Travel Blog
Switzerland Invades Liechtenstein
by Michael Yessis | 03.05.07 | 7:57 AM ET
And chaos, well, didn’t ensue. Apparently this wasn’t the first time the Swiss army has accidentally crossed into Liechtenstein during a training mission. “It has happened before,” Liechtenstein government spokeswoman Gerlinde Manz-Christ told ABC News. “Nobody really realized it.” The Guardian notes the 170 or so Swiss soldiers were carrying rifles with no ammunition on their mission last Thursday, though they did have their “obligatory Swiss army knives.”
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Yahoo! BuzzRory Stewart on Afghanistan: ‘The Problem is That We Act on the Basis of Our Own Lies’
by Michael Yessis | 03.05.07 | 7:36 AM ET
Rory Stewart, whose book about walking across Afghanistan, The Places in Between, was hailed as one of the best travel books of 2006 by the New York Times and Entertainment Weekly, began a stint as a guest columnist for the Times this weekend. His first column, which, unfortunately, resides in the TimesSelect pay-only section, addresses what he sees as the dangers of the international community’s rhetoric about Afghanistan. “Afghans, like Americans, do not want to be abducted and tortured. They want a say in who governs them, and they want to feed their families,” he writes, “But reducing their needs to broad concepts like ‘human rights,’ ‘democracy’ and ‘development’ is unhelpful.”
‘Can’t We All Just Get Along—Like Tourists?’
by Jim Benning | 03.02.07 | 5:46 PM ET
Thomas Swick has observed an infectious camaraderie among travelers at tourist sites. “People of various faiths and nationalities pose for pictures while others, with a few found words, kindly offer assistance,” he wrote recently. “Smiles are exchanged, along with looks of shared wonder. Added to the feeling of awe is a sense of oneness. And then you get another remarkable sight: The tourist as example. The tourist as ideal.”
Visiting Bob Marley’s Jamaica and ‘the Government Yard in Trench Town’
by Jim Benning | 03.02.07 | 4:05 PM ET
Trench Town, the tough Kingston neighborhood made famous in Bob Marley’s No Woman, No Cry, got some love from the New York Times today. Tens of thousands of visitors are expected in the Caribbean during the next two months for the Cricket World Cup, and Marley’s old neighborhood is one place that could see an increase in visitors. “In Trench Town, where street gangs battle over turf and where people live in shacks about the size of the garages at the glorious homes in the hills, expectations for the cricket tournament are high,” the Times reports. “Community leaders will have tour guides at the ready to take visitors around a neighborhood they say has a proud past.”
July 7, 2007: The Magic Date
by Jim Benning | 03.02.07 | 3:56 PM ET
Travel Writers Update
by Jim Benning | 03.02.07 | 3:19 PM ET
We interviewed travel editor Don George in January about his departure from Lonely Planet and the future of travel. George’s latest venture, he recently announced, is Don’s Place, which he describes as a “a multi-faceted blog sponsored by an enlightened association of ten first-class adventure travel companies called the Adventure Collection.” Meanwhile, Jen Leo—Written Road blogger, editor of several Travelers’ Tales books and also the subject of a World Hum interview—recently began writing the Daily Deal Blog at the revamped Los Angeles Times travel site. In the makeover, the paper killed its Postcards from Paris blog.
The World Hum Travel Zeitgeist: The Traveler Beware Edition
by Michael Yessis | 03.02.07 | 8:01 AM ET
They’re turning people back at the Canadian border, shrinking the payout for blackjack in Las Vegas and seeing through your clothes in Phoenix. Those stories—plus journeys to Alaska, Puerto Rico, Switzerland, Sweden and Mulholland Drive—are intriguing travelers this week. Here’s the Zeitgeist.
Most Popular Travel Story
Netscape (this week)
Going to Canada? Check Your Past
Most Viewed Travel Story
Los Angeles Times (current)
Las Vegas: A Winner’s Guide to Blackjack
* Casino are starting to pay only 6-5 for blackjack. What’s next? No doubling down?
Most Read Weblog Post
World Hum (this week)
Full-Body X-Ray Security Scanner Debuts
* The first passengers asked to submit to a full-body X-ray, apparently, “didn’t bat an eyelash.”
Most E-Mailed Travel Story
USA Today (current)
Escapes Under $500: Go to Puerto Rico’s Second City
* That would be Ponce.
Most E-Mailed Travel Story
New York Times (current)
The Cold Show in Fairbanks, Alaska
Most Read Travel Story
World Hum (this week)
Stephanie Elizondo Griest: ‘100 Places Every Woman Should Go’
Most Popular Page Tagged Travel
Del.icio.us (recent)
Wayfaring
Best Waterfront City
Project for Public Spaces
Stockholm
Travel Story of the Year
Solas Awards (2007)
Fishing With Larry by Tom Joseph
* Here are all the prize winners.
Most Competitive Country
World Economic Forum’s Travel and Tourism Competitive Index
Switzerland
* What is this? “The index is not a ‘beauty contest’, or a statement about the attractiveness of a country. On the contrary, the index measures the factors that make it attractive to develop the travel and tourism industry of individual countries,” said Jennifer Blanke, Senior Economist of the World Economic Forum.
Eel River, California
by Ben Keene | 03.02.07 | 7:07 AM ET
Coordinates: 40 38 N 124 20 W
Thanks to cell phones, digital cameras, Internet cafes and budget airlines, destinations that might have once been little known or sufficiently removed from the beaten path are revealing their secrets to determined drifters with greater frequency.
Bill Bryson: ‘When I Check into a Hotel Almost Never Do They Know Me’
by Jim Benning | 03.01.07 | 4:47 PM ET
Bill Bryson is arguably one of America’s most popular travel writers, yet few people recognize his name, he says, including hotel clerks. “You think they’d be a little more nervous to have a travel writer staying there,” he remarks in a profile in the New Zealand Herald. “I’ve always tried to go incognito, and it’s really not that hard to do.”
R.I.P. Hal Rothman, Sin City Scholar
by Jim Benning | 03.01.07 | 2:37 PM ET
You don’t have to be an academic to appreciate the work of Las Vegas scholar and writer Hal Rothman, who died Sunday at the age of 48. In books like Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the Twenty-First Century and Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth Century American West, he explored tourism’s powerful impact on Las Vegas and the Western U.S. “He didn’t dismiss it (Las Vegas),” said one UNLV professor in an obituary in today’s Los Angeles Times. “He understood that some people loved it, others hated it, and you had to take Las Vegas seriously as a subject for study.”
Lebanon: The Story Behind the World Press Photo of the Year
by Michael Yessis | 03.01.07 | 2:10 PM ET
The judges of the World Press Photo of the Year said Spencer Platt’s image—it captures a group of young, fashionable Lebanese women driving through a devastated Beirut neighborhood soon after Israeli bombings struck last summer—“has the complexity and contradiction of real life, amidst chaos. This photograph makes you look beyond the obvious.” Apparently many viewers haven’t been looking hard enough.
World Hum’s Most Read: February 2007
by Michael Yessis | 03.01.07 | 8:50 AM ET
Our 10 most popular stories posted last month:
1) JetBlue Apologizes for Stranding Passengers on Planes at JFK
2) JetBlue ‘Hostage Crisis’: The Blog
3) Armrest Seating, Anyone?
4) Supersonic Passenger Jets Poised for a Comeback
5) Paulina Porizkova Goes ‘Dancing With the Stars’
6) Stephanie Elizondo Griest: ‘100 Places Every Woman Should Go’
7) Mexican Migrant Theme Park: Homage or Crass Attraction?
8) Stephen Colbert’s ‘Investigation’ into a Caribbean Resort
9) ‘Significant Steps’ Taken in Quest for Morocco-Spain Tunnel
10) Are Cheap Airline Flights a Blessing or a Horror? Or Both?
Best Ever Opening Sentence of a Story Involving a Motor Home?
by Michael Yessis | 03.01.07 | 7:42 AM ET
From a piece by Layla Bohm of the Lodi News-Sentinel: “A jazz musician was injured Friday after jumping from a burning motor home driven by a one-time roller skating stripper from Lodi.” Via Dave Barry.
Gary Snyder: ‘Our Western Thoreau’
by Jim Benning | 02.28.07 | 3:35 PM ET
Gary Snyder might be best known as the inspiration for the character Japhy Ryder in Jack Kerouac’s novel “The Dharma Bums.” But Snyder is also a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and a fine essayist who has devoted much of his life to exploring ecology and Eastern philosophy. While he’s not exactly a travel writer, he has evoked the Sierra Nevada mountain range in his various works about as well as anyone. Which is why we note a new book from him, Back on the Fire: Essays.
Fidel Castro Dials Up Hugo Chavez’s Radio Show
by Jim Benning | 02.28.07 | 2:24 PM ET
Why don’t we in the U.S. get radio shows like this? Now that’s entertainment.
