Why THAT title?

From my soul outward, I love travel, so I started this blog — but what to call it? “Black Traveler?” Too prosaic. “Traveling While Black?” Done to death. I was stuck.

One day, my wife told her co-workers how we plan our own trips. They were stunned. “Is your husband white?” one asked. Just like that, I had a title.

So we’ll be talking travel — tips, ideas, issues — and you’ll meet some of our “folks” already Out There. As my friend Shay Olivarria says, “the world is bigger than your block.”

It’s time you had a look at it.

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Sachsenhausen: Blueprint for Evil

(NOTE: This was first posted in July 2009. It has been re-posted to repair formatting problems in the old version.)



You know about Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald. This place was the blueprint for them all.

Sachsenhausen is in the town of Oranienburg, a pleasant 45-minute country drive north of Berlin. But there is nothing pleasant about Sachsenhausen.

Heinrich Himmler ran the entire concentration camp system from Oranienburg, and Sachsenhausen was his testbed. Opened in 1936, it was the first Nazi facility purpose-built as a concentration camp, the prototype for Auschwitz, Dachau and all the rest.

The SS camp guards were trained here. The sarcastic motto “Arbeit Macht Frei” — Work Makes You Free — was adopted after first appearing on Sachsenhausen’s main gate.

Nothing happened in any camp that didn’t that didn’t happen here first.

We Americans didn’t hear much about Sachsenhausen, mainly because throughout the Cold War, it was in what was then East Germany, behind the Iron Curtain. But in a very real sense, it was the cradle of Nazi genocide.

The route from Berlin to Sachsenhausen is lined with cool, green forests and picturesque country homes of two and three stories, with steeply angled tile roofs to shed rain and snow. The camp itself lies at the end of a pleasant little residential street.

But nothing prepares you for what awaits at the end of that street.

A sprawling triangular complex of about a thousand acres, Sachsenhausen is defined by a perimeter wall interspersed with guard towers. At its height, there were 68 long, one-story barracks, laid out in a fan pattern.

A handful of those barracks — including the two where medical experiments were conducted on inmates — remain, along with the “execution trench” and a portion of the inner-perimeter death strip that includes a once-electrified fence.

In front of the fence and the barbed wire coils is a single strand of unadorned wire, running about a foot above the ground. In prison parlance, this is a “dead man’s wire” and its meaning is clear:

Step over this and you will be shot.

You didn’t have to be shot to die here, though. You could be beaten to death simply for not moving fast enough. Starved and brutalized, inmates sometimes dropped dead during roll call.

Two holes in the ground served as mounts for a simple, inefficient gallows. The condemned were left to slowly strangle in their nooses.

In December, a Christmas tree went up in place of the gallows.

DEATH BY “SCIENCE”

Then, there were the experiments. Doctors here injected Jewish children as young as 11 with the incurable hepatitis C. They stitched moldy hay into prisoners’ flesh to “study” gangrene. They made masks of inmates faces, copies of their eyes.

In addition to Jews, they seemed to have a special “fascination” with the Roma, as seen here.

Mask made of inmates' faces, two gypsy brothers.

Periodically, a Nazi psychologist visited Sachsenhausen to select inmates to send to the death camps, which he did as cheerfully as if he were delivering milk.

The cruelty wasn’t limited to physical brutality or scientific sadism.

The SS officers treated themselves to lavish banquets, which they made their starving prisoners serve them. They made other prisoners hang condemned inmates for rules violations.

They told new arrivals that their path to freedom ran through the chimneys of the camp’s “special” ovens.

They seemed to think that was funny.

SECRET SHAME, SILENT SCREAMS
In April 1945, as Germany crumbled, the Sachsenhausen guards tried to march 33,000 inmates away from potential rescue by the Red Army. Those too weak or sick to keep up were beaten or shot — or just died where they fell.

Thousands of them.

When the Red Army finally overran the camp, they found 3,000 inmates, barely alive, and nearly 13,000 bodies. That should’ve closed the book on Sachsenhausen.

It didn’t. The Soviet NKVD turned it into one of their “special camps,” where they imprisoned Nazis, Red Army deserters or soldiers who caught venereal diseases from women in occupied Germany.

By the time the place closed for good in 1950, at least another 12,000 people had died here.

Overall, no one really knows how many died in Sachsenhausen. Guesses range from 30,000 to as many as 100,000 — minus however many died on the death march.

You leave here feeling as if you’ve looked into the face of Evil, and you leave forever changed.

In place of the old horrors is now sprawling emptiness. The wind that sweeps across the vast grounds — and the murmurs of visitors — are the only sounds here now.

In Sachsenhausen, silence is a scream that never ends.

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America — Overworked and under-vacationed?

Cabo San Lucas, Baja California Sur, Mexico | © Greg Gross

So I’m reading this press release about a new pitch being developed by one of the cruise lines, Royal Caribbean International. The theme: “Cruise them or lose them.”

The “them” refers to your vacation days, and the tendency of we Americans to kiss off far too many of them. Yeah, they’ve got cruise ship cabins they’re desperate to fill, but behind the funny pitch are some serious issues.

It’s long been known that the average working adult in the United States gets the least amount of vacation time per year in the industrialized world:

  1. Italy, 42 days
  2. France, 37
  3. Germany 35
  4. Brazil 34
  5. Britain 28
  6. Canada 26
  7. Japan and South Korea, tie 25
  8. United States 13

The Japanese and South Koreans, neither of whom have a reputation for slacking off in the workplace, are the next lowest — and they still average almost twice as much vacation time as Americans.

THE $19 BILLION GIVEAWAY
And of his or her 13 average vacation days, the typical American will give three of those back to their employer. According to the folks at Expedia (another outfit with a vested interest in getting us to travel more), that saves American employers an average of $19.3 billion a year.

Did you even get a thank-you card last Christmas for your share of this $19 billion gift? I’m betting you didn’t.

According to some numbers crunched from 2009 by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, we Americans collectively worked through a whopping 459 million vacation days last year.

That’s shade over 1 million years of time off you could’ve taken, America, and didn’t.

It gets worse.

A travel industry survey showed nearly half of those polled, 45 percent, blew off vacation time last year, and 78 percent expect to forfeit ten days of vacation in 2010.

The rest of the world looks at this and thinks we’re nuts.

MORE PRODUCTIVE, MORE STRESSED
Nor is this a function of the Great Recession. We’ve always been like this. You know, that whole Puritan work ethic thing? And we wonder why we constantly feel weary in body and spirit?

(Perhaps somebody should’ve reminded our ancestors that the Puritans were religious extremists who basically got run out of England.)

Juliet B. Schor, Harvard economist and author of “The Overworked American,” was tracking this stuff back in 1990:

“Since 1948, productivity has failed to rise in only five years. The level of productivity of the U.S. worker has more than doubled…Yet hours have risen steadily for two decades. In 1990, the average American owns and consumes more than twice as much as he or she did in 1948, but also has less free time.”

We as a nation are among the most stressed out people on Earth, and we have no one to blame for it but ourselves. To paraphrase an old TV commercial from back in the day, we’re creating more and earning more, but enjoying it less.

Some folks, especially those in the mental health business, might well look at all this and wonder: What is the point?

Many of us actually love our jobs; the problem is that the job will never love you back.

KILLING OURSELVES
Face it, it’s not as if your workplace can’t go on without you. The 6.3 million men and women laid off in the last three years can attest to that. So why are you killing yourself for an employer who not only doesn’t love you, anyway, but who may not even know your name?

And if you’re one of those Americans who routinely gives away vacation days every year, you are indeed killing yourself.

John de Graaf runs a non-profit outfit that calls itself Take Back your Time. He has some stats of his own.

“Men who take them are 32% less likely to suffer from heart disease than those who don’t.  For women, it’s 50%.  And women who don’t take vacations are more than twice as likely to suffer from depression.”

So if your doctor ever writes you a one-word prescription that just says “MAUI,” he may just may be trying to save your life.

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The Godfather in London

The man I call the Godfather of Travel, Arthur Frommer, just returned from London, and blogged about it.

Being away too long from London is something we have in common, and I’m still overdue for a return visit.

“I firmly believe that every human being should go there at least yearly,” he wrote. And I couldn’t agree more.

This is one of those places that cuts the cutting edge. Everything and everyone from everywhere. Food, clubs, music, architecture, a legion of cultures from around the world — if you can’t find it in London, it may not be worth being found.

If you told me boredom was illegal here, I’d have no trouble believing it.

In short, London has the power to overload every sense you own, including your sense of time. In those moments when you’re caught up in the city’s electric energy and youthful, multicultural vibe, it can startle you to realize that Roman legions once marched on some of these same streets.

Mentally, I am somewhere over the Atlantic, heading east. You should be, too.

Physically.

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IBIT on The Cheap: AIRFARES, Part 3

Delta Airlines flight landing at Lindbergh Field, San Diego

QUESTION: When is a bargain fare not a bargain fare?
ANSWER: When it’s a low-ball rate that doesn’t include everything you’ll be charged for. Don’t let the airlines bait-and-switch you.

While you’re reading this, someone somewhere is online in search of an airfare bargain — and they just found one! They’re all excited. The adrenalin’s flowing. Their pulse is racing. Their eyes have yet to fall on that very fine print that reads: “not incl. taxes & fees”

But they will. They will.

Meanwhile, someone else on a different site just spotted a steal of an airfare, with absolutely no fine print about taxes or fees or anything else. Nothing, that is, except a little asterisk, which eventually leads them to the information that that great-looking fare is only one way, based on the purchase of a round-trip ticket.

Which means that even if they want to go one-way at that price, they won’t be allowed to do so.

SPIN THE AIRFARES
The airlines have been playing these game for years. It makes them look as if they’re charging a lot less than they actually are.

You have to wonder sometimes who they think they’re kidding. I mean, it’s not as if you aren’t going to end up paying the full cost eventually, right?

And the airline’s dirtiest little ticketing secret: An airline that seems to have higher airfares may actually end up costing you less.

So how do you tell the difference? These days, with some difficulty. For now, you have three options:

  1. Find a travel site that quotes you the first price of your flight up front — or at least break out the taxes and fees where you can see them. Such sites do exist, but you have to look for them.
  2. Do the calculations youreself manually, one reservation, one airline at a time.
  3. Find a site that helps you calculate the true cost of your flight.

At least one such site already is in beta. It’s called TruPrice.

THE TRUE PRICE
TruPrice starts you out by selecting one or more of 17 U.S.-based airlines. It then sends you to another screen where you enter the cost not only of the airfare and tax, but fees for things like checked baggage and priority boarding. In fact, it gives you eight pull-down menus of nothing but add-on fees — 35 fees in all. TruPrice automatically calculates the total cost of your flight as you go.

If you just want to know what those add-ons cost, just click one of them. TruPrice automatically tells you.

You not only can figure out what the airline actually will charging you for a given flight, but you can compare multiple airlines against one another. From this, you will learn two valuable things:

  • Not all airlines are reated equal when it comes to fees. Some charge for certain things. Others don’t.
  • Some airlines start out with a slightly higher airfare, but because they charge fewer add-on fees, or charge less for certain ones, the total cost of your ticket may actually be LESS.

Why go through this hassle? The airline industry took in nearly $9 billion in add-on fees last year, and they took it from people like you and me. That’s why. And all the signs point to the airlines continuing to get jiggy with the fees for the foreseeable future. That reason alone justifies the time you put in online with sites like TruPrice.

With or without this kind of online help, though, always make sure you understand up front exactly what you’re being asked to pay. Working it all out may take you a little extra time, but the result could leave you with some extra cash.

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One man, one world, no bags

And no, the ones under his eyes don’t count!

We told you in last week’s Sunday Travel Digest about Rolf Potts, writer and traveler, who’s doing a ’round-the-world trip with no bags. Not non checked bags. Not no carry-on bags. Not so much as a fanny pack. No bags, period.

Airlines must really, really hate this guy…

If you’d like to join him vicariously on his bagless venture, follow him on his blog.

Just be sure not to bring a bag with you.

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the SUNDAY TRAVEL DIGEST

A roundup of the good, bad and bizarre from the world of travel

Canal houseboat, Amsterdam

Canal houseboat, Amsterdam | © Greg Gross

THE WORLD ON YOUR SHOULDERS
Every year, travelers in the know save tons of money by ignoring the major holidays and doing their traveling during the so-called “shoulder seasons.” Maybe you could be one of them.

The upcoming Labor Day weekend marks the official end of the summer vacation season and the start of what the travel industry people call the “shoulder season,” those months just before and after a major holiday, when business falls like a bungee jumper for airlines, hotels, resorts, cruise ships.

To compensate, they all start offering deals, sometimes outrageously good deals, in the hope of drawing business. An airline seat or a hotel room sold at a loss, they figure, is still better than letting it go empty.

Want to see some destinations where going off-season can save you some bucks this fall? The folks at Smarter Travel offer up a set of five.

Some locales have their own shoulder seasons, dictated by climate. Take New Orleans. Summer is actually a time when tourism falls off in the NOLA. A daily regimen of searing heat and thick humidity will do that to a place.

Which explains how you can find four-star New Orleans hotels offering room rates in the dead of summer for less than $100 a night. Heat, humidity? That’s what snowballs, beer and frozen daiquiris are for.

Or what about Buenos Aires, Argentina or New Zealand, both well below the Equator. Their winter is our summer, their spring our fall. A little careful shopping could yield some great trips.

Spring and fall also are when cruise lines move their ships to and from warmer waters on one-way sails called “repositioning cruises.” They can last from a week to a month, like the traditional transoceanic liners, but at a fraction of the cost.

Work and school schedules are the biggest obstacles to shoulder-season travel, but if you can manage it, you can nail down some serious travel bargains.

And when your friends ask how you did it, you can just smile — and shrug your shoulders.

And now, here’s this week’s Digest:

from the New York Times
People are starting to travel again, but they’re doing it cheaper.

from the New York Times
Our old-fashioned credit and debit cards, with their magnetic stripes, are running into problems overseas, where many countries are shifting to cards embedded with digital chips and require a PIN to use.

from Smarter Travel
The attack on vacation rentals continues. It’s spreading now to San Francisco. More and more, you can expect to see cities cracking down on private renters and trying to force travelers into pricier hotels.

from Smarter Travel
You paid for those frequent flier miles you haven’t used yet. Don’t let them expire.

AFRICA
from The Standard (Nairobi, Kenya)
Freretown is a Kenyan community with a unique and bittersweet legacy. The usual African tribal rivalries don’t exist here. Why? Because its inhabitants are all the descendants of freed slaves.

AMERICAS
from the Los Angeles Times
Are you a fiend for chocolate? Do you love great cities? Leave your heart — and your diet — in San Francisco next month.

from the Guardian (London, UK)
Easy rider in Central America: Simon Gandolfi takes you around Guatemala by motorcycle.

ASIA
from the Guardian (London UK)
Looking to do a little shopping for electronics, or just see what happens when geeks take over an entire neighborhood? Bargain + bizarre = the Akihabara district of Tokyo. They call it Electric Town for more than one reason.

EUROPE
from the Daily Mail (London, UK)
Did you hear the one about the Mile High Pickpocket? No joke. Wonder why all those little padlocks are dangling on my carry-on backpack? Now you know!

from the Guardian (London, UK)
Ever play in a treehouse when you were a kid? In Sweden, they have treehouses from grown-ups — and they are nothing like your childhood.

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The Green Book

A country without a memory
is a country of madmen.
— George Santayana, 1863 − 1962

The New York Times evoked a memory recently with a story about the Green Book, published between 1936 and 1964 by Harlem’s Victor H. Green.

To really understand it, you need its full title: “The Negro Motorist Green Book: An International Travel Guide.” It was a guide to lodgings, restaurants, gas stations, barbershops and so on, where blacks were welcome.

All those great AAA guidebooks didn’t cover this America, so Victor Green did.

To read the entire New York Times story, click here.

This wasn’t a political statement. It was about avoiding the humiliation of being told — often in the most hurtful language possible — that “your kind” wasn’t welcome.

Sometimes, the stakes were higher, and meaner, than that. So you took precautions.

MILES AND MILES TO GO
You kept your fuel tank full, just in case. You packed an ice chest with soft drinks and sandwiches, in case you couldn’t find an eatery. And if you pulled into a town that didn’t “feel” right,” you just kept going — no matter how tired or hungry you were. Even if it meant driving all night.

Was this dangerous? Yes. But maybe not as dangerous as stopping.

Even if you didn’t have the Green Book — you had your own list of folks who could put you up. Where you didn’t know anyone, you knew to locate “your” side of town. Once there, you’d find some little cafe or shop, and start asking around.

Someone would point you to a motel, or just let you spend the night on their couch — or on the floor if the couch was too short. They might even throw in a meal or two.

Sometimes, there was no need to find the black folks in town. They would find you.

AN ACCIDENTAL MEETING
While en route to Chicago in 1966, my family’s Buick collided head-on with a Pontiac on a lonely two-lane Wyoming highway. One person was killed. The nearest hospital was 100 miles away, in Laramie.

There were less than a dozen black folks in Laramie back then. Nearly all of them found their way to the hospital. They kept us company, answered our questions.

They became our Green Book.

Victor Green’s paperback has been rendered obsolete by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But it is as much a part or our national travel heritage as the Chisholm Trail, the Natchez Trace or Route 66.

For more details about the Green Book, you might enjoy reading the Perceptive Travel blog.

Surviving copies exist at the National Civil Rights Museum, in Memphis, TN, and at the newly opened International Civil Rights Center & Museum in Greensboro, NC.

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OUT THERE: Try Anything Once

SITE: Try Anything Once

This blogging sister has a split-personality passion — half-foodie, half traveler. And she’s perfectly positioned to pursue both.

For one thing, she’s in New York. How can you not be a foodie in New York? That’s like saying “I live in the desert because I don’t like sand.” Virtually every cuisine in the world — and I mean the world — is there. You could vicariously travel the globe just going from one resto and cafe to another.

And that’s just in Manhattan.

And for another, she likes to travel. Her most recent trip was to Bali, in Indonesia, both truly exotic locale guaranteed to both appetites.

She describes herself thus:

“I am wanna-be, sorta kinda foodie who’s not really sure she’s a “foodie” who also happens to love to travel. Makes lots of sense, huh?”

Actually, it does.

Warning: Don’t read this site when you’re hungry. By the time you get through eying the delectable dishes she posts on her blog, you may find yourself gnawing on your monitor.

Let’s welcome this sister to the IBIT family — and make sure to check out her blog!

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WTF: Stupid is as AA does

Good old American Airlines. They can’t be bothered carrying out government-required maintenance on their airplanes, but they’ll gladly charge you extra to sit in the front of one. Who’s running this outfit, Alfred. E. Neuman?

Every time I think the airline industry can’t possibly become more absurd, some airline goes out of its way to prove me wrong. The most recent “honors” to go American Airlines.

First, they institute a new add-on fee: In addition to charging you an extra $10 to let you board the plane first, they’ll let you pay a little more to guarantee you a seat in the first few rows of Sardine Class, otherwise known as Coach. The total amount of this add-on starts at $19 and goes up, depending on the length of the flight. American calls these “Express Seats.”

And isn’t that just special?

(To be fair, American’s not the only airline that has gone down this road; they just took it further. Other airlines, notably Southwest, will charge you $10 to let you board first, but that’s as far as they go — if only because they don’t assign seats.)

The folks at Smarter Travel branded this one “the stupidest airline fee ever” — and I’m not inclined to argue.

Perhaps we shouldn’t laugh too hard, though. There will be people willing to pay this, if only to get first crack at the overhead bins, so they can comfortably stash their carry-ons — and avoid American’s checked luggage fees.

Oh, be joyful…

The Federal Aviation Administration isn’t too joyful these days, especially when it comes to American Airlines. They announced today their intent to hit AA with the largest fine in the agency’s history — $24.2 million.

This all started back in 2006. The FAA directed American to have its mechanics visually inspect the wiring in a specific area of their twin-engined MD-80 airliners.

They’ve long been popular with travelers because one side of the plane has two seats together, while the other has three, but they’re older now. How old are they? The company that first designed and built these planes back in 1980 doesn’t even exist anymore.

The FAA wanted American to make sure the insulation wasn’t being worn off bundles of wiring — right near tanks storing fuel or hydraulic fluid. You know, where a spark from a short-circuit might set the plane on fire?

They gave the airline two years to get the work done.

American, for reasons only it knows, opted not to do this. And they might never have done it, had not the FAA inspected a couple of American’s MD-80s themselves in 2008 — and busted them.

They kept on inspecting American MD-80s, and kept on finding more unchecked airplanes — until finally American gave up after a week, and pulled their entire MD-80 fleet out of service to do all the wiring checks they’d been blowing off for two years.

Thousands of American Airlines flights had to be cancelled, basically throwing the travel plans of hundreds of thousands of people into a blender.

You can read it all for yourself here, courtesy of the FAA.

You know what’s going to happen, of course. The FAA will go ahead and impose the penalty. American will quietly pay it — and then even more quietly raise their airfares just enough to cover it. But nothing, at American or among any of its competitors, will really change.

That rubs my insulation raw.

Who knows. Maybe’s they’ll take Southwest’s approach and say their failure to do safety checks on some of the oldest planes in their fleet was…

…wait for it…

…and act of God!

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Thinking of trains

Fellow writer and traveler Jools Stone of Scotland is a man after my own heart, which is to say, he loves traveling on trains as much as I do.

Jools has put together great list of valuable rail travel sites, especially for riding the rails in Europe. You’ll find it on his blog, He Thought of Trains.

If you’re one of the millions of travelers who’s seriously looking at passenger trains as an alternative to the nightmare that flying has become, do check out Jools’ list.

As you read this, Jools is presently in Paris, having arrived there today via Eurostar, better know as the Chunnel Train.

Why do I talk about trains v. planes so much? Because I’m an ardent believer that when it comes to travel, the journey matters as much as the destination, and “getting there” should be an affordable part of the fun, not an expensive ordeal that makes you wish you’d stayed home.

My last major train trip was this summer, between Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam via the Thalys, which is basically the northern European version of the French TGV. The Thalys trains are starting to show their age, but they still offer the best combination of speed and comfort between Paris and points north.

My last train trip period was earlier this week on the Amtrak Pacific Surfliner, hands down the best way to travel between Los Angeles and San Diego. This is especially true in on summer weekends, when the southbound traffic on Interstate 405 becomes a descent into auto hell.

More on the Surfliner, including a video, in a later post.

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