Travel Blog: News and Briefs

Travel Movie Update: ‘The Loneliest Planet’

Last year we wrote about the festival premiere of “The Loneliest Planet”, a film based on a short story by World Hum contributor Tom Bissell. Well, the movie’s now been through the festival circuit and is set for a limited U.S. theatrical release in August. Here’s the creepy, intriguing trailer:

(Trailer from Vulture, via Frank Bures)


R.I.P. Chavela Vargas

The singer who recorded countless classic Mexican rancheras during her long career died in Cuernavaca, Mexico, last night at the age of 93.

Like a number of Americans, I suspect, I fell in love with her deep, husky voice the moment I heard her rendition of “La Llorona” in Julie Taymor’s 2002 Frida Kahlo biopic, “Frida.” That was my gateway ranchera to others she recorded, like this one.

Writer Daniel Hernandez has been tweeting from Plaza Garibaldi in Mexico City tonight, where people gathered to remember Vargas. “A couple thousand people just sang ‘Volver’ at once behind Eugenia Leon like it was one big therapy session,” he wrote. “Overwhelming. Only in Mexico.”

Here’s Vargas singing “La Llorona”:

 


A Jim Crow Road Trip

Over at The Root, Nsenga K. Burton looks back at “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” a segregation-era guidebook for black travelers in America. It was first published in 1936, and, writes Burton, it “listed businesses and places of interest such as nightclubs, beauty salons, barbershops, gas stations and garages that catered to black road-trippers. For almost three decades, travelers could request (for just 10 cents’ postage) and receive a guide from Green.”

Burton tried to track down some of the places listed in the guide and found some still going strong. Lovers of guidebook nostalgia (we’re looking at you, Doug Mack) should check out the full story.


The 2012 Book Passage Travel Writers & Photographers Conference

The country’s premier travel writing conference is fast approaching. This year’s Book Passage Travel Writers & Photographers Conference takes place Aug. 9-12 in Corte Madera, Calif., just a few minutes’ drive north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Spaces are still available.

I’ll be back on the faculty, teaching online writing and blogging with Pam Mandel. This year’s faculty also includes New Yorker Staff Writer Susan Orlean, Afar Editor Julia Cosgrove, San Francsico Chronicle Travel Editor Spud Hilton and dozens of other accomplished writers, editors and photographers.

Many students at the conference have gone on to contribute to World Hum and a wide range of publications.

What’s the conference like? I loved Lavinia Spalding’s reflection on last year’s conference:

Around midnight on Saturday, I sat in a piazza under a perfectly full moon listening to my new friend Pam Mandel strum a ukulele. On my left, legendary travel writer Don George crooned “I Will Survive,” while across the table, San Francisco Chronicle travel editor Spud Hilton plucked at his own ukulele. On my right, award-winning photographer Liza Gershmann used my iphone to search for lyrics to an Indigo Girls’ tune, and World Hum’s Jim Benning sang a Death Cab for Cutie song. Together, we belted out “Rocket Man,” “The Rainbow Connection,” and “It Had to Be You.” Our coda was “Summertime”—the perfect song to end the perfect evening.

You really should’ve been there.

Let me rephrase that: you really could have been there.

This was no private party for the travel-writing elite or some secret society of travelerati. It was the annual Book Passage Travel and Food Writing & Photography Conference in Corte Madera, California—open to anyone and hands down the most exciting writing event I’ve ever attended. Consider this: there’s no application process, no previous publishing credits required. No judgment, ego, or cliques, and absolutely no limit to the connections you can make.

Her post—you can read the entire piece here—captures the vibe perfectly. I’ve been to more than a few conferences around the country. Book Passage is unique. What I love most is its emphasis on great writing and photography, and the friendly, informal gatherings that run well into each night. There’s plenty of time during classes and lectures to talk about craft. Then the party really kicks off over dinner and wine. Ukuleles come out. On Saturday night, karaoke is sung inflicted. It’s a lot of fun. But more than that, it’s a genuinely inspirational experience.

You can register for the conference here.


Taco Bell’s Big Alaskan Airlift

Last month, when I heard that residents of Bethel, Alaska, had been tricked—by a still-anonymous hoax-ster—into believing a Taco Bell franchise was coming to town, I felt a serious twinge of sympathy for my fellow Northerners. Sure, sites like Gawker had a field day with the story (“Parents looked in from bedroom doorways on their sleeping children and smiled,” they wrote at the time. “A silent prayer of thanks that sons and daughters would never know a life devoid of local fast food offerings.”) but it’s easy to snark when you’re sitting in an office in lower Manhattan, with your every heart’s desire just the swish of an iPhone away.

Geographical isolation produces strange cravings, and things that seem pedestrian, elsewhere, take on a bizarre importance. Here in Whitehorse, Canada, we’re counting down to the return of our KFC and Dairy Queen franchises—both closed several years ago—and even the healthiest of health nuts can’t wait for the grand re-openings. It’s about the injection of something new, something—anything—different into a well-worn routine. In that way, I suppose you can compare the arrival of a fast food franchise in a remote small town to the act of travel itself: Good or bad, it always shakes things up.

Anyway, Bethel’s story ends happily. Taco Bell airlifted 10,000 Doritos Locos Tacos into town to soothe the sting of the hoax, and the end result of the whole saga is this promo spot:


We’re Making the World a Better Place One Toilet at a Time!

Twitter via @RadioCeleste

That’s right. Lonely Planet author Celeste Brash posted this photo on Twitter this week, along with the message: “Hey @worldhum, you may not have known it but you’re helping to spread toilet manners in Malaysia!”

Brash told us she spotted the sign in a guesthouse in Melaka, Malaysia.

The sign was taken from the article we published in 2006 by Frank Bures, How to Use a Squat Toilet. This particular sign, of course, points out that one shouldn’t use a Western-style toilet the way one would a squat.

Needless to say, we’re extremely pleased.

 


New Documentary: ‘Neil Young Journeys’

Jonathan Demme’s third documentary about Neil Young, in select theaters now, features a solo performance Young gave at Toronto’s Massey Hall and footage of Young driving across the Ontario countryside, musing about life and his childhood.


Welcome Back, ‘Where the Hell is Matt?’

Yep, Matt Harding, he of viral-video, dancing-around-the-world fame, is back with another YouTube offering.

As blogger Corinne Bourbeillon points out, this time around Matt has ditched his trademark awkward jig in favor of choreographed flash mob-style group routines and local dance moves. The result, says Bourbeillon: The act has lost some of its initial freshness.

Agree? Disagree? See for yourself:


‘Get Out of the Damn Car’: An Illustrated Death Valley Road Trip

Over at Afar, illustrator Wendy MacNaughton has recreated a brief road trip from San Francisco to Death Valley and back. The drawings include fun headings like “Public Bathroom Ratings” and “Things That Can Be Seen From a Car Window.” I dug it. (Via @The_Rumpus)


What are Paul Theroux’s Favorite Travel Books?

The author—whose latest novel we recently excerpted—gave his top picks, plus explanations, to The Browser’s Alec Ash. And they are? Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s Antarctic memoir, “The Worst Journey in the World”; “Following the Equator” by Mark Twain; Anthony Trollope’s “The West Indies and the Spanish Main”; Carlo Levi’s “Christ Stopped at Eboli”; and “An Area of Darkness” by V.S. Naipaul.

The Cherry-Garrard and Naipaul titles are both on our list of the 100 Most Celebrated Travel Books of All Time (along with four of Theroux’s own books)—I’ll confess I’d never heard of the other three.

Before getting into his book picks, Theroux also shared his thoughts on what drives people to read about travel:

I think people read travel books either because they intend to take that trip, or because they would never take that trip. In a sense, as a writer you are doing the travel for the reader. I get emails from people saying: I loved your book about Africa, but we went to Venice instead. So I get the impression that people who read my books don’t intend to take that trip themselves. In an ideal world they would like to travel alone and go to malarial swamps, but they haven’t got the time. They only have a couple of weeks vacation. So the idea that I’m in New Guinea, facing down boys with spears saying they are going to kill me, is a thrill for them. People read travel books for the same reason that they read novels. To transport them.

Now all we need is for Paul Theroux to make a music video extolling the virtues of Trollope and Twain, and we’ll have come full circle. (Via @iainmanley)


Peter Carey: ‘Everybody Else Thought I Was an Advertising Copywriter, but I Knew Who I Was.’

Novelist and travel author Peter Carey talks with the Globe and Mail about writing, his newest novel and how his career began: “Having read nothing, knowing nothing, I decided in 1962 that writing was what I was going to do. Everybody else thought I was an advertising copywriter, but I knew who I was.”

He adds that life at the ad agency was nothing like “Mad Men.”

Carey’s “Wrong About Japan” was on our list of the 100 Most Celebrated Travel Books of All Time.


The Invasion of the Summer People

Just in time for the sweaty peak of the summer travel season, Vela’s Amanda Giracca has a lovely essay about growing up in the Berkshires. Here’s a taste:

They arrive as the first dogwood trees are flowering. They trickle in at first, so few you don’t even notice. They come for the trees, the wide-open spaces, for the first hints of fresh spring air billowing down from the hilltops. You might notice one on the roadside snapping a photo, or another stopped dead in the middle of the road observing wild turkeys scratching at gravel. You don’t think much of it at first. Their arrival can be as gradual as the greening of the hills.

Then one day it’s clear: They’re here. In full force. You’ll be sitting in traffic in high summer heat, at a dead stop, burning your arm on the metal edge of your open window, watching the string of BMW’s, Mercedes, and Audi SUVs inch along in the opposite direction. You’ll notice their windows are closed, the people inside clean and smiling against their air-conditioned white leather seats. They are so happy, you realize, to be stuck in your minor traffic jam. This is nothing to them.

Soon you can’t get a seat at your favorite restaurant, nor a camping spot at the State Forest campground. You wait in line for everything—movies, groceries, the bank. For ice cream, the library, the bathroom. These people who’ve come here to get away from it all don’t realize that they’ve brought it all here. What started as a few innocent nature-rubberneckers holding up traffic has turned into a constricted throughway, a plaque filled artery, your small town aching like a congested heart.


Moby on Los Angeles Architecture

People who’ve spent much time in Los Angeles know the city is home to some amazing architecture—classic mid-century designs, rustic Craftsman homes, bizarro medieval castles—and that these places are often tucked away in canyons, or behind tall fences, or in nondescript suburbs.

The musician Moby is now living in L.A., and he was so impressed by this that four months ago he launched a blog about it featuring his photographs and observations. It’s a good read. This short video offers an intro to L.A. architecture and his perspective on it:


Do We Bond Over Books the Way We Do During Travel?

Bryan Basamanowicz observes that people bond over mutually beloved books much the way they bond with fellow travelers in a far-flung place.

If we try to extend this “traveler’s comparison” to other narrative mediums—television programs, movies, plays—it can often lose some of its steam. Why is this? Relative limitlessness in physical and emotional sensory potential is the privilege and burden of the reader. The book, more so than any other form of narrative media, rings true, more synonymous, with the limitlessness and loneliness to be found while facing the open road or holding a one-way airline ticket to Azerbaijan. In my hypotheses, it is the loneliness quality in particular, physically and intellectually inherent to the act of reading, that lays the bedrock for the powerful social bonding achieved through literature. The limitlessness is critical too, as it promises a bounty of fertile avenues for conversation, but it’s the loneliness of the reader—or, as Rainer Maria Rilke might say, it’s how “two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other”—that assigns to a very special category those friendships formed over books.

I’ve had much the same experience. Though I’ll never forget meeting a young Canadian traveler in a lonely village in western China. When she learned I liked the band Rush, she literally jumped up and down with joy and ran over to give me a hug. You never know what, exactly, will float another’s boat.


What Do Guidebooks Say About America?

The Atlantic’s Max Fisher dug through several USA guidebooks to get a sense of what they’re telling the world. The results? He found a heavy emphasis on politics, food and dining customs, and punctuality, punctuality, punctuality.

I especially liked his observations about the complications of U.S. utensil etiquette:

You might say that global food cultures tend to fall into one of two categories: utensil cultures and finger cultures. The U.S., somewhat unusually, has both: the appropriate delivery method can vary between cuisines, and even between dishes, and it’s far from obvious which is which. Baked chicken is a fork food, but fried chicken a finger food, depending on how it’s fried. If you get fried pieces of potato, it’s a finger food, unless the potato retains some circular shape, in which case use your fork. And so on. Confused yet?

Fisher also notes that the books illustrate the expectations and habits of many outsiders as clearly as they do Americans:

In many ways, the tour books say as much about the world as they do about the U.S., by highlighting the ways in which American practices and standards deviate. Anyone who’s traveled widely, particularly in the developing world, will understand why these books are so emphatic about, for example, punctuality, personal space, and the unreliability of our trains.

Indeed. (Via Frank Bures)