Travel Blog: News and Briefs
Why My Travel Book Will be Called ‘Walk the Lost World of the Great Black Sea’
by Michael Yessis | 06.15.10 | 12:23 PM ET
I’m confident it will be a best seller. Here’s why: I fed the titles of the 100 most celebrated travel books of all time into a word cloud creator, and, as you can see, all the words in my title are quite popular.
Readers and critics will love my book. Sean Penn will buy the movie rights. I will be rich.
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Yahoo! BuzzMapped: The Places Your Travel Dollars Will Take You
by Eva Holland | 06.15.10 | 9:40 AM ET
Kayak has unveiled a pretty cool new Google maps-powered feature, Explore. Enter a price range and departure city—plus a few optional bonus fields, like your preferred temperature at destination—and Explore generates a map of all the places you can fly to on the budget you’ve specified. $550 dollars from my home in Whitehorse to San Francisco? Tempting, Kayak. Very tempting. (Via Kottke)
President Obama on the Gulf Coast: ‘Come Down Here and Visit’
by Eva Holland | 06.14.10 | 4:38 PM ET
The POTUS is visiting the Gulf Coast today—and he’s urging other Americans to do the same. USA Today’s The Oval blog quotes Obama:
There’s still a lot of opportunity for visitors to come down here. There are a lot of beaches that have not been affected and will not be affected. If people want to help, the best way to help is to come down here and visit.
The Oval dubs the suggestion “oil spill tourism,” but I’m not sure voyeur-style disaster tourism is quite what Obama has in mind. Still, whether it comes in the form of beachgoers who manage to avoid the spill or the morbidly curious aiming to witness its effects, it’s good to see tourism to the beleaguered area being encouraged.
Can’t make it in person anytime soon? World Hum contributor Robert Reid is tweeting from the Florida panhandle. Elsewhere, The Big Picture has a sobering photo essay illustrating the spill’s effects nearly two months in.
World Cup Reads: Soccer in Africa and Beyond
by Eva Holland | 06.14.10 | 2:14 PM ET
The start of the World Cup has many of us thinking about great books on soccer. For that reason, we’ve dug up a feature we did a few years ago, Soccer: Three Great Books, which highlights a few of our favorites.
Beyond that, Flavorwire offers up a globally minded soccer reading list.
And on his site, World Hum contributor Frank Bures also shares his two-part list; the first covers soccer in England, Italy, Atlanta and beyond, while the second focuses on soccer in Africa.
(Flavorwire list via The Book Bench)
What We Loved This Week: ‘The Language of Soccer,’ Diving with Rays and Ira Glass on Being Wrong
by World Hum | 06.11.10 | 4:50 PM ET
Photo by Alicia Imbody Alicia Imbody
Sneaking away to do some hardcore hiking on Mt. Mitchell and some equally serious relaxing at the winery on the Biltmore Estate. I love little mountain towns like Asheville, North Carolina, that know how to serve up just the right mix of outdoors and creature comforts. Here’s a photo of America’s largest home, with the Great Smoky Mountains as a backdrop:
London Mayor: ‘Harry Potter is Not American’
by Eva Holland | 06.11.10 | 12:01 PM ET
Universal Orlando’s latest theme park creation, The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, opens next week—and London Mayor Boris Johnson will definitely not be attending any ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Strong words from the Mayor:
I deeply and bitterly resent that Orlando is about to become the official place of pilgrimage for every Harry Potter fan on earth… Because the fact is that Harry Potter is not American. He is British. Where is Diagon Alley, where they buy wands and stuff? It is in London, and if you want to get into the Ministry of Magic you disappear down a London telephone box. The train for Hogwarts goes from King’s Cross, not Grand Central Station.
Don’t worry, London. I’m sure there are still plenty of Potter fans that will want to visit the, er, not-quite-real thing. (Via The Book Bench)
Where in the World Are You, Lynne Friedmann?
by World Hum | 06.10.10 | 5:46 PM ET
The subject of our latest up-to-the-minute interview with a traveler somewhere in the world: World Hum contributor Lynne Friedmann. Among other things, she wrote the essay All the Flowers in Amsterdam and contributed to our Top 40 Travel Songs of All Time.
Where in the world are you?
From James Brown to the Spice Girls: A Soundtrack for the Road
by Eva Holland | 06.10.10 | 3:13 PM ET
In the Globe and Mail, Peter Cheney looks back on four decades of road trips, and the music that accompanied them. It’s a good read—here’s a taste:
Music always seems best on the road. As a little boy, I strained to hear the Jackson Five over a fading AM station as my dad drove our 1963 Mercury Comet from Calgary to Kingston in the dead of winter. The Comet only had a single, tinny speaker, but the Jackson’s never sounded quite as good as they did that winter day, their voices soaring over the hum of our studded snow tires.
Indeed. We offered our picks for the ultimate travel soundtrack here.
Video: Celebrating Dubious Achievements in Travel
by Eva Holland | 06.09.10 | 12:43 PM ET
The Titanic Awards offers up a highlight reel of travel fails:
Mapped: Photos by Locals vs. Photos by Tourists
by Michael Yessis | 06.09.10 | 9:51 AM ET
A very cool set of maps on Flickr harnesses geotagging in an attempt to show which parts of cities tend to be photographed by tourists, and which areas of cities tend to be photographed by locals. The maps I looked at aren’t particularly surprising—in the San Francisco Bay Area, for instance, tourists can’t get enough of the Golden Gate Bridge (tourist shots are red in the image below), and they hardly ever photograph the East Bay (locals’ shots are in blue).
Nevertheless, it’s a simple, compelling way to share the information, and perhaps, as Jeff Pflueger mentioned in one of his travel photography columns, the kind of thing we can expect to see more of as travelers geotag their images. (Via The Morning News)
Cuban Folk Singer Silvio Rodrígues Touring U.S.
by Jim Benning | 06.08.10 | 5:02 PM ET
In 1999, two years before we created World Hum, Michael Yessis came back from a month-long trip to Spain and told me about a song he’d heard in a bar in Madrid. Two nights in a row, sometime well after midnight, the bartender played an anthemic folk song on the stereo called “Ojalá,” and as Mike recalled it, each time the song came on, the patrons erupted in singing, with dozens of locals joining in.
He wasn’t sure what the song was about, but he thought I’d like it, and sure enough, when I finally tracked down a copy of it, I did. I’ve been a big fan of its singer-songwriter, Silvio Rodríguez, ever since.
Finally, the Cuban folk singer, now 63, is touring the U.S. He has already played to a sold-out Carnegie Hall—this New York Times piece and this Christopher Baker blog post are well worth a read—and he’s scheduled to play Oakland, Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and Orlando.
Rodriguez is a controversial figure outside of Cuba. Many Cuban exiles despise him because he has, at times, defended the Revolution. I love him for his music, not his politics. Besides, as the New York Times put it, “Through the decades Mr. Rodríguez has become more poet than propagandist.” He sings about life.
How excited am I about this tour? I’m going to reschedule a flight and eat a hefty penalty fee so I can see him play.
Here’s a video of Rodriguez performing “Ojalá” in Madrid’s Plaza de Toros—you can hear the crowd singing along, line for line, and imagine the scene in that Madrid bar. I’ve since heard the song played by folk singers in cafes and bars from Mexico to Argentina. It’s wildly popular. Its meaning is the subject of great debate.
The version of the song below is available on the album “Mano a Mano”—an excellent live album that also features Spanish trovador Luis Eduardo Aute performing.
How to Make A Globe of Your Hometown
by Michael Yessis | 06.07.10 | 2:25 PM ET
Or state. Or country. Or whatever. Apparently localized globes were popular in the countries of the former USSR post-independence. English Russia remembers the phenomenon, and explains how to make a localized globe with a map and a photoshop plugin. This might be cooler than the Map Envelope. (Via Utne Reader)
What We Loved This Week: Brel’s Pick, Beerfest, and Hemingway in Paris
by World Hum | 06.04.10 | 8:05 PM ET
Michael Yessis
I’m in awe of Brel. Who can even afford fresh squeezed room service orange juice? Trader Joe’s must pay really well, or this dude has boldly made juice a life priority.
Steve Coll: ‘In Journalism, There is no Substitute for Travel’
by Eva Holland | 06.04.10 | 12:50 PM ET
The writer is saying goodbye, temporarily at least, to his public policy blog over at the New Yorker. In his final post, he shares some lessons learned—including one about the importance of travel.
Here’s Coll:
In journalism, there is no substitute for travel. By far the most fun I had with this format came when I was on the road. Last summer I was in Africa and Indonesia. Taking half-assed digital pictures for Think Tank and writing diary entries redoubled the already uplifting experience of reporting from those places. If the new journalism arising from digital formats can compensate a person adequately for wandering the world in a taxi with an iPhone, I will happily surrender my nostalgia for newspapers, magazines, and books.
(Via The Daily Dish)
Tracking Twain and the Mississippi
by Jim Benning | 06.04.10 | 12:03 PM ET
Laura Barton followed the river through 10 states to better know Twain. Her story about the journey also touches on the music and other literature of the river. It’s a lovely piece.
I kept in mind a line from “Old Glory”, Jonathan Raban’s account of his own journey down the river: “It is called the Mississippi, but it is more an imaginary river than a real one.”
It had been shaped in my own imagination by a confederacy of literature and song lyrics. I pictured it as described by Twain, or Eudora Welty, or William Faulkner, who saw “alluvial swamps threaded by black, almost motionless bayous and impenetrable with cane and buckvine and cypress and ash and oak and gum.” I imagined it as it was conjured up by Paul Robeson in “Ol’ Man River”, or in the songs of Johnny Cash or Charlie Patton, a mighty force capable of carrying away the one you loved, of breaking levees and washing the lowlands of Greenville and Leland and Rosedale, and I saw the delta through Paul Simon’s eyes, “shining like the national guitar”.
Side note: The more time goes by, the more I appreciate Paul Simon’s “Graceland” for its power to evoke the river and the region.
