Travel Blog: News and Briefs

That’s just one bit of advice from nation-branding guru Simon Anholt, the founding editor of Place Branding, a wonkish quarterly journal devoted to nation brand management. It’s covered in a recent issue of Foreign Policy (even if you’re not a policy wonk, the dessert recipes in the back are fabulous). Why are we writing about it? Why have we just created a new weblog category devoted to nation branding? We can’t get enough of the topic, in part because we know at some level it drives the travel decisions we make. As we’ve noted before, branding efforts have completely changed public perception of countries like Spain and New Zealand. That makes one wonder whether countries with bigger image problems can turn things around with a slick marketing campaign, a few well-timed commercials on CNN and a funky-hip logo. Probably not, says Anholt.

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Petra Makes Push for Seven Wonders Status

by Michael Yessis | 01.17.07 | 12:03 PM ET

Until last century, Petra was virtually off limits to non-Arab travelers. And in recent years, troubles in the Middle East have kept travelers away. But now that Petra has been shortlisted for the New Seven Wonders of the World list, the Jordanian government is making a push to show off the “rose red city half as old as time.” The BBC’s Jon Leyne reports that Petra “has probably not seen such a buzz of activity since civilised life ended there in the 8th century AD.”

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R.I.P. Bradford Washburn

by Michael Yessis | 01.17.07 | 7:12 AM ET

Photographer Ansel Adams called the mountaineer, mapmaker and photographer Bradford Washburn “a roving genius of mind and mountains.”

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Honoring ‘Babel’

by Jim Benning | 01.16.07 | 9:41 PM ET

I’ve done a bit of complaining about some travel-related films recently, but I have no qualms with Babel. In fact, I was happy to see it win the Golden Globe for best dramatic movie last night. While it doesn’t depict world travel in the most favorable light—among other calamities in the film, Cate Blanchett’s character is shot during a trip to Morocco—it does movingly show how interconnected the world is becoming, and how that doesn’t necessarily make communication across borders (or even within families) any easier. Filmed in rural Morocco, Tokyo and Tijuana, it’s the kind of movie that somehow simultaneously shrinks the world and expands it. It’s ambitious, with a global perspective, and how many movies can you say that about?

Need a New Passport? Bill the Caribbean.

by Terry Ward | 01.16.07 | 2:59 PM ET

When my passport expired late last year, I shelled out nearly $150 in expedited fees and overnight shipping envelopes to have a new one rushed my way. If Morocco hadn’t been calling, however, perhaps I would have waited for the Bahamas to pick up the tab. Nassau Paradise Island is spending big bucks on newspaper ads—I saw one in the Orlando Sentinel—touting a new gimmick to keep passport-shy Americans coming: 19 member hotels are offering to reimburse the cost of passports in exchange for a minimum two-night stay.

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‘Has the Romance Gone Out of Travel?’

by Michael Yessis | 01.15.07 | 9:17 AM ET

Michael Bywater argues it has and Alexander Frater says no way in a he said-he said debate this week in the pages of The Observer. I stand with Frater, a former chief travel correspondent for the paper, who writes: “To those who say the excitement has gone out of travel, I say ‘cobblers’. Curiosity continues to tug us around blind corners and over interesting hills, so that even something as innocuous as a sightseeing day trip in Ladakh can become a small adventure, a genuine golden moment.” The Atlantic has a similar story this month, as Virginia Postrel explores how glamour has been eliminated from air travel.

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The World Hum Travel Zeitgeist: California Dreaming

by Michael Yessis | 01.12.07 | 8:40 AM ET

From Los Angeles to Big Sur, travelers have California on their minds this week. Supermodels, Walt Disney World, St. John and Sealand, too. Here’s the Zeitgeist:

Top-Ranked ‘Zeitgeist’ City
Hub Culture (2007)
Los Angeles
* The Walt Disney Concert Hall (pictured) and other attractions have helped turn L.A. into a city of the moment.

Most E-Mailed Travel Story
New York Times (current)
Big Sur Without the Crowds

Most Popular Travel Story
Netscape (current)
Ghostly Squid Boats of San Pedro

Most Viewed Weblog Post
World Hum (this week)
For Sale: World’s Smallest Island Nation
* The price for Sealand? $100 million, by one estimate.

Top Travel and Adventure Audiobook
iTunes (current)
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

Best Selling Travel Book
Amazon.com (current)
The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2007 by Bob Sehlinger with Len Testa

Most Viewed Story
World Hum (this week)
Paulina Porizkova: A Model Traveler

Most Popular Page Tagged Travel
Del.icio.us (recent)
Dance of the Flight Attendant
* A clever comic by Jen Wang.

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Peru: It’s No Nepal

by Michael Yessis | 01.12.07 | 6:16 AM ET

Royal Nepal Airlines apologized to Peru for promoting Nepalese tourism using an image of Machu Picchu, perhaps the most iconic attraction in all of South America. How does such a blunder occur? M.B. Khadka of the airline said the mix up was caused by the printing agency in charge of making the airline’s advertising posters, according to news reports.

Jimmy Buffett at 60: Still Selling ‘Unsentimental’ Tropical Fantasies

by Jim Benning | 01.11.07 | 5:15 PM ET

As I’ve confessed before, I’m a sucker for Jimmy Buffett songs celebrating margaritas, hammocks and sailing odysseys in the tropics. How can you not love a guy who would name an album “Banana Wind”? So I was happy to read yesterday’s appreciation of Buffett in Slate. The sandal-shod singer-songwriter turned 60 last month, and he’s still touring and turning out new albums. Jody Rosen places Buffett in the long tradition of singers evoking tropical fantasies, from Bing Crosby to Don Ho. The difference with Buffett? He is, he writes, identifying something I think is key to his songs’ appeal, “unsentimental and journalistic.”

 

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Rapa Nui to World: ‘We Don’t Want to Become an Archaeological Theme Park’

by Michael Yessis | 01.10.07 | 8:55 AM ET

Should Rapa Nui restore more of its iconic and mysterious stone statues? They’re a big reason Rapa Nui has become a hot spot for travelers, and “commercial and political interests, as well as some archaeologists, would like nothing better than to restore more—or perhaps eventually all—of the moai, as the statues are known,” writes Larry Rohter in the New York Times. “But many residents of Rapa Nui, the Polynesian name for Easter Island that is favored here, regard that possibility with a mixture of suspicion and dread.”

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Ward on CouchSurfing: ‘I’ve Paid Dearly to Stay in Bed-and-Breakfasts that Weren’t Half as Inviting’

by Michael Yessis | 01.10.07 | 8:35 AM ET

World Hum contributor Terry Ward recently tried CouchSurfing, and her latest story for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel covers her night lodging in Limerick, Ireland with Mike and Carlo. The experience, Ward writes, made her realize “how many times having a little faith in people has opened up my world while traveling.”

Related on World Hum:
* CouchSurfing in Good Magazine: ‘This Isn’t Just About a Place to Crash’

R.I.P. Momofuku Ando, Inventor of Instant Ramen Noodles

by Jim Benning | 01.09.07 | 1:31 PM ET

Oh instant ramen, how we love thee. You feed 100 million people a day, by some estimates. You have served as a worthy and affordable introduction to Japanese food for countless people around the globe. In much of Asia, you are standard dining fare on trains. And now, we learn you were invented by Momofuku Ando in 1958. Sadly, we learn, too, of Ando’s death at the age of 96 near Osaka, Japan. But we agree with everything Lawrence Downes writes in an eloquent tribute in today’s New York Times: “Ramen noodles have earned Mr. Ando an eternal place in the pantheon of human progress. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Give him ramen noodles, and you don’t have to teach him anything.” Too true.

Related on World Hum:
* Chinese Noodles Predate Marco Polo

Photo: jayceho, via Flickr. (Creative Commons License.)

For Sale: World’s Smallest Island Nation

by Jim Benning | 01.09.07 | 12:29 PM ET

Yup. The Principality of Sealand, a former wartime fort seven miles off the coast of England, is up for sale. It doesn’t exactly sound like paradise. Calling it an “island” might be generous. It’s set on a steel platform rising out of the chilly North Sea. But if you’re looking to be king, it surely has it charms—particularly a wild history. It was claimed in 1967 by Paddy Roy Bates. The Royal Navy ordered him out, but he refused and even fired warning shots at a Navy ship to defend his autonomy. In 1968, a judge ruled that Sealand was beyond Britian’s territorial control, allowing Prince Roy to go about the business of nationhood, including issuing passports and developing currency and a flag.

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‘The Cultures That Produced Dubai and Las Vegas Surely Must Have Something in Common’

by Michael Yessis | 01.09.07 | 8:40 AM ET

Seth Stevenson believes Dubai’s “media moment” has passed. “The flurry of breathless write-ups —in Sunday travel sections and glossy lifestyle magazines—has come and gone,” he writes in the latest edition of Slate’s Well-Traveled. “We’re on to the next destination already. (Laos. Yemen. Low-altitude space orbit.)” Yet Stevenson couldn’t resist Dubai’s “profound wackiness,” and set-forth on a trip that, in typical Stevenson fashion, he mines for insight and laughs.

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Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos on Fresh Air

by Michael Yessis | 01.09.07 | 8:14 AM ET

The frontman for Scottish band Franz Ferdinand sat with Terry Gross yesterday on the public radio show Fresh Air to talk about Sound Bites, Kapranos’s book about his gastronomic adventures on the road. The book is based on a food column Kapranos wrote for The Guardian. Food, Kapranos tells Fresh Air, has always played a big role in his life. He and bassist Bob Hardy hatched the idea for the band while working in a Glasgow restaurant.