THE travel experience of 2009, I humbly propose, is the Total Solar Eclipse on 22 July. What makes it so irresistible? Totality is, at its maximum, six minutes 39 seconds. That's just phenomenally long. There won't be another totality this long during the lifetime of anyone who reads this.
The eclipse path, according to NASA, "begins in India and crosses through Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar and China. After leaving mainland Asia, the path crosses Japan's Ryukyu Islands and curves southeast through the Pacific Ocean."
NASA has a fabulous resource. And Fred Espenak, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is your guy for all things eclipse, at MrEclipse.com. You can immerse yourself there until you realize you really ought to get back to work.
Some agents, a map and practical advice, after the jump.
Naturally, lots of travel agencies are offering packages, although it's getting a little late in the game now to start making plans. As USA Today quoted a tour operator last fall, "Our tour was filling up so fast, we had to create a second departure... Now we're thinking of adding a third."
If you join a tour, with tours ranging to $10,000 or so and with a simple cloudy day enough to dash all the operator's carefully laid plans, you'll really want to do your research on where you want to be on eclipse day. There's a PDF called "Average July Cloud Amount Along the Central Line" on the NASA site.
Most operators appear to have settled on China. Feeling the burdensome possibility of a rainy eclipse day, most have whipped up larger packages with visits to China's famous tourist sites. Some operators:
IAHHoliday (in the UK), Eclipse Traveler, Mountain Adventures, & Sirius Travel.
Common Sense and Whiskey doesn't know anything about these guys, we've just listed them for you to get an idea of what's out there. As for ourselves, we've wrested a room at the Emei Shan Golden Summit hotel (Jin Ding Hotel), atop Mt. Emei ("Shan" means mountain in Mandarin), without joining a tour.
Using a Guilin-based travel agency, we booked our room last September, and even then several tour agencies told us there were no rooms at the inn. The folks we used told us there were only suites left, and we gobbled one up. Looks like we'll be in the midst of lots of package tourists.
As you can see from the map, Emei Shan is just about on the center line (where the arrow is pointing), and totality should be just over five minutes there. First contact, when the moon first touches the outer edge of the sun, is at 8:06 a.m. Totality begins at 9:09.
Some tour operators, including Explorers Tours in the U.K., have chosen to take their groups to a spot south of Shanghai. Besides Shanghai being easier to get to, these companies tout the Qiantang River tidal bore as an additional attraction.
Now we could be entirely wrong, and we shall certainly see. But our gut feeling is that the coastal plain around Shanghai ought to have a higher chance of clouds than a perch atop Emei Shan, at 10,167 feet (3099 meters) where, unless it's just a rainy day, morning ground fog should be far below.
We've seen total solar eclipses in Hungary and Turkey, both under two minutes of totality. Totality is a singular experience, way beyond the ability of words to describe. If you go, it will be one of the most memorable experiences of your life. Promise.
We'll be talking a lot more about eclipse photography here as we get closer to July.
(Eclipse photo from the Hungary Gallery - where we saw that eclipse occur - at EarthPhotos.com. Map of the path of totality and Emei Shan from Harvey Mudd College.
Very informative. Thank you.
Cheers,
Mihir.
Posted by: Mihir.S.Bijur | 15 January 2009 at 01:27 PM