Travel Blog
The Best Travel Books of All Time: The World Hum Top 30
by Frank Bures | 05.01.06 | 11:45 PM ET
This month marks World Hum’s five-year anniversary. Whew. Even we can’t believe we’ve made it this far. To celebrate, we asked some of our favorite writers and contributors to help us come up with the top literary travel books of all time—the kind of books that transcend travelogues, that inspire distant wanderings, that change lives. Each day this month, we’ll be counting down our picks, starting with No. 30 tomorrow, and ending with the best travel book of all time on May 31. Look for contributions from yours truly, Thomas Swick, Michael Shapiro, Tom Bissell, Rolf Potts, Terry Ward, Michael Yessis and Jim Benning.
—Frank Bures is the books editor of World Hum.
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Yahoo! BuzzLove in Bangladesh: Wooed by a Policewoman
by Michael Yessis | 05.01.06 | 12:21 PM ET
Most of the women in Bangladesh, a socially-conservative country with an 80 percent Muslim population, only stared at Evan Ratliff during his three weeks there. Shilpa was different. “Shilpa was the first and only Bangladeshi woman who ever flirted with me,” writes Evan Ratliff in a terrific Modern Love piece in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times. Shilpa, a policewoman working during a general strike, asks for his phone number, beginning a series of calls and semi-secret meetings that Ratliff describes in heartbreaking detail.
“United 93” Finds an Audience
by Michael Yessis | 05.01.06 | 10:25 AM ET
It turns out a lot of people are ready to see the tragic events of 9/11 played out on the big screen. United 93, which recounts the last moments on the hijacked flight that crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, finished second at the box office this weekend. “The doggedly fact-based drama grossed $11.6 million in its Friday-Sunday debut, per estimates from the box-office tracking firm Exhibitor Relations,” writes E!Online’s Joal Ryan. “Its per-screen average was even more impressive: $6,462—average-wise, no other major movie played to bigger crowds.”
Jimmy Buffett: Celebrating Changes in Latitudes
by Jim Benning | 04.28.06 | 3:45 PM ET
Last Saturday, on a drizzly Southern California evening, I took in my first Jimmy Buffett concert, joining thousands of rabid Parrotheads festooned with Aloha shirts, shark-fin hats and other tropical-inspired accoutrements. I invested in the requisite margarita. A couple of friends wearing grass skirts greeted me and my wife with offerings of plastic leis. And as Buffett launched into his classics—“Margaritaville,” “Coconut Telegraph,” “Volcano,” and my favorite, his cover of the Crosby, Stills & Nash song evoking a ruminative sailing trip to Papeete, “Southern Cross”—I was transported.
Library Card Tourism Hooks California Teen
by Michael Yessis | 04.28.06 | 2:23 PM ET
Every summer for the past six years, Cory Peterson and his mother embark on a road trip to visit libraries around the country and sign up for library cards. So far the 13-year-old library lover has accumulated 1,678 cards, and stands to gain more when he makes a planned trek through Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Montana, Idaho and Nebraska this July. “I hope to grow it into the greatest collection of library cards in the world!” Peterson writes on his Web site, which features scans of all his cards. As with Bookstore Tourism, where I found out about Cory, this is a concept I can get behind.
Blogger Sued for Posts Criticizing Maine’s Department of Tourism
by Michael Yessis | 04.28.06 | 1:54 PM ET
Lance Dutson, who posts about Maine tourism at the Maine Web Report, has been sued for defaming the Maine Department of Tourism and violating its advertising agency’s copyright, according to a story in the Boston Globe. “He has written commentaries ridiculing the state’s tourism efforts and, last month, he posted a ‘rough draft’ advertisement pulled from Maine’s Department of Economic and Community Development website showing a collage of iconic images of the Maine seacoast, woodlands, and ski slopes, with a dummy phone number that turned out to connect to a line promoting a phone sex service,” the Globe’s Robert Weisman writes. “The agency had inadvertently placed the phone number on the draft advertisement for a presentation made to state tourism officials.”
Travel Photo Caption Contest
by Jim Benning | 04.28.06 | 1:17 PM ET
Inspired by The New Yorker’s cartoon caption contests, we thought we’d give our own contest a try. I took this shot in China. Got a caption idea? Click on “comments” below and let us know!
Thousand Islands
by Ben Keene | 04.28.06 | 12:56 PM ET
Coordinates: 42 20 N 76 0 W
Official island count: 1,864
Food often reminds us of cities visited, journeys taken or even homes awaiting our return. But some connections between places and edibles can be harder to establish than others. Thousand Island dressing, for instance, takes its name from a group of well over 1,000 small landmasses stretching for approximately 50 miles along the U.S.-Canada border in the St. Lawrence River. Credited to Sophie LaLonde, a resident of Clayton, New York who served the now familiar dressing to visiting fishermen, Thousand Island made its world debut at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. George C. Boldt, the owner of the Waldorf, frequently vacationed in the area around Alexandria Bay, and invested millions in the construction of a massive castle on Heart Island that would never be completed.
—.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) is the editor of the Oxford Atlas of the World.
Kili’s Woes, Our Woes
by Jim Benning | 04.28.06 | 12:47 AM ET
Salon reports on the melting snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro, which are expected to disappear completely in 15 years. According to the site, “It’s another unbearable loss on an overheating planet.”
Anthony Lane in Europe: “What Country, Friends, is This?”
by Michael Yessis | 04.26.06 | 1:19 PM ET
He’s got a pretty good day job as a film critic for The New Yorker, but in the magazine’s current Journeys issue, Anthony Lane focuses his considerable talents on a story about traveling via Europe’s low-cost airlines. As usual, the London-based Lane is hilarious. “[T]he best thing to happen to Great Britain in the past decade is the increasing profusion of ways to get the hell out of the place,” he writes. And so he does, recapping a few of his excursions on the Continent, including a great opening sequence about flying to Vitoria-Gasteiz, a place he’d never heard of and had no idea where it was located. He did know, though, that he could pay for things with euros.
California Woman Plans to Turn a 747 Into a House
by Michael Yessis | 04.26.06 | 12:16 PM ET
Francie Rehwald has hired architect David Hertz to build her an environmentally friendly and “feminine” house out of an old 747. “The wings will be the main house,” according to an Agence France-Presse report. “The cockpit will become a meditation temple, the jet’s trademark hump will become a loft and the remaining scrap will be used for more buildings.” A computer rendering of the house is pictured here.
Jack Kerouac’s Cape Cod House Goes for $300,000
by Michael Yessis | 04.26.06 | 7:51 AM ET
The house in which Jack Kerouac married his third wife was bought by Ida Perry and her mother, Gladysann Lewis, who, according to the AP, weren’t attracted by its connection to the On the Road author. Perry said she wasn’t even familiar with the legendary Beat Generation author. The 1,344-square-foot, single-story house is on Bristol Avenue in Hyannis, Massachusetts.
“Life Is a Non-Stop Cavalcade of Fascination”
by Jim Benning | 04.25.06 | 3:56 PM ET
So says occasional travel writer and cheery raconteur Simon Winchester in the hourlong PBS documentary, Seeking 1906 with Simon Winchester. The production focuses on the making of Winchester’s latest tome, A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906. It aired on my local PBS station in Southern California last night; it’s a terrific documentary, following Winchester as he conducts research in San Francisco; buys maps from the U.S. Geological Survey with the relish of a kid in a candy store; admits he’s never actually experienced an earthquake; and comes up with several titles for his book, none of which make the final cut.
Business Traveler on Chinese Brothel: I Had to “Damn Near Fight My Way Out”
by Jim Benning | 04.25.06 | 1:41 PM ET
No, this is not from the pages of the Onion. It’s from an AP story about an American business traveler in China who wound up flying into the wrong city—Taiyuan, a place with 1.5 million residents—and seemed to nearly fear for his life. We’re not sure what’s more shocking: the business traveler’s level of anxiety over a situation backpackers experience more or less daily, or the AP’s breathless account, which doesn’t begin to question the traveler’s response. (How does any city with 1.5 million people qualify as “remote”?)
Plane Maker Pitches Standing-Room Space for Passengers*
by Michael Yessis | 04.25.06 | 11:43 AM ET
If the graphic accompanying Christopher Elliott’s story in today’s New York Times is accurate, the standing-room “seats” look a bit like something used to transport Hannibal Lecter. Writes Elliott: “Passengers in the standing section would be propped against a padded backboard, held in place with a harness, according to experts who have seen a proposal.”
Update: Airbus, the plane maker in question, has issued a statement denying any plans for standing-room “seats.” According to a CNNMoney.com report, a spokeswoman called the New York Times report “crap.”
