Common Sense and Whiskey

Travel to Places That Scare You

We've written frequently in the past about challenging travel destinations (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8). Here, though you wouldn't know it from the photo, is one of the more dangerous, or at least formerly fear-inducing, of them all.

Photo from the New York Times.

At first glance, where do you think this might be, maybe a planned community somewhere in the midwest? Could have been, except that mosque in the distance rules that out. Okay then, modern Muslim country... how about a planned community on the edge of the desert outside of Amman, Jordan? Maybe a development somewhere around the new airport for Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia?

Take a guess, and then after the jump  see a "before" picture of the same place.

The Afterlife of American Clothes

An article in Reason called the Afterlife of American Clothes talks about the  2.5 billion pounds of clothes donated to charity in America each year, and says as much as 80 percent is shipped globally. The article's focus is Haiti, but you see kids like these in Old Navy and Eddie Bauer sweatshirts throughout the developing world. These guys watched us eat a picnic lunch on a hillside near the tiny village of Nteko in rural southern Uganda in August.

The Case Against Business Class

from Pico Iyer.

Escaping the Tourist Hordes in Thailand

Travelfish says it's "100% original Asia travel intelligence authored by dedicated travelers who know what they're talking about," covering Cambodia, Laos, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. The article The Best Islands in Thailand, for example, presents intelligent advice on how to avoid the tourist hordes.

There's photo coverage of Cambodia, Laos, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam on our travel photography site, EarthPhotos.com, and while we're in the region, try Indonesia, Malaysia, & Burma, too.
 

Passport-Optional Travel to Somalia

Speaking of border zones, as we were recently:

Hargeisa, Somaliland, may be "filled with men selling junk in dirt alleys," but hey, anybody can go there, and you don't need your passport, writes Graeme Wood in his article titled Gray Areas, in The Smart Set.

Some Words about Your Next Trip

It's travel guidebook boilerplate: Learn some of the language when you travel abroad. Personal rule of thumb on The Five Most Important Words: yes, no, please, thank you and beer.

You can find blogs about learning Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese and Swedish at Transparent Language. Today, this sentence alone: "... I am leading an extremely fabulous life as a Master student of Russian Literature living in a small dorm room with a Korean and a guinea pig...." makes the Russian blog worth reading. 

Impressions of Oman as a Travel Destination

Photo from EarthPhotos.com's Oman gallery

In no particular order:

- The government appears to have been watching the neighboring U.A.E. and now means to cherry-pick the best of its development schemes. They’ve obviously moved more slowly, and more cautiously, but now it looks like they’re ready to embrace tourism. For example, a $2.6 billion, 4000 unit residential project on the beach a few minutes from the airport called The Wave is under development (and heavy advertising) and will surely afford blocks of rental properties. It’s being developed in low-slung, anti-garish, Omani style.

- The Muttrah Souk near Muscat is smaller than souks and markets we’ve visited in Marrakech, Cairo and Calcutta. It is possible not to get lost in the Muttrah Souk. Nonetheless, it’s an absorbing couple of hours.

- Dubai is Muscat’s big brother, and connection to the rest of the world. I don’t know how many people proudly noted that it’s only four hours (some said five) drive up the highway.

- Everybody is fascinated with water.

Let Me Outta Here!

A week to go until we head out to take pictures. It's time this weekend to make sure all the paperwork is in order and pack and repack the Case Logic SLR and camera backpack:

Photo from the Case Logic site.

After a week at our cabin in Finland we'll travel to Sweden, Ethiopia briefly, then a week in Uganda & Rwanda, including two days of gorilla treks, then a few days on the beach in Oman and, briefly, Dubai, to catch our ride home.

Having invested in substantial new mobile storage, we'll be shooting almost entirely in RAW for the first time, with a Nikon D200 and Photoshop CS3 in the laptop.

Watch this space for photos.

Has Hong Kong Changed?

Everyone (Governor Patten here, from the BBC) stood in a downpour eleven years and a month ago as the Brit's Hong Kong became a Special Administrative Region of China. So has it changed?

Read Joyce Hor-Chung Lao, who would probably know, on Globespotters.

EP - POD. Thank You for Visiting Miss Puke!

Vote for the Picture of the Day on EarthPhotos.com. This photo is currently ranked #1:

Number one with a bullet, in fact, because it just entered the favorites gallery for the first time last week. Miss Puke Massage Center, in the Siam Square section of Bangkok, is one of those unfortunate "lost in translation" kind of places, and we just imagine these fine, smiling young ladies must be mystified by the steady stream of amused photographers.

See more photos from Thailand in the EarthPhotos.com Thailand gallery, and more fun stuff in EP's Signs gallery. 

The Mekong River, and a photo journey: Vietnam from Cambodia to China

Jaunted posts  about a trip along the Mekong River from Phnom Penh to Chau Doc, Vietnam. CS&W has posted on Cambodia before, and once visited Chau Doc, a sprawling Mekong Delta river town on the Vietnam/Cambodia border.

Starting here on the Cambodian border at the south end of the country, let's take a photo tour right on up to the Chinese border.

Eats!

Food tourism has spawned its own book, academic studies and even an apparently not too successful blog. A culinary trip to Nigeria might be a dish too far, but you've got to give them credit for trying.

On our most recent stay at the (stylish, venerable, legendary - you pick) Metropole Hotel in Hanoi, we spent a morning in the kitchen, divining the differences between Hanoi and Saigon spring rolls, incorporating banana flowers into entrees and learning to carve fruit that pretty Asian way.

Before the kitchen session, everybody hopped a cyclo to the local market to go over the finer points of choosing Asian ingredients. You could buy these dogs there but the ladies told us, a touch disdainfully, that only men eat them, when they are drinking beer.

There are nearly four hundred pictures (including these dogs) from all over Vietnam in the Vietnam gallery on EarthPhotos.com.

WSJ: Airlines All Dead

It's a great time to be a blog about airlines. Plenty of grist for the mill, from the charge for the first bag story right down to complaining about the coffee. The Wall Street Journal does the blogs one better. It announces the death of the entire industry.