Common Sense and Whiskey

Links for the Weekend

A travel blog centered on Eastern Europe: Argophilia. Note their advice on TripAdvisor.

The people at Anna.Aero have been in touch. It's a site for Airline Network News and Analysis, hence ANNA. (A natural partner for the Airline Route Updates blog. If you've GOT TO KNOW that Eastern Airways is to Start Glasgow – Stavanger Service, or Air Mauritius from 30MAR12 is introducing its 4th weekly service between Mauritius and Mumbai, then Airline Route Updates is for you.)

And most importantly, big big Lakhs for Big Babus.

Quick Travel Links

Chernobyl, My Primeval, Teeming, Irradiated Eden: Story of a visit to the exclusion zone, in Outside magazine.

The Pizkuny Wall: Story in Der Spiegel about life along the Lithuania/Belarus border, and their own mini-Berlin Wall.

Where is Resolute Bay, site of a 20 August 737 crash in northern Canada? Way up there, it turns out. Several maps. The air carrier was First Air. Here's its route map, from its web site:

 

When Money Doesn't Matter #9

Michele Bachmann's in the news for politics, but more importantly, how does she travel?

Ryan Lizza's long biography in the current New Yorker informs us that Bachmann's campaign has traveled in a Dassault Falcon 900, and that she told Lizza, "Isn't this an incredible way to fly? I've never been on a nicer plane in my life."

So let's see.

The Dassalut Falcon is a trijet. Various iterations of the 900 can fly from 4150 to 4750 miles. Here's the web site. I found several used Falcons on sale, ranging from a 1986 model for just $6,700,000 to a nice 1994 for $15,300,000.

 

Have You EVer Flown One of These Airlines?

Don't.

Here is the banned-airlines list maintained by the European Union to identify airlines that have severe problems. Looks like we've only had the pleasure of flying one - Air Madagascar - winningly known as Mad Air, back in 1995. The list is pertinent (thanks to JoeSharkey.com) because of the recent crash of an airline on the list outside Kisangani, Congo.

Our flight was from Mauritius to Antananarivo, Madagascar's capital, back in 1995. Best I remember, it was just fine. It was a big ol' 747 which, lore had it, was in service except when the President's wife took it to Paris to go shopping.

There's a chapter on Madagascar in my new book, and we'll have that chapter here on the blog later this summer. For now, check out these photos from Madagascar on the Common Sense and Whiskey Companion, and these on EarthPhotos.com.

Three Quick Tools to Help Decide on Your Next Travel Destination

If you've read Common Sense and Whiskey - the book, you've read these quotes:

Robert Louis Stevenson: “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”

Colin Thubron said just about the same thing: “You go because you are still young and crave excitement, the crunch of your boots in the dust; you go because you are old and need to understand something before it’s too late. You go to see what will happen.”

I think they’re both right. You just pick a spot and go.

Here are a couple of tools I use to start the process of deciding where to go:

I like Hipmunk for initial checks of air routes, because it's quick, streamlined and easy. (For air route  junkies, there's also AirlineRoute.net.) For example, you don't have to click a button to tell Hipmunk if your flight is one way or round trip. If you don't enter a return date, it figures it out. Smart. Here's my review.

If you search for "(your destination) airport," there's usually a Wikipedia result that will tell you the flights to and from a place. Here's an example of what you can learn from Wikipedia about who flies where from Ashgabat airport.

TripAdvisor. It makes me crazy that they try to keep you on their site and don't link to the hotels they describe. That's nuts. But they've got reviews of hotels in some pretty obscure places.

And check the travel planning resources in the sidebar here on CS&W.

Turtles!

It's not everyday....

A Week at the Airport

Great, great, lyrical book for those of us who have a weak spot for getting from here to there. Fine, light summer reading.

Check it out.

Vignettes from Africa V - Around Victoria Falls

We're not in Africa. We're actually en route to Panama City, Pamana today. We'll talk with you from there shortly. Meantime, here's part five of a series of short vignettes from some of our past trips to Africa.

The Zambesi is the fourth largest African river after the Nile, Niger and Congo, at 2700 kilometers. It's the longest to empty into the Indian Ocean. It's mouth in Mozambique comprises a 120 kilometer wide delta.

Its source is in northwest Zambia. Above the falls it’s navigable by bigger boats to only ten kilometers upstream, at Kandahar island. It's a calm river with sandbars and islands. 84 species of fish, 415 of birds, Ebony, Fig, Mahogany, Waterberry and what they call the "Raintree" and the "Sausage Tree" as well as Ilala and Wild Date Palms.

A woman named Precious arranged us a Zambesi cruise. We climbed aboard a two-deck blue and white cruiser and found a seat with some agreeable gin-swilling Germans.

Upstream, hippos yawned, a croc lurked here or there, boats like ours chugged by. The sun ground us into the sundeck.

Qantas QF32 flight from the cockpit

"Captain David Evans is a Senior Check Captain at Qantas with some 32 years of experience and 17,000hrs of flight time.... The other flight deck crew were Richard de Crespigny (Pilot in Command, 15,000hrs), Harry Wubben (Route Check Captain, 20,000hrs) Matt Hicks (First Officer, 11,000hrs and Mark Johnson (Second Officer 8,000hrs). With the Cabin Service Manager (Michael Von Reth) this team boasted some 140 years of experience and over 71,000 flight hrs – a significant factor in the successful outcome of the incident."

Fascinating interview, although it's pretty heavy on pilotese: Qantas QF32 flight from the cockpit

And While on the Subject of the Middle East...

Robert D. Kaplan has a piece in Foreign Policy today whose most salient point, "Peaceful or not, the future of the region will be one of weakened authority," is perceptive, I think. May have to defer that trip to Damascus for now ("Dozens reported dead in bloodiest day of uprising so far,") but I'm hankering for a visit to the Erbil Rotana Hotel, below, in nearby Kurdistan. 6x/week nonstop service from Vienna on Austrian Airlines flight OS 829.

Photo from the hotel web site.

Worth Your Time

Timely:

"Twenty-five years after the Soviet-era meltdown drove 60,000 people from their homes in the Ukraine, a rebirth is taking place inside the exclusion zone. With Geiger counter in hand, the author explores Europe's strangest wildlife refuge, an enchanted postapocalyptic forest from which entirely new species may soon emerge." - from Outside Magazine.

Expensive:

"This 17-minute-long "national image film" features a string of uplifting facts and inspiring pronouncements about modern-day China." - from Danwei.

Dangerous:

"On 4 November Qantas flight QF32, an Airbus A380 outbound from Singapore, ran into serious problems when a turbine on its Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engine suffered an uncontained failure. We caught up with one of the five pilots onboard, who describes how the crew professionally dealt with the incident, the sequence of events, and how the most dangerous period was after they had landed." - from Aerospace Insight.

Busy Airports.

Our home airport is ATL. It's feeling the heat from BJS.

Eventful Africa

Revolution along the north coast, pirates on the east and a new country in the middle. Africa won't sit still.

But in the west, not much seems to have happened in the week since we wrote about the revolt against the son of the strongman in Gabon. When we last left our story, the Gabonnaise opposition had pulled an Ivory Coast and set up a parallel government. Last thing I can find is that eight days ago students protested at Libreville University, and it was reported that "the unrest appears to be developing into a wider social conflict."

There's a small  section on Global Voices that aims to aggregate coverage.

Meanwhile the standoff continues in Ivory Coast, and the Gbagbo government has seized some banks, which have nevertheless remained closed.

Farther north in Guinea, on the other hand, they're upbeat about the future with their new leader Alpha Conde, a 72-year-old Sorbonne university professor who has spent most of his adult life in France.

And south down the coast, according to the Economist,

"Last year Angola’s capital was the most expensive city in the world, according to Mercer, a New York-based consultancy. A bog-standard hotel room costs $400, a non-alcoholic drink in the lobby $10 (though a mere $2 in a supermarket). An underwhelming hotel buffet is $75 and a pizza on the street $25.

It may be expensive, Luanda, but now we can get there direct, three times a week, from our home airport, ATL.

One last thing: While looking up and down Africa's west coast, I found what looks like a fun place to stay in between all these places. Next time you're in Gambia (where all that's happened is that the authorities have banned a radio station and separately, lawyers are on strike), check out the Mandina Lodges, eight river and jungle lodges in the Makasutu Forest.

Cockpit Seats Must Be More Comfy than in Coach

And speaking of Sweden (day before yesterday), "The captain of an SAS plane flying between Copenhagen and Stockholm fell asleep last week, as the first officer was using the lavatory." The captain "claims to have only gotten four hours of sleep the night before, and it was his fourth flight of the day."

But still, come on, flights only take an hour and ten minutes.

New! Non Non-Stop!

There's a non-stop between Kuala Lumpur and LAX, with only an hour and a half stop in Taipei.

With more than 10 million flights and 700 million passengers in 2010...

... This is remarkable.

Kabul's Safi Airways In-Flight Magazine

It's not everyday you see an ad for armouring cars ... in an in-flight magazine. But then, this one comes from the Safi Airways in-flight magazine, and Safi Airways flies out of Afghanistan. The magazine features breezy articles about Herat ("People Smile") and Kabul, and lists eleven Kabul hotels from which to choose. It's interesting reading. Check it out. The whole thing is online here.

Name That Stan

Most of us world travel fans who studied our maps in school will be able to tell you that Ashgabat is the capital of one of the five Stans that emerged from the Soviet Union - Turkmenistan, to be exact. NPR reporter Frank Langfitt didn't know where Ashgabat is, but he filed an entertaining little piece yesterday on "extreme travelers," in which he interviewed two of the top-ten-ranked people at mosttraveledpeople.com.

Just personally, as far as "where you've been" websites go, I like passportstamp.com better. Mosttraveledpeople.com is klunkier to get your information into, and passportstamp.com lets you map your visited countries on a fun little map you can use elsewhere, like so:

Flight Search with Hipmunk is Fun

We're enjoying using Hipmunk, a new flight search tool. The way Hipmunk displays results represents a real, substantive advance, displaying all flights on a single page in a graphic form that shows flights' departure times and duration at a glance.

No more changing the date format to suit every different site. Just enter, say, "Aug 28." Never thought about it before (while looking around to see if the site I'm on requires "08/28/2010" or "8/28/10"), but that makes sense, because with most flights only bookable eleven months out, there's really no need for the year.

No more looking for the "One Way" or "Round Trip" buttons, either. You set the departure date and return is "optional." If you don't enter one, Hipmunk will figure out you're only traveling one way.

Results presented graphically in a way that gives you more visual information than the usual lists. Less hunting around for each sites' peculiar protocols. More intuitive. Simpler. More fun. Try it.

 

You Are Happy, Dammit.

Jacob Sullum in Reason:

"According to the Transportation Safety Administration, Americans have no problem with the new airport screening procedures. So they should stop complaining."