Travel Blog
Jeffrey Tayler on World Hum’s Top 30 Travel Books
by Rolf Potts | 07.25.06 | 9:45 AM ET
Two months ago, World Hum’s Top 30 Travel Books rundown put Jeffrey Tayler’s 2000 tome Facing the Congo in the number 28 slot. Tayler is a regular visitor to my summer writing classes at the Paris American Academy, so I recently had the chance to ask him what he thought of the World Hum Top 30, and which books he might have included.
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Yahoo! BuzzThomas Swick on Travel Writing: Meeting People
by Tom Swick | 07.24.06 | 6:18 PM ET
South Florida Sun-Sentinel travel editor Thomas Swick recently contributed a chapter about how to write compelling travel stories to the book “Travel Writing” (Leromi Publishing). The chapter is packed with great tips, and we’ll be publishing passages from it in the coming days.
Meeting people: It can sometimes be difficult meeting people—depending on the place (holiday resorts where you don’t speak the language are especially tough) and on your own degree of comfort in approaching strangers. But once you do, it’s easy to talk to them because you’re so well-informed; you’ve read their hometown paper, you’ve watched the films of their great director, you’re curious about the Nobel prospects of their feminist novelist.
In Cuenca, Ecuador, a “Spare, Unhurried, Bohemian Life”
by Jim Benning | 07.24.06 | 1:02 PM ET
Thomas Swick wrote about a visit to the bohemian city of Cuenca, Ecuador in Sunday’s South Florida Sun-Sentinel. It’s a terrific story packed with people and conversation—further evidence that Swick practices what he preaches. “After only a few days in Quito I had heard so many good things about Cuenca that I walked to the AeroGal office and bought a ticket,” he writes. “From the stories I envisioned an Ecuadorian version of other places I loved—Guanajuato, Mexico; Coimbra, Portugal: Hue, Vietnam—graceful university towns with strong cultural roots that, in their small, condensed forms, are a kind of bottled essence of national character.”
The Pursuit of Free Travel: Inside a Year-Long Quest to Win a Trip
by Michael Yessis | 07.24.06 | 8:09 AM ET
Can Microjets Save Us From Being Alone?
by Michael Yessis | 07.24.06 | 7:45 AM ET
Walter Kirn has some serious issues with modern air travel. “A passenger on a great commercial airline is like the subject of a tyrant who rules through humiliation and conflict,” he writes in an interesting essay called Flying Alone in Sunday’s New York Times magazine. “Resources are kept perpetually scarce, while the procedures for obtaining them (achieving ‘platinum status,’ for example) are kept infernally confusing. Even the architecture of airliners seems designed to encourage sullen withdrawal. The seats not only don’t face each other; they recline in the fashion of falling dominos, creating a chain reaction of resentment every time someone up front decides to stretch. And the windows aren’t windows. They’re demoralizing peepholes, reminding the flier that there’s a world out there from which he is, for the moment, wholly cut off.” Kirn makes his points in the context of arguing that modern air travel has become socially isolating and that “a sense of debilitating entrapment” pervades. I don’t completely agree with his characterization—the thrill of travel still outweighs my sense of isolation and entrapment—but I think he makes some interesting points.
Thomas Pynchon: Travel Writer?
by Michael Yessis | 07.24.06 | 6:59 AM ET
“Against the Day,” the first Thomas Pynchon book since Mason & Dixon in 1997, will be released in December, according to the AP and other press reports. It’s a novel, but from a description allegedly written by Pynchon himself that appears on Amazon.com, it sounds like it could be a hell of a travel book. From the promo blurb: “Spanning the period between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.” And he covers all that ground in a mere 992 pages.
Taco Travel is Big News
by Michael Yessis | 07.22.06 | 3:17 PM ET
There’s chaos in the Middle East, heat still grips much of the U.S. and Europe, and Tiger Woods leads the British Open. And at 4:30 p.m ET today the most e-mailed story at the New York Times is ... Chasing the Perfect Taco Up the California Coast. Never underestimate the power of the taco.
Tallinn, Estonia
by Ben Keene | 07.21.06 | 7:43 PM ET
Coordinates: 59 22 N 24 48 E
Population: 401,502 (2005 est.)
Novel as it may seem, some places in the world are actually attempting to make their governments more efficient and their societies more open. Across the Gulf of Finland, not quite fifty miles from Helsinki, the Estonian cabinet conducts its paperless meetings entirely online in the capital city of Tallinn. Nearly four times larger than the country’s next biggest city, Tallinn is the center of an electronic society as well as an e-government. Internet access is considered a constitutional right and throughout the city blue traffic signs with the @ symbol direct citizens to hundreds of free Public Internet Access Points (PIAPs). Every school, along with 82 percent of home computers, is connected to the web, supporting the results of a recent survey showing that over half of the population uses the Internet nationwide.
—.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) is the editor of the Oxford Atlas of the World.
Berlin’s DDR Museum: ‘There Must Be a Microphone Around Here Someplace’
by Michael Yessis | 07.21.06 | 7:50 AM ET
A museum chronicling life in the former East Germany recently opened in Berlin, and Richard Bernstein of the New York Times writes that it captures what it was like to live in the German Democratic Republic, aka the D.D.R., under the thumb of the Stasi. “By the time you leave the museum, you’ve been both a perpetrator and a victim,” museum founder and director Peter Kenzelmann told Bernstein. It’s not all about oppression and murder and eavesdropping. “Other exhibitions are on the East German mania for nude bathing, a freedom that was considerably reduced by new regulations after reunification,” writes Kenzelmann. “There are displays on East German rock bands, ordinary consumer products and on the press, with this barbed comment: ‘Despite 39 newspapers, two television channels and four radio stations, there was only one opinion.’”
Neil Armstrong and the Promise of Space Travel
by Michael Yessis | 07.20.06 | 9:32 PM ET
Thirty-seven years ago today commander Neil Armstrong, command module pilot Michael Collins and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin landed the Apollo 11 spacecraft on the moon. And a mere two days ago, Virgin Galactic announced that designer Philippe Starck, actress Victoria Principal and movie director Bryan Singer are among the 200 people who have bought tickets for what may become the world’s first commercial space flight for tourists in 2008. I don’t know what I find more amazing. The fact that we’ve actually been to the moon, or that in about about two years it may be possible for you or me to travel to space with the woman who played Pam Ewing on the soap opera “Dallas.” Damn. We sure live in extraordinary times.
Anthony Bourdain Evacuated from Beirut
by Jim Benning | 07.20.06 | 5:11 PM ET
Whew. Reuters caught up with the host of the Travel Channel’s Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations on a U.S. Navy ship, where he was reclining on an army cot among hundreds of other evacuees. As we noted earlier this week, the globe-trotting chef was in Beirut with a crew to shoot an episode of his show when the violence began. Bourdain left a very different city than the one he found when he arrived just days ago. “It was paradise, sort of the western dream of the way we’d all like the Middle East to be—enlightened, progressive, multi-cultural, and multi-religious,” he told Reuters. No longer. “I was in love for two days,” he said, “and had my heart broken on the third.” He added: “I feel this awful sense of regret that we were never able to show Beirut as it was. To see everyone’s hopes die and watch the country dismantled piece by piece was very painful. I’m very angry and very frustrated.”
Why Should You Give Care’?
by Jim Benning | 07.20.06 | 4:51 PM ET
Needless to say, after spotting this sign during my visit to Beijing, I gave tons of care.
Photo by Jim Benning.
Thomas Swick on Travel Writing: Venturing Beneath the Surface
by Tom Swick | 07.20.06 | 4:30 PM ET
South Florida Sun-Sentinel travel editor Thomas Swick recently contributed a chapter about how to write compelling travel stories to the book “Travel Writing” (Leromi Publishing). The chapter is packed with great tips, and we’ll be publishing passages from it in the coming days.
Venturing beneath the surface: Having walked and sat you want something a little richer. You’ve observed the surface, and now you want to venture beneath it; you want to participate in the life of the place. You call your contacts. You search for a character or an incident or even a calamity that can become your subject. The worst trips, it is famously said, make the best stories, and, in a kind of proof of that, Vintage published in 1991 an excellent anthology of travel writing titled Bad Trips.
The Crown Princess, The Norovirus and Titanic
by Michael Yessis | 07.20.06 | 11:12 AM ET
It’s been a tough week for cruisers. Almost two days after the crowded Crown Princess rolled 15-degrees to its left while sailing off the coast of Florida, the injury total has reached more than 200. All who were thrown out of swimming pools and onto railings were expected to recover, according to the Miami Herald. We’re also seeing the day-after rush of on-board video and reaction from passengers. Miami’s CBS affiliate has some good home video of the post-tilt aftermath. Kudos to the local anchor who kept a straight face when he ended the segment with the revelation that the scheduled movie aboard the Crown Princess the night of the accident was Titanic.
Thomas Swick on Travel Writing: Arrival and First Impressions
by Tom Swick | 07.19.06 | 12:10 PM ET
South Florida Sun-Sentinel travel editor Thomas Swick recently contributed a chapter about how to write compelling travel stories to the book “Travel Writing” (Leromi Publishing). The chapter is packed with great tips, and we’ll be publishing passages from it in the coming days.
Arrival and first impressions: Travel writers, when thought of at all, are seen as charmed figures, always moving, never stymied in front of an immigration officer (or computer screen). Travel writers, if we reflect at all, see ourselves as aimless, inconsequential, and nevertheless under-appreciated beings.
