infinite Boston’
by Eva Holland | 08.10.12 | 9:37 AM ET
Calling all “Infinite Jest” tourists: This blog has you covered. (Via The Millions)
The Sociology of Greyhound Buses
by Eva Holland | 08.10.12 | 8:03 AM ET
Talk about legwork. Yale University PhD student Esther Kim spent two years criss-crossing the USA by Greyhound, studying the ways in which people create the illusion of solitude or privacy while crammed together in a public space. The Atlantic Cities has some highlights from her findings:
Kim says we distance ourselves from others by putting on a “calculated social performance” that lets strangers in a shared public space know that we don’t want to be bothered. This behavior is intended to keep us safe and undisturbed in an “otherwise uncertain social space.” ...Once passengers acquired a seat they began their performance to dissuade potential row partners. They avoided eye contact, stretched their legs to cover the open space, placed a bag on the empty seat, sat on the aisle and blast earphones, pretended to sleep, looked at the window blankly. They also contorted their expressions into the “don’t bother me” face or the “hate stare,” writes Kim.
Of course, we’ve all done these things—I’m a master of the fake nap with one leg stuck out into the empty space, myself—but it’s still interesting to see the same behaviors documented time and time again. I guess it’s a small, slightly anti-social world after all?
Team USA, Mapped
by Eva Holland | 08.09.12 | 10:42 AM ET
Where do Olympic athletes come from? As London 2012 winds down, The Atlantic Cities has an answer. Urban trend watcher Richard Florida mapped the 500+ members of Team USA, first by hometown and then by current residence. Here’s Florida on the hometown results:
The largest number - 9 percent (43 athletes) - are from Los Angeles; 3.6 percent (17) are from the Bay Area, 3 percent (14) are from greater New York; and 2.3 percent (11) from Dallas. Four metros claim ten athletes each (2 percent): Tampa, San Diego, Atlanta and Miami.
Smaller metros rise to the top when we control for population. Now, Rochester, New York, leads the way with 1.7 athletes per 100,000 people followed by Great Falls (1.2), Cheyenne (1.1), Fairbanks (1.0), and Boulder (1.0).
Big northern cities like Chicago and Boston are conspicuously absent from the top rankings. Don’t worry, Chicagoans and Bostonians—you can just take a page out of the Canadian playbook, and blame it on the weather.
