Travel Blog
Nicholas Kristof’s Modest Proposal: Students Should Earn Credits for Travel
by Michael Yessis | 03.28.06 | 1:30 PM ET
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof sure believes in the power of travel. On the heels of his contest to find a university student to travel with him comes a column suggesting that travel should play a central role in education at American colleges. “Universities should grant a semester’s credit to any incoming freshman who has taken a gap year to travel around the world,” he wrote last week. “In the longer term, universities should move to a three-year academic program, and require all students to live abroad for a fourth year. In that year, each student would ideally live for three months in each of four continents: Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe.”
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Yahoo! BuzzA Visit to Montenegro
by Jim Benning | 03.28.06 | 1:19 PM ET
Friends didn’t know what to think when David Farley told them he was heading to Montenegro. “Back home, I received mostly blank stares when I announced I was headed to Montenegro for my vacation, stares that evolved into looks of concern when I said that the country is in a union with Serbia, as the last remnants of what used to be called Yugoslavia,” he writes in Sunday’s Washington Post. “But when I mentioned that Montenegro’s beaches make up the southern section of the Dalmatian Coast and that, in fact, the country is already being dubbed the ‘next Croatia,’ I had a list of people who suddenly wanted to come with me.’” Farley wrote the World Hum story The Pasta Nazi.
Francis Fukuyama vs. Bernard Henri-Lévy: Battling Over Las Vegas
by Michael Yessis | 03.28.06 | 12:29 PM ET
Travel Writers’ Festival in Minneapolis
by Jim Benning | 03.28.06 | 9:47 AM ET
From May 5 to 7, The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis will host a travel writing festival featuring workshops and discussions led by a dozen veteran writers and travelers. Among the participants are several writers familiar to World Hum readers, among them: Jason Wilson, series editor of Houghton Mifflin’s “The Best American Travel Writing” and a World Hum contributor, who will deliver the keynote address; World Hum books editor Frank Bures, who will lead discussions Saturday and Sunday entitled “See the World and Write About It”; and Catherine Watson, author of “Roads Less Traveled” and the former travel editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Watson wrote Incident in a Spanish Church and was recently the subject of a World Hum interview. A complete festival schedule can be found here.
Venezuela: Travelers ‘Want to See for Themselves What’s Really Going On’
by Jim Benning | 03.27.06 | 11:42 PM ET
Washington Residents Just Saying No to “SayWA”
by Michael Yessis | 03.27.06 | 12:26 PM ET
Writers of tourism slogans are having a bad month. This time it’s the folks in Washington who are getting grief for their SayWA campaign. It’s not that some people find it offensive, like Australia’s latest slogan. It’s that people simply don’t get it. “Thirty-five years ago I smoked dope and probably could have come up with something like that,” Darrell Bryan, general manager of Victoria Clipper, the largest tour operator in the Northwest, told the Seattle Times. “To me, it’s better to have no slogan than to come up with something like that. There’s too much scratching the head about ‘What does that mean?’”
‘Snakes on a Plane’: A Brief Hisssstory
by Michael Yessis | 03.27.06 | 12:18 PM ET
As Jim wrote last week, few travel-themed films capture the spirit of travel as we see it here at World Hum. “Snakes on a Plane” likely will not be one of those movies. But if you haven’t heard about it yet, prepare yourself. You probably will not be able to avoid it for the next few months. “Snakes,” which stars Samuel L. Jackson as an FBI agent dealing with, um, snakes on a plane, has already become one of the oddest entertainment stories of the year, spawning, among other things, Web sites, song-writing contests, groan-inducing headlines (see above), dialogue suggestions (“Ever play Roulette? Always bet on Black Mamba”), an NPR segment and a page translating the title into various languages, including Esperanto (“Serpentoj en Aeroplano”). All this, and the movie doesn’t even open until Aug. 18.
“Americano”: A Backpacker Travel Movie Worth Seeing?
by Jim Benning | 03.24.06 | 11:42 AM ET
Too few travel-themed movies capture the spirit of travel as we see it at World Hum. “Before Sunrise” did. So, too, did “The Motorcycle Diaries.” This new film in limited release, Americano, sounds like it has potential. It focuses on a recent college graduate played by Joshua Jackson who is contemplating his future as his trip to Europe winds down during Pamplona’s San Fermin festival. Interestingly, actors in the movie were filmed as they participated in the actual Running of the Bulls. In a three-paragraph review in today’s Los Angeles Times, critic Kevin Crust praises the film: “Writer-director Kevin Noland effectively utilizes his fine young cast and the natural beauty and rich culture of northern Spain in amiably posing timeless questions of youth.”
The Australia Tourism Ad Controversy: ‘Has the World Gone Mad?’
by Michael Yessis | 03.24.06 | 11:04 AM ET
Now that the Canadians have joined the Brits in objecting to Tourism Australia’s “Where the bloody hell are you?” campaign, and the U.S.-based American Family Association is poised to make its concerns known, Australians are asking themselves, “Is the ‘bloody hell’ ad campaign a growing embarrassment for Australia? Or is it the greatest marketing ploy of all time?” The comments are flowing on both sides at the Sydney Morning Herald news blog.
Guernica and “Picasso’s War”
by Jim Benning | 03.24.06 | 9:35 AM ET
Since our contributor Ben Keene featured the town of Guernica as his Place of the Week today, I thought I’d mention a terrific book about the attack on the town and the extraordinary Picasso painting of the same name. It’s Russell Martin’s Picasso’s War: The Destruction of Guernica and the Masterpiece That Changed the World, published in 2003. Martin recalls the Nazis’ attack on the Spanish village, Picasso’s work on the painting, its move to New York’s Museum of Modern Art until the death of Franco, and then its post-Franco return to Spain aboard an Iberia Airlines flight in 1981.
Guernica, Spain
by Ben Keene | 03.24.06 | 9:34 AM ET
Travelers’ Tales “The Best Travel Writing 2006”
by Jim Benning | 03.23.06 | 11:58 PM ET
If you read Bill Belleville’s story A Million Years of Memory about the Galapagos on World Hum, you read some of the very best travel writing of late, according to the editors at Travelers’ Tales. We’re delighted they included the story in their new release, The Best Travel Writing 2006. Launched in 2004, the annual collection aims to “celebrate the world’s best travel writing—from Nobel Prize winners to emerging writers.” This edition features 33 stories, including pieces by Thomas Swick, Phil Cousineau and Pamela Logan.
Bradlee Heading for “The Slot”
by Michael Yessis | 03.23.06 | 1:04 PM ET
We’re not usually in the business of teasing a travel story that hasn’t been written yet, but this looks like it will be a good one. According to Editor and Publisher, Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post editor who stood with Woodward and Bernstein during the Watergate saga, has been commissioned by the New Yorker to write a story about cruising with his son, Quinn, through the South Pacific waters where he fought during World War II.
Elvis, Robert Goulet and a Shot-Out 25-Inch RCA Television
by Michael Yessis | 03.23.06 | 12:36 PM ET
I always thought the stories about Elvis Presley using his guns to shoot holes in televisions were apocryphal. I guess I was wrong. An exhibit featuring “the only surviving television or appliance that Elvis shot out” went on display at Graceland this week. “As the story goes,” the AP’s Woody Baird writes, “entertainer Robert Goulet was performing on TV when Presley blasted the 25-inch RCA that’s part of the exhibit called ‘Elvis After Dark.’”
Chick Lit Around the World
by Michael Yessis | 03.22.06 | 10:30 AM ET
Rachel Donadio has a great piece in the New York Times Sunday Book Review this week chronicling the popularity of the oft-derided genre known as chick lit in countries around the world. It’s taken hold in India and throughout Eastern Europe. In Scandinavia, it’s marked by a “certain existential angst.” In Indonesia, it has inspired a related genre known as “fragrant literature.”
