Travel Blog: News and Briefs
To Russia, With Actors
by Michael Yessis | 11.29.06 | 8:48 AM ET
Martha Plimpton, who plays Varenka Bakunin in The Coast of Utopia, prepared for her latest role by traveling with her fellow actors to Russia. Moscow and St. Petersburg, to be precise. “Rather than dive headlong into the icy waters of ‘Voyage,’ ‘Shipwreck’ and ‘Salvage,’ the three plays about revolutionary thinkers from 19th-century Russia which make up Tom Stoppard’s epic ... four of us decided it might be wise—not to mention unspeakably cool—to go to Mother Russia herself.” Plimpton joins the growing list of celebrity travel writers and recounts her week-long experience in New York’s Daily News. “Nothing is ‘easy’ in Russia,” she writes. “You don’t just ‘get a taxi’ at the airport, for example. You don’t just go ‘grocery shopping.’ But it’s through these seemingly irrelevant inconveniences one gets a feel for the place and for the culture shaping our characters.”
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Yahoo! Buzz‘It’s Not Easy Being a Comic on the Airport Security Line’
by Michael Yessis | 11.29.06 | 7:46 AM ET
R.I.P. Jesús Blancornelas
by Jim Benning | 11.28.06 | 2:51 PM ET
The Tijuana journalist was fearless, and for all the right reasons. The New York Times and San Diego Union-Tribune remember him.
USA Today Readers Name Grand Canyon ‘8th Wonder’
by Jim Benning | 11.27.06 | 2:49 PM ET
When we last checked in on USA Today, the newspaper was in the midst of counting down the seven new wonders of the world picked by its panelists. The paper had already proclaimed Potala Palace/Jokhang Temple in Tibet, Jerusalem’s Old City, the polar ice caps, Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine Monument and the Internet as new wonders. Since then it has added the final two: the Maya pyramids in Central America and Serengetti Plain, Tanzania. But it seemed that seven wonders weren’t enough. And so it was that USA Today’s readers were asked to vote for an 8th wonder. On Friday, the paper announced that they chose the Grand Canyon.
Coming to a Theater Near You (Sigh): ‘Turistas’
by Jim Benning | 11.27.06 | 1:59 PM ET
Yes, it’s time for yet another movie about travelers getting in over their heads in a foreign country, reassuring the roughly 80 percent of Americans who don’t hold passports that they’re better off limiting their travels to short trips between home and the cineplex anyway, because, hey, it’s scary out there. ‘Turistas,’ which opens in U.S. theaters Dec. 1 and stars Josh Duhamel, apparently tells the story of a group of tourists—excuse me, turistas—who get lost in the Brazilian jungle and suffer a series of terrifying and even horrifying calamities. It’s the first U.S. film to be shot entirely in Brazil. In today’s Los Angeles Times, director John Stockwell, who also directed “Blue Crush,” said he was inspired to take on the film project after a harrowing experience on a surf trip to Peru.
The Great Wall, Siem Reap, Stonehenge Getting Too Much Love
by Jim Benning | 11.27.06 | 9:14 AM ET
They’re not the only places in the world being overrun with tourists, of course, but their tourism woes have been highlighted in recent days by the New York Times, Associated Press and Los Angeles Times, respectively. The New York Times on Sunday focused on the Great Wall of China, which is suffering under the weight of an estimated 13 million visitors a year. “[T]he Great Wall is not just crumbling,” writes Jim Yardley. “It is disappearing. Roughly half of the estimated 4,000 miles of the wall built during the Ming Dynasty no longer exists, according to a recent report. It is also regularly being abused.” Among other problems, he writes, last year “the police broke up a huge dance party of Chinese ravers atop the wall a few hours’ drive outside Beijing.”
Hide the California Rolls! Here Comes Japan’s ‘Sushi Police’
by Michael Yessis | 11.27.06 | 9:10 AM ET
Japan has a problem with the proliferation of Japanese restaurants around the world: Too often, Japanese government officials say, they give Japanese food a bad name. “A fast-growing list of gastronomic indignities—from sham sake in Paris to shoddy sashimi in Bangkok—has prompted Japanese authorities to launch a counterattack in defense of this nation’s celebrated food culture,” writes Anthony Faiola in the Washington Post. “With restaurants around the globe describing themselves as Japanese while actually serving food that is Asian fusion, or just plain bad, the government [in Tokyo] announced a plan this month to offer official seals of approval to overseas eateries deemed to be ‘pure Japanese.’”
Aircraft Makers to Public: More Tolerable Planes Are on the Way
by Michael Yessis | 11.27.06 | 7:59 AM ET
I’ll believe it when I see it. And according to a Washington Post story, I should look for more fresh air, more soothing lighting, bigger windows and even onboard showers in 2008. “Veteran fliers have heard such sales pitches before,” Del Quentin Wilber writes. “They’ve been promised amenities such as on-board luxury lounges, gyms and restaurants ... This time, however, rival aircraft manufacturers Boeing and Airbus say they’ve got it right. They’re building jets that don’t give the airlines a choice on many of the amenities, such as bigger windows, that passengers say they want most.”
The World Hum Travel Zeitgeist: Beer, Bryson and the City of Brotherly Love
by Michael Yessis | 11.24.06 | 10:02 AM ET
The Zeitgeist has returned from a two-week hiatus spent mostly in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, and it finds travelers still loving Bill Bryson, still concerned about their airfare prices and wondering whether to order a Heineken, Grolsch or Amstel in Amsterdam. Let’s go.
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36 Hours: Philadelphia
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How do airlines set their ticket prices?
* This Slate “explainer” unravels the mystery.
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U.S. to Require Passports for Nearly All Air Travelers
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The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir by Bill Bryson
* Two Three Six weeks in a row at the top for Bryson’s memoir of growing up in 1950s Iowa.
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A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
* Bryson hits the daily double with his classic about hiking the Appalachian Trail.
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808Talk: Hawaii’s Premier Podcast
Thanksgiving: Here Come the Traffic Snarls, Horror Stories and an Avalanche of Statistics
by Michael Yessis | 11.22.06 | 1:57 PM ET
And holiday travel tips. Lots and lots of tips. It is one of the busiest travel days of the year in the U.S. and the start of a long weekend. We’ll be posting light in the next few days, but we’ll be back strong Monday.
Mothers Stage “Nurse-In” at Airports Across U.S.
by Michael Yessis | 11.22.06 | 7:58 AM ET
Women throughout the United States yesterday staged a “nurse-in” at more than 30 domestic airports, breastfeeding their babies to express their outrage about a fellow mother, Emily Gillette, being ejected from a Delta Air Lines flight last month for refusing to cover up with a blanket while nursing her daughter. According to news reports, 37 U.S. states have laws protecting a woman’s right to nurse in public, and legislation has been reintroduced to amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protect breast-feeding in public.
The End of the DC-10 Era
by Jim Benning | 11.22.06 | 7:35 AM ET
The last DC-10 making scheduled passenger trips will fly its final trip Jan. 8. “And with that,” USA Today reports, “the era of scheduled passenger service aboard three-engine jumbo jets will close.”
Eleven Great Movie Moments in Airports
by Michael Yessis | 11.21.06 | 8:21 AM ET
Steve Martin’s tirade at a rental car counter in “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” Harry Shearer’s zucchini incident in “This is Spinal Tap” and, of course, the farewell scene in “Casablanca” all make the rundown of great airport movie moments compiled by USA Today’s Barbara De Lollis.
Survey: U.S. Least Friendly Country to Travelers
by Michael Yessis | 11.21.06 | 7:31 AM ET
It’s rude immigration officials and difficulty obtaining travel documents—not to mention the country’s current image in most of the world—that have travelers avoiding the U.S., according to a survey of 2011 non-U.S. residents released Monday by the Discover America Partnership. “Since 9/11 this country has viewed foreign travellers as more of a threat than an opportunity,” Geoff Freeman, the director of Discover America Partnership, said Monday in a conference call with reporters, according to a Reuters report. “They [border officials] do not understand that foreign travellers are also key to our national security: they go home as ambassadors for our country.”
The Critics: ‘Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast’
by Jim Benning | 11.20.06 | 12:27 PM ET
If you love the oudoors, it’s hard not to love Edward Abbey, author of the classic Utah memoir Desert Solitaire. (“Since you cannot get the desert into a book any more than a fisherman can haul up the sea with his nets,” Abbey memorably wrote in “Solitaire,” “I have tried to create a world of words in which the desert figures more as a medium than as material.”) Abbey died in 1989, and now, a publisher has collected 236 letters he wrote over his lifetime, in a collection entitled Postcards from Ed. It was reviewed in Sunday’s New York Times. Writes Jonathan Miles: “If few surprises are embedded in this trim selection of letters, edited by Abbey’s pal David Petersen, it’s because Abbey, on the page, was always Abbey: free ranging, cymbal crashing, an anarchist in mind as well as politics, encased throughout his life in an ever-shaken snow globe of contradictions, provocations, bathroom-wall jokes and fortissimo declarations.” That may be so, but die-hard Abbey fans are sure to add it to their collections.
