Travel Blog: News and Briefs
Dembling: “Our Small World Gets Bigger With Every Trip”
by Michael Yessis | 08.14.06 | 7:25 PM ET
Travel isn’t a part-time endeavor and it doesn’t end when you close your front door behind you when you get home. It’s something that seeps into every part of your life. Sophia Dembling knows this, and she’s written a terrific column articulating why in Sunday’s Chicago Tribune. “I was driving home from the hairdresser the other day, thinking about this and that and what to make for dinner when NPR started talking about rural China. I turned up the radio, forgot about dinner and listened with interest. Why? Because I’ve been to China,” she writes. “It’s been a couple of years since my tour of China, and I wasn’t anywhere near the towns under discussion on the radio. But, as always happens for me, after I’ve visited a place, it is forever more interesting to me.”
Email to friend
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Mixx
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Yahoo! BuzzThe Alluring Sound of Faraway Places
by Michael Yessis | 08.14.06 | 6:32 AM ET
Steven Knipp used to play a game with his mother where they’d take turns shouting out the names of exotic destinations. “After one of us would holler the name of a particularly glamorous city or island, the other’s job was to describe the first vision that came to mind,” he writes in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle. “At that time, I’d never traveled much beyond New Jersey. But the mere mention of some alluring place name was enough to set my imagination ablaze.” Knipp’s excellent story explores how the sound of a destination can be a bit part of its attraction, and how traveling to a place with an beautiful, romantic name can ultimately be a letdown. “So, is it still worth traveling, despite the risk that some of your ultimate dream destinations might be shattered?” he asks. “In other words, is it better to have loved and lost them, then never to have loved them at all? You bet it is. Actual travel is always superior than the most imaginative armchair journeys.”
World Hum Raises Travel-Terror Fatigue Level
by Jim Benning | 08.11.06 | 11:05 AM ET
That’s right. Based on the recent foiled terrorist plot in England and the ensuing sighs from travelers around the globe, we’re taking the extraordinary step of raising the World Hum Travel-Terror Fatigue Level from Really Annoyed (level 3) to Totally Sick of This (level 4). For those keeping score, that’s just below the highest level on the World Hum Travel-Terror Fatigue Index, Enough Already. Don’t be alarmed. The index simply reflects widespread terror-fatigue levels among business and leisure travelers. While we’re obviously relieved the horrific plot was averted, we can’t believe our ginger-lime shampoo is now under scrutiny. (Remarked one frustrated but well-groomed female traveler on CNN: “I don’t think you can blow up a plane with blush.”) Let’s hope we can one day drop back to level one—Margaritaville. We can dream, right?
Petition Filed Asking U.S. Supreme Court to Rule on “Secret Law” for Travelers
by Michael Yessis | 08.10.06 | 7:18 PM ET
We all know the drill: Check in for a U.S. flight and you’re asked to show a photo ID. Most of us hand over a driver’s license or passport and don’t think twice about it. One man did, asking to see the law behind the ID requirement. No can do, he was told. It’s secret. The matter went to the courts, and soon it may be in the hands of the highest court in the land.
Moscow vs. Lonely Planet
by Michael Yessis | 08.10.06 | 4:08 PM ET
Politics, business and travel often intertwine. Take, for example, Lonely Planet. Recently, the guidebook giant has lobbied the United States Congress to support a National Passport Month. In 2002, Hong Kong took issue with Lonely Planet’s guidebook coverage. In 2004, Burma Campaign UK called for a boycott of the guidebook giant simply for publishing a book about the country. Now it’s Moscow’s turn to take some shots at LP. From a story by Tom Parfitt in the Guardian: “Moscow officials have launched an attack on Lonely Planet, saying the backpackers’ guide portrays the Russian capital as a gangster-infested Gotham and presents an image of the city that is at least 15 years out of date.”
Airline Bomb Plot Foiled
by Michael Yessis | 08.10.06 | 7:39 AM ET
British authorities say they’ve arrested more than 20 people who were plotting to detonate bombs in multiple planes flying between Britain and the United States. Travel around the world has been affected today, and London’s Heathrow has been closed to most flights. “The head of London’s counter-terrorist police, Peter Clarke, said the plot had ‘global dimensions.’ He said the number of flights, destination and timing were still under investigation,” according to an early Reuters report. “The U.S. Department of Homeland Security raised the threat level for all commercial aircraft to ‘high’ and U.S. authorities banned liquids, including drinks, from U.S. commercial flights.” Police sources say “liquid chemical” devices were the potential weapons. Countless news outlets, of course, have the story.
Anthony Bourdain’s Beirut Show to Air
by Jim Benning | 08.09.06 | 4:10 PM ET
We’ve written about Anthony Bourdain’s recent experience in Beirut— the globe-trotting chef was there taping an episode of his show No Reservations when fighting broke out. (He was safely evacuated.) At the time, he wasn’t sure whether the episode would ever air. Now comes word that it will indeed be broadcast on the Travel Channel Monday, Aug. 21 at 10 p.m. ET/PT. Remarked the Travel Channel’s Pat Younge, “This special is not about a celebrity chef in peril, but an opportunity to show unique footage of the Beirut that existed before the hostilities broke out—an unfinished portrait of the Beirut that Anthony wanted to show the world.”
“Girls Gone Wild,” the Ocean Cruise?
by Jim Benning | 08.09.06 | 1:53 PM ET
As scary as that sounds, the idea is apparently being discussed. It’s mentioned, though only in passing, in a profile of the video company’s founder in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times Magazine. I can see the TV commercials now: Scantily clad women frolicking—I mean, “going wild”—in the ship’s pool to Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life.” Many rightfully thought that song was an awful choice for Royal Caribbean’s commercials (as one Slate reader put it: “Nothing says maritime comfort like a song about shooting up junk”). It would be perfect for “Girls Gone Wild” cruises: “Here comes Johnny Yen again / With the liquor and drugs / And a flesh machine / He’s gonna do another strip tease.”
Twenty Secret Great Places Revealed!
by Jim Benning | 08.09.06 | 12:15 PM ET
Backpacker magazine’s cover immediately grabbed Bill Stall’s attention. “The Last UNKNOWN Places,” it screamed. “5 Hidden Paradises Where Nature Still Rules.” He bought the magazine in a millisecond. And then, as he writes in a thoughtful op-ed in today’s Los Angeles Times, he began questioning the whole enterprise—the cover’s promise, the story inside by Tracy Ross. [W]ait a minute,” he writes. “Ross and Backpacker were tipping off the crowds, weren’t they? Hidden paradises aren’t hidden once they’ve been touted to the whole world on the cover of a magazine.”
Mumbai vs. Bombay: “Will Bollywood become Mumblywood?”
by Michael Yessis | 08.09.06 | 11:53 AM ET
“On Language” columnist William Safire is the latest to dig into why and how places around the world change their names. He covers the big recent switches—Bombay to Mumbai, Burma to Myanmar, Upper Volta to Burkina Faso—most of which have been inspired by efforts to eliminate remnants of their colonial past. But Safire also looks at another interesting part of the name-change game: The product angle.
Xeni Jardin Hacks the Himalayas
by Michael Yessis | 08.09.06 | 6:21 AM ET
This week National Public Radio’s “Day to Day” is broadcasting Xeni Jardin’s four-part series about how Tibetans are coping with encroaching technology. Jardin traveled through Tibet, India and China, and her reports explore “how Western ‘hackers’ are building low-cost communications networks to bring phone and Web service to displaced Tibetan refugees—and how native peoples are trying to hold onto their culture in an interconnected world.” Jardin has supplemented her stories with photos and audio on the NPR Web site, and extra commentary and video on her personal page.
Four World Hum Stories Honored in 2006 Best American Travel Writing
by Michael Yessis | 08.08.06 | 4:36 PM ET
Tony Perrottet’s The Joy of Steam was selected for inclusion and three other World Hum stories were picked as notable travel writing in this year’s edition of Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Travel Writing anthology. The noted stories are Terry Ward’s Girl Power in the Land of the Maharajahs, Porter Shreve’s Derelicts in the Sinai and Rolf Potts’s The Art of Writing a Story About Walking Across Andorra. Tim Cahill edited the latest edition, which also features stories by Pico Iyer, David Sedaris, Heidi Julavits, Caitlin Flanagan, Gary Shteyngart and Tom Bissell. The book goes on sale Oct. 11.
Number of U.S. Students Studying Abroad Triples
by Michael Yessis | 08.08.06 | 1:17 PM ET
About 175,000 students earned college credit abroad in the 2003-2004 school year, triple the number from 20 years before, according to a story in today’s Washington Post. The Post emphasizes the local angle. Study abroad programs are particularly popular in the Washington D.C. area “where so many students come to study international affairs,” and one local college, as we mentioned here previously, requires study abroad in order to graduate. But writer Susan Kinzie points out that it’s not only a local phenomenon.
Travels with Douglas Coupland: Blogging Tales From the Road
by Michael Yessis | 08.08.06 | 8:12 AM ET
It’s a shame the New York Times has posted Douglas Coupland’s Time Capsules blog in its pay-only section, TimesSelect. His documentation of, among other things, 15 years on the road as a Famous Author on Book Tour, deserves a much wider audience than I imagine it’s getting. It’s a highly-entertaining mix of photos, links, lists and Coupland’s insightful, pop-culture infused writing. And, as expected from the man who coined the term poverty jet set, he’s sharp and observant when it comes to travel, particularly the minutia of travel.
Club Gulag: Inside Post-Soviet ‘Extreme Tourism’
by Michael Yessis | 08.07.06 | 7:41 AM ET
Care to stay the night in a former KGB prison in Latvia? How about a weekend in an abandoned gulag 100 miles above the Arctic Circle? Or do you just want to make like a Volga boatman, pulling a barge up the river? According to The Age, the night at the KGB prison is already a hot destination for masochistic tourists. “On some nights, for extra money, they call out the guard, and the shivering guests can witness a mock execution, with the ‘corpse’ being flung like a sack of potatoes into a lorry before being driven away, presumably for a reviving cuppa,” Allan Hall writes. “Once past the humiliating stripping and donning of prison garb, the gruelling physical exercise regime, the interrogation and the solitary confinement cell—for those that answer back to Ivan—there is dinner. It is a delicious melange of stale rye bread, pickled fish heads, pressed meat from some unidentifiable mammal, pickles and black, sweet Russian tea.”
