Unfortunately, it’s not another April Fool’s Day joke. Since opening March 27, Terminal 5 at London’s Heathrow Airport has been a disaster. One of the major issues: The $8.5 billion automated luggage system failed to work as promised. 

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Athens is tied with Rome as the third dirtiest city in Europe, according to a survey by TripAdvisor. If the survey had been done this week, however, Greece’s capital might have made first place. Garbage collectors have been on strike for days, as part of a nationwide union protest against government pension reforms. 

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Five members of a group called Plane Stupid managed to breach security and climb onto the roof of the British parliament this week, to protest the planned expansion of London’s Heathrow Airport. 

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Uzbekistan has never been high on my must-see list, despite its Silk Road mystique and stunningly beautiful architecture. Maybe I’ve read too many dreary news reports about soldiers mowing down unarmed protesters and police boiling alive terrorism suspects. But a strange profile this weekend in The Washington Post made this hard-to-love land alluring in a flinty, James Bond-meets-Graham Greene sort of way. 

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France’s high-speed rail network, which has been coping with a labor strike, was hit by fires and other acts of sabotage overnight, according to reports. But in unrelated news, there’s at least one glimmer of good news coming from some rail service in the region. Historical enemies France and England are getting soft-eyed over the new high-speed rail link between Paris and London, according to the New York Times. A recent full-page ad in the French newspaper Le Figaro declared “Oubliez Waterloo”—forget Waterloo. And the English were talking not about Napoleon’s last stand but the former Waterloo rail terminus station.

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When I visited London for the first time earlier this year, I was torn. For my first UK meal, would it be fish and chips in a pub or a bowl of curry on Brick Lane? Both meals are about as typically British as you can get. In fact, according to the“‘Curry factfile” on a UK Food Standards Agency Web site , there are more Indian restaurants in London than in Bombay and Delhi. Britain’s first curry house opened in 1809, and Indian food has since become a UK favorite, accounting for more than 40 percent of all ethnic food sales. The love affair, however, is decidedly one-sided. British cuisine—the term alone elicits snickers from food snobs worldwide—hasn’t exactly taken the Subcontinent by storm. But that’s a fact that one British celebrity chef is out to change.

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We recently noted the 50th anniversary of the classic travel guide, Arthur Frommer’s “Europe on 5 Dollars a Day.” USA Today’s Kitty Bean Yancey pays tribute today by taking a trip to Paris in search of answers to the questions, “[D]o his budget staples survive? And can a euro-trashed tourist find satisfaction there today?” Yancey also turns back the clock, sharing a terrific journal entry—and a great photo of her hitchhiking—she wrote in 1971 while traveling in Paris with the guidance of “5 Dollars.”

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It’s a new year, and travelers are still showing love for some old standbys—Las Vegas, cheap travel and a good Irish beer. But they’re also looking for some underwater adventure. Here’s your first Zeitgeist of 2007:

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

Most E-Mailed Travel Story
New York Times (current)
No Place for a Zamboni: A Hockey Rink Where Players Sink
* Yes, this story is about the glorious sport of underwater hockey. It is, apparently, big in Britain.

Most Popular Page Tagged Travel
Del.icio.us (current)
How to Get the Cheapest Flight Every Single Time

Most Dugg Travel Podcast
Digg (current)
The Traveling Morans

Most Viewed Weblog Post
World Hum (this week)
Three Travel Books Crack Entertainment Weekly’s Nonfiction Books of the Year List

Best Selling Travel Book
Amazon.com (current)
The Places in Between by Rory Stewart

Top Travel and Adventure Audiobook
iTunes (current)
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

Busiest Airport in the U.S.
FAA (2006)
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport
* Total flights logged in Atlanta: 976,307. Chicago O’Hare International Airport finished a close second with 958,643 flights.

Most Popular Travel Story
Netscape (current)
Covered Bridges Take You From Present to Past

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As an atlas editor, I have a questionably healthy obsession with maps. As a traveler, I never go anywhere without one (and preferably two or three). Which is why I was particularly excited to learn that a British design company is now selling credit card-sized, stainless steel maps of the London Underground and the New York Subway. They strike me as the perfect accessory for a hip cartographer or really anyone wishing to be a less conspicuous tourist. Hopefully they’ll pave the way for similar maps for other cities with subterranean mass transit systems. Tokyo would be an excellent candidate—that is if it’s even possible to fit all of the subway lines and stops on a piece of metal measuring 85 millimeters across.

-- is the editor of the Oxford Atlas of the World.

In Sunday’s Washington Post, Mary Jordon has a terrific feature on Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner—one of the inspirations for World Hum’s feature of the same name. “Once a place where the condemned were hanged—and perhaps, some say, because they were given one last chance to say a few words—the northeast corner of Hyde Park has since the late 19th century been sacred ground for free speech,” she writes. “There are other noteworthy patches in the 350-acre park—the Nanny’s Lawn, the Lovers’ Walk—but it is only here near Marble Arch where the unsung, along with legends from Winston Churchill to Karl Marx, have come to have their say.”

As cities turn into megacities—often defined as metropolitan areas with more than 10 million citizens—many academics are asking if, given their size and power, they are becoming more important than the countries that contain them. “Greater Shanghai has a population that has passed 20 million. The sprawl of Mexico City is estimated to house another 20 million. And Mumbai too,” the BBC News Magazine’s Finlo Rohrer writes. “These cities are bigger than many industrialised nations. And they are growing at a dizzying rate, sucking in workers from rural areas.”

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To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1975
Territory covered: India, Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia and Japan
“Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.” So begins what is arguably Paul Theroux’s most universally beloved travel tome, The Great Railway Bazaar—a book that beckons train enthusiasts, lovers of literature and armchair adventurers as easily as the seasoned traveler. The great American author set off from London in the early 1970s, determined only to ride the rails east. “It was my intention to board every train that chugged into view from Victoria Station in London to Tokyo Central,” reads Theroux’s first page introduction. But before the journey begins, even a reader new to Theroux realizes that this voyage, like all true on-the-road awakenings, has more to do with the people one meets than the places one goes. “I sought trains; I found passengers,” writes Theroux. The book unravels more as a series of vignettes than a traditional travelogue, and can be read as such as Theroux rolls along the great rail lines of the time—the Khyber Pass Local, the Delhi Mail, the Grand Trunk Express to Madras and Burma’s Mandalay Express, to name a few. Perhaps the most resonant passages are those from Vietnam. The author’s visit to the south of the country straddled the insecure years between the 1973 ceasefire and the 1975 withdrawal of U.S. troops. To see glimpses of ordinary Vietnamese life through Theroux’s vigilant eyes transcends history and time, making the dead weight of bloody war fall momentarily silent to the relentless pace of culture and man. (A postscript to his Vietnam chapters, written in April 1975, explains that nearly all the towns Theroux wrote about had since been destroyed and many of their people killed.) If the best travel writing transports the reader, then Theroux remains the master. Few authors affect us like the very trains Theroux writes about –- blurring the peripheries at times to focus on a single, exponentially elaborated detail, then letting the world in and pulling the reader hypnotically along.

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