Common Sense and Whiskey

Unsettling Weekend Reading

We've all done trips that were ... less fabulous ... than others. (Funny: Search "worst travel" on Amazon and the Lonely Planet guide to Ukraine comes in at number twelve.) Let's just say these are trips that involve more trials than, oh, losing your luggage. I can nominate my friend who had to have an emergency appendectomy in the Soviet Union in the mid-80's, for example. No, no, he didn't speak Russian.

Farther along on the scale, maybe, here's the Amazon description of the book The Worst Journey in the World: "hoping that the study of penguin eggs would provide an evolutionary link between birds and reptiles - a group of explorers left Cardiff by boat on an expedition to Antarctica. Not all of them would return. Written by one of its survivors, (this book) tells the moving and dramatic story of the disastrous expedition."

But the really worst worst trip might have been this one. Enjoy reading about it in front of your cozy, warm fireplace this weekend.

•••••

And then there's Cruise Passengers Overboard. Somebody out there has it in for mega-ships even more than me. They describe their site as "a comprehensive list of known cases of persons falling or jumping overboard since 1995. " This thing must take a lot of work. It's up to date as recently as seven days ago.

 

Defeat!

How much is just too much for a Japanese budget wonk? 10,000 free airline tickets, apparently.

In an effort to relight the fire under travel to Japan after the Fukushima disaster, the Japan Tourism Agency submitted a budget request for money enough to give away 10,000 tickets. The budget was to have been aproved and applications were to be received by about April this year. To apply, you'd send an essay describing why you'd like to visit and where you'd go.

Just found this on the Tourism Agency web site. It was posted while we were away for the holidays:

"The project titled Fly to Japan! (to offer flight tickets to 10,000 foreigners with high potential to communicate Japan’s attractions), which had been covered in a number of media in autumn this year, was not approved as a governmental draft budget of FY 2012."

And I already had my essay written in my head.

 

Maximizing Your International Travel Dollar

This post bears repeating, because it's a couple of years old so new readers of CS&W probably haven't seen it, it's still as true as ever, and because travel dollars are dearer than ever.

As we wrote in Don't Let "Experts" Tell You Where to Go This Summer,

There are 192 U.N. member states. Kosovo, Taiwan and Vatican City aren’t U.N. members, so add them. Add South Sudan, to be born as the world’s newest country on 9 July. That’s 196 countries, and there are dozens and dozens of territories (Greenland is Danish, Tahiti is French, Aruba is Dutch and so on) and odd bits and specks of land all over the globe. There are plenty of places to choose from....

Keep an open mind. Do your online research. Pick a spot and just go. Buy a ticket, get on the plane, and go see what it’s like. Our world is a great big, sprawling pageant of color and chaos and diversity, and you should go out there and see it."

But use your travel dollars wisely. Now, a reprise from 2009:

•••••

Our mailbox is laden with expensive glossy catalogs from high end travel providers. Mountain Travel Sobek, “Celebrating 40 Years of Adventure Travel,” sends a very nicely done 204 page 2009 catalog offering, for a couple of examples:

12 days in Namibia for $7795 per person, starting and ending in Windhoek, including internal airfare and the company of others (price offered is for four or five people). Including Clara and Herb from Cleveland, your close proximity partners for nearly two weeks of Land Rover trips and box lunches, whom you’ll meet on arrival, this epic journey departs from Windhoek twice each year, on Mountain Travel Sobek’s schedule.

Or how about 13 nights in the Republic of Georgia from $3695 (again, not just you, but from 4 – 12 people)? This one starts in Tibilisi, twice a year, again on Mountain Travel Sobek’s schedule.

Not to fault Mountain Travel Sobek. This is what they do. You’ve seen the Perillo Tours ads for travel to Italy? Same thing. You’re buying it? They’re selling it.

So don’t buy it. Do your research and hire local people. They not only have local knowledge, but they’re also often quoting in local money, and the money you spend with them stays local.

My wife Mirja and I flew into Windhoek, for example, by ourselves, and spent a bare fraction of that group price. And it was simple:

South Sudan Born Today

It's fun to have a new country in the world. It just somehow seems like progress.

Despite all the challenges ahead, welcome, Republic of South Sudan, to the community of nations as of today, your new Independence Day.

Want to be the first intrepid traveler you know to visit? Here are a few (there are only a few) travel planning resources, including the very few airlines and hotels and two articles (1, 2) about plans for future South Sudan safaris.

Don’t Let “Experts” Tell You Where to Go This Summer

Americans love to visit London, Paris and Tuscany, but there are so many compelling places to go in this world. I say, go and discover someplace obscure!

There are 192 U.N. member states. Kosovo, Taiwan and Vatican City aren’t U.N. members, so add them. Add South Sudan, to be born as the world’s newest country on 9 July. That’s 196 countries, and there are dozens and dozens of territories (Greenland is Danish, Tahiti is French, Aruba is Dutch and so on) and odd bits and specks of land all over the globe. There are plenty of places to choose from.

So, how to pick your destination?

First, don’t rely on glossy travel magazines – and they know who they are – for travel advice, or you’ll never get out of the London/Paris/Naples/luxury hotels cocoon. All that press a few months back about Tibet as the new hip destination – that was all because the Starwood chain (Sheraton, Westin) opened a new high-end St. Regis hotel in Lhasa. See Travel+Leisure, for example.

Now, next time we’re in Lhasa maybe I'd like to stay at the St. Regis, too. But be aware of what you’re getting as travel advice from the glossy magazines. As a rule of thumb, be wary of anything in a magazine that’s bracketed by ads for Tag Hauer watches and Louis Viutton luggage. Whatever it is, it’s just marketing words.

Don’t be overly swayed by guidebooks and their “dangers and annoyances” sections. It’s no surprise that there’s the danger of pickpockets in poor African countries. The answer to that: Don’t carry valuables in your pockets.

Keep an open mind. Do your online research. Pick a spot and just go. Buy a ticket, get on the plane, and go see what it’s like. Our world is a great big, sprawling pageant of color and chaos and diversity, and you should go out there and see it.

And this summer, don’t let “experts” steer you onto the too-well-trodden path. Imagine: No more sitting in a left bank café disdaining the waiters who disdain you right back for trying to use your high school French. It’s liberating.

Tomorrow I'll link to a few tools I use to start the process of deciding where to go.

Common Sense and Whiskey on the Radio

Here's excerpts from today's radio interview about Common Sense and Whiskey, the book, on WUTC Chattanooga. Many thanks to the interviewer, Michael Edward Miller. Click to play the mp3.

Common Sense And Whiskey Radio Interview     

 

Congratulations, and Happy Thanksgiving.

 

Hey Buddy, Can You Spare £125?

Readers of the Financial Times Weekend will be familiar with Tyler Brûlé, the peripatetic columnist who flies internationally like a fiend, and who wants you to know that he'd fly in better-than-first-class if only it were available.

He publishes a magazine called Monocle, available for a £75 annual subscription (which is $114.43 today according to the handy currency converter on the right of this page). It would be nice if you could help Mr. Brûlé with his next international airline ticket by dropping by the Monocle online shop. Perhaps you could buy a tiny bag of wood, which is currently priced at $190. 

(Thanks to The Smart Set's article, Printing Money.)

Burdensome Belarussian Bureaucracy

The government of Belarus is trying my patience.

One November long ago, my friend Steve and I took the train from Moscow to Warsaw. For the moment, Moscow still reigned over the Soviet Union, which was dissolved the next month, on Christmas day, 1991. Thus our trip didn’t traverse an independent state called Belarus, which was born a month later.

CS&W is related to EarthPhotos.com, where we have photos from some 95 countries around the world. In 1991 (as ever) the Soviet authorities were intimidating about photography, and I was afraid to take any pictures when we stopped at Brest, on the Soviet/Polish border, to change the bogies on the rail cars for our onward travel. I imagine I took slide photos out the train windows while traveling across Belarus, but none survive today.

So I’ve been eager to visit Minsk in its own right, to enjoy that last little existing slice of Soviet-dom, and to add Belarus to the countries with photos on EarthPhotos.com. Next month, on 13 August, we’ll be in Vilnius, Lithuania. It’s a four hour train ride down to Minsk, so we booked a room for two nights at the Minsk Crowne Plaza hotel and a flight out with our old friend Austrian Airlines a couple of days later.

Our visa company, Passports and Visas, Etc. in Atlanta, sent off our passports and visa applications to the Belarussian embassy in Washington. The embassy web site says a letter of invitation is required, but not for US & EU visitors staying less than 30 days. Here is the pertinent passage and here is the web site. Plain as day.

Our friend Rita at Passports and Visas, Etc. (who has successfully gotten us around the world three times in not quite twenty years) called yesterday. Despite what's on the embassy web site, for a visa they would require a letter of invitation. They helpfully provided this faxed document listing approved travel agencies in Minsk.

Never mind that we’re already booked to spend at least 2288000.0 BYR ($760.13) in their country at the Crowne Plaza Minsk, and never mind the instructions on the web site. We’d need to spend something more with one of their approved travel agencies to get our tourist visas.

There are seven listed suggested travel agencies on that fax. I emailed all seven and the hotel for visa support. Four emails bounced back as undeliverable to the email addresses on the embassy fact sheet.

Welcome to Belarus. It appears to be far more of a privilege than I'd realized to visit in 2010.

Updates here as things change.

Angry. Helpless.

In my day job, I sometimes work with a company whose business is directly tied to Gulf Coast tourism. They are angry and, like everyone else, utterly helpless. As Joe Sharkey points out (thanks Joe), a Chamber of Commerce "is not usually the place to be putting out dire news like" this notice, posted yesterday by the Pensacola Chamber of Commerce. Click it to link through to the C of C site.

Coming Up Next

In a month we'll be off on our summer holiday. This time, after a week at our little cabin on the lake in Finland, we'll sail on the two-hour fast boat the Tallink from Helsinki across the Gulf of Finland to Tallinn, Estonia, reprising our first visit, in 1991, when Estonia had regained its independence for scarcely three months.

For the next week we'll cross the Baltic republics by bus (a really nice bus), car and train, from Estonia to Riga, Latvia to Vilnius, Lithuania to Minsk, Belarus. From Minsk we'll fly (our old buddy) Austrian Airlines to Zurich, enjoy a couple of nights with a nice view of the peaks Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau at the Hotel Eiger in the automobile-free Alpine village of Murren, and then the Glacier Express train from Brig to Chur, ending with a few last days in Munich.

Afterward, we'll have four new Countries Galleries to add to EarthPhotos.com, bringing the total to 98.

It's not as off-the-beaten-path as some trips, granted. But it's built for pleasure. Please join us via these pages, beginning in August.

Safaris Are a Top Goal for that "Trip of a Lifetime"

We've waxed editorially about the overuse of the marketing words "of a lifetime" a couple of times. Now Alexia Nestora, who runs a blog called Voluntourism Gal, has published a study that gets past the marketing to have a look at what people really decide to do when they take what they describe as their trip of a lifetime.

Key finding: "70% of respondents said they are most interested in visiting natural and man-made wonders on a once-in-a-lifetime trip such as Machu Picchu, the Pyramids or Victoria Falls. Beyond that, 53% said they were very interested in going on safari...."

Also: "52% of respondents organized their lifetime trip independently, 18% join a tour group, and 16% use a travel agent to organize their trip."

Have a look at her summary, or download the whole report.

And while we're on about research, in a journal called Applied Research in Quality of Life, the study "Vacationers Happier, but Most not Happier After a Holiday" claims something confirmed travelers could have told you in the first place. As the New York times quotes the lead author of the study, “The practical lesson for an individual is that you derive most of your happiness from anticipating the holiday trip.” 

And, I'd add, from reliving the experience with your photos after the trip.

The study author has a tip most of us can probably agree with: “What you can do is try to increase that (your happiness) by taking more trips per year. If you have a two week holiday you can split it up and have two one week holidays. You could try to increase the anticipation effect by talking about it more and maybe discussing it online.”

*****

(Photo is an HDR of a tree climbing lion in the Ishasha Wilderness, Uganda, from EarthPhotos.com. See more in the Uganda Gallery and the Animals & Wildlife Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

Government Sanctioned Photo Trip to Cuba

Photographers who fancy a trip to Cuba: Painet, the picture resource service for photo buyers, sends this, which I pass along in its entirety:

"Successful travel and stock photographer Bill Bachmann will be directing another Cuba Photo Mission from March 28th thru April 9th, 2010. This trip is Bill's third 13-day directed trip with the opportunity to see time stand still in Cuba from the 1950's before the embargo started. This will be a wonderful opportunity to take photos of all the old Classic 50s autos, colorful people, colorful music, and fabulous old buildings before the embargo gets lifted and Cuba changes forever.

His group will have a special Humanitarian Visa to fly directly via 45-minute charter American Eagle flight to/from Miami to Havana. Bill has traveled extensively throughout Cuba four times and several Painet shooters just returned from a wonderful adventure with his last trip in October, 2009. The price is right and we also will bring much-needed medical supplies to this colorful country and people.

This trip will fill up quickly, so for more information, look at Bill's website www.billbachmann.com . Bill is on assignment this month in Tunisia in the Sahara Desert, so if you want all the information about the trip, email him at his traveling email billbachmann@yahoo. com and he will get back with you with the itinerary, pricing, and all other information. This is a rare opportunity, so don't pass it up."

Technology Makes Our Lives Better

You could see this coming from the very beginning.

Now you're going to need one of these, a "special alloy sleeve... designed to shield RFID signals and protect a single passport embedded with a wireless radio frequency chip."

In an article titled  What a shock: Your e-passport isn’t secure after all, the web site Upgrade: Travel Better explains that "the U.S. State Department is now urging travelers to keep their RFID-chip enabled passports in “radio-opaque sleeves” to protect owners from having their information skimmed by unauthorized readers within a 30-foot range."

That'd be the same State Department that made "earlier claims that e-passports are 'totally secure'.”

Follow These Round-The-World Trips, in Progress

My web friend and fellow southerner (at least he lives in the south nowadays), Rick Ingersoll, aka the Frugal Travel Guy, is taking us all along on his round-the-world vacation. He and his wife Katy are now in the Swiss Alps. Follow along on his blog.

Gary Arndt, who runs the site EverythingEverywhere, has been on the road for two-plus years now. He's also in Europe at the moment. Check out his really interesting post titled How I Manage A Travel Blog On The Road.

Our own big round-the-world adventure began the day after Christmas 1994 and lasted until April 1995, covering 22 countries, and we've since done two more, shorter RTW trips. In 1995, there were no blogs, so the only coverage that lives on is the occasional story from back then (some of which are here).

In a couple of months, though, we invite you to join us here on CS&W as we explore Urumqi & the Kashi (Kashgar) Sunday market in western China, and then cross the 12,310 foot (3752 meter) Torugart Pass into Kyrgyzstan and travel on to Kazakhstan from there.

Tough Times for Thai Tourism

Less than five months ago protests shut down the shiny new Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok, stranding travelers for days.

With the Thai people again at  each  others'  throats (running updates here via Bangkok's Nation newspaper), perhaps it's better to picture Thailand the way most visitors experience it - like in this photo of a beach on an uninhabited islet off Koh Samui.

As governments around the world react to the return of violence in Thailand with travel warnings, the tourism industries in neighboring Cambodia, Laos & Vietnam stand to benefit.

In Laos, the emerging showplace is the ancient royal capital of the Lan Xang Kingdom, Luang Prabang, a UNESCO World Heritage site on the Mekong River. The introduction of scheduled air service a few years ago has eliminated the need for a long overland trek or, as we experienced in 2000, a long float in from upstream, at the Thai border north of Chiang Rai.

Direct flights have brought other changes. In 2000 a tall cold Beer Lao in Luang Prabang would come with a big smile and change back from your dollar. Nowadays you can spend just shy of USD$500 a night for lodging.

Cambodia is touting development of its coastline, most notably at an island called Kep and adjacent to Vietnam's Phu Quoc island.

Vietnam's tourism sector has a huge jump on Laos and Cambodia. See a photo tour of Vietnam from the Cambodian border in the south all the way up to the far northern Chinese border, previously posted on CS&W. And as you're planning your non-Thai holiday, check out photos in the Laos Gallery and the Cambodia Gallery on EarthPhotos.com.

(Photo above from the Thailand Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

Polar Opposites

Last week we looked at the woes of Antarctic tour providers. The International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators predicts that the number of visitors to Antarctica may fall some seven thousand to around 39,000 in the 2008-09 summer season.

It doesn't appear that the same is true at the antipodes. In an article headlined Tourism heats up at the North Pole, eTurboNews talks with a tour operator or two and concludes "one destination has never been busier - the North Pole."

(Photo from the Greenland Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

Related articles by Zemanta

• Growing Arctic sea ice likely to melt, says scientist (cbc.ca)

French Polynesia and Antarctica Are About the Same, Really

The mordant Irish joke in the financial community goes like this: What's the difference between Iceland and Ireland? Answer: One letter and six months.

So, what's the difference between Antarctica and Tahiti? Answer: Nothing at all, at least through the eyes of the travel business.

French Polynesia's hotel occupancy rates are down around 20 percent from a year ago. South Pacific Travel Blog reports that in January only about a third of rooms were occupied, and that Air Tahiti Nui is discontinuing service between Papeete and Sydney, because not enough people are turning up at the turnstiles.

Meanwhile, the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators predicts that the number of visitors to Antarctica may fall some seven thousand to around 39,000 in the 2008-09 summer season, and World Hum wonders if that might be a good thing.

Red Orbit points out that fewer than 1,000 a year visited until the early 1980s, but that number rose to a record 46,000 a year ago. Some would like to use this dip in visitor numbers to establish a cap, but Antarctica is not sovereign, so enforcement would be uncertain.

Spending Dollars Outside the U.S.

Now that Zimbabwe has run out of space to print zeros on its money, it has recognized the South African Rand and the U.S. dollar as legal tender.

About a dollar and a quarter will buy a Euro today, considerably better than last July, when it cost $1.60. But it's possible for travelers to avoid exchange rate fluctuations entirely - depending on their destination.

Some countries peg their currency's value to the value of the dollar, so the rate of exchange never changes, or changes only slightly. Here is a list of countries whose currencies are pegged to the Dollar: Bahamas - 1.00 BSD = 1.00 USD, Barbados - 2.00 BBD = 1.00 USD, Belarus - 2150 BYR = 1.00 USD, Belize - 2.00 BZD = 1.00 USD, Bermuda - 1.00 BMD = 1.00 USD, Hong Kong - 7.8 HKD = 1.00 USD, Lebanon - 1500 LBP = 1.00 USD, Saudi Arabia - 3.75 SAR = 1.00 USD.

Other countries, now including Zimbabwe, simply use the dollar itself as legal tender. The list, according to Wikipedia: British Virgin Islands, East Timor (uses its own coins), Ecuador (uses its own coins), El Salvador, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, Panama (uses its own coins), Turks and Caicos Islands.

Buy a Room in a Mega-Beach Resort, Then Pay Extra for a Spot of Sand

Everybody published the Ryanair pay toilet story because it was such an obvious example of excess. Here's one that won't get headlines but would steam me if I were a mega-resort type: View from the Wing reviews the Westin Maui, a 700+ room resort, and reports:

"They charge for beach chairs ($5 apiece) and umbrellas ($25 buys an umbrella and two chairs)."

View from the Wing appreciated it because the resort was full and that was a way of essentialy buying your patch of beach. And at least "A staff member sets up the chairs and umbrella for you, and gives you a slip of paper to sign it to your room (plus tax and a line for tip)." Well, then.

Bidding for a spot of sand amid the clambering residents of 700 other rooms? Why not just go somewhere else in the first place?