Travel Blog
Boston Globe Begins Travel Series
by Jim Benning | 09.28.04 | 7:21 PM ET
In an ambitious project, Boston Globe staff writer Tom Haines and photographer Essdras Suarez set out for remote regions of Africa, Asia, the Arctic and South America to capture places and cultures we don’t often hear about. Their four-part series, “Crossing Divides,” began Sunday with an account from South America. The Globe offered a front page introduction to the series. The series itself can be found here.
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Yahoo! BuzzTravel Writers Vs. the Big, Hungry PR Machine: It’s War!
by Jim Benning | 09.27.04 | 7:25 PM ET
We’ve read a lot of critiques of modern travel writing, but none with the overheated rhetoric of Tim McDonald’s recent piece, “Travel Writers Often Turn a Blind Eye to Reality.” “There is a war going on,” he writes. Travel writers are “consorting with the enemy.” McDonald pulls from Thomas Swick’s critique from the Columbia Journalism Review to support a lot of his points, which isn’t surprising. Swick’s is a cogent piece. What is surprising, though, is where McDonald’s article is posted: travelgolf.com.
Note to American Travelers Pretending to Be Canadians: Stop It!
by Michael Yessis | 09.27.04 | 7:22 PM ET
Joseph Cohen writes in Sunday’s Seattle Times that he “could have held a full (and very poorly played) hockey game with all the fake Canadians [he] ran into while traveling in Western Europe.” They were, of course, Americans trying to avoid being outed. Cohen believes pretending to hail from Canada is a silly practice. “The plethora of Canadian flags on American backpacks this summer obviously has roots in current events dealing with Iraq and President George W. Bush,” he writes. “Yet Europeans do not translate their dislike of our president into animosity toward American travelers. You have a better chance of being pickpocketed in Switzerland than accosted for being an American anywhere in Western Europe.”
National Geographic’s Mea Culpa
by Jim Benning | 09.24.04 | 11:15 PM ET
Dan Rather and CBS News aren’t the only media heavyweights apologizing for shoddy journalism these days. In the October issue of National Geographic, Editor-in-Chief Bill Allen apologizes to readers for unwittingly passing off a staged photograph of a tribal elephant hunt in Tanzania as the real thing. According to Allen, the photographer, Gilles Nicolet, posed the photo, which appeared in the July issue, and then lied to editors about it. Readers noticed that elephant tusks in the photo had numbers printed on them. When confronted, Nicolet confessed that the tusks had been borrowed from the Tanzania Department of Wildlife. “I’m still losing sleep over the fact that we failed to uncover the truth before publishing the pictures,” Allen writes in the print edition; (a different explanation is available here). “You have our apology.”
Cat Stevens, Madonna
by Jim Benning | 09.24.04 | 11:13 PM ET
Celebrities continue to make big travel news. Fortunately, our favorite fake news program, The Daily Show, has been covering the issue, helping us put this very important travel information into context and perspective. When the folk singer formerly known as Cat Stevens was sent back to Britain for ridiculous security concerns, Daily Show host Jon Stewart noted that Stevens’ commercial airliner was not only tailed by U.S. fighter planes for security, but also was being followed by a moonshadow, a fact overlooked by most news organizations. Stewart also reported on singer Madonna’s recent visit to Israel, home to three religions and ongoing conflict. “The good news,” Stewart reported, “came this week in the form of the world’s fourth major religion, celebrity, as pop star Madonna stopped by to speak at a conference on Jewish mysticism, and maybe while she’s there, work in a light desecration of holy sites.” Video of the fake news report is available at DailyShow.com.
Reflections From a Globetrotting 9-Year-Old
by Jim Benning | 09.20.04 | 11:22 PM ET
Alice DuBois recently discovered the hardback journal she kept as a 9-year-old touring Italy with her parents. In an eloquent travel essay in Sunday’s New York Times, she reflects on the entries she made during that early trip. One highlight from her visit to the Uffizi: “Italy’s greatest art collection seems to have merited about eight minutes of my attention. The rest of the day’s entry consists of an elaborate and self-satisfied explanation of how I managed to eat a chocolate bar inside the museum without getting caught by the security guard. Every time I read this portion of the journal, I wince with embarrassment. Did I have to be so smug about my lack of interest?”
Branding Liechtenstein
by Jim Benning | 09.20.04 | 11:21 PM ET
Poor Liechtenstein, the tiny country sandwiched between Switzerland and Austria. She is so often ignored, so little understood. But now Liechtenstein is fighting back, a la McDonald’s, with a branding campaign to change her image. International branding firm Wolff Olins has come up with a new logo featuring a “democratic crown,” according to the Los Angeles Times. And there’s more to come. “[Wolff Olins official Henning] Rabe is not specific about what might follow,” the article states. “But he speaks admiringly of how Switzerland, also a small country albeit much bigger than Liechtenstein, has developed an instantly recognizable identity thanks to its distinctive flag, reproduced on a wide range of items, even penknives and pocketbooks.”
Che: The Brand
by Jim Benning | 09.20.04 | 11:19 PM ET
The new Che Guevara-related film “The Motorcycle Diaries” opens this week in U.S. theaters. Marking the occasion in today’s Los Angeles Times, New Yorker writer and Che biographer John Lee Anderson offers a thoughtful reflection on the ubiquitous Che image. Che, he writes, “lives on as a youthful recrimination of the Icarus myth, which is at once a moral tale and a lamentation about the eternal tragedy of the fleeting nature of youth and its doomed idealism.”
Thomas Swick for President
by Jim Benning | 09.17.04 | 11:24 PM ET
That’s right. Forget Bush and Kerry and even Nader. They aren’t talking about improving the lives of ordinary American travelers, or the experiences of visitors to the U.S. They aren’t worried about creating more leg room in coach. And finding a cure for jet lag? They couldn’t care less. They’d rather talk about more “important” issues, like the Vietnam War. But South Florida Sun-Sentinel Travel Editor Thomas Swick is hip to the voting-traveling public’s hopes and fears. In a groundbreaking recent column reprinted in Sunday’s San Diego Union-Tribune, Swick details his course of action if he were to wake up in the Oval Office. Among his solemn vows, he’d lift the ban on travel to Cuba—proof he’s not kowtowing to the Miami Cuban crowd. Also, he writes, he’d “see to it that every foreign visitor to this country, after getting photographed and fingerprinted, is given a Toll House cookie.” Now that’s vision. One tip for Swick: Beware of the latest 527 group, Retired American Airlines Pilots for Truth. They’re a prickly bunch, and we hear they have an anti-Swick commercial in the works. Something about the legitimacy of his “editor of the year” award.
On the Bus with Hong Kong’s ‘Long Hair’
by Jim Benning | 09.15.04 | 11:26 PM ET
Journalist and travel writer Daisann McLane is filing dispatches from Hong Kong this week for Slate. The first article, which appeared yesterday, focuses on Sunday’s legislative council elections and “Long Hair,” a Che-T-shirt-wearing Marxist activist and surprise winner. McLane jumped on his press bus Monday, as soon as she got the invitation. “I used to be a staff writer for Rolling Stone, so I know the first rule of superstar journalism: If you’re invited on the tour bus, you go,” she writes. Today’s dispatch focuses on Hong Kong cuisine. McLane is at work on a memoir about learning Cantonese. If it’s half as engaging as the New York Times story she wrote a year ago about studying the language, it’s sure to be a good read. She was featured in a 2002 World Hum interview.
The First Rule of Visiting Thailand: Do Not Sit on the Buddha’s Head
by Michael Yessis | 09.14.04 | 11:27 PM ET
Thai government officials have had enough of culturally insensitive travelers to their country. To combat the problem, they plan to publish a book on Thai etiquette. A poster for a film called “Hollywood Buddha,” which featured a man sitting on a Buddha statue’s head, triggered the course of action, according to the BBC. “Some officials called for ‘malicious’ foreigners to be banned from Thailand,” the BBC reports. “But a government minister denied reports that it was preparing a blacklist to ban foreigners who had offended Thai culture.”
British Backpackers Slain in Thailand
by Jim Benning | 09.10.04 | 11:30 PM ET
A couple of young British backpackers in Thailand were apparently shot to death Thursday by an off-duty Thai police officer. The shootings followed an argument in the restaurant the officer owns northwest of Bangkok. The Independent has a report. The Bangkok Post has a story that requires registration to access. For those of us who’ve had the pleasure of traveling in Thailand, such violence directed at tourists is hard to imagine.
Blowing For Joy at a Balkans Trumpet Festival
by Jim Benning | 09.10.04 | 12:31 AM ET
Boston Globe Staff Writer Tom Haines filed a thoughtful story this summer about his visit to the Guca trumpet festival in Serbia and Montenegro, where locals were setting aside war memories to have a good time. “I think many years have taken of my generation,” one young man told Haines during the festival. “War was beside me since I have seven. We don’t hate anybody. Bosnia, Kosovo, there is a part our guilt. But we shouldn’t punish all because of one man. We lived in Bosnia, and we had to leave, and my parents, and blah, blah, blah. But who cares?” Wrote Haines: “Who did care, on that night last August, in the cool hill air of the Balkans? Wars had ended. Slobodan Milosevic had long since fallen from power, and the Guca trumpet festival had hit full swing, as it has every year since 1961…”
“Barcelona was Perfect!”
by Jim Benning | 09.09.04 | 11:33 PM ET
That’s the conclusion of pop star turned travel writer Alicia Keys, who is now contributing occasional travel stories to the New York Daily News. “I just love the pen and the paper,” Keys recently told the Associated Press in an article about her new vocation. “I like to document what I’ve seen and what I feel.” Keys recently felt that Barcelona was perfect. Or as she put it in her Daily News article: “Another thing I fell in love with in Barcelona was the constant feeling that everything was absolutely perfect. The sun is blinding and warms you deeply; the water is transparent and shines with the sun’s reflection. The beach has the kind of soft sand that’s so good for running barefoot in. The architecture is grand and historic.” If all that weren’t enough to convince any New York editor that Keys is the ideal writer to chronicle her journeys for the city’s urbane readers, Keys then boldly asserted: “And it’s all there like a playground waiting to be explored.”
Lowell Thomas Awards Announced
by Jim Benning | 09.08.04 | 11:38 PM ET
Winners of the 20th annual Lowell Thomas Awards were announced Tuesday by the Society of American Travel Writers. Travel + Leisure won for best magazine. The Boston Globe’s travel section received top honors in the 500,000-plus circulation category. LonelyPlanet.com won for best Web site, and Rolf Potts’ Virgin Trail: Travels in the Other Central America, which appeared on Slate, won for best Internet travel article. Congrats to the winners.
