World Hum contributors share a favorite travel-related experience from the past seven days.

Frank Bures
In the weekly email I get from NASA’s Earth Observatory, I received a satellite photo from miles above Rub’ al Khali (pictured), or the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula. It’s the world’s largest ocean of sand, and it was crossed by Wilfred Thesiger in what World Hum selected as the best travel book of all time, Arabian Sands. The photo is beautiful, and a reminder of how far we’ve come since the days when the only way to see across the Empty Quarter was to travel with your own feet. 

Jim Benning
Writing this item yesterday led me to dig up a song I’ve loved for years: Jose Feliciano’s rendition of the Mamas & the Papas’ “California Dreamin’.” Feliciano took this originally very Anglo celebration of California and Los Angeles and gave it a bit of a Latin sound, even riffing in Spanish. (At about the 2:45 mark in the video below, he sings: “Oye, me gusta gozar en California ...”) It captures everything I love about multicultural, multilingual Los Angeles.

Terry Ward
Eating raw oysters raised by my parents at their home on the Rappahannock River in White Stone, Virginia. When I was younger, we’d catch blue crabs off the dock, using lines tied around drumsticks. But the Chesapeake Bay’s crab population is plummeting, while oysters make a comeback. My parents’ neighbor, a commercial fisherman, has even started catching shrimp in his nets—unusual for the region.

Eva Holland
This week I loved being evacuated from New Orleans. Of course I wasn’t thrilled that I had to leave (I had big plans for my final days in the Big Easy—they involved equal parts shrimp Creole, Abita Amber, and Charmaine Neville). And I certainly didn’t love Hurricane Gustav, the reason for the evacuation. But I was pleasantly surprised by the organization level in the city, the clarity of communications from city officials, and the (relatively) smooth process of getting us all out. Between my naturally overactive imagination and the footage I’d seen of Katrina, I had been bracing myself for much worse. Oh, and once I was home and safe, I also loved this mash-up of CNN’s hurricane team being blown all around the camera frame:

Valerie Conners
I enjoyed reading and pondering the debate raised in Alexander Fiske-Harrison’s essay on bullfighting, A Noble Death, which offers a graphic and stirring account of a 2007 bullfight in Spain. The story questions “whether the level of suffering inflicted on the bull in the ring is justified by the sheer aesthetic pleasure of the bullfight.” I don’t agree with the writer’s easy take in which he likened watching bullfights to eating red meat or watching nature documentaries, though it brought back the memory of the first (and only) bullfight I witnessed. It was in 2001, when I was living in Spain. At the time, the spectacle stunned me. I wrote to friends and family about the experience, “Emotionally, I am tormented. It was full of such dreadful violence and the torture of these bulls, and yet as you watch, you begin to see the ritual, and the tradition, and the passion and the history inherent in the event ... I couldn’t sleep that night. The conflicting emotions. Shame that I watched this; awe at its beauty.”

Joanna Kakissis
I sold my car before I moved to Greece in 2004, so now that I’m back in the United States (in Boulder, Colorado) for the year, I’m trying to get around town on bike. So far so good, except for that big hill leading to Chautaqua Park, which reminds me of how out of shape I am. The Boulderites love their bike shops, especially University Bikes, which not only fixed the bike I inherited but also rented me a cool mini-mountain bike that was so fun to ride that I actually could envision myself going on an 80-mile bike ride into the foothills. (Don’t laugh: This is totally normal for Boulderites.)

Michael Yessis
Harry Chapin’s “Taxi,” the best taxi song in pop music. I heard the original recording this morning on local Maryland radio, and was transported to a rainy night in “‘Frisco,” flying in the taxi with Harry and Sue. YouTube has a great live version, but, on the verge of the weekend, I’ve gotta love the full Shatner treatment:

Photo by NASA.