Travel Blog
Pico Iyer on “The Naked Tourist”
by Jim Benning | 06.05.06 | 12:08 PM ET
We noted that Lawrence Osborne’s The Naked Tourist: In Search of Adventure and Beauty in the Age of the Airport Mall earned high marks in Sunday’s New York Times. On the other coast, in the L.A. Times, Pico Iyer also had praise for the book. “Osborne’s premise, in short, is to chronicle a journey through the virtual, simulacrum world that has emerged so quickly that increasingly we can barely tell (or long to tell) one site from another,” Iyer writes. “He decides to sample Planet Tourism, as he calls it, and experience ‘whateverness’ by passing gradually along ‘the Asian highway’ through a series of ever more ersatz places until he arrives at the unadorned treehouses of west Papua, an area kept remote by civil wars and cannibalism. Along the way, he tells us that French playwright Antonin Artaud based his ‘theater of cruelty’ partly upon the intensities of Balinese dance, that boys in Thailand enjoy the legal right to wear skirts to school, and that in Papua pidgin, the pope is known as ‘Jesus Number One Man.’” Iyer observes that Osborne’s writing sometimes echoes Paul Theroux’s: “Osborne is an Englishman of the oldish school, scrupulously crotchety, generally disenchanted and aware enough of worldly realities not to make a fuss about them.”
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Yahoo! BuzzNew York Times Picks Summer Travel Reads
by Michael Yessis | 06.05.06 | 5:56 AM ET
The paper of record printed its annual summer roundup of travel books today, reviewing five recent releases: There and Then: The Travel Writing of James Salter, Frances Mayes’ A Year in the World: Journeys of a Passionate Traveller, Michael Benanav’s Men of Salt: Crossing the Sahara on the Caravan of White Gold, J. Maarten Troost’s Getting Stoned with the Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu and Lawrence Osborne’s The Naked Tourist: In Search of Adventure and Beauty in the Age of the Airport Mall. Reviewer Max Watman reserved most of his praise for Troost’s “Savages” and Osborne’s “Naked,” calling the former “excellent copy” and the latter “funny, intelligent, insightful and honest.”
A Journey through “Transfatamerica”
by Michael Yessis | 06.05.06 | 4:53 AM ET
What happens when a big city restaurant critic drives across the country sustaining himself by eating only fast food? I missed Frank Bruni’s story about his trek when it first ran in the New York Times recently, but the International Herald Tribune has it up now and it’s a great read. “My sample period ultimately spanned 9 days, 15 states, 3,650 miles and 42 visits to 35 different restaurants (I hit some more than once),” he writes. “It bequeathed crucial knowledge and invaluable lessons.”
Longyearbyen, Norway
by Ben Keene | 06.02.06 | 12:35 PM ET
Catching Up with Rolf
by Jim Benning | 06.02.06 | 11:58 AM ET
Travel writer Rolf Potts has been a busy guy lately. Not only has he been contributing to our list of the top 30 travel books of all time, and writing our Ask Rolf column, but he has been turning out columns for Yahoo and interviewing travel writers for his own site, too. Whew. For his Yahoo columns, he recently talked with “River Town” and “Oracle Bones” author Peter Hessler and meditated on our affection for souvenirs. Over at RolfPotts.com, he just posted an interview with Boston Globe travel writer Tom Haines, whose stories we often link to on World Hum. Remarked Haines: “I believe good travel writing, as opposed to foreign reporting, or essay writing, or memoir, or whatever, comes with recreating the experience of place. That is, try to present a complete picture: factual, imagistic, emotional. Try to capture, in other words, the multiple layers of reality of a place. Economics and politics, religion and history are all critical. But so is the way people walk, or talk, or act in a group, for example. So is how the light changes by late afternoon, or the feel of a hot wind from the west.”
Have Bong, Will Travel
by Jim Benning | 06.02.06 | 11:45 AM ET
High Times profiles top spots for the perfect “stoner vacation.” Making the list: Ibiza (hosting the first annual World Marijuana FIlm Festival); Negril, Jamaica (“Pot Paradise”); and, naturally, Amsterdam (“Not only is it home to arguably the best marijuana in the world, but it’s also the freest in its attitudes toward smoking pot”).
Mt. Everest: A Climber’s Controversial Decision
by Jim Benning | 06.01.06 | 12:49 PM ET
The Los Angeles Times today recounts an expedition last month in which climbers left a man to die near the summit. Everest icon Sir Edmund Hillary condemned the incident, saying, “Human life is far more important than just getting to the top of a mountain.”
The Rise of “Celebrity Colonialism”
by Jim Benning | 06.01.06 | 7:21 AM ET
What is it? According to a piece by Brendan O’Neill in Spiked, it’s what happens when celebrities like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie descend on a tiny nation like Namibia and start calling the shots. “Their daughter - Shiloh Nouvel - was born on Saturday night,” he writes. “As they awaited the birth they reportedly surrounded themselves with their own personal security detail and armed Namibian police. According to the Independent there was even a no-fly zone, enforced by the Namibian government, over the luxurious Burning Shore beach resort where Pitt and Jolie were holed up. Apparently, the stars also got to dictate which reporters could and could not enter the country.”
Patrick Leigh Fermor: ‘An Englishman Abroad’
by Jim Benning | 05.31.06 | 10:53 PM ET
A few weeks ago, we declared (with the help of Thomas Swick) “A Time of Gifts” by Patrick Leigh Fermor one of the greatest travel books of all time. Leigh Fermor, now in his 90s, is not as well known to many American readers as other great travel writers of our time. So it was a pleasant surprise to find, in the May 22 issue of the New Yorker, a lengthy profile of Leigh Fermor by Anthony Lane. The story describes a writer who has lived one of the most compelling lives of the 20th century—so fascinating, in fact, that Lane insists it makes the rest of our lives “laughably provincial in their scope.”
No. 1: “Arabian Sands” by Wilfred Thesiger
by Frank Bures | 05.31.06 | 12:14 PM ET
To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1959
Territory covered: Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Arabian Penninsula (now Yemen, Oman, Saudia Arabia, United Arab Emirates)
“Pimp my Ride”? How about “Pimp my Vespa”?
by Michael Yessis | 05.31.06 | 11:40 AM ET
Apparently European audiences can’t get enough of the MTV show Pimp my Ride. “For reasons perhaps understandable only to residents of the Continent, the show has been one of MTV’s biggest crossover successes,” Robert Ito writes in the New York Times. So the network has spun off versions for various countries—“Pimp My Fahrrad” in Germany, for instance, is a low-budget bicycle repair show—and will debut “Pimp my Ride International,” a “pan-European” show, this fall. Fat Joe will be one of the hosts of “International,” which should make for some interesting TV.
What’s in a Place Name?
by Jim Benning | 05.30.06 | 11:09 PM ET
A lot, especially if that name happens to be “Whorehouse Meadow,” “Squaw Tit” or, say, “Cripple Brush Creek.” Syracuse University geographer Mark Monmonier takes up the subject of controversial place names in a new book, From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame. In the book, Monmonier writes that “how a nation manipulates and preserves its place and feature names says a lot about its respect for history, minority rights and indigenous culture.” Critic Michael Kenney reviewed the book in today’s Boston Globe and writes that it’s “an entertaining and enlightening excursion.” We’re intrigued.
Related on World Hum: Goodbye “Calcutta,” Hello “Kolkata.” What’s in a Name?
No. 2: “The Road to Oxiana” by Robert Byron
by Tom Bissell | 05.30.06 | 7:51 PM ET
To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1937
Territory covered: Persia (Iran) and Afghanistan
‘Wanderlust: On the Road with American Road Movies’
by Michael Yessis | 05.29.06 | 7:30 PM ET
Tonight at 9 p.m ET/PT the Independent Film Channel debuts Wanderlust: On the Road with American Road Movies, a 90-minute documentary that, according to the promo materials, explores the questions: “Does the road still promise us an open sense of freedom and liberation as it did in so many great films? Or, has the adventure of the American road ultimately been reduced to the stuff of Hollywood lore?” As someone who earlier this month spent eight days driving America’s interstates and backroads relocating from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., I know the adventure of a road trip is very much alive.
No. 3: “The Great Railway Bazaar” by Paul Theroux
by Terry Ward | 05.29.06 | 12:58 PM ET
To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1975
Territory covered: India, Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia and Japan
