Travel Blog
Video: Lavinia Spalding’s TEDx Talk on Travel Writing
by Jim Benning | 05.01.12 | 12:00 PM ET
The editor of The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011 recently spoke at the TEDx conference in Park City, Utah, delivering an eloquent argument for the power of travel stories to reveal our shared humanity.
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Yahoo! BuzzEverest Base Camp: Now With 3G
by Eva Holland | 04.28.12 | 11:40 PM ET
Outside’s Grayson Schaffer is spending two months blogging from base camp—and, as he notes in one of his early posts, he’s doing so without the use of a spendy satellite connection:
Until the 1970s and ‘80s, most Everest expeditions included two porters who did nothing but run mail dispatches from Base Camp to the nearest village. No longer. This year, multiple climbers at Base Camp are snapping photos on their iPhones and sharing them through Instagram and Facebook in real time.
That’s possible because of Nepal’s dominant cell phone service, Ncell. In 2010, the provider announced plans to bring 3G coverage all the way to Mount Everest. Now it’s here.
Just one more sign of our inexorably shrinking planet.
Chicago Tourism Song Declared a Catastrophe
by Jim Benning | 04.27.12 | 12:41 PM ET
Or something close to that. The promotional song, recently released by the city’s tourism organization, is getting slammed, especially in comments on the song’s YouTube page. One example: “It’s like the theme song from an ‘80s sitcom, probably starring Tony Danza, only it’s the muzak version of that song. A milestone in war crime level banality.”
You almost have to wonder if the whole thing is a put-on, made intentionally bad to draw more attention to the city. I mean, it is getting Chicago a lot of press. You be the judge:
Mapped: America’s Unofficial State Borders
by Eva Holland | 04.27.12 | 9:59 AM ET
Pop vs. soda vs. Coke. Yankees fans vs. Red Sox fans. Over at The Atlantic Cities, Samuel Arbesman and a team of colleagues have used data from cell phone records, sports broadcast blackout zones and more to track some of the country’s informal, internal boundaries. The result is a fascinating selection of maps.
Jon Krakauer: Writing is like Rock Climbing
by Eva Holland | 04.26.12 | 9:51 AM ET
This week I’ve been making my way through a collection of interviews called The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft. It’s an interesting read. The writers—everyone from Gay Talese to Eric Schlosser and Susan Orlean—describe how they work, from story idea through interviewing to writing and editing.
In one section, Jon Krakauer explains his use of outlines. It involves a lot of hand-written scenes pinned to his office wall in sequence. The book’s author, Robert S. Boynton, asks him where he got the technique.
Here’s Krakauer’s reply:
Rock climbing. When you embark on a really big climb like, say, the Salathé wall of El Capitan, which rises three thousand vertical feet from the floor of Yosemite Valley, the enormity of the undertaking can be paralyzing. So a climber breaks down the ascent into rope-lengths, or pitches. If you can think of the climb as a series of twenty or thirty pitches, and focus on each of these pitches to the exclusion of all the scary pitches that still lie above, climbing El Cap suddenly isn’t such an intimidating prospect. By following an outline I can focus on the chapter that’s in front of me… It makes writing a book much less terrifying.
Travel TV Movie Watch: ‘Hemingway & Gellhorn’
by Jim Benning | 04.24.12 | 7:43 PM ET
For those of you who just can’t get enough Ernest Hemingway in your life (and, really, love him or hate him, who can ever get enough?): HBO is behind a new film about the romance between Papa and Martha Gellhorn. It premieres on HBO Monday, May 28, and stars Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman. And hey, isn’t that Metallica’s Lars Ulrich in the trailer, talking about people heading to Spain? Why yes (thanks, IMDb).
Cue Ulrich’s anthem to landmine wounds?
Amanda Hesser’s Advice for Aspiring Food Writers
by Jim Benning | 04.18.12 | 10:14 AM ET
What does the former New York Times food writer and editor say to aspiring food writers who ask her for advice?
I can no longer responsibly recommend that you drop everything to try to become a food writer. Except for a very small group of people (some of whom are clinging to jobs at magazines that pay more than the magazines’ business models can actually afford), it’s nearly impossible to make a living as a food writer, and I think it’s only going to get worse.
Hesser talks salaries and freelance budgets, and she offers other suggestions for those still interested in pursuing food writing.
So what happens now if someone comes to me wanting to become a writer? I don’t totally crush their dreams. I just step on them a bit—before trying to help the aspirant re-imagine his or her future in a whole new way.
If all that’s too depressing for you, check out this photo of falafel and tzatziki on the same site. It’s pretty, and it won’t step on your dreams. Its only purpose is to delight you.
‘Paris Was the Landscape of What I Wanted to Be’
by Eva Holland | 04.12.12 | 12:51 PM ET
In the latest essay in The Rumpus’ “The Last City I Loved” series, writer Rebekkah Dilts looks back on her time as a foreign student in Paris. Here’s a taste:
Speaking and being spoken to in French, this language that’s like a song, opened a new vein of cognition and a different sensibility in me. Paris was the landscape of what I wanted to be: I wanted to have a history that I believed in fiercely, I wanted for art and words to be acknowledged, but also for softness and aesthetics to be appreciated. And I was embraced by a family again; to feel tenderness and a sense of belonging in the setting of so incredible a city was the greatest gift I could have been given. I felt a unique and profound freedom.
Travel Writing: ‘Almost as Over-Romanticized as Bacon’
by Jim Benning | 04.10.12 | 11:08 AM ET
Every spring I teach a travel writing class at New York University. Within the first five minutes of the first class, I tell my students the bubble-bursting secret: that being a travel writer is almost as over-romanticized as bacon, Brooklyn and Italy. Not that I’m necessarily complaining. Sometimes on the road, we can experience glimpses of a decadent life of Hemingwayan proportions, but when we get back home, the cash-strapped reality sinks in as quickly as it takes to boil a packet of Top Ramen. Travel we most certainly do; money we most certainly do not make.
The Critics: ‘‘Wild’ by Cheryl Strayed
by Jim Benning | 04.05.12 | 10:39 AM ET
Strayed’s memoir about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail while reflecting on her life, including the death of her mother, is getting rave reviews.
This is a long way from Bill Bryson’s “A Walk in the Woods.” Apparently it’s no “Eat, Pray, Love,” either.
From Slate:
By laying bare a great unspoken truth of adulthood—that many things in life don’t turn out the way you want them to, and that you can and must live through them anyway—Wild feels real in ways that many books about “finding oneself,” including Eat, Pray, Love and all its imitators, do not. The hike, rewarding though it is, doesn’t heal Strayed. “I’d thought I’d weep tears of cathartic sorrow and restorative joy each day of my journey,” she writes. “Instead, I only moaned, and not because my heart ached. It was because my feet did and my back did and so did the still-open [pack] wounds around my hips.”
I’m a big fan of Brad Listi’s Other People podcasts, featuring wide-ranging, hour-long conversations with authors. He spoke with Strayed in February:
What Does $5 Buy You in Europe Today?
by Doug Mack | 04.04.12 | 10:53 AM ET
Editor’s note: For his new book, Europe on 5 Wrong Turns a Day, Doug Mack traveled around the continent using a decades-old copy of Arthur Frommer’s “Europe on Five Dollars a Day.”
So what will $5 buy in Europe these days?
During the course of their World Hum interview, Leif Pettersen asked Doug just that. Here’s what Doug came up with:
- Florence: Some crappy knockoff designer sunglasses from an unofficial vendor by the Arno (but only after you bargained down from the original price and the salesman, with a practiced sigh/grin, says that he’s never, EVER made an offer this low, but ...).
- Paris: A pain au chocolat and maybe a macaron from Gerard Mulot on the Left Bank, along with eternal, wistful memories of same, an enduring, bittersweet nostalgia for that transcendent instant when all seemed right with the world. This is all true. Or a couple of condoms from the Eiffel Tower gift shop. Also true.
- Amsterdam: Aw, bro, I know this kinda shady place down a back alley, you gotta bang on this steel door, but for five bucks they’ll hook you up with a little bag of this, like, super-primo ... Gouda.
- Brussels: A couple of chocolate bars in the shape of Manneken-Pis.
- Berlin: Two fake East German stamps in your passport at Checkpoint Charlie.
- Munich: Beer! Or a prostate cancer test from a vending machine at Oktoberfest. I promise this is a real thing. Unfortunately (or not), it does not involve a little robot hand cranking out of the machine, finger extended. In fact, it’s a little stick; you pee on it, like a pregnancy test, which you can also procure from the same machine.
- Zurich: Ha! Good one. Right, like you can get something for $5 in Zurich. You take a single breath of that crisp Alpine air and it sets you back 8.35 CHF, which is, like, $210.04 at the current exchange rate. Though that does include VAT.
- Vienna: Your choice of all manner of Mozart-themed tchotchkes. A Mozart wig, alas, will set you back quite a bit more than 5 dollars, but such is the price of timeless fashion.
- Venice: A map, so you can figure out where the *%$@!! you are in that enchanted labyrinth-land. Or a shoddy plastic version of those famous Venetian masks.
- Rome: Gelato. Gelatogelatogelato. Go to Gelateria del Teatro, near the Piazza Navona. Five bucks (or, you know, the equivalent in euros) will get you two scoops of creamy transcendence that rivals the Sistine Chapel for awesomeness. (Hyperbole? Of course not.) Try the lemon. Or the chocolate-wine. Thank me later.
- Madrid: A ticket in the highest, most sun-blasted seats at a novillada con picadores bullfight. Available online through a Ticketmaster subsidiary. (Again, I am not making this up.)
Will Aun San Suu Kyi’s Election Victory Spur Travel to Myanmar?
by Jim Benning | 04.02.12 | 5:19 PM ET
Indeed, the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s election to a parliamentary seat “may further fuel demand,” reports Jayne Clark at USA Today.
But then, travel to the country formerly known as Burma was already on the rise, thanks in part to a growing sense of optimism that positive changes are afoot in the country.
Tourist arrivals rose by 20% in 2011, according to the Myanmar Times, though the 816,000 tally is dwarfed by the 19 million tourists who visited neighboring Thailand.
A number of U.S.-based tour operators are for the first time offering tours to the once-reclusive nation. Demand for Overseas Adventure Travel’s Burma tours is so great, the Boston-based company has increased its 2012 departures from 40 to 61 and is hoping to schedule more.
At any rate, it’s good to see.
Travel Movie Watch: ‘Mariachi Gringo’
by Jim Benning | 04.02.12 | 4:49 PM ET
This looks promising. That said, I don’t see an official release date set; it got a mixed review in Variety; and according to a piece last month in the Hollywood Reporter, “The film has no sales agent nor distribution deals in place.” Hmm. (Via @TranquiloTravel)
Longreads Launches Travelreads
by Jim Benning | 03.21.12 | 10:43 AM ET
It’s always nice to see long-form travel writing get some love on the manic, impatient, impulsive internets.
Today, Longreads, the website that curates longer stories with excerpts and links, launched a travel section.
Among the stories now featured are a Susan Orlean piece on Bangkok’s Khao San Road, an Ernest Hemingway dispatch from the Spanish Civil War and a John Jeremiah Sullivan article about Disney World. A couple of World Hum pieces are in the mix, too.
Jodi Ettenberg of Legal Nomads is contributing her curatorial powers to the operation. Readers can suggest stories to include via Twitter, posting links with the hashtag #travelreads. The site defines a “longread” as something typically more than 1,500 words.
Travel Movie Watch: ‘Chico & Rita’
by Jim Benning | 03.13.12 | 4:44 PM ET
This looks great. Nominated for a 2012 Academy Award for best animated feature, Chico & Rita is set in Havana, New York and Paris in the 1940s and ‘50s and features some great music by the likes of Bebo Valdés. A.O. Scott just gave it a rave review in The New York Times, calling it “an animated valentine to Cuba and its music.” He also notes that Havana’s streets “are exquisitely rendered and meticulously colored.”
It’s playing in select Landmark Theatre locations; in Los Angeles, it’s at the Nuart through Thursday.
Here’s the trailer:
