Travel Blog: News and Briefs
Gross’s Isaac Newton Moment: Picking Apples in Turkey
by Michael Yessis | 07.13.06 | 7:23 AM ET
Matt Gross, who has been zipping frantically around the world for the last two months writing the Frugal Travel column for the New York Times, slowed down recently to spend four days on an organic apple farm in Beypinar, Turkey. “I couldn’t stand to see another sight,” he writes in this week’s dispatch for the Times. “I had to do something—anything, I had to feel useful.” It turned out to be a great idea. The story begins as a breath-catching trip to a farm, where he gains “muddy palms, scratched calves and an unironic farmer’s tan,” but soon becomes something else: a sweet tale about friendship and brotherhood.
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Yahoo! BuzzWhy Am I Searching the World for Mexican Food?
by Jim Benning | 07.10.06 | 6:19 PM ET
I enjoyed seeing a few letters in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle in response to my recent story about eating Mexican food in France. In the piece, I (courageously, I think) came clean about my Mexican food addiction and complained about the curry-flavored fajitas I was served in Lyon. But at least one reader, a Mr. Brown, was not sympathetic to my plight. “If Jim Benning is searching the world for Mexican food, I understand you can find it in Mexico,” he wrote. “Personally, when I go to a foreign country, I try to eat what the locals eat.” Believe me, Mr. Brown, I am not searching the world for Mexican food. I enjoyed many fine French meals in France. The trouble, you see, is that I am a Mexican food addict, owing in large part to my upbringing in Southern California, where seriously excellent taco shops can be found on almost every corner. Now, as an adult, I am powerless when confronted with Mexican food, especially when I’ve gone without for a few days, and even when I know it will be awful. So when I stumbled upon El Sombrero restaurant in Lyon, in I went. And that is when the trouble began. Alas, I suspect this is something only fellow addicts can understand. You are a lucky, lucky man, Mr. Brown. If you suffered from my condition, I know you would be more sympathetic.
“Really Cool, Well-Traveled” John Flinn on the Dorky Zip-Off Pant
by Jim Benning | 07.10.06 | 5:49 PM ET
It’s one of the great questions of our time: Is the zip-off travel pant simply dorky—end of story—or is dorky but also useful? The topic reared its oh-so-unfashionable head in John Flinn’s column in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle. Flinn dipped into the mail bag to share feedback on a recent piece he wrote with tips on packing light. In that column, Flinn recommended packing zip-off pants, but afterward, one reader wrote in, remembering that Flinn had once called the pants “dorky.” As the reader put it in an e-mail: “I often wear such pants on trips during the summer, feeling dorky knowing what the really cool, well-traveled John Flinn thinks of them. What am I to think now?” That poor, confused reader. Fortunately, Flinn clarified his position on Sunday. “Actually, I called them ‘dorky but useful,’” he writes. “I wear them in shorts mode most of the time and convert them into longs if weather, bugs or poison oak dictate. And besides, I’ll take dorky over wannabe-hip or self-important any day.” Whew. We’re glad that’s cleared up.
Lucha Libre in Tijuana: The Real “Nacho Libre”
by Michael Yessis | 07.09.06 | 9:35 AM ET
Jim has a story in today’s Washington Post about a trip to Tijuana to watch some chair-slamming lucha libre action. He’s scheduled to be interviewed about the piece this morning on Washington Post radio between 10:30 and 11 a.m. ET.
A Los Angeles-San Francisco Bullet Train?
by Jim Benning | 07.07.06 | 10:35 AM ET
Michael Dukakis (the guy who taught us all that one bad photo-op can ruin your whole presidential campaign) makes the case in today’s L.A. Times for a high-speed train connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco. We know, it’s a pipe dream. But we can dream, can’t we?
Train Completes First Journey to Tibet. But is it Progress or a ‘Second Invasion’?
by Jim Benning | 07.07.06 | 7:30 AM ET
In the final chapter of his terrific 1988 book Riding the Iron Rooster, about riding trains through China, Paul Theroux wrote of the difficulty in traveling from China to Lhasa, Tibet—“six days overland from Xian, or else a long and frightening flight from Chengdu.” Later, he continued, “[T]he main reason Tibet is so undeveloped and un-Chinese—and so thoroughly old-fangled and pleasant—is that it is the one great place in China that the railway has not reached. The Kunlun Range is a guarantee that the railway will never get to Lhasa.” If only it were so. Earlier this week, after years of construction, a train completed the first journey from Beijing to Lhasa along what is now the world’s highest railway, topping out at a breathtaking 16,640 feet. “Laptop computers and digital music players failed because the tiny air bags that cushion their moving parts broke,” the AP reported via the Los Angeles Times. “Some passengers threw up. Others took Tibetan herbs or breathed oxygen through tubes.”
Update: CouchSurfing Returns
by Michael Yessis | 07.07.06 | 7:03 AM ET
The popular Web site that connects travelers with fellow travelers and places to sleep around the world suffered a huge data loss the other day, which caused founders to believe the site might be too far gone to recover. But the site’s supporters rallied, and
CouchSurfing 2.0 is now online. Thanks to Mikky Mouth for the heads up.
CouchSurfing Knocked Out By “Perfect Storm” of Tech Problems
by Michael Yessis | 07.06.06 | 7:13 AM ET
Is CouchSurfing wiped out? The popular Web site that connects travelers with fellow travelers and places to sleep around the world suffered a huge data loss in recent days, erasing profiles, e-mails, photos and other information central to the site’s mission. It may have also turned some CouchSurfers into “refugees.” The damage to the community has been “massive,” according to a message Sebastien, one of the site’s co-founders, posted on a message board that’s currently taking the place of the once-vibrant site.
Hahn: “More Sections of the New York Times That Help Terrorists”
by Michael Yessis | 07.05.06 | 8:29 PM ET
Why did the right-wing attack the New York Times travel pages for revealing the location of the vacation homes of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld when, as World Hum contributor Kate Hahn shockingly points out today on McSweeney’s, the Gray Lady has so many other sections that aid the terrorists? The real estate section, for instance (“Shows terrorists where people live or might live,” she writes. “Extremely dangerous.”). And the vows (“Makes public the names of recently wed couples, so terrorists have no problem hacking into gift registries and determining which china patterns are most popular,” she writes. “Just think what they could do with that information.”). Even the crossword puzzle. Hahn writes: “Weekly lesson in cracking the code of double-entendres, obscure literary references, and puns used by people on the Upper West Side. Once deciphered, allows terrorists to infiltrate the best private nursery schools and kiddie gyms.” Will Shortz, watch your back.
Happy Fourth of July!
by Michael Yessis | 07.04.06 | 3:32 PM ET
Greetings from Washington D.C., where I’m spending Independence Day in the nation’s capital for the first time. I usually lay low on the Fourth, but today I’m taking part in some of the events around the District. I just returned from hearing Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams read the Declaration of Independence on the steps of the National Archives, fife and drum corps in tow. In a few hours, I’ll be out on the National Mall to see Stevie Wonder and the fireworks show. This will be our only post for the day, but it’s not the only Independence Day material we’ve got. Check out Joel Deutsch’s story about spending the Fourth in Los Angeles with some of his Russian immigrant friends. And over at MSN, Jim has a story about watching Fourth of July fireworks at a U.S. military base in Stuttgart, Germany. Happy Fourth, everyone.
“Cross Country”: Across America with Lewis and Clark, Emily Post, Jack Kerouac, Etc.*
by Michael Yessis | 07.03.06 | 10:05 AM ET
For the second time in less than a month a travel book made the cover of the New York Times Book Review Sunday. Robert Sullivan’s Cross Country is the latest book to get what might be the most coveted review spot in U.S. media, and like The Naked Tourist The Places in Between in early June, it earned a rave review. “‘Cross Country’ is delightful as history, but it’s the tender portrait of a family driving home together, enjoying their time just the four of them, that resonates on closing the book,” Bruce Barcott writes. “America may or may not ‘be’ the road, but for the Sullivans and so many other families, their time there comes to define them.”
Bush, Koizumi and Fried Peanut Butter and Banana Sandwiches for Everyone*
by Michael Yessis | 06.30.06 | 6:22 AM ET
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is such an Elvis fan he’s got to have a fried PB&J for lunch today, doesn’t he? It’s the day he and President George W. Bush say farewell to each other with a trip to Memphis to visit Graceland. Priscilla and Lisa Marie will be their guides. ABC News, among others, has details.
R.I.P. California Map & Travel, Cody’s Books
by Jim Benning | 06.29.06 | 1:13 PM ET
Today, we pay our respects to two great California bookstores we’re losing or already have lost. California Map & Travel Center, the fine Santa Monica travel bookstore whose L.A. roots stretched back to 1949—an eternity in L.A.—recently closed shop. The small Pico Boulevard store was crammed with guidebooks, narratives and globes, and it sometimes hosted readings. I once saw travel editor and writer Thomas Swick read there on a book tour, to an enthusiastic audience. The store was profiled here in better days. The other big loss, of course, is Cody’s Books, an institution on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. The store, which stocked all kinds of books, will close July 11. Two other Bay area Cody’s locations will continue to operate, but it is the Telegraph Avenue store, a stone’s throw from the UC Berkeley campus, that is so beloved among book-lovers.
Ethical Travel: What is a Traveler’s Responsibility?
by Michael Yessis | 06.28.06 | 9:27 PM ET
World Hum books editor Frank Bures explores the idea of ethical travel in a piece for the July/August 2006 issue of Mother Jones. “Last year more than 800 million tourists traveled internationally, and in 2004 tourism generated $623 billion, making it one of the largest industries in the world,” he writes. “Yet somehow that rising tide has not lifted all the boats (except, perhaps, cruise liners), and a growing number of travelers are ... looking to such movements as pro-poor tourism, fair trade tourism, and ethical travel for answers.”
R.I.P. William Shurcliff
by Michael Yessis | 06.28.06 | 12:46 PM ET
The famed physicist was, among other things, the founder of the Citizens League Against the Sonic Boom, “a scientific clearinghouse that opposed the U.S. government’s development of supersonic transit,” according to an obituary in today’s Washington Post. Shurcliff emphasized the “sound pollution” of supersonic jets and, writes Adam Bernstein in the Post, was credited with helping to end the development of American supersonic jets and to limit supersonic flights from Europe to the U.S. Shurcliff also built kayaks, helped create military camouflage paint, co-edited an official history of the Manhattan Project, advocated for solar energy and documented atomic tests on Bikini Atoll. He was 97.
