We’ve read the big-league critiques and pondered potential stunts at the Hualapai Indians’ horseshoe-shaped glass perch that allows visitors to peer 4,000 feet down into the Grand Canyon. Now comes a personal view in Sierra Magazine from a young writer and environmentalist who visited the site with the hopes of understanding why the Hualapai have invested so much in it. 

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Island-hopping Hawaii visitors now have a new way to get from Oahu to Maui or Kauai besides flying: the Hawaii Superferry Alakai, a giant catamaran that can haul 866 people and 282 cars. But not everyone is overjoyed with the new travel option. Hundreds protested the launch of the Superferry yesterday, including surfers who paddled out into the water, blocking the ferry from entering Lihue harbor in Kauai for more than an hour.

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Talk about a shrinking planet. “On some days,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “almost a third of the air over Los Angeles and San Francisco can be traced directly to Asia.”

First came the hype. Now comes the big-league critical eye. New York Times cultural critic Edward Rothstein shuffled in his yellow surgical booties along the see-through glass of the Grand Canyon Skywalk, and he wasn’t too impressed. Seeing the Canyon from its natural edge, he suggests, transcends any man-made perch.

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We’ve done the math: This week, travelers have professed their interest in the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, India, Venice, Antarctica and hotels with a certain ”je ne sais quoi de geek.” Here’s the Zeitgeist.

Most Popular Page Tagged Travel
Del.icio.us (recent)
Best Geek Hotels in the World
* Yes, that’s an equation-covered bed cover at Boston’s Hotel @ MIT.

Most Viewed Travel Story
Los Angeles Times (current)
Hey, Sin City Top This: Grand Canyon West’s New Skywalk
* Moonwalker Buzz Aldren will take the ceremonial first walk Monday. We still ask: What Would Edward Abbey Think?

Most Viewed Travel Story
Telegraph (current)
Getting It Om In India

Most Read Weblog Post
World Hum (this week)
Stardust Blown to Dust
* Of course there’s video.

Most Blogged Travel Story
New York Times (current)
Making a Pilgrimage to Cathedrals of Commerce
* It’s all about the 19th-century shopping arcades of Paris.

Most E-Mailed Travel Story
USA Today (current)
Miss Manners’ Venice: In a Word, Civilized

Most Popular Travel Story
Netscape (this week)
Antarctica: The Crystal Desert
* More on Antarctica: A Brief and Awkward Tour of the End of the Earth

Best Selling Travel Book
Amazon.com (current)
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert

Most Read Story
World Hum (this week)
Stephanie Elizondo Griest: ‘100 Places Every Woman Should Go’

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Travelers this week looked to Las Vegas, Seville, the Grand Canyon, Tallinn, Riga and Charleson, S.C., and wondered whether to avoid Oslo (too expensive) and Atlanta (too busy). Here’s the Zeitgeist: 

Most Read Weblog Category
World Hum (this week)
Las Vegas

Most Viewed Travel Story
Los Angeles Times (current)
Las Vegas: A Winner’s Guide to Blackjack

World’s Busiest Airport
Airports Council International (2006)
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport
* Chicago’s O’Hare and London’s Heathrow finished second and third respectively.

Most Viewed Travel Story
Telegraph (current)
Seville’s the City for Piety Animals
* This also gets another of our groan-inducing headline of the week awards.

Most E-Mailed Travel Story
New York Times (current)
36 Hours in Charleston, S.C.

Most Read Weblog Post
World Hum (this week)
Switzerland Invades Liechtenstein

Most E-Mailed Travel Story
USA Today (current)
Another Wonder for Grand Canyon?
* As we like to say, what would Edward Abbey think?

Most Popular Travel Story
Netscape (this week)
Wi-Fi Bus Crosses the Border
* It’s “likely the first international cross-border Wi-Fi-enabled bus line.” It connects Tallinn, Estonia and Riga, Latvia.

Most Popular Page Tagged Travel
Del.icio.us (recent)
Schmap

Most Read Story
World Hum (this week)
Stephanie Elizondo Griest: ‘100 Places Every Woman Should Go’

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If you love the oudoors, it’s hard not to love Edward Abbey, author of the classic Utah memoir Desert Solitaire. ("Since you cannot get the desert into a book any more than a fisherman can haul up the sea with his nets,” Abbey memorably wrote in “Solitaire,” “I have tried to create a world of words in which the desert figures more as a medium than as material.") Abbey died in 1989, and now, a publisher has collected 236 letters he wrote over his lifetime, in a collection entitled Postcards from Ed. It was reviewed in Sunday’s New York Times. Writes Jonathan Miles: “If few surprises are embedded in this trim selection of letters, edited by Abbey’s pal David Petersen, it’s because Abbey, on the page, was always Abbey: free ranging, cymbal crashing, an anarchist in mind as well as politics, encased throughout his life in an ever-shaken snow globe of contradictions, provocations, bathroom-wall jokes and fortissimo declarations.” That may be so, but die-hard Abbey fans are sure to add it to their collections.

Few features define the Los Angeles landscape more than towering palms. They’re the stuff of postcard images. They earn appreciative nods in just about every L.A. travel story—a quick Google search turned up this gem: “From sun, sand and palm trees, to hiking and biking in the mountains, the Los Angeles area has something for everyone.” But according to city officials, they couldn’t be less environmentally correct or more expensive. As a result, few of the dying trees planted before the 1932 Olympics are being replaced by young palms. A USA Today story about this—and how oaks just might become L.A.’s new palms—offers a fascinating glimpse into the way economics and changing environmental attitudes can re-shape a landscape.

Photo by Jim Benning.

Backpacker magazine’s cover immediately grabbed Bill Stall’s attention. “The Last UNKNOWN Places,” it screamed. “5 Hidden Paradises Where Nature Still Rules.” He bought the magazine in a millisecond. And then, as he writes in a thoughtful op-ed in today’s Los Angeles Times, he began questioning the whole enterprise—the cover’s promise, the story inside by Tracy Ross. [W]ait a minute,” he writes. “Ross and Backpacker were tipping off the crowds, weren’t they? Hidden paradises aren’t hidden once they’ve been touted to the whole world on the cover of a magazine.”

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Several years ago I visited China, and I enjoyed just about every minute of it. This photo I shot at a McDonald’s in Xian—Chinese food is great, but a guy needs a break now and again—captures a hint of the juxtaposition between old and new that is becoming such a common sight in the country. But the gorgeous, centuries-old building out the McDonald’s window here looks so gray because in Xian I encountered thick, gray-brown, throat-burning, eye-stinging air, the worst I’d ever seen. It was so bad I bought a cloth cover to wear over my nose and mouth, as many locals do, hoping to filter out some of the pollution. It’s ugly. The World Bank reports that China is home to 16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities. This week, the public radio show The World is airing a four-part series on China’s environmental problems, entitled “Paying for Prosperity.” The first report, broadcast yesterday, focused on air quality, among other issues. Listening to it, I almost felt like coughing as I recalled Xian and the kind of air that so many people in China have to breathe daily.

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Salon reports on the melting snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro, which are expected to disappear completely in 15 years. According to the site, “It’s another unbearable loss on an overheating planet.”

Newsweek International and MSNBC.com have published a terrific story surveying the many threats posed to some of the world’s most iconic destinations, from the Great Wall of China (believe it or not, tourists are riding go-carts along it) to Mount Kilimanjaro (thanks to deforestation and global warming, the famous “Snows of Kilimanjaro” could be gone in 15 years) to New Orleans (water!).

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