Travel Blog
Bryan Curtis: ‘My Dinner With Zagat’
by Michael Yessis | 01.30.07 | 8:48 AM ET
Slate’s ‘Middlebrow’ columnist Bryan Curtis spent an evening out in New York City with Tim and Nina Zagat, which he describes as “a bit like sailing the coast of South America with Ferdinand Magellan.” The Zagats are the publishers of some of the most influential dining guides in the United States, and Curtis’s excursion provides much insight into their powers. Their books are everywhere, and when you’re a Zagat, an open table in a crowded restaurant and fawning fellow diners seem the norm.
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Yahoo! BuzzUpdate: Japan’s ‘Sushi Police’
by Michael Yessis | 01.30.07 | 8:46 AM ET
I supported the idea of a seal of approval for “pure Japanese” food when I heard about it last year. Now, as the Japanese government moves closer to taking action on the idea, Mariko Sanchanta has another take. “Japanese food has spread in popularity abroad in great part thanks to restaurants owned by enterprising individuals—many of whom are Chinese and Korean in the US—who saw a business opportunity and successfully exploited it,” Sanchanta writes in the Financial Times. “Sure, kimchi and sashimi probably don’t mix. But instead of separating the authentic from the inauthentic, the government should hand out thank you notes to everyone who tries to promote Japanese food—especially the genius who invented the California roll.”
Doing Hard Time at the Ritz
by Jim Benning | 01.29.07 | 12:16 PM ET
Paying your debt to society has never sounded so appealing. A man sentenced to home detention in Southern California is doing his time at the Ritz-Carlton in Marina del Rey, where amenities include Los Angeles’s only waterfront pool and hot tub and Jer-ne Restaurant + Bar, which Los Angeles Magazine raved has the city’s “Best Fusion Cuisine.” The federal prosecutor for the case is nonplussed, observing, “When someone is sentenced to electronic monitoring, normally the presumption is he’s not going to be holed up in a four-star hotel.” Actually, by AAA’s ratings system, the hotel is a five-diamond. In fact, it’s the only waterfront five-diamond hotel in L.A.
Daisann McLane: ‘Learning Cantonese’ in Hong Kong
by Jim Benning | 01.29.07 | 9:20 AM ET
Calcata: ‘This May Be the Grooviest Village in Italy’
by Michael Yessis | 01.29.07 | 8:25 AM ET
The fresco of Jimi Hendrix on the wall of an 18th-century building in Calcata helps give it away. Then there are the art galleries, aging hippies and, oh yeah, the Holy Foreskin. David Farley, a World Hum contributor, tells the tale of the one-of-a-kind Italian hill town in Sunday’s New York Times. “You could walk around here in your pajamas holding a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, and no one is going to judge you because you(tm)re not tied to the proper Italian way of doing things,• restaurateur Pancho Garrison tells Farley. “That says a lot about the place.” So does Garrison’s restaurant: It serves nouvelle Italian food, writes Farley, and it resides in a mosaic-lined cave.
Sweden Reveals Embassy Plans for Second Life
by Michael Yessis | 01.29.07 | 8:07 AM ET
Second Life has at least one virtual hotel, a travel guide and some virtual tourists, so why not a virtual embassy? Sweden thinks it makes sense— promotional sense.
Tony Perrottet on the Intersection of Travel and History
by Jim Benning | 01.26.07 | 11:40 AM ET
Author Tony Perrottet knows a thing or two about travel and history. His books include Pagan Holiday: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists. His World Hum story The Joy of Steam is featured in this year’s The Best American Travel Writing anthology. Now, he’s planning to teach an intriguing, unconventional new course about the intersection of writing, travel and history. It’s called The Past on the Page: Bringing History to Life, and it begins March 1 at New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies. To learn more, I e-mailed Perrottet to ask a few questions. He wrote back today from Tortola, of all places, where he had gone “to thaw out.”
The World Hum Travel Zeitgeist: Celebrations and the ‘Soccer People’
by Michael Yessis | 01.26.07 | 9:14 AM ET
Happy Australia Day! This week online travelers are going Down Under, up Mount Everest and around the world via Clarkston, Georgia. Here’s the Zeitgeist.
Most Viewed Weblog Post
World Hum (this week)
‘The Soccer People’: Heartbreak and Triumph in Clarkston, Georgia
Most Popular Travel Story
Netscape (current)
Melburnians Celebrate Australia Day
* Among the highlights of the day for Australians: Whipping England at cricket.
Best Travel Magazine
North American Travel Journalism Association Awards (2006)
Budget Travel
* The list of winners includes National Geographic Traveler (best online travel magazine) and St. Louis Post-Dispatch (best newspaper travel section).
Most Blogged Travel Story
New York Times (current)
Site Calculates Risk Factors for Travelers
* It’s a joint project by “researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, with support from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.”
Most Popular Travel Podcast
iTunes (current)
Travel With Rick Steves
Most Popular Page Tagged Travel
Del.icio.us (recent)
Travel Like a Pro: 8 Tips To Make Your Journey Easier
Most Read Travel Story
USA Today (current)
Online Oracles Promise to Ease Your Airfare Angst
* An overview and comparison of Farecast, Farecompare, Kayak, Hotwire and Airfarewatchdog.
‘You Look Like You Could Use Someone To Talk To On This 5-Hour Bus Ride’
by Michael Yessis | 01.26.07 | 7:50 AM ET
It’s going to be a long trip with this guy beside you.
Was Your Hotel Room Coffee Maker Used as a Mini Meth Lab?
by Jim Benning | 01.25.07 | 4:30 PM ET
If it has reddish-orange stains and your room smells of chemicals, then the answer just might be yes. Gross.
The Venezuela-Cuba Freebie Vacation?
by Jim Benning | 01.25.07 | 4:13 PM ET
You bet. It’s Karl Marx meets Club Med! USA Today reports: “Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has plans to sign an agreement with Cuba to send at least 100,000 poor Venezuelans to the communist-led island for no-cost vacations, an official said Wednesday.” A free vacation? That’s one item on the socialist agenda I can get behind.
Nouveau Sandalista on Venezuela: ‘There Is So Much Vibe and Passion’
by Jim Benning | 01.25.07 | 2:22 PM ET
We noted early last year that Venezuela was the new, hip Latin American travel destination for good sandal-shod lefties (or naive commies, depending on your perspective). Cindy Sheehan, Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte, among other famed agitators, had already made the trek. Now comes another breathless report on the phenomenon. “From a trickle a few years ago,” the Mail & Guardian reports, “there are now thousands, travelling individually and on package tours, exploring a left-wing mecca that promises to build social justice in the form of ‘21st-century socialism.’”
‘Travel Writing: Inner and Outer Journeys’
by Frank Bures | 01.25.07 | 8:38 AM ET
Every year, writers of narrative nonfiction get together at Harvard’s Neiman Conference on Narrative Journalism to talk about the genre. The event has been going on long enough that the speeches have been gathered into a new book, Telling True Stories. It’s got some great stuff from Tom Wolfe, Susan Orlean, Gay Talese and other writers. But one of the most exciting things is that travel writing makes an appearance as a bona fide subgenre. “Travel writing is one of the oldest forms of our craft,” Bury the Chains author Adam Hochschild writes in an essay “Travel Writing: Inner and Outer Journeys.” Hochschild traces the journey archetype back to the Odyssey, and cites Primo Levi’s The Reawakening and Michael Arlen’s Passage to Ararat as classics of travel literature.
R.I.P. Ryszard Kapuściński
by Jim Benning | 01.24.07 | 12:26 PM ET
The acclaimed Polish journalist and author died Tuesday in Warsaw at the age of 74. This morning, Poland’s parliament remembered him with a moment of silence. Kapuściński is the author of “The Soccer War,” among other books, which ranked fourth on our list of the top 30 travel books of all time. We’ll have more on Kapuściński soon.
Macau Surpasses Las Vegas as Gambling Mecca
by Michael Yessis | 01.24.07 | 9:20 AM ET
The numbers are staggering: Macau’s gambling revenue rose from $2 billion in 2001 to $6.95 billion in 2006, and this year analysts predict a take of $8 billion. Las Vegas took in $6.5 billion in 2006. Why is Macau booming? According to a New York Times story, liberalized Chinese travel policies have helped spur growth.
