Travel Blog
Of Spilled Beer and Lederhosen: Recalling Oktoberfest
by Jim Benning | 12.04.06 | 7:46 AM ET
So October is but a distant memory. That doesn’t mean the annual bacchanal in Munich cannot still be celebrated. Thomas Swick of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel does just that in Sunday’s paper: “Remember this. The vast hall. The great din. The spilled beer. The smoky haze. The saccharine music. The pretzel vendors. The workhorse waitresses. The buttery smell of roasted chickens. The vendors of silly hats. The bodies squeezed onto benches that disappear into the distance and suggest a boarding school cafeteria of colossal scope and questionable fare. The strange feeling, as you drink engulfed by a human sea, of escape, of having departed the world of work, responsibility, sobriety.”
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Yahoo! BuzzThe World Hum Travel Zeitgeist: Great Wall, Good Grief!
by Michael Yessis | 12.01.06 | 8:50 AM ET
Is the world falling apart? Travelers this week seem concerned that it is, as crumbling attractions in China, England and Cambodia have grabbed our attention. Don’t worry. A man in India has some duct tape, and if he can fix a plane with it, surely he could be handy with it elsewhere. Here’s your Zeitgeist.
Most Viewed Weblog Post
World Hum (this week)
The Great Wall, Siem Reap, Stonehenge Getting Too Much Love
Most Blogged Travel Story
New York Times (current)
Saving the Great Wall From Being Loved to Death
Most E-Mailed Travel Story
USA Today (current)
Ski Europe: The Best of the Alps
Most Popular Page Tagged Travel
Del.icio.us (current)
Paris by Night
* A slow-loading but spectacular panorama of the City of Light.
No. 1 World Music Album
iTunes (current)
Loreena McKennitt’s An Ancient Muse
Most Dugg “Travel” Story
Digg (current)
Why Americans Should Never Be Allowed To Travel
* A collection of ridiculous things travel agents have heard from travelers. How ridiculous? This ridiculous: “I had someone ask for an aisle seats so that his or her hair wouldn’t get messed up by being near the window.”
Most Popular Travel Podcast
PodcastAlley (November)
808Talk: Hawaii’s Premier Podcast
New York Times Selects ‘The Places in Between’ as Top-10 Book of 2006
by Ben Keene | 12.01.06 | 7:34 AM ET
Deeming it suitable company for “the masterpieces of the travel genre,” the New York Times chose Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between as one of its Ten Best Books of 2006 this week. In his review in the Times this summer, World Hum contributor Tom Bissell praised Stewart’s comic timing, sense of character, as well as the effort made to empathize with the men he meets along his trek, and then concludes by extracting a few pieces of valuable advice from the narrative: “If you are forced to lie about being a Muslim, claim you’re from Indonesia, a Muslim nation few non-Indonesian Muslims know much about. Open land undefiled by sheep droppings has most likely been mined. If you’re taking your donkey to high altitudes, slice open its nostrils to allow greater oxygen flow. Don’t carry detailed maps, since they tend to suggest 007 affinities. If, finally, you’re determined to do something as recklessly stupid as walk across a war zone, your surest bet to quash all the inevitable criticism is to write a flat-out masterpiece.” Here’s hoping other end-of-the year lists include a few of the other examples of excellent travel writing published in the last twelve months.
Related on World Hum:
* ‘Naked Tourist,’ ‘The Places in Between’ in the New York Times
* ‘It Would Be a Pity to be Killed, Of Course’
Rachael Ray to Feed Space Travelers
by Michael Yessis | 12.01.06 | 7:22 AM ET
Perky, polarizing multimedia mogul, Food Network personality and travel show host Rachael Ray will cook Thai chicken and two other meals for the astronauts on the next voyage of the space shuttle Discovery, which is set to launch Dec. 7. They’re the first meals from a food celebrity to fly on the shuttle, USA Today reports. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station ate Emeril Lagasse’s jambalaya and mashed potatoes with bacon last August.
World Hum’s Most Read: November 2006
by Michael Yessis | 12.01.06 | 7:12 AM ET
Our 10 most popular stories posted last month:
1) USA Today’s Seven New Wonders of the World
2) The Art of the Deal: Peter Wortsman Bargains for Goods in Marrakesh, Morocco
3) ‘This is Lagos’: George Packer in Nigeria’s Megacity
4) “The Odyssey”: The Sir Ian McKellen Audio Version
5) Seven New Wonders of the World Fever: Catch It
6) The Rise of the Procreation Vacation (Complete with Sea Moss!)
7) Mexico 2006: ‘The Year of Traveling Cautiously’
8) Surfing U.S.A.: Australian Duo Getting Stoked in All 50 States
9) A Dreaded Norovirus Strikes Again
10) The Critics: ‘Walt Disney’ by Neil Gabler
Tourism Official Insists ‘It’s Not Whatever Goes’ in Brazil
by Jim Benning | 12.01.06 | 6:43 AM ET
‘Micronations’: Interviews with the Authors
by Michael Yessis | 11.30.06 | 8:23 AM ET
Lonely Planet’s recent book about micronations begs several questions, such as: Are micronations better when they’re founded on comedic or political principles? Also: Is creating your own nation a better alternative to armed revolution? The authors of Micronations answer these and other questions in several interviews they’ve given this month. Co-authors John Ryan, George Dunford and Simon Sellars spoke with Andres Vaccari at Sleepy Brain; Ryan spoke with Alex Chadwick of NPR’s Day to Day and Rolf Potts at Yahoo! Travel; and Sellars talked to Geoff Manaugh at BLDGBLOG.
Related on World Hum:
* Inside the World’s “Micronations”
Plane Magic
by Michael Yessis | 11.30.06 | 7:43 AM ET
The creator of this amazing image of airplanes taking off is apparently still a mystery to awestruck flickr users.
Airlines to Screen “Beat the Drum” in Support of World AIDS Day
by Michael Yessis | 11.30.06 | 7:41 AM ET
American, Delta, United, British Airways and 30 other airlines will set aside their usual in-flight entertainment on more than 40,000 flights Friday to show the movie Beat the Drum. The movie depicts the impact of AIDS on African children, and, according to news reports, the screenings are expected to raise $300,000 for African charities.
‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ Author’s ‘Last’ Interview
by Jim Benning | 11.29.06 | 4:23 PM ET
The reclusive Robert Pirsig, author of classic philosophy-travel tome Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, recently gave what he said was his final interview. Tim Adams’s compelling story in the Guardian, based on the interview, covers some tragic ground, from Pirsig’s struggle with depression to the death of his son. “When the book came out, in 1974, edited down from 800,000 words, and having been turned down by 121 publishers, it seemed immediately to catch the need of the time,” Adams writes. “George Steiner in the New Yorker likened it to Moby Dick. Robert Redford tried to buy the film rights (Pirsig refused). It has since taken on a life of its own, and though parts feel dated, its quest for meaning still seems urgent. For Pirsig, however, it has become a tragic book in some ways.”
Radiation Detected on Two British Airways Planes*
by Jim Benning | 11.29.06 | 2:26 PM ET
Yikes. From the Guardian Unlimited: “British Airways passengers were being sought tonight after traces of radiation were found on two aircraft as part of the investigation into the death of a Russian former spy. The airline said very low levels of radiation were found as part of the investigation into the death last Thursday of Alexander Litvinenko, whose body had traces of polonium 210, a lethal radioactive substance.” British Airways officials believe “the risk to public health is low.”
* Add: AP reports that officials “drew up plans to contact thousands of airplane passengers”; three planes have been grounded.
To Russia, With Actors
by Michael Yessis | 11.29.06 | 8:48 AM ET
Martha Plimpton, who plays Varenka Bakunin in The Coast of Utopia, prepared for her latest role by traveling with her fellow actors to Russia. Moscow and St. Petersburg, to be precise. “Rather than dive headlong into the icy waters of ‘Voyage,’ ‘Shipwreck’ and ‘Salvage,’ the three plays about revolutionary thinkers from 19th-century Russia which make up Tom Stoppard’s epic ... four of us decided it might be wise—not to mention unspeakably cool—to go to Mother Russia herself.” Plimpton joins the growing list of celebrity travel writers and recounts her week-long experience in New York’s Daily News. “Nothing is ‘easy’ in Russia,” she writes. “You don’t just ‘get a taxi’ at the airport, for example. You don’t just go ‘grocery shopping.’ But it’s through these seemingly irrelevant inconveniences one gets a feel for the place and for the culture shaping our characters.”
‘It’s Not Easy Being a Comic on the Airport Security Line’
by Michael Yessis | 11.29.06 | 7:46 AM ET
R.I.P. Jesús Blancornelas
by Jim Benning | 11.28.06 | 2:51 PM ET
The Tijuana journalist was fearless, and for all the right reasons. The New York Times and San Diego Union-Tribune remember him.
Searching for ‘Random Weirdness’ on Mexico’s Southern Border Highway
by Jim Benning | 11.28.06 | 1:56 PM ET
We always enjoy Ben Brazil’s stories, and his piece in Sunday’s Washington Post about an ambling trip through the southern Mexican state of Chiapas didn’t disappoint. He and his wife traveled the 262-mile Carretera Fronteriza del Sur, a relatively new two-lane road which runs along the border between Chiapas and Guatemala. They visited the Maya ruins of Palenque, but that was only the beginning. “If you just want to see the highlights, scads of tour operators in Palenque and San Cristobal de las Casas—Chiapas’s main tourist hubs—sell reasonably priced package tours,” he writes. “But we wanted to see the whole highway on an unscripted journey open to chance encounters and random weirdness. As such, we opted to travel on public transportation and eschew reservations, following an itinerary so vague that it verged on impressionist art.”
