Travel Blog
Report: Passenger on Virgin Atlantic Flight Had Ebola Virus
by Michael Yessis | 05.21.06 | 4:41 PM ET
The Mirror reports that a 38-year-old passenger on a flight from Johannesburg to London suffered a “violent fit” and subsequently died from the deadly Ebola virus. “Virgin Atlantic cabin crew who came into contact with the woman have been told to monitor their health,” writes Stephen Moyes. “One said: ‘We are now terrified what we may have caught.’”
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Yahoo! BuzzMontserrat: It’s “Against FAA Regulations to Fly Through Volcanic Ash”
by Jim Benning | 05.21.06 | 3:06 PM ET
Gadling’s Karen Walrond had a wild flight near the Caribbean island of Montserrat yesterday. Her flight from Miami to Trinidad was diverted because, as she saw from the window, the deadly Soufriere Hills volcano has been shooting ash nearly 60,000 feet high.
No. 12: “The Songlines” by Bruce Chatwin
by Jim Benning | 05.21.06 | 2:19 AM 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: 1987
Territory covered: Australia
Early on in The Songlines, British-born Bruce Chatwin recalls his childhood as one of “fantastic homelessness.” His most treasured possession was a conch shell his father brought back from the West Indies that he called Mona, which he held to his ear to listen for crashing waves. Perhaps this accounts for the peripatetic life Chatwin would go on to lead, and his journey to explore the traditionally semi-nomadic Australian Aborigines and their “Songlines”—creation myths that “tell of the legendary totemic beings who had wandered over the continent in the Dreamtime, singing out the name of everything that crossed their path…and so singing the world into existence.” With its sharp dialogue and philosophical digressions, Chatwin’s evocative account reads almost like a novel—some people he included in the book, in fact, accused him of playing fast and loose with the facts, writing more fiction than fact. Chatwin is among the most enigmatic of modern travel writers, and one of the few to be recalled in a biography. He died of AIDS-related causes in 1989 at the age of 48. “The Songlines” endures as a travel-lit classic from a writer whose life ended all too soon.
Forget Hollywood. How About Nollywood?
by Jim Benning | 05.20.06 | 12:34 PM ET
What’s Nollywood? As World Hum books editor Frank Bures reports in today’s Los Angeles Times, it’s Nigeria’s thriving film industry, “which, in terms of sheer numbers of movies made, has grown bigger than either Hollywood or Bollywood—with estimates of 500 to 1,500 new films being shot each year.” Bures was recently in Nigeria, and his vivid story takes readers inside Lagos video shops and explores how the low-budget films are made.
Interview with Jen Leo
by Jim Benning | 05.19.06 | 2:41 PM ET
Travelers’ Tales editor extraordinaire (and friend of World Hum) Jen Leo fields questions about travel, editing and writing at eMarginalia.com. “I’m a romantic,” she says, “but I’ve never held any romantic ideals about writing.” A wise approach, Jen. How many perfectly good lives have been ruined by romantic notions about writing and the writing life? I shudder to consider the numbers.
The Historical Rise in Chinese Tourists
by Jim Benning | 05.19.06 | 1:41 PM ET
The New York Times reported on the phenomenon earlier this week: “For the first time in history, large numbers of Chinese are leaving their country as tourists, resulting in an unparalleled explosion in Chinese travel. If current projections are met, the global tourism industry will be undergoing a crash course in everything Chinese to accommodate the needs of what promises to be the greatest wave of international travelers ever.” The story notes Lonely Planet’s foray into Chinese-language guidebooks beginning next month: “The initial titles cover Germany, Britain, Europe and Australia, with guides covering the United States, Canada and Southeast Asia due soon afterward.” It’ll be interesting to see how all this develops. I was in China a few years ago. My most enduring recollection of Chinese bus tourists traveling within their own country was the great risk I saw several of them take leaping onto a tiny rock in the midst of a rushing river in order to pose, sullen-faced, for photographs. I couldn’t imagine most Americans willing to take that leap. And they seemed to thinking nothing of it. Granted, these might have been particularly daring Chinese travelers, and one always has to be careful making generalizations, but let’s just say that if the tourist Olympics are held any time soon, my money is on the Chinese.
The New Latin American Sensibility
by Jim Benning | 05.19.06 | 1:30 PM ET
The ever provocative Richard Rodriguez wrote an eloquent essay in today’s Los Angeles Times about all the immigration fuss these days, and about the changing character of the United States. Among the highlights: “A new Latin American sensibility is being born - here, in the U.S.! One of the things I’ve seen in the huge pro-immigrant demonstrations is not simply families walking together—the son walking with the father, the mother with her babies—but also Colombians walking alongside Mexicans, walking alongside Dominicans, walking alongside Guatemalans. These people are no longer members of their ethnic or national groups; they’re marching as some new nation of the ‘Hispanic’ world. That is quite revolutionary.”
No. 13: “Travels with Charley” by John Steinbeck
by Michael Yessis | 05.19.06 | 11:52 AM 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: 1962
Territory covered: The United States
Some readers may question the inclusion of John Steinbeck’s best-known work of nonfiction, Travels with Charley, in our list of the top travel books. It is, after all, about a man driving across the United States in a camper named after Don Quixote’s horse in the company of a poodle named Charley. On the face of it, that doesn’t sound like a work to be taken seriously. But “Travels with Charley” is no Marley & Me. The dog, for the most part, remains in the background, and the Salinas, California-bred Steinbeck trains his Nobel Prize-winning eye—he was awarded the Literature Prize the same year “Charley” was released—on what he believed to be a decaying America. Beginning in Long Island, New York, Steinbeck rolls to the west and, eventually, into the south, sticking to backroads and reflecting on life, politics and the places and people he meets along the way. In lesser hands, such a book could turn into a rambling mess. But Steinbeck, one of America’s most treasured writers, holds it together. The result is a vivid snapshot of “this monster land” between two of its most significant and tragic events, World War II and the Vietnam War, as well as an engaging meditation on the power of travel.
No. 14: “Riding to the Tigris” by Freya Stark
by Frank Bures | 05.18.06 | 12:17 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: Turkey
More than halfway through her 100 years on earth, Freya Stark, the “poet of travel,” headed alone on horseback across the Turkish plateaus to the Tigris River. By that time she had been traveling for decades, mostly in the Middle East, where she had learned Arabic as well as French, Latin, German, Italian and Persian. For her Turkish travels, she threw in Turkish. Stark always stayed in places long enough to write with an insider’s knowledge of a culture. Stark believed in the power of travel and of its capacity to open minds. She once wrote that, “Only with long experience and the opening of his wares on many beaches where his language is not spoken, will the merchant come to know the worth of what he carries.” Stark, who thought the world was divided into two kinds of people, the settled and the nomad, and who climbed Annapurna at 86, was fearless in her traveling. Early on, she abandoned the restrictions of her era for her love of the horizon, which she called “the eternal invitation to the spirit of man.” And while the collection, “Journey’s Echo,” might be a better introduction to her overall work, Riding to the Tigris is one of her finest and most reflective books.
Kurt Andersen on Denmark’s “Touristic Outliers”
by Michael Yessis | 05.18.06 | 12:05 PM ET
Legendary magazine editor and Turn of the Century author Kurt Andersen has a piece in the May issue of Travel + Leisure on Denmark. It’s a journey into the cultural fringes of a place popularly thought of as “sensible, reasonable, healthy, tidy, virtuous, nice.”
No. 15: “Europe, Europe” by Hans Magnus Enzensberger
by Frank Bures | 05.17.06 | 5:50 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: 1989
Territory covered: Sweden, Italy, Hungary, Portugal, Poland, Spain, Germany, Holland, Finland, Romania
Once upon a time, Europe was fascinating. There was much more to the continent than the endless pension and immigration debates we hear so much about today. In Europe, Europe: Forays into a Continent, Hans Magnus Enzensberger captured some of that old fascinating place. His book is filled with the rich, complicated, maddening, exhilarating patchwork of cultures that have mixed and clashed on the continent for thousands of years. Visiting just before the fall of communism, Enzensberger was concerned with politics, but mainly as a window into culture. He explored and skewered national character without reverting to stereotypes. In fact, he investigated stereotypes, turned them inside out, and made them at once amusing and insightful. Enzensberger has a gift for this, and for identifying minutiae that make even the most boring country in the world (Sweden) riveting. “Europe, Europe” is one of the few books written about the continent before the fall of communism that remains as relevant, vibrant and hilarious as when it was first published. What’s more, it’s one of the best travel books written about Europe in any era.
What Do Audiences Think of the Cruise-Ship-Disaster Movie ‘Poseidon’?
by Jim Benning | 05.17.06 | 11:54 AM ET
“Total concept rejection”—that’s the phrase used in an internal marketing memo from Warner Bros., according to FishbowlLA. “It’s an amusing turn of phrase, and thus far, the best one we’ve seen to describe what’s going on with the film,” the site reports. Wow. That sounds like a marketing disaster of, uh, Titanic proportions.
Talking Immigration Reform on NPR
by Jim Benning | 05.16.06 | 6:09 PM ET
If you caught it, that was World Hum contributor (and my better half) Leslie Berestein discussing immigration-related issues on NPR’s Talk of the Nation today.
The Latest in Perceptive Travel
by Jim Benning | 05.16.06 | 11:29 AM ET
The new travel site has published its third edition, and it’s looking good. Included are pieces by Ayun Halliday and Susan Griffith, and a few book and music reviews, too. Check them all out here.
No. 16: “City of Djinns” by William Dalrymple
by Terry Ward | 05.16.06 | 10:26 AM 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: 1993
Territory covered: India
An intrepid Scotsman who undertook the adventures chronicled in his first book, “In Xanadu,” at the tender age of 22, William Dalrymple spent a year in Delhi to research City of Djinns. He and his wife, Olivia, set themselves up in a small flat near the Sufi village of Nizamuddin. The common characters who enter their lives—from an opinionated Sikh taxi driver to their frugal and frenetic landlord—are as carefully revealed as the eunuchs and dervishes Dalrymple meets. All prove inextricable from the city’s diverse fabric. The djinns—“like us in all things, but fashioned from fire,” spirits invisible to the naked eye and only seen during times of fasting and prayer—seem as elusive as the richly layered city itself in the end. Dalrymple’s informative historical narrative, carrying the reader from Delhi’s Muslim and Hindu roots to partition, never becomes dull or droning. It’s one man’s impression of one of the planet’s most fascinating cities. For those who love travel for travel’s sake and travel writing for the vicarious ride it can deliver, “City of Djinns” is a classic.
