Travel Blog: News and Briefs
Somerset Maugham: Hippie Scribe?
by Jim Benning | 06.03.04 | 9:48 PM ET
So argues Henry Shukman in an appreciation of the fiction writer who evoked so many faraway lands. “Maugham has a few creeds,” Shukman writes in The Guardian, “one of them being happiness above all else.”
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Yahoo! BuzzAsk the Pilot: The Book
by Michael Yessis | 06.02.04 | 9:50 PM ET
Patrick Smith has a new book out based on his popular Salon column, “Ask the Pilot.” The book, an “extension and elaboration” of his column, goes by the same name. Yesterday, Salon published an excerpt and an interview with the reclusive pilot. “I’m a throwback, maybe,” he says, “in the sense that I still see planes as a way of bridging people, cultures and continents.”
Fear. It’s What Every Summer Traveler Should Pack.
by Michael Yessis | 05.29.04 | 12:33 AM ET
So says Brian Unger of public radio’s Day to Day program. “Your throat is a good place for it, but most people carry it in their stomachs,” he says.
Honoring ‘Hearing Birds Fly’
by Jim Benning | 05.29.04 | 12:32 AM ET
Britian’s The Royal Society of Literature has awarded its inaugural Ondaatje Prize for a book that best captures the spirit of a place to Louisa Waugh, for her travel memoir Hearing Birds Fly: A Nomadic Year in Mongolia. The Independent has the details.
World Hum Writers in the World
by Jim Benning | 05.28.04 | 12:35 AM ET
A number of writers we’ve been delighted to feature on World Hum recently have new articles and books worth noting. Frank Bures, whose last piece for the site was Test Day, has been particularly prolific. Among other projects, he interviewed “Colossus” author Niall Ferguson for The Atlantic Online, compiled a fascinating list of oddball comments on Yahoo! News about the University of Wisconsin’s laser cheese slicer for McSweeney’s, and reviewed Edwidge Danticat’s new novel, “The Dew Breaker,” for The Capital Times. Rolf Potts, who recently contributed Lost in Translation, wrote about a curiously nameless Peruvian desert for the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine. And Bill Belleville, who wrote A Million Years of Memory, as well as a forthcoming story, recently published a new book, Sunken Cities, Sacred Cenotes and Golden Sharks: Travels of a Water-Bound Adventurer. He’ll be signing the book at Book Mark in Neptune Beach, Florida tonight at 7 p.m.
Utne on Travel
by Michael Yessis | 05.26.04 | 12:41 AM ET
The always interesting Utne magazine devotes a section to travel in its May/June issue. Several original and reprinted stories are featured, including one about organic farms that offer room and board for travelers, a snapshot of pre-3/11 Madrid and an excellent essay from Outpost magazine called “Misguided Guidebooks?” In it, Chris Turner contrasts his two favorite restaurants in Delhi, Karim’s and T.G.I. Friday’s. “[Karim’s] embodies practically everything the indie guides—your Rough Guides, your Footprint and Moon handbooks, and of course your Lonely Planets—stand for: tradition, value, authenticity.” But what about the American chain restaurant? “During the nightly happy hour, South Delhi’s T.G.I. Friday’s is the place to see the city’s new generation of yuppies ... The place is packed to overflowing with young Delhiites at play—decked out smartly in trendy casual wear, quaffing two-for-one drafts, chattering into cell phones. this is not the India of postcards but rather modern India as it actually is.” The piece explores the notion of what makes for an “authentic” travel experience and, unfortunately, it’s not available online. In fact, none of the stories are unless you’re a subscriber or want to spend $2.95 per story.
Inside “Backpack”
by Michael Yessis | 05.26.04 | 12:37 AM ET
Exploring Vermeer’s Delft
by Jim Benning | 05.18.04 | 12:43 AM ET
The recent novel and movie based on Johannes Vermeer’s 1665 painting, “The Girl with the Pearl Earring,” are inspiring an upswing in visits to his hometown of Delft in Holland, according to a story in the International Herald Tribune. “Historians say 80 percent of the prosperous town of Vermeer’s time still exists,” the paper reports.
Swick: Where Are All the Domestic Travel Stories?
by Jim Benning | 05.16.04 | 12:48 AM ET
South Florida Sun-Sentinel Travel Editor Thomas Swick was going through a stack of freelance travel story submissions recently when it hit him: Most of the stories he was receiving were about foreign travel. “I asked myself: What is wrong with the United States?” he wrote in a column last Sunday. “It is one of the most geographically diverse, ethnically rich, scenically stunning (three categories that travel writers butter their bread with) countries in the world. Why don’t its travel writers sing its glories? It is especially puzzling that in the golden age of flag waving I should be having more trouble than ever finding good stories about the United States. Are travel writers so out of touch with the rest of the country?” It’s a frustration Swick also mentioned in a recent World Hum interview. I suspect Swick hit the nail on the head when he acknowledged in the column that “nothing gets the adrenaline going like a border.” Like the upstart city hall reporter who dreams of a foreign posting, travel writers inspired by books like “Video Night in Kathmandu” and “The Old Patagonian Express” see the big stories, rightly or wrongly, as residing primarily in distant lands, the more distant the better.
Goodbye “Blue,” Hello “Go World Travel”
by Michael Yessis | 05.14.04 | 12:47 AM ET
We’ve updated our travel publication links on the front page. The bad news is that we had to eliminate quite a few links to Web sites that simply disappeared. Among those to go was Vagabunda, Passion Fruit, and Blue magazine, which retains a site but no longer publishes. The good news is that we’ve added a number of new sites, including Go World Travel and Travel Lady. We’ve kept the link to the Savvy Traveler public radio show because, even though the show has ended, the site maintains a substantial archives. The same goes for Salon.
What’s the Strangest Travel Book Ever Written?
by Jim Benning | 05.13.04 | 12:51 AM ET
According to writer John Derbyshire’s recent article in The New Criterion, it’s “An African in Greenland,” Tete-Michel Kpomassie’s story of his experience in Greenland in the late 1950s and 1960s. First published in French, the book was translated into English in 1983. Why did Kpomassie leave his home in a tribal society bordering the Gulf of Guinea to visit Greenland? “After Kpomassie had an unpleasant encounter with a snake, his family elders decided that he was destined to become a priest in a local snake cult,” Derbyshire writes. “This involved living in the deep jungle among pythons. Kpomassie was not keen on the idea. At just this time, at a bookstore in the nearest city, he happened to see Dr. Robert Gessain’s book ‘The Eskimos from Greenland to Alaska.’ Kpomassie was seized with the idea that he should go and live among these folk. By a sustained effort of will, and through many difficulties—it took him six years just to work his way to Europe, two more to get to Greenland—he eventually did so. It is, as it sounds, the strangest travel book ever written.”
“Stop Here When Flashing”
by Jim Benning | 05.13.04 | 12:50 AM ET
Voting is underway for the best snapshot submitted in the last year to travel writer Doug Lansky’s wacky sign column, “Signspotting: Unintentionally Funny Signs from Around the World.” Lansky has narrowed last year’s entries down to five finalists. Take a look at them and cast your vote here. The winning photographer wins a ‘round-the-world plane ticket. To submit your own photo and learn more, visit Signspotting.com.
Travels in Topeka
by Jim Benning | 05.04.04 | 8:24 PM ET
Slate magazine this week is featuring a five-day Well-Traveled series on Topeka, Kansas. Why Topeka? The Brown Museum will open in the city later this month to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, in which the court declared that separate, segregated schools were inherently unequal. The series began Monday. For writer Matthew Polly, the trip to Topeka was also a journey back to his hometown. He doesn’t know quite what to make of the museum’s big opening day, when dignitaries are expected to gather in Topeka. “Having the Brown Museum placed in my city is at best a dubious achievement,” he writes. “The reason Oliver Brown, his daughter Linda, and Topeka have come to personify the case is that we were the law-abiding segregationists.”
Young Pioneers Debuts
by Michael Yessis | 04.21.04 | 8:30 PM ET
The first issue of Young Pioneers, a new quarterly publication “concerned with documenting all aspects of independent travel culture,” launches this week with a 64-page issue. Editor Dan Eldridge plans to base each issue on a theme, and the first focuses on independent travel icons. It’s a promising start. Eldridge features interviews with Rolf Potts, Jeff Greenwald, Robert Young Pelton and many others. There’s no website to visit, but you can send an e-mail to get information about purchasing the magazine. Those near Pittsburgh can check out the launch party 8 p.m. Thursday night at The Quiet Storm Cafe in Garfield, PA.
“On the Press Trip You Are Treated Like the General of a Liberating Army”
by Jim Benning | 04.15.04 | 8:33 PM ET
The debate over whether a travel writer’s acceptance of freebies taints his or her coverage of a place is old news in the U.S. To avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, many stateside travel publications refuse to publish stories about journeys funded by anyone other than the publication or writer. But according to the Telegraph, the debate gained new currency in the UK this week after a controversial travel story appeared in the Mail newspaper. In the inimitable words of the Telegraph, “The cosy world of travel journalism has been stirred by an article lifting the lid on the freebie.” According to the Telegraph’s account, Mail writer Roderick Gilchrist published a travel story about a fabulous trip to the Caribbean, describing the visit in no uncertain terms as a “press trip.” “This,” Gilchrist wrote, “is where a disparate group of journalists and a travel PR or two are thrown together with the objective of writing a favourable account of a resort, hotel or airline.” Gilchrist went on to write: “On the press trip you are treated like the general of a liberating army.” Such honesty, the Telegraph’s article notes, is highly unusual. (Gilchrist’s story is available here; the “press trip” section begins on page three. Talk about burying the lead!) The Telegraph’s coverage of the controversy offers a compelling exploration of the debate, noting that although many magazines now refuse to publish travel articles based on comped journeys, their coverage is no less tainted because their reliance on advertising revenue requires that articles remain relentlessly positive. All of which explains, in our opinion, why so many travel publications are often so dull.
