Travel Blog
Shamrock, Texas
by Ben Keene | 03.17.06 | 9:59 AM ET
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Yahoo! BuzzChurch Leaders to Bush Administration: Stop Restricting Religious Travel to Cuba
by Michael Yessis | 03.16.06 | 1:14 PM ET
Representatives from churches around the United States and members of congress met with executive branch officials yesterday to protest new travel restrictions to Cuba. “The meeting,” writes Pablo Bachelet in today’s Miami Herald, “was in response to a March 3 bipartisan letter signed by 105 lawmakers, asking the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control to explain why travel licenses for some U.S. church groups were not being renewed.”
March Madness Hits Las Vegas
by Michael Yessis | 03.16.06 | 12:43 PM ET
I clearly remember March Madness of 1990. It’s the year I won $120 on a three-team parlay (big money in those days) when Duke’s Christian Laettner drained a buzzer-beater versus Connecticut, and I remember having no problem finding a seat at any of the Las Vegas sports books where I watched the NCAA basketball tournament that year. People cared, but not like these days. Now it’s truly March Madness. Round one of the NCAA men’s college basketball championship begins today, and hotels and casinos are guaranteed to be slammed. And not just for today. For three consecutive weekends.
The Life of a Billionaire Traveler
by Michael Yessis | 03.15.06 | 12:23 PM ET
Oslo, Tokyo and the other places that topped the recent list of most expensive cities list hardly make a dent in the budgets of these private-jet flying, American Express Centurion card-wielding, $25 room service hamburger-ordering travelers. Forbes has an inside look at what it’s like to travel like a billionaire.
Interview with Karl Taro Greenfeld
by Jim Benning | 03.15.06 | 12:53 AM ET
The author of “China Syndrome: The True Story of the 21st Century’s First Great Epidemic” fields questions from Rolf Potts. Among the highlights is his recollection of freelancing travel stories, along with another writer friend, to high-paying Asian in-flight in the early 1990s: “We systematically wrote our way through all the different quaint topics: tea ceremony, Japanese slippers, Thai kickboxing, Sumo wrestling, all the cliches—and tons of little travel stories, but we were bad: we would sometimes write travel articles about places we had never been—and then just crank the stuff out. It was like vocational training for magazine hacks.”
Rolf Potts in New Orleans: A Visit to the Lower Ninth Ward
by Michael Yessis | 03.14.06 | 12:46 PM ET
Crass as it might seem, Potts writes in his latest Yahoo! column, “disaster tourism” is a time-honored travel tradition. “Thomas Cook started taking British travelers on tours of American Civil War battlefields in 1865; a couple years later, Mark Twain and his cohorts famously toured the war-torn city of Sevastopol (where Twain chided his travel companions for carrying off armfuls of shrapnel as souvenirs),” Potts writes. And a lot of travelers are now heading to the Lower Ninth Ward, the district in New Orleans that took the brunt of the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina last year.
James Joyce’s Trieste
by Jim Benning | 03.14.06 | 12:12 PM ET
There’s more out there in the travel world than a trip to Dublin for serious James Joyce fans. The peripatetic writer spent 11 years drinking and writing in Trieste, the port city in northeast Italy. The Boston Globe featured a travel story Sunday about Joyce sites there. It turns out, from a writing standpoint, that Trieste was good to Joyce. He wrote “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” there, most of “Dubliners,” and he even began “Ulysses” in the city.
Lessons from the Road: “Pipe Down”
by Jim Benning | 03.13.06 | 2:35 PM ET
Among those things the San Francisco Chronicle’s John Flinn has learned in more than 25 years of travel: “Pipe down. Americans tend to talk louder than other people.”
Thomas Swick Takes the Train to Orlando
by Jim Benning | 03.13.06 | 2:28 PM ET
How was it? “I looked like a contented man,” he writes in Sunday’s South Florida Sun-Sentinel, “but inside I was raging.”
Bullfighting School: ¿Quién es Más Macho?
by Jim Benning | 03.13.06 | 12:50 PM ET
I don’t talk about this much because, frankly, it just intimidates people, as it should. But back in 1998, when I was but a young magazine freelancer with a dog-eared copy of Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” on my bookshelf, I enrolled in bullfighting school. The California Academy of Tauromaquia in San Diego, to be specific. That’s me in the photos. It was for a story for Men’s Fitness magazine.
I studied the art of bullfighting for several weeks, learning the ins and outs of cape-handling, among other essentials. For homework, I studied episodes of the TV show “When Animals Attack.” And then, wearing the traditional white shirt and cap of a bullfighting student, I stepped into a stone bullring in Mexico under a hot desert sun (actually, it was rather cool, but “hot” sounds more unforgiving; stick with me here), and went mano a mano with a snarling, charging 400-pound heifer. I graduated with honors.
Before any of you send angry e-mails: Not only did I not harm the animal, but at the time, I was a vegetarian who wouldn’t go within 10 feet of a Big Mac, so send your notes elsewhere. But I digress. I bring this up now because Gadling just pointed out a recent New York Times story in which the writer attended the same bullfighting school and faced a 300-pound heifer.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: Three hundred pounds? That’s it?
Exactly. That’s the first thought that ran through my mind.
Back in the day, if you wanted to prove yourself in the ring and deliver a meaty story to your editors, you made sure you faced at least 350 pounds of lumbering beef. Know what I’m saying? And honestly, if you were an editor worth your salt, you wouldn’t print a bullfighting story by a writer who faced anything close to 300 pounds. At the New York Times, you’re just giving more ammunition to those in Red America who claim the liberal media elite are out of touch. Don’t you editors know your heifers? Get back in touch. We need you. No bull. Okay, a little bull.
As for the California Academy of Tauromaquia, it offers an excellent bullfighting education, and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in learning the basics. And really, shouldn’t we all know at least the basics? No? Okay.
“The Amazing Race” Host Phil Keoghan: We Show Another Side of the World
by Jim Benning | 03.13.06 | 11:15 AM ET
Interesting little piece on Phil Keoghan, host of TV’s “The Amazing Race,” in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. In a brief interview with the New Zealand native, he was asked about the perspective American viewers get of foreign countries from watching the show. The interviewer noted that “The Amazing Race” offers “an up-close look at the people and their customs.”
Remembering “Japanland” and Other Books
by Jim Benning | 03.13.06 | 9:30 AM ET
The New York Public Library’s list of 25 Books to Remember from 2005 included “Japanland: A Year in Search of Wa,” which we reviewed and also made our 2005 list. Also making the library’s list was “Carnivorous Nights: On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger.”
Hokusai Exhibition Generates Wave of Enthusiasm
by Jim Benning | 03.12.06 | 4:20 PM ET
An exhibition of the work of Japanese woodblock print artist Hokusai attracted more than 9,000 visitors a day in Tokyo last year, the highest numbers for any museum exhibition since The Art Newspaper began tracking such data a decade ago, the paper reports. A Los Angeles Times article on the high visitor counts—which careful readers will observe carries a far inferior pun-headline to our own; “Hokusai Makes a Big Splash”? Please—points out that Hokusai fans in the U.S. can see some of his works at the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., until May 14.
Jack Kerouac on a U.S. Stamp?
by Michael Yessis | 03.12.06 | 1:50 PM ET
Today, on what would be the On the Road author’s 88th 84th birthday*, the Boston Globe’s Douglas Belkin examines the “13-year crusade to honor Kerouac” by several fans. The main supporter, Belkin writes, is Dean Contover, who says he played a game of pool with Kerouac in 1968 and has been “reading and rereading” his work ever since.
R.I.P. Bill Cardoso, the Writer Who Gave Us “Gonzo”
by Jim Benning | 03.12.06 | 1:43 PM ET
I’d never heard of journalist Bill Cardoso until I saw his obituary in today’s Los Angeles Times. In 1970, Cardoso congratulated his friend Hunter S. Thompson on an article Thompson had written about the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan’s Monthly magazine. The article was, Cardoso wrote in a note to Thompson, “pure gonzo.” Thompson grabbed the word “like a hungry dog and ran with it,” remarked his friend, artist Ralph Steadman.
