Travel Blog: News and Briefs
Lights Out in Pyongyang
by Michael Yessis | 08.10.09 | 12:00 PM ET
Journalist Sarah Wang recently spent four days in North Korea, traveling incognito with a group of “potential investors.” Her story in Slate adds some vivid details to what we know about life in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Here’s one scene:
The men in the streets usually wore black or dark blue uniforms that looked like Mao suits, and the women wore cheap white or gray blouses with black or dark blue skirts. The most popular shoes were made of dark blue cloth, with white shoelaces and white plastic soles. The blue color ran and stained the laces when it rained.
Look for more North Korea coverage on World Hum in the coming days.
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Yahoo! BuzzDubai in the Downturn
by Michael Yessis | 08.10.09 | 10:10 AM ET
“It’s all a bit scary,” one expat tells the Washington Post’s Andrew Higgins. He’s not the only one cowering and fleeing. Many expats believe there’s a hunt on for “foreign culprits to blame for the sheikdom’s sliding economic fortunes.”
In Dubai’s defense, its Media Affairs Office told Higgins that it “prides itself on a well-established system of law and order and judicial fairness,” but it didn’t “respond to repeated and detailed questions.”
What We Loved This Week: Amadou & Mariam, the Washington Nationals and Iced Coffee in Shanghai
by World Hum | 08.07.09 | 4:01 PM ET
Photo by Michael Yessis New Travel Magazine ‘Afar’ Launches
by Jim Benning | 08.07.09 | 3:27 PM ET
The first issue of a new print travel magazine called Afar landed in my mailbox yesterday. Travel writer friends have been talking about it for some time—largely marveling at the fact that anyone would launch a print travel magazine in these times.
I like the look and spirit of the magazine—it emphasizes “experiential travel.” It’s an approach that’s been tried before—I’m thinking of magazines like Blue and Escape. It was launched by Greg Sullivan and Joe Diaz, a couple of entrepreneurs with a passion for travel. Here’s hoping these guys and the editorial team they’ve assembled can come up with the magic formula to make it work over the long haul.
Sullivan has a background in the law, investment banking, car dealerships and arcade games, according to an interview in Daily Finance. He told the publication:
“There are some things that magazines are really good at and one of them is what we’re after with Afar. We’re really trying to inspire and model a certain kind of travel that’s really about experiencing a place and getting to know its people and its culture—getting the essence of the place. A magazine happens to be a really good medium for that because it can do it with narrative stories and essays and photos.”
Suerte, guys.
Adventures in Unfortunate Place Names
by Eva Holland | 08.07.09 | 2:39 PM ET
Fill in the blanks: Residents in F**king, Austria, are sick of tourists flocking for lewd photo-ops with the town’s signage, but across the border the folks in W**k, Germany, think F**king should learn to embrace the crude humor—and cash in. That’s what W**k’s tourism leaders have done: Said one W**k spokesperson, “There are W**k postcards on sale although many people prefer to take their own W**k holiday snaps standing beside Welcome to W**k signs.” And understandably so. I’ll leave the DIY jokes to less refined bloggers.
Book Passage Travel Writers Conference 2009
by Jim Benning | 08.07.09 | 2:00 PM ET
The annual Book Passage Travel Writers & Photographers Conference kicks off Thursday in lovely Corte Madera, just north of San Francisco. Given the tumult in the publishing world, this year should be interesting, to say the least. The faculty lineup is impressive, as always, including such writers and editors as Tim Cahill, Jen Leo, Rolf Potts, Spud Hilton, John Flinn, Phil Cousineau, Pauline Frommer, Larry Habegger, Michael Shapiro and Wendy Perrin.
I’ll be teaching a three-hour class each morning on Travel Writing in the Digital Age. We’ll cover everything from blogging to producing audio slideshows to writing personal essays and web-friendly articles. And we’ll dig into the business side of things. Jen Leo and Rolf Potts have promised to pop in to offer their perspective.
Airline Crew Crash Pads: The ‘World’s Largest Illegal Housing Network’?
by Michael Yessis | 08.07.09 | 11:41 AM ET
Senators questioned airline executives yesterday about the living conditions of some pilots and other airline workers, who often live in crash pads around the country. Some context: In another Washington Post story this week, crash pads were characterized as the “world’s largest illegal housing network.”
The Hard Life of Los Angeles’ Street Tamaleros*
by Jim Benning | 08.07.09 | 10:55 AM ET
We’ve written before about the sometimes tough plight of L.A.’s taco trucks. Fortunately, taco trucks these days are ascendant—thanks in part to the mobility patterns of young urbanites.
So let us now turn our attention to L.A.’s Mexican street-food vendors. They’ve never had it easy, what with gang battles sometimes raging around them and the watchful eye of health inspectors threatening their livelihoods.
Public radio’s Marketplace recently put together a fine little profile on the struggles of one tamale vendor who works the tough neighborhood of MacArthur Park.
Tamalero Antonio, who sells tamales out of a box mounted on a tricycle, told the show: “It’s dangerous. It’s very, very dangerous. You have to be careful with the gangs, you have to be careful with the police, you have to be careful with the cars. There are a lot of dangers in the street.”
(Via Boing Boing)
* Update 4:16 p.m. P.T. Speaking of dangers, today’s L.A. Times reports that at least 22 taco truck operators have been robbed at gunpoint in East L.A. in the last three months. (Thanks for the tip, Eli.)
‘The Era of the Small Town has Passed’
by Eva Holland | 08.07.09 | 9:50 AM ET
In The Smart Set, Jessa Crispin reflects on the dual pop culture mythologies of small town America—the nostalgic’s warm, sleepy hamlet and the horror movie’s lurking nightmare—and the ways in which both miss the point. Her conclusion is stark: “[T]he era of the small town has passed, and if all we ever remember are these false versions, we’ll never understand what we’re losing.”
For my part, I think there are more nuanced portrayals of small-town American life out there than those she mentions—see, for instance, John Updike’s earlier short stories. But I take her point about the dominant portrayals being cartoon-ish more often than not. My proposed remedy: some real-life exposure. Trans-American road trips for all?
Found: A New ‘Wanderlust Gene’
by Michael Yessis | 08.07.09 | 9:03 AM ET
Scientists at the University of British Columbia identified it in the stickleback fish, which, of course, is now my all-time favorite fish. Wondering about a wanderlust gene in humans? Scientists may already have discovered that, too.
R.I.P. John Hughes
by Eva Holland | 08.06.09 | 5:45 PM ET
Hughes, who wrote “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” has died of a heart attack at age 59. Other travel movie favorites from the prolific writer-director included “European Vacation,” “Christmas Vacation,” “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” and “The Great Outdoors”—the last two made our lists of great travel race movies and great summer vacation movies, respectively, while we gave “Vacation” the World Hum Travel Movie Club treatment for its 25th anniversary last summer.
For my part, I’ll never be able to visit Chicago without thinking of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” another Hughes classic.
Sam Sifton: Hard-Traveling NYT Restaurant Critic
by Eva Holland | 08.06.09 | 2:53 PM ET
The latest New York Times restaurant critic was unveiled yesterday, and after the announcement the lucky winner, Sam Sifton, took some questions from readers. Among them: Where would he like to travel on assignment for the Times? By his response, I’m guessing we have a fellow travel enthusiast on our hands:
I’m forwarding [your question] to the accountants and news administrators as complete explanation for why I just booked flights to and hotel rooms in Paris, Aix-en-Provence, Brussels, Shanghai, Barcelona, Riga, Los Angeles, Seattle, Toronto, Mexico City, Stellenbosch, South Africa and Big Pine Key, Florida (home to the only credibly fantastic ham and pineapple pizza on Earth—no lie).
For Sale: Dinosaur Adventure Land
by Eva Holland | 08.06.09 | 11:20 AM ET
Theme park down: Dinosaur Adventure Land, a creationist theme park in Pensacola, Florida, has been seized by the government to satisfy nearly half a million dollars owed by its owners to the IRS. The site will be divided up into its nine constituent properties and sold in pieces until the debt is paid—so if you’ve dreamed of owning a fraction of a defunct religious tourist attraction, now’s your chance. (Via Gawker)
Hitchens: A Taste of Japan in California
by Eva Holland | 08.05.09 | 5:02 PM ET
In his latest over at Slate, Christopher Hitchens visits a Japanese cultural festival in Palo Alto and makes a nice point about reconciliation in the wake of Pearl Harbor, civilian internment camps and the atomic bomb. What I liked best, though, was his observation about the resilience of cultural events in the face of rising tourist interest. Hitch writes:
There’s a large turnout of non-Japanese for these attractions, getting larger every year it seems to me, but it doesn’t succeed in swamping the main event or in making it into a mere tourist attraction. You come across a group of grave and serious Japanese gardeners, engaged in the judging of a bonsai competition, and you suddenly appreciate that nothing can turn this consideration into a hucksterish sideshow.
(Thanks Frank Bures.)
Museums and the Lost Art of ‘Slow Looking’
by Eva Holland | 08.05.09 | 2:41 PM ET
In the New York Times this week, Michael Kimmelman watched tourists power-walking through the Louvre, and lamented the lost days of “slow looking” at museums and galleries. I enjoyed the article, and I can certainly relate—my first visit to Notre Dame, in Paris, was largely spoiled by a businessman who dashed up and down the aisles holding a camcorder over his head while shouting into a cellphone—but at the same time, if the faster-moving visitors aren’t actively disrupting the slowpokes, I don’t have much energy to condemn them.
After all, as Kimmelman himself says, there is “no single, correct way to look at any work of art, save for with an open mind and patience.” I think he had it right without the qualifiers.
