Travel Blog: News and Briefs
UK-Inspired Thames Town Opens in China
by Jim Benning | 11.08.06 | 1:36 PM ET
Further evidence the planet will soon become one giant theme park: the opening of Thames Town, an English-inspired village in a suburb of Shanghai. It’s a $600 million development that includes a Winston Churchill statue, Victorian-style homes for sale, a fish-and-chips shop and a pub. Most of the homes have already been sold. But not everyone is pleased. According to Reuters, the owner of a pub and fish-and-chips shop in the UK feels cheated because her businesses were reproduced “almost exactly” in Thames Town. Said a representative from the development: “Maybe it’s a little bit of a misunderstanding. It’s not in any way supposed to be a replica.” Shanghaiist has more.
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Yahoo! BuzzIqaluit, Canada: Unlikely Celebrity Hot Spot
by Michael Yessis | 11.08.06 | 8:06 AM ET
All the stars go to Iqaluit: Foxx. Paltrow. Willis. Schwarzenegger. Banderas. The list goes on. And they go to the Arctic town of 6,500 on Canada’s Baffin Island for good reason: It’s where celebrities and politicians traveling between Los Angeles and Europe stop to fuel their private jets. “We’re a gas station,” Eric Leuthold, who runs Frobisher Bay Touchdown Services, told the Washington Post’s Doug Struck. “Some of the stars don’t even know where they are. They wake up groggy and ask where they are, and never come out of the jets.”
Scientists Unveil ‘Silent, Energy-Efficient Plane’
by Michael Yessis | 11.07.06 | 8:06 AM ET
It’s good news as concern grows about the environmental impact of jet travel. From the Guardian: “Plans for a silent, energy-efficient plane which could take to the sky in less than 25 years’ time were unveiled this afternoon by scientists,” writes Hillary Osborne. “On a typical flight the plane, which has been designed by scientists from Cambridge University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), will achieve the same kind of fuel efficiency as a Toyota Prius.” Check the Silent Aircraft Initiative for details.
Flinn on the Lhasa Express: “I’d Give it a B-Minus”
by Michael Yessis | 11.06.06 | 8:06 AM ET
San Francisco Chronicle writer John Flinn took a ride on the Lhasa Express, the new train from China to Tibet, and returned with that verdict and a terrific tale of life—and strange happenings—on the high-altitude rails.
Second Life Welcomes Virtual Tourism
by Michael Yessis | 11.06.06 | 7:44 AM ET
It’s got at least one hotel and a travel guide, so it was only a matter of time before we read a real travel story about virtual travels in Second Life. Matt Gross’s piece in the Escapes section of the New York Times covers a virtual weekend in the virtual space. His thoughts: There’s a lot of dancing and, in some ways, it really is like being on the road. “I’d had brief chats with a dozen Second Life residents—the unreality makes it easy to approach them—but had made no real connection. In a way, it was because I really was a tourist,” Gross writes. “I had nothing invested in this world, while they were building houses and yachts, organizing rock concerts and fashion shows and creating virtual refugee camps to educate people about Darfur.”
A Guide to the ‘Middle of Nowhere’
by Jim Benning | 11.03.06 | 7:11 AM ET
Having created guidebooks to just about everywhere, Lonely Planet has set its sights on nowhere, and in a big way. We recently noted the release of Lonely Planet’s new literary travel anthology, Tales from Nowhere, which features stories from far-flung locales. Now comes the Lonely Planet Guide to the Middle of Nowhere, a coffee table book with arresting photos and short essays about middles of nowhere around the globe, from Bolivia’s Atacama Desert to India’s Himachal Pradesh. “For a supposedly social species, our appetite for space, wilderness and isolation is remarkable,” writes Ben Saunders in the introduction. “The phrase ‘middle of nowhere’ has wormed its way into our everyday language; we all know where it is, and we can all recount a visit there, but unlike the summit of a mountain, the shore of an ocean or a famous monument, ‘nowhere’ itself is harder to pinpoint.” Yet LP manages to locate it in more than 50 places, each of which can whet the appetite of those yearning for their own kind of nowhere.
Exporting Dubai
by Terry Ward | 11.02.06 | 8:46 AM ET
For me, visiting Morocco has always meant hanging with my host family in Fes (I studied Arabic there in 2003), seaside sardine feasts for a few bucks in Essaouira and strolls through the medinas to soak up the chaos and color. But when you’re Emaar—Dubai’s largest property group, backed by the ruling Maktoum family—Morocco is just another stage for a decadent Arabian playground, replete with a golf-course-cum-ski-resort, luxury shopping streets and fake beaches. Never mind that the construction site, Oukaimeden—a small provincial ski resort in the High Atlas mountains, not far from Marrakech—is nowhere near the United Arab Emirates.
KLM Introduces Sustainable Coffee on Flights, Faces Greenwashing Charges
by Michael Yessis | 11.02.06 | 8:16 AM ET
The airline’s recent pledge to serve coffee from sustainable farms in conjunction with the Rainforest Alliance has been met with mixed reviews. It’s the first European airline to take such a step, but according to a story by Tom Chesshyre in The Times of London, “environmentalists are sceptical that the move is ‘greenwashing,’ designed to shift focus from the damage that emissions cause to the environment.” KLM serves 25 million cups of coffee a year.
Related on World Hum:
* Branson Pledges Airline and Train Profits to Renewable Energy Research
* Airplanes and Climate Change
Help for the Wayward Underground Rider
by Ben Keene | 11.01.06 | 3:07 PM ET
As an atlas editor, I have a questionably healthy obsession with maps. As a traveler, I never go anywhere without one (and preferably two or three). Which is why I was particularly excited to learn that a British design company is now selling credit card-sized, stainless steel maps of the London Underground and the New York Subway. They strike me as the perfect accessory for a hip cartographer or really anyone wishing to be a less conspicuous tourist. Hopefully they’ll pave the way for similar maps for other cities with subterranean mass transit systems. Tokyo would be an excellent candidate—that is if it’s even possible to fit all of the subway lines and stops on a piece of metal measuring 85 millimeters across.
—.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) is the editor of the Oxford Atlas of the World.
This Magazine Cover Has the Philadelphia Hotel Association Running Scared
by Michael Yessis | 11.01.06 | 11:54 AM ET
Philadelphia Magazine usually distributes about 6,000 copies of its glossy pub to hotel rooms around the city. Not this month, though. November’s issue features a cover story about murder in the city, with a subhead that reads: “One terrifying night on the streets—and why everything we’re doing to stop the shooting won’t work.” Philadelphia Hotel Association executive director Ed Grose “urged hotels to think twice before providing guests with copies” of the magazine, according to a story in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
World Hum’s Most Read: October 2006
by Michael Yessis | 11.01.06 | 7:11 AM ET
R.I.P. Stardust Hotel
by Jim Benning | 10.31.06 | 5:59 AM ET
Photo by heather0714, via Flickr (Creative Commons).
I spotted the guy in the ghoulish grim reaper costume, gripping his faux scythe, at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas Saturday night. He fit right in among the other Halloween revelers—the scantily clad nurses, the Top Gun pilots in their flight suits and reflective sunglasses, Richard Nixon and his entourage of Secret Service agents. But the grim reaper really should have been skulking several blocks up the strip at the Stardust, where death loomed like a hazy cloud of casino cigarette smoke. On Wednesday, the half-century-old hotel with the strip’s most iconic neon sign will close for good. The usual implosion will follow in several months, paving the way, as the Vegas hotel life cycle dictates, for a new megaresort.
The World Hum Travel Zeitgeist: Skimpy Skirts and Thunderbolts
by Michael Yessis | 10.27.06 | 11:30 AM ET
There’s a hint of fear in the air, but, as always, we’re still hitting the road. This week the Zeitgeist leads to Paris, Dubai, Iowa, Mexico City and the most scenic toilet in the world. Let’s go.
Most Read Weblog Post
World Hum (this week)
Japanese Tourists Succumb to “Paris Syndrome”
* I’ve seen a bit of coverage of this story this week, and the New York Post gets the best headline award: Paris Leaves Japanese French Fried.
World’s Least Favorite Airline
TripAdvisor (survey)
Ryanair
Most Blogged Travel Story
New York Times (current)
Beyond Skimpy Skirts, a Rare Debate on Identity
* Hassan M. Fattah’s story explores the limits of multiculturalism in Dubai.
Best Selling Travel Book
Amazon.com (current)
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir
* Two weeks in a row at the top for Bryson’s memoir of growing up in 1950s Iowa.
Most E-Mailed Travel Story
USA Today (current)
Hotels Ditch Imposing Desks for Friendly ‘Pods’
* Three reasons why: To lure younger customers, to improve employee productivity and, of course, to increase revenue.
Most Popular Page Tagged Travel
Del.icio.us (current)
Farecast
Most Dugg “Travel” Story
Digg (current)
Apple’s Gift to Travelers: Magsafe Airline Power Adapter
Panama Backpackers’ Hotel Doubles as “Noah’s Ark” for Endangered Frogs
by Michael Yessis | 10.26.06 | 7:20 AM ET
Panama’s golden frogs are, according to the Washington Post’s Manuel Roig-Franzia, “considered so lucky that their images appear on lottery tickets.” They’re also on the run from a fungus that has killed more than 100 species of amphibians in Central America, so an international network of biologists, zookeepers and environmentalists, in conjunction with Panama’s Hotel Campestre, has decided to make a stand by building a Noah’s Ark for the creatures within the hotel.
Outing the CIA’s Travel Agent
by Michael Yessis | 10.26.06 | 7:11 AM ET
It’s San Jose, California-based Jeppesen International Trip Planning, a subsidiary of Boeing, according to a Talk of the Town piece in this week’s issue of The New Yorker. “Boeing does not mention, either on its Web site or in its annual report, that Jeppesen’s clients include the C.I.A., and that among the international trips that the company plans for the agency are secret ‘extraordinary rendition’ flights for terrorism suspects,” Jane Mayer writes. “Most of the planes used in rendition flights are owned and operated by tiny charter airlines that function as C.I.A. front companies, but it is not widely known that the agency has turned to a division of Boeing, the publicly traded blue-chip behemoth, to handle many of the logistical and navigational details for these trips, including flight plans, clearance to fly over other countries, hotel reservations, and ground-crew arrangements.”
