Travel Blog: News and Briefs
Solas Awards Winners Named
by Jim Benning | 03.01.12 | 11:38 AM ET
Travelers’ Tales’ editors announced the winners of the sixth annual Solas Awards for travel writing this morning.
The grand prize winner was Peter Wortsman, for his story Protected. Erin Byrne won the silver for Spirals: Memoirs of a Celtic Soul. The bronze went to Bruce Berger for Mysterious Fast Mumble.
The complete list of winners can be found here. Congrats to everyone.
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Yahoo! BuzzA Travel Blog From the Netscape Era
by Eva Holland | 03.01.12 | 8:24 AM ET
Travel writer Jason Cochran looks back on his first travel blog:
It was 1998. People were still paying for Netscape. Few of us used the Web regularly, and all of us had dialup, but I was determined to try it: I documented my journey online as I went. I’m ashamed to admit I began by using Courier.
Everyone logs their trips online now, but no one was doing it then. I was a pioneer. It took real effort. Flashpacking didn’t exist. I had to seek out Internet cafés and without WordPress or Blogspot to rely upon, I had to hand-code everything in basic HTML, and I was forced to seek out crude FTP programs (Fetch!) to get my writing online.
I didn’t put my travels online for Web fame or to garner a following, the way so many backpackers do now. There were no affiliates or appeals for free lodging, and I was years away from collecting my first paycheck for travel writing. Then, it was simply so my family and friends could follow along and know I wasn’t lying dead in some South African ditch.
It’s amazing to think about how much has changed in the years since. Cochran’s blog is still live, in all its retro glory.
The Halibut Taco is Alaska’s Unofficial State Dish. Discuss.
by Eva Holland | 02.28.12 | 7:23 AM ET
I spent nine days traveling in Southeast Alaska last month, and as I went from one panhandle port to the next, and from bar to pub to restaurant, I noticed something: the halibut taco is everywhere. It’s even outstripping such traditional Alaskan standbys as king crab legs, beer-battered halibut fish ‘n’ chips, and seafood chowder. It’s the new normal.
I’m not World Hum’s designated taco expert, by any means—Jim’s the Mexican food addict around here—but I’ve been intrigued by unexpected Mexican-in-the-sub-Arctic offerings before. And I’m no less intrigued by the halibut taco seemingly conquering the last frontier.
Alaska isn’t a state that most people associate with cutting-edge cultural fusion (though if you spend much time there, you’ll see there’s more to the place than the Discovery Channel lets on), and it seems to me that the taco’s dominance there is just one more sign of our ever-shrinking planet. I say, bring on the tasty and fascinating cultural variations.
Paul Theroux Walks Into Mexico
by Jim Benning | 02.27.12 | 12:01 PM ET
Nogales, to be specific.
In a lifetime of crossing borders I find this pitiless fence the oddest frontier I have ever seen—more formal than the Berlin Wall, more brutal than the Great Wall of China, yet in its way just as much an example of the same folie de grandeur. Built just six months ago, this towering, seemingly endless row of vertical steel beams is so amazing in its conceit you either want to see more of it, or else run in the opposite direction—just the sort of conflicting emotions many people feel when confronted with a peculiar piece of art.
Theroux has written more about Africa, Asia and Europe than he has Mexico, so it’s nice to see his take on someplace closer to home. His story appeared in Sunday’s New York Times.
Yelping with Cormac McCarthy
by Eva Holland | 02.27.12 | 7:36 AM ET
A funny Tumblr has been channeling the author since last summer. From a recent entry, titled “Marias Cantina, Lordsburg NM, Three Stars”:
But the yelpers also had money. Gold dust by the sack. And pretty soon that little outpost was boomin. You see the yelpers had this hunger. To try ever little thing. Take its measure. Put it in the little book. As if they could take the chaos of that world and bring form to it. Corral it somehow. I’ll admit it was unnatural. But that’s how it started.
Sometimes I wonder what those townfolk was thinkin. All this strangeness around them. But they took the money. Hell I would of too. But I kindly doubt they knew the true cost. What was bein bought. What was bein sold.
And from “Tijuana Marriott Hotel”:
The hacendado whistled through his teeth and shook his head. You Americans, he said. Always the judge. This hotel is very good. That country is very bad. But when it is time for you to be reviewed you are begging please no. Please I can pay money. I will review you now. The hacendado snapped his fingers and a vaquero entered carrying a branding iron in the shape of a star, the whitehot tip sputtering and sparking like some wroughtiron incubus.
(Via @dougsaunders)
Russell Banks, Ernest Hemingway and Masculinity in America
by Jim Benning | 02.24.12 | 12:33 PM ET
The New York Review of Books explores Russell Banks’ novels and touches on Ernest Hemingway’s legacy in American letters.
When it comes to the anxiety of influence, American women writers seem to have an easy relation to their gentler and more urbane literary ancestresses; but men writing in America have to contend with the shade of Hemingway, and the longstanding tradition of manliness he tried to represent. They may reject that tradition but they can’t ignore it, though Henry James may have been trying to by making himself into an Englishman. Most of the ongoing mining of Ernest Hemingway’s character, sexuality, and personal history arises from our sense that he embodied the paradoxes and conflicts in masculinity as Americans have constructed it. Was he a bully or a baby, brave or cowardly, gay or straight, tough or weak?
That “shade of Hemingway” has colored American travel writing as much as any other genre, of course. The article is available online but only subscribers can read the piece in its entirety.
Mapped: The Complete Travels of ‘The Simpsons’
by Eva Holland | 02.24.12 | 12:00 PM ET
Slate has a clickable map, marked up by season and character.
Over 23 seasons, 499 episodes, and one feature-length movie, the Simpsons have become one of America’s most well-traveled families. Since the show debuted in 1989, they’ve travelled to more than two dozen countries and about two dozen U.S. states. By the end of the season, they will have travelled to all seven continents. The Simpsons are going to Antarctica!
Call me biased, but I always loved the episode where the Simpsons travel to Canada—and are joined on the bus to Toronto by a hockey player, a Mountie and a Sasquatch.
Video: Interview with Author Elizabeth Gilbert
by Jim Benning | 02.15.12 | 12:10 PM ET
A thoughtful 20-minute interview with the “Eat, Pray, Love” author covering MFA programs and her novel-in-progress, which she refers to at one point as “another travel book.”
Travel Story Hall of Fame: ‘The Lonely Planet Guide to My Apartment’
by Eva Holland | 02.14.12 | 11:57 AM ET
Today we introduce the Travel Story Hall of Fame, an occasional series in which we honor the best in travel writing new and old.
Title: The Lonely Planet Guide to My Apartment
Author: Jonathan Stern
Publication: The New Yorker
Date: April 24, 2006
Nomination Speech: I first read Jonathan Stern’s Shouts and Murmurs piece in “The Best American Travel Writing 2007,” but its tone, its language and sub-heads were all weirdly familiar, as though I’d read the story before. That eerie sense of recognition is a sure sign of a well-executed satire.
Meet the strange land of My Apartment, whose “vast expanse of unfurnished space can be daunting at first, and its population of one difficult to communicate with.” Under “Places to Eat,” Stern notes that “tourists often flock to the salvaged wooden telephone-cable spool in front of the TV as a convenient dining spot. More adventurous eaters might try standing over the sink, as the locals do. If you’re willing to venture off the beaten track, there’s balancing your plate on the arm of the couch or using the toilet lid as a makeshift table.”
Years later, “The Lonely Planet Guide to My Apartment” remains one of the funniest pieces of travel writing I’ve ever read.
Excerpt:
ORIENTATION
My Apartment’s vast expanse of unfurnished space can be daunting at first, and its population of one difficult to communicate with. After going through customs, you’ll see a large area with a couch to the left. Much of My Apartment’s “television viewing” occurs here, as does the very occasional making out with a girl (see “Festivals”). To the north is the food district, with its colorful cereal boxes and antojitos, or “little whims.”
Dispatch from the Yukon Quest Trail
by Eva Holland | 02.07.12 | 3:57 PM ET
I’m on the road this week, doing some writing and social media work for the Yukon Quest.
For those unfamiliar with it, the Quest is a 1,000-mile sled dog race that runs from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Whitehorse, Yukon (my hometown). I’m following along, and on the trail with me is a traveling crowd of volunteers, veterinarians, race officials, “handlers” (assistants to the mushers), and friends and family. We drive from checkpoint to checkpoint, meeting up with the dog teams whenever they intersect with the sparse road system. I’m writing this from Central Corner, an outpost on the Steese Highway just south of the one-time Gold Rush town of Circle City.
Never seen a long-distance dog sled race? Here’s a video that gives you a real sense of the scene at the start line back in Fairbanks:
2012 Travel Writing Conferences
by Jim Benning | 02.06.12 | 2:22 AM ET
Spring and summer are fast approaching, and that means warmer days, Major League Baseball and, yes, travel writing conferences. Gadling recently noted several upcoming conferences. Among them:
Travel Blog Exchange (TBEX)
The annual travel blogger gathering created by Kim Mance lays claim to being “the world’s premiere and largest conference of travel bloggers, writers, and new media creators.” Discussions and workshops explore the art and business of travel blogging, including ethical considerations and social media best practices. For many, it’s a reunion, of sorts: Bloggers who’ve been tweeting at one another for the last year can finally catch up in person. This year’s conference takes place June 15-17 in Keystone, Colorado. (Luasanne, Switzerland will also host a TBEX gathering in October.)
The Book Passage Travel Writers & Photographers Conference
Co-founded by veteran travel editor Don George, the four-day Book Passage conference just north of San Francisco has focused on great writing and photography for 20 years. It features panel discussions, specialized learning tracks, readings, dinners and convivial nightly gatherings. Faculty members in recent years have included Tim Cahill, Spud Hilton, David Farley and yours truly. This year, Susan Orlean will be on hand. It takes place Aug. 9-12 in Corte Madera, California.
Also worth noting:
Travel Classics Writers Conferences
These conferences are open only to professional writers and feature editors from a number of glossy magazines. Writers must submit an application to attend and show they’ve been published in at least three magazines in the last year-and-a-half. The next conference takes place June 7-12 in Cardiff, Wales.
Wondering which conference is right for you? Vagabondish has a useful guide.
Finally, if you want to hone your writing skills but don’t want to travel to a conference, consider taking a travel writing class at a local bookstore or university.
Spots are open now in David Farley’s two upcoming classes in New York City—one beginning Feb. 10 at Idlewild Books, and the other beginning Feb. 9 at NYU.
NATJA Announces 2011 Winners
by Eva Holland | 02.03.12 | 4:36 PM ET
The complete roster of North American Travel Journalists Association award winners was announced this week. National Geographic Traveler took the grand prize for top travel publication, while Andrew McCarthy and Jill Schensul were named the travel journalists of the year.
Several World Hum contributors were also among the winners. Larry Bleiberg took Gold in the Historical or Hobby Travel category, while Daisann McLane received a Gold award for Cultural, Educational or Self-Improvement Travel. Lola Akinmade Akerstrom received two Gold awards—one for Personality and Profiles and one for Culinary Travel—and Wayne Curtis also received a Silver award for Culinary Travel.
Congratulations to all the winners.
‘Downton Abbey’ and the Art of the English Library
by Jim Benning | 02.02.12 | 3:17 AM ET
Like so many people, I’ve been glued to PBS’ “Downton Abbey” and the scheming and backstabbing unfolding in Highclere Castle. Here, series creator Julian Fellowes discusses his favorite room in the castle: the library. I love his take on it. The French have their drawing rooms. The Austrians have their ballrooms. Libraries, he says, are the rooms the English get right.
Watch Downton Abbey: Julian Fellowes on a Favorite Room at Highclere on PBS. See more from Masterpiece.
Looking for the Old Hippie Trail
by Eva Holland | 01.31.12 | 9:44 AM ET
At Old World Wandering, Iain Manley has a long, worthwhile post on the classic overlander, mixing his personal experiences as a “novice traveller” on the route with a history of the trail’s literature, from “Across Asia on the Cheap” all the way back to the Romantics of the 1700. Here’s a taste:
I knew something of the old Hippie Trail by the time we arrived in Goa, but only as much as I had read in Paul Theroux’s Great Railway Bazaar. Theroux had encountered the freaks making their way out east - “like small clans of tribesmen setting out for a baraza or new pastures” - on a train from Istanbul to Tehran. He thought “the majority of them, going for the first time, had that look of frozen apprehension that is the mask on the face of an escapee,” and had “no doubt that the teenaged girls who made up the bulk of these loose tribal groups would eventually appear on the notice boards of American consulates in Asia, in blurred snapshots or retouched high-school graduation pictures: missing person and have you seen this girl?” Theroux, propped up on his first-class berth “like a pasha,” consulting Nagel’s Encyclopaedia-Guide, or lying down in the heat, “like a Hindu widow on a pyre, resigned to suttee,” was too much of a prig to characterise the hippies as anything but wastrels and strays, and it seemed a pity that the Hippie Trail had never had a Kerouac to document it, to tell us as he did that “somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.”
Video: Eric Weiner on his new Book, ‘Man Seeks God’
by Jim Benning | 01.30.12 | 1:03 PM ET
We recently published The Inner Nightclub of Everlasting Joy, an excerpt from Eric Weiner’s new book, Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine. Here’s Weiner discussing the book and his travels with Lisa Napoli earlier this month at a Live Talks Los Angeles event. It’s an engaging, humor-filled conversation.
Eric Weiner in conversation with Lisa Napoli from Ted Habte-Gabr on Vimeo.
