Travel Blog
Kiel Canal, Germany
by Ben Keene | 10.13.06 | 6:38 AM ET
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Yahoo! BuzzFarris Hassan’s (Latest) Excellent Adventures
by Jim Benning | 10.12.06 | 2:11 PM ET
Remember the Florida high school student who made headlines last year with his secret trip to Baghdad? It turns out he has the travel bug in a big way. According to a profile in this week’s Village Voice, Farris Hassan spent much of this past summer traveling around the U.S., in part to further his goal of becoming a journalist who does “immersion reporting.” Reports Ashley Harrell: “On July, 3 he flew to Denver and hitchhiked from Steamboat Springs to attend the Rainbow Gathering in Routt National Forest. For five days, he immersed himself in the annual itinerant tent city of latter-day hippies. Then Hassan hitchhiked back to the city, where he befriended an alcoholic and a prostitute and checked himself into the Denver Rescue Mission posing as a penniless drifter. Then he flew to Dearborn, Michigan, home of America’s largest mosque, and for two weeks, he assumed the identity of a Jew, hoping to find out whether Muslims there harbored anti-Semitic views. In Detroit, he spent two nights wandering the streets and five more in the Salvation Army’s homeless shelter on skid row.” Oh yeah, Hassan also has his own press agent now—the same one who represents Donald Trump.
Related on World Hum:
* Dear Farris Hassan
* We’re Back, and So is Farris Hassan
First Printed Atlas Fetches $3.9 Million at Sotheby’s Auction
by Michael Yessis | 10.12.06 | 8:24 AM ET
The 1477 Ptolemy atlas was sold at Sotheby’s in London by the family of Lord Wardington to a private collector Tuesday. It’s one of two copies in private hands, and it was almost destroyed a few years back. From an AP story on the sale: “The atlas could have been lost, when in April 2004 a fire raged through the Wardington family estate. Local villagers formed a human chain and carried the books to safety, while over 95 firefighters tackled the blaze, saving the library.” Via Gadling.
Don’t be a Touron!: New Additions to the Travel Lexicon
by Michael Yessis | 10.12.06 | 7:48 AM ET
Daily Candy has posted another round of its excellent travel lexicon. Among the travel-related words suggested by the site’s readers: touron (n. tourist + moron. “Don’t even bother with the Louvre on a Saturday. It’s overrun with tourons.”), gabbin pressure (n. sense of obligation to chat to the passenger next to you during a flight. “I’m just recovering from gabbin pressure—I sat next to a real flight dependent.”) and, my favorite, travelanche (n. the state of affairs when one little thing goes wrong and then everything snowballs toward disaster. “It started as a minor delay in Seattle and ended up a full-blown travelanche involving lost luggage, bad airport food, and dire intestinal consequences.”). Also: Read last year’s first batch of the Daily Candy travel lexicon.
From Our Own Correspondent: An Appreciation
by Frank Bures | 10.12.06 | 6:15 AM ET
Late last month, the BBC’s Andrew Harding ate at an unusual restaurant in Beijing. He reported back to the Beeb for the show that is one of my favorites anywhere, and a real gem for many of us who love good, vivid travel writing: From Our Own Correspondent. As Harding sat in the restaurant, he stared at the the grey and shiny food on his plate:
Travel Book Among National Book Awards Finalists
by Ben Keene | 10.11.06 | 1:45 PM ET
It’s true. The National Book Foundation announced its finalists for the 2006 National Book Awards this afternoon, listing as usual, five nominees for each of its four main categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and young people’s literature. Rarely are travel-related titles recognized by the foundation. Yet there it is, among the finalists for the nonfiction award: Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present, published this spring by HarperCollins. Whether or not the book wins the big prize Nov. 15, we’re delighted. Hessler is one of the writers we celebrated back in May—his first China book, River Town, made our list of the top 30 travel books of all time. Earlier this year, Hessler shared his thoughts with us on our list, including his take on travel writing as a genre.
There is no Such Thing as a Boring Place. Only Boring Travelers.
by Michael Yessis | 10.11.06 | 9:24 AM ET
I love that sentiment, which comes from John Heaton, the subject of Tuesday’s “Frequent Flier” feature in the New York Times. “I find that some business travelers are numb to the portals through which they pass, focusing only on the destination,” he writes. “I think they’re missing a lot. Something as mundane as an airport stopover can be fascinating.”
R.I.P. Anna Politkovskaya
by Frank Bures | 10.11.06 | 7:18 AM ET
A few years ago, I showed up at a small used book store in Portland, Oregon to hear a Russian journalist whose book A Dirty War had just come out. Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered last week, was a thin woman with short hair and a fearlessness that few writers in the West could conjure. It was not long after Sept. 11, 2001, and we didn’t really know what the world was going to be like, or if we’d be able to travel around the world as we had before.
Video: A Primer on “Slum Tourism”
by Michael Yessis | 10.11.06 | 7:12 AM ET
A few months ago we wrote about Rio de Janeiro’s Little Slum Inn. Now, Yahoo! Current Traveler takes on “slum tourism” with a short video that looks at its emergence among a certain set of adventurous travelers. See it after the jump.
Which Country’s Tourists are the Worst in the World?
by Michael Yessis | 10.10.06 | 6:46 AM ET
Rolf Potts touches on the perennial hostel-lounge argument topic in his latest Traveling Light column on Yahoo! His opinion: The country a traveler hails from isn’t the problem. “The problem here is that assessing your travel companions by nationality is rarely an earnest inquiry so much as it is a dull parlor game—an empty exercise in rhetorical one-upmanship,” he writes. “The worst travelers in the world are, after all, the rude, small-minded ones—and rude, small-minded travelers can hail from any nation.”
The Rules for Calling Shotgun: The International Travel Amendment
by Michael Yessis | 10.10.06 | 6:45 AM ET
Yes road trippers, there are now official rules for calling shotgun. Amendment XXXIII covers international travel. It states: “When crossing the border into another country. All shotgun claims are void, and passengers may once again call shotgun. If another passenger gets it, the driver must pull over at his earliest and safest convenience.” Consider yourself warned.
The Decemberists Channel “In Patagonia”
by Michael Yessis | 10.10.06 | 6:44 AM ET
Looks like another beloved indie band is cribbing from a classic travel book. Last time around it was The Hold Steady. This time its The Decemberists. According to Los Angeles Times music critic Ann Powers, the band’s new album features “a rambling, 11-minute suite of watery horror stories, climaxing with the chilling pronouncement, ‘Go to sleep ... you’ll not feel the drowning.’” Songwriter Colin Meloy tells Powers: “I got that from ‘In Patagonia’ by Bruce Chatwin. There’s a great section about a 19th century sailor who had journaled all this stuff when he was a kid. At one point his boat is stuck in a squall and it looks like it’s going to capsize, and he’s down in his bunk with some of the older boys, and one says that to him. And it really struck me—wow, so harrowing.”
Why Don’t More College Students Study Abroad?
by Jim Benning | 10.05.06 | 10:42 AM ET
“[W]e have taken our gazes off the horizon and set them on classes, majors and prospective careers,” laments Rashmi Joshi in UCLA’s Daily Bruin.
R.I.P. R.W. Apple
by Michael Yessis | 10.05.06 | 3:30 AM ET
Legendary New York Times journalist R.W. “Johnny” Apple passed away yesterday from complications of thoracic cancer. Apple, who made his name as a hard-hitting newsman, wrote mostly food and travel stories in recent years. Times editor Bill Keller wrote in a note to his staff that Apple wrote his last story for the Times—this story about 10 restaurants abroad worth boarding a plane to visit—from his sickbed.
‘Will Disney Abandon Book-Lovers for Pirates 2.0?’
by Jim Benning | 10.04.06 | 4:14 PM ET
That’s the question Robert Niles poses at Theme Park Insider, reacting to word that Disneyland officials are apparently considering closing Tom Sawyer’s Island, a half-century-old fixture at the theme park, to build another Pirates of the Caribbean attraction. “[A]s much as I love Pirates, it is entertainment, not art,” Niles writes. “In Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain created the most compelling, debated and beloved characters in all of American culture. If today’s kids do not know of them, why, that’s a pretty damning indictment of the rest of us, as parents, educators and artists. That Disney’s failed these characters, and their story, by allowing Tom Sawyer’s Island to fall into decay does not speak to an inherent lack of appeal in the characters, but to a lack of foresight by Disney.”
