Travel Blog
Robinson: “I’m Over 55, and I’m Willing to Pay Good Money to Sleep on the Floor of a Villager’s Hut”
by Michael Yessis | 11.28.06 | 8:22 AM ET
Take note, travel industry: Joy Robinson may be getting older but she doesn’t want to take your Caribbean cruise or go on your golf vacation at an upscale resort. She still wants to embark on her “soft adventures in the developing world,” many of which involve open-air plumbing, so don’t count her out just because she’s not in your target demographic. “This is the travel I love, and this is the travel I’ve been pursuing since I was first able to afford it,” Robinson writes in an essay in the Christian Science Monitor.
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Yahoo! BuzzUSA Today Readers Name Grand Canyon ‘8th Wonder’
by Jim Benning | 11.27.06 | 2:49 PM ET
When we last checked in on USA Today, the newspaper was in the midst of counting down the seven new wonders of the world picked by its panelists. The paper had already proclaimed Potala Palace/Jokhang Temple in Tibet, Jerusalem’s Old City, the polar ice caps, Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine Monument and the Internet as new wonders. Since then it has added the final two: the Maya pyramids in Central America and Serengetti Plain, Tanzania. But it seemed that seven wonders weren’t enough. And so it was that USA Today’s readers were asked to vote for an 8th wonder. On Friday, the paper announced that they chose the Grand Canyon.
Coming to a Theater Near You (Sigh): ‘Turistas’
by Jim Benning | 11.27.06 | 1:59 PM ET
Yes, it’s time for yet another movie about travelers getting in over their heads in a foreign country, reassuring the roughly 80 percent of Americans who don’t hold passports that they’re better off limiting their travels to short trips between home and the cineplex anyway, because, hey, it’s scary out there. ‘Turistas,’ which opens in U.S. theaters Dec. 1 and stars Josh Duhamel, apparently tells the story of a group of tourists—excuse me, turistas—who get lost in the Brazilian jungle and suffer a series of terrifying and even horrifying calamities. It’s the first U.S. film to be shot entirely in Brazil. In today’s Los Angeles Times, director John Stockwell, who also directed “Blue Crush,” said he was inspired to take on the film project after a harrowing experience on a surf trip to Peru.
The Great Wall, Siem Reap, Stonehenge Getting Too Much Love
by Jim Benning | 11.27.06 | 9:14 AM ET
They’re not the only places in the world being overrun with tourists, of course, but their tourism woes have been highlighted in recent days by the New York Times, Associated Press and Los Angeles Times, respectively. The New York Times on Sunday focused on the Great Wall of China, which is suffering under the weight of an estimated 13 million visitors a year. “[T]he Great Wall is not just crumbling,” writes Jim Yardley. “It is disappearing. Roughly half of the estimated 4,000 miles of the wall built during the Ming Dynasty no longer exists, according to a recent report. It is also regularly being abused.” Among other problems, he writes, last year “the police broke up a huge dance party of Chinese ravers atop the wall a few hours’ drive outside Beijing.”
Hide the California Rolls! Here Comes Japan’s ‘Sushi Police’
by Michael Yessis | 11.27.06 | 9:10 AM ET
Japan has a problem with the proliferation of Japanese restaurants around the world: Too often, Japanese government officials say, they give Japanese food a bad name. “A fast-growing list of gastronomic indignities—from sham sake in Paris to shoddy sashimi in Bangkok—has prompted Japanese authorities to launch a counterattack in defense of this nation’s celebrated food culture,” writes Anthony Faiola in the Washington Post. “With restaurants around the globe describing themselves as Japanese while actually serving food that is Asian fusion, or just plain bad, the government [in Tokyo] announced a plan this month to offer official seals of approval to overseas eateries deemed to be ‘pure Japanese.’”
Aircraft Makers to Public: More Tolerable Planes Are on the Way
by Michael Yessis | 11.27.06 | 7:59 AM ET
I’ll believe it when I see it. And according to a Washington Post story, I should look for more fresh air, more soothing lighting, bigger windows and even onboard showers in 2008. “Veteran fliers have heard such sales pitches before,” Del Quentin Wilber writes. “They’ve been promised amenities such as on-board luxury lounges, gyms and restaurants ... This time, however, rival aircraft manufacturers Boeing and Airbus say they’ve got it right. They’re building jets that don’t give the airlines a choice on many of the amenities, such as bigger windows, that passengers say they want most.”
Three Travel Books: Jason Roberts’s Picks
by Frank Bures | 11.27.06 | 7:23 AM ET
Jason Roberts is the author of A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler. World Hum reviews the book this week, and we asked Roberts for three travel book recommendations. Here’s what he told us:
An Italian Affair by Laura Fraser.
Roberts says: “The definitive book on travel as an act of transformation. After a brief, imploded marriage, Fraser reclaims her freedom and sense of adventure at the same time. The affair (with a mysterious Frenchman) is really just one interlude in a layered, compelling story.”
The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo by Peter Orner.
Roberts says: “One of the most astonishing evocations of place in contemporary fiction. Set in Namibia after the wars of independence from South Africa, Shikongo sees a country at once new and ancient, through the eyes of a volunteer American teacher. Orner is a superb writer, who captures dead-on details in almost poetically-compressed prose, sometimes painting vivid scenes in just a single sentence.”
The Happy Isles of Oceania by Paul Theroux.
Roberts says: “Theroux at his grumpiest, which means at the height of his irascible form. On a book tour to Australia, he brings along a folding boat and paddles himself in and out of numerous milieus and meditations. He’s also floating himself through something of a midlife crisis, making the book perfectly balanced between interior and exterior worlds.”
The World Hum Travel Zeitgeist: Beer, Bryson and the City of Brotherly Love
by Michael Yessis | 11.24.06 | 10:02 AM ET
The Zeitgeist has returned from a two-week hiatus spent mostly in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, and it finds travelers still loving Bill Bryson, still concerned about their airfare prices and wondering whether to order a Heineken, Grolsch or Amstel in Amsterdam. Let’s go.
Most E-Mailed Travel Story
New York Times (current)
36 Hours: Philadelphia
Most Popular Travel Story
Netscape (current)
How do airlines set their ticket prices?
* This Slate “explainer” unravels the mystery.
Most E-Mailed Travel Story
USA Today (current)
U.S. to Require Passports for Nearly All Air Travelers
Best Selling Travel Book
Amazon.com (current)
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir by Bill Bryson
* Two Three Six weeks in a row at the top for Bryson’s memoir of growing up in 1950s Iowa.
Top Travel and Adventure Audiobook
iTunes (current)
A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
* Bryson hits the daily double with his classic about hiking the Appalachian Trail.
Most Popular Page Tagged Travel
Del.icio.us (current)
SideStep
Most Popular Travel Podcast
PodcastAlley (November)
808Talk: Hawaii’s Premier Podcast
Thanksgiving: Here Come the Traffic Snarls, Horror Stories and an Avalanche of Statistics
by Michael Yessis | 11.22.06 | 1:57 PM ET
And holiday travel tips. Lots and lots of tips. It is one of the busiest travel days of the year in the U.S. and the start of a long weekend. We’ll be posting light in the next few days, but we’ll be back strong Monday.
Leiden, Holland
by Ben Keene | 11.22.06 | 1:51 PM ET
Coordinates: 52 9 N 4 30 E
Population: 118,702 (2004 est.)
A symbol as much as it is a supper, the feast of Thanksgiving held in the U.S. the fourth Thursday in November first combined North American foodstuffs with European recipes and cooking methods. Actual evidence of any kind of festival in the fall of 1621 is scant, yet we know that if a meal of mythic proportions did take place at Plimoth Plantation, it would have been prepared by a group of Separatists who had fled religious persecution in England. Before reaching present-day Massachusetts, however, these British transplants spent roughly 10 years in Leiden, Holland—a settlement whose origins can be traced to the Roman Empire. Leiden is also the site of the oldest university in the Netherlands, a school that had already been established by the time the Pilgrims turned up in 1609. Visitors to the City of Refugees today will find two small museums dedicated to the Pilgrims and the brief period they spent among these narrow Dutch canals and alleyways.
—.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) is the editor of the Oxford Atlas of the World.
Mothers Stage “Nurse-In” at Airports Across U.S.
by Michael Yessis | 11.22.06 | 7:58 AM ET
Women throughout the United States yesterday staged a “nurse-in” at more than 30 domestic airports, breastfeeding their babies to express their outrage about a fellow mother, Emily Gillette, being ejected from a Delta Air Lines flight last month for refusing to cover up with a blanket while nursing her daughter. According to news reports, 37 U.S. states have laws protecting a woman’s right to nurse in public, and legislation has been reintroduced to amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protect breast-feeding in public.
The End of the DC-10 Era
by Jim Benning | 11.22.06 | 7:35 AM ET
The last DC-10 making scheduled passenger trips will fly its final trip Jan. 8. “And with that,” USA Today reports, “the era of scheduled passenger service aboard three-engine jumbo jets will close.”
Eleven Great Movie Moments in Airports
by Michael Yessis | 11.21.06 | 8:21 AM ET
Steve Martin’s tirade at a rental car counter in “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” Harry Shearer’s zucchini incident in “This is Spinal Tap” and, of course, the farewell scene in “Casablanca” all make the rundown of great airport movie moments compiled by USA Today’s Barbara De Lollis.
The Critics: Adventures in Going Native
by Michael Yessis | 11.21.06 | 8:09 AM ET
In this week’s Washington Post “Book World,” Kate Fogarty reviews four travel books with a “going native” theme. She praises two: A translation of Corinne Hofmann’s The White Masai and John Taliaferro’s In a Far Country. She writes: “Taliaferro, a former senior editor at Newsweek and author of three earlier books, expertly introduces readers to the forces of nature, religion, culture, business and government at work in the late 1800s.” Daniel Kalder’s Lost Cosmonaut: Confessions of an Anti-Tourist and Eric Talmadge’s Getting Wet: Adventures in the Japanese Bath, according to Fogarty, fall short of the other selections.
Video: Steve Allen Interviews Jack Kerouac
by Michael Yessis | 11.21.06 | 8:07 AM ET
This seven-minute YouTube gem from 1959 features Steve Allen fingering a piano and talking to Jack Kerouac about the beat movement and “On the Road,” and includes the author reading from his text. Via BoingBoing. Click “Continue reading” to see full video.
