Travel Blog
Kate Hahn
by Jim Benning | 07.13.06 | 10:41 PM ET
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Yahoo! BuzzPam Mandel
by Jim Benning | 07.13.06 | 10:40 PM ET
Liz Sinclair
by Jim Benning | 07.13.06 | 10:40 PM ET
Michael Shapiro
by Jim Benning | 07.13.06 | 10:38 PM ET
Ben Keene
by Jim Benning | 07.13.06 | 10:38 PM ET
Angelina Jolie to Star in Film About Daniel Pearl
by Jim Benning | 07.13.06 | 2:05 PM ET
On the Autobahn, a New Mercedes and the Bhagavad-Gita
by Jim Benning | 07.13.06 | 1:10 PM ET
Los Angeles Times Pulitzer-winning car columnist Dan Neil recently took a new Mercedes-Benz CLK 63 for a spin on the Autobahn near Stuttgart, maxing out at the car’s 155 mph limit. Even if you’re not a big car buff—I’m certainly not—Neil’s writing is so spirited and compelling, it’s hard not to get drawn into his transcendent Autobahn experience. “In the words of the Bhagavad-Gita,” he writes, “I am become death, destroyer of bugs.”
Adventures in Airworld
by Michael Yessis | 07.13.06 | 8:15 AM ET
I consider myself a longtime citizen of “Airworld,” the space beyond the security barriers and X-ray machines in airports worldwide, a place that Walter Kirn, in his novel Up in the Air, calls “a nation within a nation with its own language, architecture, mood and even its own currency.” (That currency, of course, is frequent flier miles.) My father worked for TWA, so I grew up spending a lot of time in and around airports. Some of my strongest early travel memories, in fact, take place in Airworld. A six-hour layover at O’Hare, roaming the crowded terminals fruitlessly searching for a Pac-Man machine. The seemingly endless moving sidewalks at Heathrow. Spending the night huddled with a gaggle of fellow stranded travelers in Eero Saarinen’s swooping TWA Terminal at JFK, feeding quarters into a coin-op television and watching “Quadropehnia.”
Granta 94: “On the Road Again. Where Travel Writing Went Next.”
by Jim Benning | 07.13.06 | 7:43 AM ET
The latest issue of Granta, On the Road Again, focuses on travel, and on Sunday, the Guardian published a thoughtful piece about the issue and Granta’s proud travel-writing history. Writer Robert McCrum notes that former Granta editor Bill Buford “charmed and bamboozled” contributors such as Paul Theroux, Redmond O’Hanlon and Bruce Chatwin for stories. “Buford celebrated travel writing as a cocktail of reportage, storytelling and ‘a narrative eloquence’ that placed it ‘somewhere between fiction and fact,’” McCrum writes. “Now, in more sober times, new editor Ian Jack, who locates the genre somewhere more trustworthy and responsible, has come up with an absorbing edition subtitled ‘Where Travel Writing Went Next.’”
Gross’s Isaac Newton Moment: Picking Apples in Turkey
by Michael Yessis | 07.13.06 | 7:23 AM ET
Matt Gross, who has been zipping frantically around the world for the last two months writing the Frugal Travel column for the New York Times, slowed down recently to spend four days on an organic apple farm in Beypinar, Turkey. “I couldn’t stand to see another sight,” he writes in this week’s dispatch for the Times. “I had to do something—anything, I had to feel useful.” It turned out to be a great idea. The story begins as a breath-catching trip to a farm, where he gains “muddy palms, scratched calves and an unironic farmer’s tan,” but soon becomes something else: a sweet tale about friendship and brotherhood.
Want to Be a Travel Writer?
by Jim Benning | 07.12.06 | 12:15 PM ET
Jen Leo has 10 tips to consider. My favorite? Number four: “Read Read Read.” Based on at least some of the submissions we get at World Hum alone, it seems there are writers who would rather skip this step. Dude, total turn-off.
Provolone, Toblerone and the Art of Bad Writing
by Michael Yessis | 07.12.06 | 1:34 AM ET
The Bulwer-Lytton contest celebrates intentionally horrible writing. Specifically, entrants are challenged to compose “the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.” Today, the 2006 winners were announced and, oh my, did they ever produce some horrible prose. But horrible in a highly-entertaining way. Jim Guigli took home the grand prize with a 63-word doozy about a hot dame and a super burrito. My favorite selections, though, were those that tasted of travel writing.
“Napoleon Dynamite” Town Demonstrates Tourism Skills
by Michael Yessis | 07.11.06 | 11:53 AM ET
Preston, Idaho is cashing in on its Napoleon Dynamite connection. Much of the movie that unleashed the “Vote for Pedro” T-shirt upon the world was filmed in the little town on the Utah border, and it has capitalized with a “Napoleon Dynamite” festival, city-sponsored merchandise and on-location tourism.
Tahir Shah: Books that Inspire Wanderlust
by Michael Yessis | 07.11.06 | 10:56 AM ET
The author of The Caliph’s House: A Year in Casablanca and other tomes wrote about six books that inspire wanderlust in Sunday’s Book Post section of the Washington Post. Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft and Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines made the cut, as did the No. 1 book in World Hum’s recent countdown of top travel books, Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger. Shah writes in his lead that he once met Thesiger in Kenya. It’s a great anecdote.
Sarah Schmelling
by Jim Benning | 07.11.06 | 1:37 AM ET
