Category Archives: Americas

LAS VEGAS: Four-wheeled bandits

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Water show, Bellagio hotel-casino, Las Vegas | © G. Gross

Water show, Bellagio hotel-casino, Las Vegas | ©IBIT/G. Gross

In the town that fiscal caution forgot, taking taxis could mean getting stripped before you even get to The Strip. But you have options.

In Las Vegas, it seems the game is rigged before you even start playing. When you get a taxi at McCarran International Airport to take you to your hotel, you truly are being taken for a ride.

According to the Associated Press, Vegas taxi drivers are taking their passengers on needlessly roundabout routes, driving up cab fares to the tune of $15 million in excessive charges every year.

You can read the entire AP story here.

Most travelers routinely suspect cabbies everywhere of pulling this trick. In Clark County, they apparently have documented proof of it.

As one who usually rents a car in Vegas, I really haven’t run into this problem personally. If you have, don’t get mad. Get smart. That means looking for alternatives to the desert cab rats.

  • Plan your stay
    What do you plan to do and where do you plan to go while you’re in Las Vegas? If you’re going to be ranging far and wide — say, out to Hoover Dam or other side trips — odds are you’ll want to rent a car, anyway. So just track down the best rental car deal for your stay and thumb your noses at the wandering cabbies.
  • Hotel shuttles
    If you plan to stay pretty much in one area, be it the downtown or the Las Vegas Strip, ask when making your reservations if the hotel has a free shuttle service to that pick up and drop off hotel guests at the airport. Many do, and here’s a list.
    In the unlikely event that your hotel doesn’t offer a free shuttle, there are pay shuttle services that could work out to be cheaper than taxis. That list, courtesy of Vegas.com, is here.
  • The bus, Gus
    The Regional Transit Commission of Southern Nevada, aka the RTC, operates multiple bus lines to and from McCarran, including its own bus shuttle between the airport, The Strip and downtown Las Vegas. Virtually guaranteed to be cheaper than any taxi ride.
  • Catch “Mono”
    The Las Vegas Monorail won’t get you to or from McCarran, but if you’re staying on The Strip, it can get you around smoothly and comfortably, without need of pricey cabs. What’s more, you can buy passes good for unlimited rides per person, from a day to a week.
  • Be Forewarned
    There are several online programs and smartphone apps which, among other things, allow you to calculate a cab fare in advance. Check out the fare from the airport to your destination, then ask the cabbie to give you his estimate of the fare. If his figure is substantially higher than yours, don’t get in.

    Taxi fare calculators include:

    Also, according to the folks at Mashable, there is a Tax Fare Calculator app that will allow users of Bing Maps to estimate cab fares between two points.

Eventually, the local authorities will find a way to crack down on their wandering cabbies. But even if they don’t, you still have plenty of cost-effective options. “What happens in Vegas” does not have to needlessly reach into your wallet.

Cuba travel: Phony controversy, real issues

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Havana

© Roxana González | Dreamstime.com

All the folks questioning the motives of two black celebrities for going to Cuba should be asking instead why the US government still clings to its tired Cuba trade embargo.

Unless the cave you live in doesn’t get cable, you’re surely aware by now of the anniversary trip that Beyoncé and Jay-Z took to Cuba, seemingly flouting the half-century-old US trade embargo against Havana.

Cue the political posturing, conspiracy theorizing and even bogus racial animus.

Did the trip violate the embargo? Was it really an educational trip? Did the Obama administration secretly pick up the tab? Wasn’t it a shame that they were using their wealth and celebrity status to support the Castro regime? Were Beyoncé and Jay-Z traitors to the black race by giving indirect financial aid to a Cuban government dominated by mestizos that oppresses Cuban blacks?

There may be a lot of products nowadays that no longer have “made in America” stamped on them, but when it comes to manufacturing synthetic controversy, nobody does it better.

What we should be asking is why this Cold War policy relic is still on the books at all.

First, let’s get a few things straight:

  1. There is no outright ban on Americans traveling to Cuba. The US government limits Cuba travel for Americans to specific purposes, expressly forbids travel there for tourism and requires a license from the Treasury Department. However, under certain circumstances, you can get a license even for tourism.
  2. The main purpose of the travel restrictions was not and is not to bar Americans from traveling to Cuba, but from spending US dollars there. The idea was to cripple the Cuban economy by depriving it of the financial fuel that more or less drives the economies of the Caribbean and South America, namely dollars.
  3. American tourists have been traveling to Cuba, legally or not, for decades. According to Cuban government statistics, upwards of 60,000 Americans visit their island each year — some with licenses, most probably without.

Let a couple of black American entertainers of the hip-hop generation decide to visit Cuba, however, and American political and media types lose their minds?

The real question isn’t whether the Beyoncé/Jay-Z Cuba trip was legal or ethical, but why it should’ve been restricted in the first place.

Washington enacted this embargo shortly after Fidel Castro came to power in 1958, hoping to bring down his government. After a half-century and change, it’s fair to say that didn’t work. So why are we still doing this?

Why should it be easier for Dennis Rodman to travel to North Korea than for Beyoncé and Jay-Z — or any other American, for that matter — to visit Cuba?

Even at the height of the Cold War, we never restricted American travel to the then-Soviet Union. China has a communist government, but hundreds of thousands of Americans visit China for business and pleasure every year, with nary a peep out of Washington. You could even visit Iran more easily than you can visit Cuba.

If the Beyoncé/Jay-Z Cuba tour and its subsequent flap served any useful purpose, it might be to remind us how senseless it is to maintain this failed bit of US foreign policy. Any American should be allowed to visit Cuba, or any other country in the world, so long as the host country allows it.

ALSO CHECK OUT:
A not-that-slow boat to Cuba
CUBA: The rules
Delta’s new connection: Charter flights to Cuba
RACISM: Cuba faces its demon
TRACY GROSS: To be black in Cuba “no es facil”
RANT — The Cuba embargo

TRAINS: Twelve lovely hours

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One of an occasional series.

The view from a Superliner Roomette on the Amtrak Coast Starlight.

The view from a Superliner Roomette on the Amtrak Coast Starlight.

All images by IBIT/G. Gross unless otherwise identified. All rights reserved.

A day’s ride down the California coast aboard the Amtrak Coast Starlight proves the perfect antidote to two weeks of stress.

I had flown up from San Diego to Oakland to deal with medical emergencies in my family. Now, after two weeks, it was time to go home. This time, however, I wouldn’t be flying. In more ways than one, I needed a break.

Which was why, at precisely 8:50 on a drizzly Oakland morning, I was aboard the Amtrak Coast Starlight as it gently edged away from Jack London Square Station, heading south to start the second of its two-day run from Seattle.

Behind me were two weeks of hospital visits, doctor conferences,bedside vigils, rehab centers, dialysis clinics.

Ahead were 12 hours aboard the Coast Starlight, a double-deck Superliner train.

I’d made this run before — first as a kid with my mother, more recently with IBIT guest columnist Walt Baranger from LA to Oakland.
Parlour car 2

This time, instead of sitting in a Coach seat, I’d be holed up in one of Amtrak’s Superliner Roomettes, the smallest and cheapest of its sleeping compartments. Two comfortable facing seats which convert at night into the bottom bunk, with a fold-out table between them to share by day and space beneath to store small luggage.

Let me be clear here: traveling by Coach on an Amtrak train is infinitely better than flying in Coach. A normal-sized human can travel in actual comfort. No Sardine Class on the rails. What’s more, even at top speed, passenger trains are amazingly quiet, much more than airliners with their noisy jet engines.

Still, if you’ve never done it, a train trip in your own compartment — or “sleeper,” as it’s still often called — truly takes rail travel to that proverbial “next level.”

First, there’s the “chill factor.”

In every passenger car on a train, people are constantly in the aisle — going to and from the bathroom, the lounge car, the dining car, the luggage rack. In your own compartment, you have only to shut your door and draw the curtains to create your own quiet, climate-controlled little world. Put on your headphones to listen to your favorite tunes and watch the world glide past your window.

Come nightfall, while Coach passengers are reclining nicely in their seats to go to sleep, you are curling up in your own bunk bed.

Another important difference shows up in the dining car, where Amtrak has worked hard over the last several years to raise the quality of its food. The cost of your compartments covers all your meals aboard the train. As long as you don’t order wine or beer with your meals, you can eat your way across America without once taking out your wallet.

You also get first dibs on meal reservations.

On the Coast Starlight, however, Amtrak goes a major step further with the Pacific Parlour Car, reserved for sleeper passengers and found exclusively on the Coast Starlight.
Train wine tasting
The upper deck is split into two sections. One is a lounge area, with comfy swivel chairs, along with couches positioned for sightseeing and small tables for your laptop or tablet computer, with plenty electric outlets and — drum roll, please — free wi-fi. The rest of the upper deck is a small dining area plus stand-up bar.

Downstairs is laid out as a rolling movie theater, complete with a big screen.

As a compartment passenger, you have the option of taking your meals in the dining car or the Pacific Parlour Car. It’s a tradeoff. The dining car menu is more extensive. The parlour car is calmer and quieter.

The Pacific Parlour Car also offers an afternoon wine tasting just before dinner — again, included in the cost of your sleeper ticket.

Actually, I might have spent the whole trip in the parlour car were it not for the 1950s oldies being played non-stop via Sirius XM radio, which pretty much guaranteed that I would spend as much time as possible in my comfy little roomette.

SOUNDS ON RAILS
For a lot of travelers, music is a big part of the experience. The airlines provide their own wide-ranging audio selections on long international flights, but the railroads are “there” yet. Not to worry; computers and digital audio/video players make it possible for every travelers to literally bring a library of tunes along with them.

When I’m on a train, I’m usually looking to chill, and the iTunes playlist I create generally reflects that. This is a sample of the playlist I created for my Amtrak Coast Starlight trip:

“French Dream,” Marc Antoine, from the album ‘Classical Soul’
“Big Girls,” Kenny Barron Quintet, from ‘The Kenny Barron Quintet: Quickstep’
“Dansa Negra,” Yo-Yo Ma & Kathryn Stott, from the album ‘Obrigado Brazil’
“When Love Comes Around,” the Braxton Brothers, from the album ‘Steppin’ Out’
“Dreamin’,” the Heath Brothers, from the album ‘Expressions of Life/In Motion’
“Just Gets Better with Time,” The Whispers, from the same album
“Keep Looking,” Sade, from the album ‘Stronger than Pride’
“Last Train Home,” Pat Metheny, from the album ‘Still Life (Talking)’

What would you play on a long train trip

All this self-pampering set me back $206 — $88 for the base fare and $138 for the roomette — or almost $40 less it had cost me to fly to Oakland in Coach.

It gets better. Every passenger pays the basic Coach fare no matter what, but the extra charge for a sleeper compartment is per trip, not per person. Friends or couples who can share the cost of a compartment can score both serious creature comforts and major savings.

There are some minor drawbacks to a Superliner Roomette. When I say it’s just big enough for two people, I do mean just. If you’re larger than a typical fourth grader, you may find the bunk beds more than a little cramped. Also, you don’t get your own wash basin, toilet or shower in a roomette. Amtrak reserves en suite bathrooms for its larger and more expensive bedrooms. For you, those are downstairs.

And none of the seats in sleepers recline.

Funny thing, though. Once you’re rolling in your roomette, with your tunes in your ears, sipping on a tasty beverage and gazing out the window as you watch the scene across the horizon change every second, none of that seems to matter.
Salinas Valley
You can take pics along the way and share them with your Facebook and Twitter friends (which I did). You can break out the laptop and get some serious work done (which I did not). Or you can exhale and do nothing at all (of which I did a great deal).

By the time you’ve covered your first 50 miles, you can almost feel your blood pressure dialing itself down.

Somewhere between the bottled water, the Martinelli’s sparkling cider and the Sierra Nevada pale ale, between the Cabernet, the riesling and the pinot grigio, between the salad of cherry tomatoes and strawberries sprinkled with grated Parmesan and the chicken hiding under a liquid blanket of red wine and beer sauce, the condos of Jack London Square and the backlots and backyards of East Oakland and San Leandro turn into the salt ponds of Hayward and Fremont.

Further on, sprawling suburbia fades seamlessly into farm country, where the vegetables of future dining car salads and the grapes that will star in future wine tastings still thrive in the ground, arrayed in precise rows that fan past your window like long fingers when the train is at speed.

Hills still green from winter rains briefly give way to rolling terrain so bare and brown that it lacks only a few craters to qualify as a moonscape. You almost expect to see a green, lizardlike Gorn from Star Trek, chasing a gimpy William Shatner in slow-motion through the narrow draws.

Not long after you clear Paso Robles and its quaint little station, the sand dunes in the distance signal that the sea is near. And when the Pacific Ocean suddenly spreads out before you, with the sun shining its own enormous spotlight down through the clouds on the waters that seem to fill the lower half of your window, you know why some passengers spend hours staking out seats in the lounge cars of this train.

The LA night skyline greets you as you pull into Union Station, the end of the line for the Coast Starlight. Ahead for me are two more hours aboard a different Amtrak train, the Pacific Surfliner, before San Diego and home.

By then, however, I was already de-stressed.

The Coast Starlight had done its job, in twelve lovely hours.

NEW ORLEANS: Roll, Zulu!

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Zulu king, Mardi Grtas, New orleans

Zulu king, Mardi Gras, New Orleans — image property of nola.com

Mardi Gras Day this year falls in the middle of Black History Month. You can see some of that history in motion this morning when the Krewe of Zulu rolls through the streets of the Crescent City.

New Orleans is the city that taught America how to party, and every year during Carnival season, it gives a refresher course. For the last three weeks, it’s been parades large and small, day and night, fancy-dress balls known as cotillions, floats and flambeaux.

It all comes to a raucous, joyous head today, Fat Tuesday — or in French, Mardi Gras.

By now, the Skeletons, or Skull and Bones gangs, have already awakened the sleepy residents of predominantly black neighborhoods, dressed head to toe in black-and-white skeleton costumes and banging pots, pans and tambourines as they shout, “WAKE UP! YOU NEXT!”

But the official kickoff of Mardi Gras Day comes at 8 a.m. Central time, when the Krewe of Zulu rolls their parade through the streets of New Orleans, members dressed in their traditional black face, Afro wigs and grass skirts, handing down their now-famous Zulu coconuts.

(NOTE: In New Orleans, all Mardi Gras parades roll. To say anything else instantly marks you as a tourist.)

And that’s the moment when Carnival and Black History Month converge.

The krewes are the private social organizations that put on the big parades, with marching bands and gaudily decorated floats towed by tractors, each manned by costumed members throwing all manner of trinkets — some of which require parental guidance — to hundreds of thousands of spectators.

Zulu was the first black krewe officially recognized by the city. These days, the Krewe of Zulu holds equal standing with Rex, one of the oldest original all-white Mardi Gras krewes, which originated many of the Mardi Gras traditions that still exist today.

The kings of Zulu and Rex formally open the festivities together the day before on Lundi Gras, Fat Monday, when the mayor officially turns over the city streets to them.

But it hasn’t all been smiles and good times for Zulu. When the organization began back in the early 1900s, fun wasn’t really the point.

Zulu began as what’s known in New Orleans as a “social aid and pleasure club,” which collected due from its members. Together with black churches, these clubs formed a financial and social safety net for black New Orleans, a role both still play today.

The club dues collected served as a kind of life insurance, a pool of funds that members could tap into when times were hard — a frequent occurrence for black working men in the NOLA. And when you died, your dues paid for your funeral, which club members would put on for you.

Zulu banner

Zulu banner


Zulu was not the only such club in New Orleans, but were easily the best-known, and still are.

New Orleans Online offers a detailed history of Zulu here.

The early 1900s also was a time when black New Orleanians weren’t allowed to take part in the “mainstream” Mardi Gras activities. Joining the established krewes was “by invitation only” — and if you weren’t white, you weren’t invited.

You didn’t even show your black face on the main parade routes of St. Charles Avenue and Canal Street except at your own — considerable — risk.

The response of black neighborhoods was to hold their own Carnival parades and create their own Mardi Gras traditions, one of which became the Zulus, who set out to mock every aspect of “traditional” Mardi Gras.

Their parades were sponsored by neighborhood bars, a marriage of convenience for both the parade goers and the local “watering holes,” which could count on overflow crowds on parade days.

Not until 1968 did the Zulu parade roll on St. Charles and Canal. It’s been a mainstream parade ever since.

Zulu has had its share of controversy, especially back in the 1960s, when a lot of black folks in town felt that its black face and grass skirt get-ups were demeaning to an increasingly self-aware Black America. At one point, their membership shrank to a mere 16 men.

One of them was my father, who was as proud of being a Zulu as he was having been a Navy Seabee in the Pacific during World War 2.

Stubbornness is a major character trait — some would say character flaw — in New Orleans. It was that stubbornness that led those last 16 to hold out and hang on in the face of all the scorn heaped upon them.

In the years that followed, Zulu not only survived, but grew and ultimately flourished. The annual Zulu Ball became of the city’s major Carnival events, and one of its most highly prized invitations.

Today, Zulu finds itself at eye level with every other major krewe in New Orleans, known as much for its charity work, feeding poor families during holiday seasons, and for sponsoring local schools and college scholarships as for its noisy, gaudy parades. Their continued existence is a testament to the creative, defiant, joyously stubborn spirit of black New Orleans.

And they’re rolling right now. If you want to see them live, and you have the time, go to the WDSU webcam…right this second.

Roll, Zulu!

THE ZULU COCONUT
After Zulu started rolling on the mainstream parade routes in 1968, it didn’t take long for the Zulu coconut to eclipse the doubloon as the most cherished of all Mardi Gras “throws.”

These are real coconuts, each one individually gilded and decorated by hand by Zulu members, who make up the designs themselves.

But there was a problem.

Tossing out plastic beads and fake gold doubloons was no big deal, but throwing Zulu coconuts could be life-threatening. More than a few parade goers who lacked the receiving skills of, say, a Jerry Rice ended up getting brained by these things. Zulu became the target of so many lawsuits that insurance companies wouldn’t go near them.

Finally, the Louisiana legislature stepped in, passing a law that exempted Zulu from liability — provided they handed out their coconuts to the crowds. No more throwing.

Every so often, some overly exuberant Zulu member forgets himself and flings one, but for the most part, they stick to the rule. Which means spectators can go home with their beloved coconuts — without a detour to the emergency room.

It also meant that fewer parade goers would even get a shot at going home with a Zulu coconut, making them even more prized than they already were.

ALSO CHECK OUT:
All on a Mardi Gras Day
NEW ORLEANS: Streetcars and Baby Dolls

TRAVEL TECH THURSDAY 2.7.13

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Rio de Janeiro skyline

Rio de Janeiro — © Mypix | Dreamstime.com

Rio de Janeiro embeds QR codes in sidewalks to put tourism info literally at visitors’ feet. KLM puts your friends’ travel tips in your hands. And a Russian online travel agency sets its crosshairs on Priceline.

BRAZILIAN BRILLIANCE
I don’t know how you say “slick” in Portuguese, but trust me, this is slick.

Rio de Janeiro has some of the world’s greatest sights — Sugarloaf Mountain, the Christ the Redeemer statue, the Copacabana and Ipanema beaches and their thong-clad beachgoers, male and female.
Rio QR code
But if you want to see some real genius in Rio, just look down — and have your smartphone handy.

The city is turning QR codes into mosaics and embedding them into sidewalks around Rio’s tourist attractions.

You can read all about this visitor-friendly urban innovation in this Associated Press story here.

For those of you who have yet to join Smartphone Nation, a QR code is a two-dimensional variation of the standard bar code, but can store a lot more information.

When you scan a QR code with the camera built into your smartphone, it can take your device directly to a Web site. A scan of the Rio sidewalk QR code takes you to a tourist information site — in English, Spanish or Portuguese, as well as a city map.

It works with any smartphone that has a camera and a QR-scanning app, the latter of which you can download off the Web for pennies or even free.

Rio plans install 30 of these at various tourist sites around the city.

The brilliance is as artistic as it is practical, since the QR design was worked into a mosaic sidewalk. The very design of the QR code lends itself perfectly to mosaics.

Like i said…slick.

You don’t even have to be in Rio to use it. I’ve scanned the Ipanema mosaic QR code right off my computer screen here in San Diego, more than 6,000 miles away. It worked as fine — and as fast — as if I were standing directly over it.

IBIT says: Within five years, you’ll be seeing QR codes embedded into sidewalks in major destination cities around the world. Bet on it.

Meanwhile, next time you find yourself in Rio, don’t forget to look down.

YOUR OWN LIVING TRAVEL MAP
Royal Dutch Airlines, better known around the world as KLM, is trotting out a computer app that lets you turn your friends into a travel information asset that you can put in your pocket.

KLM logo

Basically, it lets you incorporate tips from your social media connections into your own personalized travel map, which the airline prints and send to you, free of charge.

The airline calls it Must See Map. Here’s how it works:

  1. Go to the Must See Map site. Pick one of the 100 preloaded destinations, all of which happen to be part of KLM’s route system.
  2. Name — and SAVE! — your map.
  3. Invite your friends via Facebook, Twitter or email to look at your destination map and mark their own suggestions for must-do’s and must-see’s on it.
  4. When you feel you’ve got enough tips, order your map.

That’s it. About three weeks later, your personalized destination map will arrive via conventional “snail mail” from KLM. That’s right, an old-school, foldable, jam-it-in-a-pack-or-a-pocket paper map.

Again, it’s free. No charge for “shipping and handling.” No charge for anything. Gratis.

And yes, you will be able to access your customized map online, also.

If there’s a weakness in this idea, it’s that KLM forces you to create this map on a desktop, laptop or tablet computer. You can’t create your Must See Map on a smartphone.

Once you create the map, however, your invitees can add their destination tips via smartphone.

Also, this application evidently doesn’t cover all of KLM’s vast list of destinations. Perhaps the airline is waiting to see how travelers respond to Must See Map before expanding the destination list.

IBIT says: This could make a pretty cool trip souvenir, even if you end up not going — not to mention a good prop at a pre-trip or post-trip party. Also, I’ve flown KLM and they do a good job.

FROM RUSSIA WITH BARGAINS(?)
William Shatner may soon be hearing footsteps, and they’re coming all the way from Moscow.

Apparently, the Russian-owned online agency OneTwoTrip is looking to take on both Expedia and Priceline.
OneTwoTrip logo
According to the Russian business news site BSR Russia, OneTwoTrip already is selling airline tickets and is looking to move into booking hotels. And while initially targeting the expanding Russian middle-class market, the company has no intention of stopping there.

That by itself is interesting enough, but really raised my eyebrows was how OneTwoTrip plans to elbow its way into the Expedia-Priceline orbit — by providing what you might call value-added online information.

In addition to airline bookings, for instance, the site already rates airlines on seat pitch, the likelihood of flight delays and even the age of their airplanes.

Having recently flown on a Boeing 747 that may have been at least as old as the flight crew, with an in-flight entertainment system that your parents first flew with, I can tell you that aircraft age matters.

OneTwoTrip already is planning to do something similar with hotels, even telling you which ones — in their opinion, anyway — are overpriced.

You can read the entire BSR Russia story here.

Intrigued? I sure am. As a consumer, I’m also hesitant. Given the amount of cybercrime that originates in Russia, I would have to think long and hard before knowingly booking anything online over a Russian commercial site.

Still, if this enhanced online travel service shows signs of catching on, expect Priceline and its US contemporaries to upgrade their own offerings in response.

IBIT says: The folks behind OneTwoTrip sound smart and innovative. If they can get past Russia’s reputation as one of the world’s hacker capitals, they just might give William Shatner reason to sweat.

ALSO CHECK OUT:
INTRODUCING: Travel Tech Thursday
In search of travel apps, Part 1
In search of travel apps, Part 2
SAFE TRAVEL: Can your hotel room be hacked?

the IBIT Travel Digest 2.3.13

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The good, the bad and the bizarre in the world of travel

cropped-hburghof.jpg

When you’ve finished overdosing on Super Bowl hype, chips and dip, come refresh your mind with a peek at what’s happening in the world of travel

PRICELINE+KAYAK=?
We are soon to find out, because according to Travel Weekly, the Federal Trade Commission has signed off on Priceline’s bid to buy the popular travel search engine for $1.8 billion.

That pretty much makes the sale a done deal, which could go down as soon as next month.

Snapping up Kayak gives Priceline a powerful search tool to tie in with its existing travel sales service. Less clear is how this marriage will benefit the traveling consumer.

On the other hand, Priceline has said that Kayak will to function as an independent entity, so we’ll see what happens.

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CAR SHARING: THE BIG BOYS TAKE NOTICE
You know that a new way of doing things really works when the big, old-line corporations start diving into it. That’s what has happened with car sharing.

Car sharing is kind of the automotive version of couchsurfing. It got its start in Switzerland in 1948 and took hold in the rest of Europe in the 1970s.

Once you become a member of a car-sharing service, you can rent a car for an entire day, a few hours or even a few minutes, if that’s all you need. You pick up the car in town, use it around town, drop it off in town. Cheaper and often more convenient than conventional car rentals, more flexibility and independence than taxis.

The concept doesn’t appeal only to travelers. Some people who don’t need a car full-time every day are actually getting rid of their own wheels (and the costs that go with them) and resorting to car sharing instead.

It’s also a good way to get a real-world feel for operating an unfamiliar vehicle type, whether it’s a pick-up truck or an electric car — without having to put up with a car salesman.

One of the pioneers in this field has been Zipcar, available in 34 states and the District of Columbia, as well as Ontario and Vancouver in Canada, as well as Barcelona, Spain and five cities in the United Kingdom.

How well does this concept work? Well enough for some of the rental car industry’s biggest players to take notice.

Hertz is answering its challenge by creating a car-sharing service of its own which it calls Hertz On-Demand. Enterprise followed suit with what they call WeCar. Even U-Haul has jumped into this game with U Car Share.

Avis, too, is buying the Zipcar concept. It’s also buying Zipcar…for $500 million.

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MORE (CRUISE) SHIPS AHOY
At this point, I’m not sure if the cruise industry’s shipbuilding binge is entering its second decade or its third. The one thing I do know: It’s not stopping.

Royal Caribbean, locked in mortal combat with Carnival for the dominant share of the market, is showing every sign of both expanding and updating its fleet super-sized cruisers.

They’re already moving to trademark the names of six new Oasis-class vessels that haven’t even been built yet.

The Oasis-class — led by its namesake, the Oasis of the Seas — is currently the largest cruise ship afloat, maxing out at 5,400 passengers.

But Royal Caribbean isn’t stopping there. The line also is working on a new, slightly downsized cruise ship, the Sunshine-class, designed to transport and entertain a mere 4,100 passengers at a time.

This ship is so new, the first one hasn’t been named yet, much less built. But according to Travel Weekly, Royal Caribbean has already committed to building a second one.

I have no idea how the folks at Carnival will respond to this, but you know that they will be respond. It’s like an arms race, only with oceanview suites, water slides and Bahama Mamas.

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AND FINALLY…
If you were (or perhaps still are) a regular viewer of the 1970s TV series M*A*S*H, you might vaguely recall lots of occasional references to some mythical town or village whose name sounded like “Wee-John-Boo.”

Well, it turns out that Uijeongbu is no myth. It’s a real place, where the real Mobile Army Surgical Hospital operated during the Korean War. And in South Korea, its legacy extends far beyond film and television.

The people of Uijeongbu, desperately hungry during the war, made meals of whatever they could get their hands on. The result was a dish the locals called budaejjigae, Korean for “army base stew.”

Basically, it combined traditional Korean ingredients with whatever leftovers the locals could scrounge or smuggle from U.S. Army mess tents.

The shooting eventually stopped (the Korean War has never formally ended), but “army base stew” remained a staple of Uijeongbu — and Julie Wan of the Washington Post took advantage of a visit to her family in Seoul to seek out this most unconventional dish in its birthplace.

And as you’ll see when you read her story, she found it.

If you know the origins of things like gumbo, barbecue or fried chicken, you can relate to budaejjigae. Cookbooks today are full of dishes devised by poor, hungry people who tossed anything and everything into a stew pot and used a slow fire, a lot of spices and their imaginations to create something unforgettable.

If I ever find myself in South Korea, I may need to make a small side trip to Uijeongbu.

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And now, here’s The Digest:

AIR
from Travel Weekly
JetBlue experimenting with an expedited security service that could — maybe — speed you past regular airport security lines. For a fee, of course.

from Smarter Travel
Visual advice on how to dress for air travel. Aimed mainly at women, but the fellas can learn a few things from this, too. SLIDESHOW

from Smarter Travel
The TSA shuts down an airport terminal in Atlanta because of an unattended…toothbrush? You can’t make this stuff up. I mean, those Colgate bombs can be deadly…

from Smarter Travel
Did you know that fresh oranges, in addition to being healthy for you on the ground, can help keep you hydrated in the air? These and other healthy food tips for air travelers.

LAND
from Travel Weekly
Hertz now letting its Gold Plus Rewards members upgrade their rental cars via their smartphone app.

SEA
from Travel Weekly
Carnival cancels Belize port calls for two of its biggest ships through 2013. The cruise line says the port is overcrowded with ships.

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AFRICA
from Tanzania Daily News (Tanzania) via allAfrica.com
Serengeti National Park, already a UN World Heritage Site, wins a prestigious international tourism award.

from The Star (Kenya) via allAfrica.com
The German cruise ship MV Astor makes a historic port call at Lamu, setting aside fears of kidnappings by Somali bandits.

from The Star (Kenya) via allAfrica.com
Are British Army units training in East Africa arming and equipping poachers?

AMERICAS
from CNN Travel
Today’s Super Bowl is more than just a battle between two pro football teams. It’s also a tale of two cities, Baltimore and San Francisco, and how they play. SLIDESHOW

from NBC News
New York City’s Grand Central Terminal celebrated its centennial last Friday. The Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty may be great monuments, but if you want to locate New York’s beating heart, you’ll find it here.

from the New York Times
Yes, you can send an email to the Bahamas, but a mail boat can send you there.

from Travel Weekly
Haiti officially protests the latest U.S. State Department travel advisory on visiting the island nation, which reads in art: “No one is safe from kidnapping, regardless of occupation, nationality, race, gender or age.” State denies trying to discourage Haitian tourism.

ASIA/PACIFIC
from Yomiuri Shimbun
Deep in a forest, well away from the mad urban bustle of Tokyo, a village of Japanese craftsmen hand-builds elegant wood furniture with skills honed over 15 centuries.

from France 24
Missed out on the New Year’s Day festivities Jan. 1? Well, there’s still Chinese New Year coming up on Feb. 10, and the place to party is Hong Kong.

from CNTV
A small lake fishing village in China’s Yunnan province becomes a hidden tourist gem.

EUROPE
from the New York Times
Feel yourself choking on mobs of tourists in Venice? Find a way to go eat with some of the locals.

from Lonely Planet
Is this the world’s most beautiful train ride? It’s in Norway.

from Travel Weekly
The Waldorf-Astoria hotel chain is making a serious move on Europe. With hotels already in London, Rome and Versailles, the luxury brand is now opening a Waldorf-Astoria in Berlin. And they’re not done. SLIDESHOW

the IBIT Travel Digest 1.27.13

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The good, the bad and the bizarre in the world of travel

IMG_1605

DANCING THROUGH CUSTOMS
One of the fringe benefits of writing a travel blog is that you can make some great friends doing great work. One such friend of mine is Renee King, who publishes A View to a Thrill.

In her most recent installment, she gives us the 4-1-1 on of the US government’s trusted traveler programs that can seriously speed you through the Customs process upon your return to the United States. It’s called “Global Entry” and here’s what Renee had to say about it:

“Originally created to target frequent international travelers, the U.S. Global Entry program has been a virtual god-send for travelers who want a fast and secure way of skipping the lines altogether when re-entering the United States.”

To pick up all the details on “Global Entry,” check out Renee’s article here. And then bookmark it. You’ll want to keep this one handy.

Anyone who doesn’t “get” the importance of this program has never walked/stumbled/staggered off a jumbo jet with about 300 other exhausted souls after a transoceanic flight lasting 12 hours or longer, only to queue up in a Customs line…with the passengers of two, three or four other jumbo jets, all doing the same thing you are.

I have. I don’t recommend it.

If such a trip is a one-in-a-lifetime deal for you, then you may not need this program, especially when it costs $100. You’ll also have to make an appointment to be interviewed, electronically fingerprinted and see if you qualify for the program — and frankly, not everyone will.

But when you walk off that plane in a jet-lagged fog and breeze by all those folks suffering in line, you’ll swear it was the best time and money you ever spent on travel.

And if you make more than, say, three or four globe-girdling flights per year, you need this.

To apply for the Global Entry program, start here.

ALL ABOARD…THE NIGHT TRAIN
If it’s true that, in the words of the old Amtrak commercial, “there’s something about a train, then there’s something even more captivating about an overnight “sleeper” train.

Watching the sun set from the privacy of your own compartment, then bedding down for the night with a window full of stars and awaking the next morning in a different city — or a different country — is unforgettable.

It’s also practical. A sleeper train combines transportation and lodging in one. Instead of losing a day traveling between points, you arrive at your destination early the next morning.

It’s not cheap, but a private compartment often includes all your on-board meals, as well as other perks unavailable to Coach passengers, all of which makes the sleeper experience worth considering.

London’s Daily Telegraph newspaper has considered it at length, and compiled a slideshow of what they consider to be the top ten overnight sleeper train runs in Europe, including one between Europe (London) and Africa (Marrakech, Morocco).

Paris-Barcelona? Paris-Berlin? London-Penzance? Yeah, I could happily do any of those.

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AFRICAN FASHION MADE EASY
Not many folks on this side of the Atlantic are aware of it, but Africa has developed quite the fashion scene. We’re talking high-end threads for men and women from high-profile designers from the length and breadth of the Mother Continent.

Until a few years ago, your best shot at checking out this vibrant and growing fashion world was to fly to one or more of perhaps seven African cities:

  • Lagos, Nigeria
  • Nairobi, Kenya
  • Cape Town, South Africa
  • Johannesburg, South Africa
  • Dakar, Senegal
  • Luanda, Angola

And if you want to get a feel for the sources of inspiration that drive these African fashions, that still might be the best idea.

However, you do have alternatives. Lots of them, in fact.

New York City, Los Angeles and Dallas both annually hosts African Fashion Weeks. But if you feel like giving your fashion trip some international flavor — with a bit less expense and a lot less flight time — there’s the Black Fashion Week in Paris and the Africa Fashion Week London, now in its third year.

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And now, here’s The Digest:

AIR
from Business Insider via Yahoo
A Germany-based air safety monitoring group lists the world’s ten most dangerous airlines over the last 30 years. Read with some large grains of salt.

from eTurbo News
An Indonesian airline adopts new Sukhoi Superjet 100 airliners from Russia. The reason: They can operate from the country’s short runways.

from NBC News
Southwest Airlines is betting that you’ll be willing to pay $40 extra to board their planes early. Would you?

from eTurbo News
Ethiopian Airlines cuts flights from Addis Ababa to Europe.

LAND

from Travel Weekly
A heavy late-December snowfall has the skiing looking good at America’s ski resorts.

from The Telegraph (London UK)
What do you get when you take an Amtrak train between Toronto and New York? A 12-hour rail cruise through US history and some of North America’s most gorgeous scenery.

from Forbes via Yahoo
Can you measure a country’s happiness? The Legatum Institute of London says it can, and it’s produced a list of the world’s ten happiest nations. And no, the United States is nowhere in the top ten.

from Time
Has snowboarding lost its mojo?

SEA
from Cruise Industry News
More evidence of the cruise industry’s growing tilt toward Asia: Princess Cruises to homeport a second cruise ship, the Diamond Princess, in Japan.

from Cruise Critic
For those of you dying to escape the frigid winter, there are six cruise ships sailing in warm waters that nearly always have cabins offered at a discount.

from Cruise Industry News
The upscale cruise line Silversea plans to offer shorter (and thus cheaper) cruises in Northern Europe and the Mediterranean.

from Cruise Industry News
As cruises go, this one’s the ultimate icebreaker. Hapag-Lloyd Cruises is planning an August cruise of the Northwest Passage fron Greenland to Alaska on one of its expedition ships, the Hanseatic. You don’t often see the words “expedition” and “5-star” in the same sentence.

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AFRICA
from Reuters
You might want to hold off on that Cairo vacation a little longer. Things are getting hectic — and deadly — again in Egypt.

from al Jazeera
Museum in Mali trying to protect some of the country’s historic artifacts from the threat of destruction by radical Muslim insurgents.

from eTurbo News
British Airways pulls out of Tanzania, and Emirates is the first airline to step into the void.

from The Telegraph (London UK)
Tourism officials in Egypt report that foreign visits are up, but not as much as expected.

from eTurbo News
Ethiopia turning to China, India and Russia as potential new tourism markets.

AMERICAS
from the Huffington Post
George Hobica says Albuquerque NM has been overshadowed by Santa Fe, but it deserves a closer look. Especially if you’re a fan of beer, road trips and under-the-radar cool.

from Travel Weekly
Want a shot at some warm winter weather and a whiff of that new hotel smell? Start saving your coins and circle Dec. 2014 on your calendar. That’s the the 1,000-room $1 billion Baha Mar casino resort is set to open its doors.

from the Chicago Tribune
If you’re a baseball junkie, a visit to Chicago’s historic Wrigley Field is something close to a religious pilgrimage. Now, the Sheraton hotel chain is planning to put up a boutique hotel directly across the street from the old ballpark. Think they’ll pt bleachers on the roof?

from Reuters via NBCNews
More flights and a weaker dollar have combined to create record-setting tourism in Hawaii.

ASIA/PACIFIC
from BootsnAll
Southeast Asia is a great destination for rail travel.

from China Daily
The dispute between China and Japan over the Senkaku (or if you’re Chinese, Diaoyu) Islands is throwing cold water on tourism between the two countries.

from SFGate.com
Walking in the path of samurai. Scenic medieval walkways in Japan.

from The Guardian (London UK)
What would you see on a 40-mile walk across a city of 30 million souls? Marcel Theroux gives us his answers from his trek across Tokyo, the first of a series of walks across the largest cities on Earth.

EUROPE
from ABC News via Yahoo
Welcome to County Kerry in southwest Ireland, where drunk driving is legal. And no, that’s not a typo.

from eTurbo News
Ukraine’s largest airline, AeroSvit, goes belly up, stranding hundreds of passengers in the process.

from The Guardian (London UK)
It wasn’t that long ago that the term “luxury hostel” might have been the ultimate oxymoron in travel especially in Europe. It’s fair to say that things have changed. A lot. SLIDESHOW

the IBIT Travel Digest 12.16.12

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The good, the bad and the bizarre from the world’s best travel media

©IBIT/G. Gross

©IBIT/G. Gross

DOWN AND (NOT) DIRTY EATS, WORLDWIDE
I’m not a foodie; I just like food. And I love checking out the hidden, under-sized, under-rated places. The incredible street vendor. The lovingly run Mom-and-Pop storefront.

It’s great when you do that in your hometown. When you can do it on the other side of the world, it’s magic.

So I could hardly restrain the joy when London’s The Guardian newspaper introduced me to a blog after my own heart, or at least my own palate: Culinary Backstreets.

This blog focuses on five cities — Istanbul, Athens, Barcelona, Mexico City and Shanghai. If their content is any indication, you could lose your mind — and gain some weight — in any of them.

It’s a reminder that you don’t need a fistful of Michelin stars to find a galaxy of wonderful flavors.

The specific blog post that The Guardian locked in on was one about a street food paradise in an old Shanghai neighborhood that was almost lost to redevelopment.

A story like that speaks not only to my love of urban street food, but my taste for preserving and enhancing an old community instead of tearing everything down and replacing it with the new, the shiny, the sterile.

Real people, in a real community, making and selling real food. How does “urban renewal” improve on that?

ANSWER: It usually doesn’t.

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AFTER-CHRISTMAS (TRAVEL) SALES
One nice way to beat the post-holiday blues would be to score yourself some after-Christmas travel bargains, and the period between the day after NEw Year’s and Martin Luther King Jr. days is one of the best ties of year to do it.

The folks at The Motley Fool call this period “dead time” for the travel industry. I prefer to think of it as hunting season for the smart travel consumer.

To that end, the Motley Fool folks have some tips on how to snag some killer travel deals during that period.

Happy bargaining hunting.

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LUGGAGE TAGS? TRY LUGGAGE APPS
Believe it or not — and I know some of you won’t — the airlines are getting better at not losing your checked bags. Statistics from the US Department of Transportation say so. Considering that they make you pay nowadays for the “privilege” of checking them, I’d say that’s only fair.

Still, air passengers do sometimes find themselves left waiting vainly at the luggage carousel, something we’d all love to avoid. And yes, there’s an app for that.

Delta Airlines started the ball rolling with its Fly Delta app that, among other things, allows you to track your checked baggage.

The makers of Bag-Claim say their iPhone app sends a signal to your phone and your Bluetooth headset to let you know when your bag is nearby, and it continues until your bag is literally in your hand.

Another possible option, depending on whether the Federal Aviation Administration decides to loosen up its rules on the use of personal electronic devices in flight, would be to toss your own GPS tracking device into your bag.

One example would be the Pocketfinder GPS Locator. Like Fly Delta, it works with iPhones, Android phones, Windows Mobile devices…and for us digital troglodytes out there, even Blackberrys.

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And now, here’s The Digest:

AIR
from Business Week
Eastern Europe’s state-owned airlines are struggling in the post-Cold War era, with some cutting services and one, Malev of Hungary, shutting down altogether. Hopes that their Western European counterparts might buy them — and thus save them — so far seem in vain.

from Associated Press via Yahoo
Can you put your smile on strike? Flight attendants for Cathay Pacific sas they intend to do just that. And no, this is not a satirical piece from The Onion. The’re serious.

from USA Today
Is South Korea’s Incheon International Airport now the world’s greatest air terminal? The Airports Council International says yes. See why, and see how the world’s other major airports fared.

LAND
from the UN News Service via allAfrica.com
The number of tourists worldwide hit the 1 billion mark in 2012, a record. And as ominously huge as that number might sound, the UN World Tourist Organization thinks that could be a good thing. Maybe even a very good thing.

from Smarter Travel
Is duty-free shopping really the bargain it’s cracked up to be? ST’s Ed Perkins says don’t believe the hype.

from Independent Traveler
If you’re traveling in Britain, better keep it down in the hotel. The hotel noise police are looking — and listening — for you.

from Travel Weekly
Washington fires a warning shot at 22 hotel operators over their hidden fees.

from Travel Weekly
Hertz competes its purchase of Dollar Thrifty rent-a-car. What was three car rental agencies not that long ago is now one. Hertz now controls 26 percent of the rental car market. The company that owns Enterprise, National and Alamo controls 50 percent. So much for competition.

from Travel Weekly
OFFICIALLY COOL: Need some exercise? Need to charge your smartphone or your laptop? The Starwood Element Hotels chain is installing exercise cycles in its hotel gyms that simultaneously let you do both. Charge your devices by burning calories? Genius.

SEA
from Friends of the Earth
The cruise industry has sent the last decade or so trying to clean up its image as an environmentally unfriendly industry. If this report card from Friends of the Earth is any indication, it’s still a work in progress.

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AFRICA
from The Star (Kenya) via allAfrica.com
Kenya launches a campaign to promote cultural tourism abroad.

from East African Business Week (Uganda) via allAfrica.com
Turkish Airlines begins flights between Istanbul and Mombasa, Kenya. Flight time, about six hours. Turkey could make a nice stopover enroute to East Africa. Hmmmm…

from The Herald (Zimbabwe) via allAfrica.com
Poaching in Africa is taking a frightening turn. Park rangers in Zimbabwe kill two elephant poachers in a shootout. The rest flee, leaving behind…mortar bombs? If poachers are using mortars, against animals or people, this is no longer a police matter. This is war.

AMERICAS
from the New York Times
Manhattan is for lovers. Book lovers, that is.

from BBC Travel
Think of Idaho and a lot of words may come to mind. “Cultural mecca” probably won’t be among them. Think again, says the BBC.

ASIA/PACIFIC
from The Guardian (London UK)
In Japan, the best skiing is found at small-scale local spots. No crowds and lots of perfect powder. Are you packing yet?

from GrindTV via Yahoo
This is how you get around China’s Mount Hua. When they say the view is to die for, they mean it. If you slip, you’ll be falling for awhile. Actually, you’ll be falling for a mile.

from Travel Weekly
Myanmar, the country most of us grew up knowing as Burma, may or may not have fully abandoned its dictatorial government and fully embraced reform — but that’s not stopping US and other Western travelers from bum-rushing this country. Good idea, or bad idea?

EUROPE
from the New York Times
There’s more to anchovies than those super-salty strips of fish most people want “held” off their pizzas — and anchovy season on the Black Sea in Turkey may be just the time and place to find out why. Ask for the hamsi.

from Reuters
Well, this is not jolly good. A TripAdvisor survey of travelers finds London not only dirty and expensive, but the second most unfriendly city in the world. Only Moscow was worse. Bloody hell, eh what!

from the Los Angeles Times
An early peek at Sochi, Russia, the Black Sea venue for the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Sacred ground in Rio

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The recently discovered remains of Brazil’s largest slave port give those interested in black heritage travel new reason to add Rio de Janeiro to their bucket list.

There are a lot of reasons to list Rio de Janeiro as one of your must-see cities. Fifteen different beaches. Stunning scenery. Soccer. Music in the form of samba and choro. Nightlife. Carnaval.

And four years from now, it’s going to be the venue for the 2016 Summer Olympics.

But when you think about Brazil’s African heritage, Rio may not be the first location that comes to mind.

That aspect of Brazilian culture finds its best and fullest expression about 800 air miles to the north, in Salvador, the capital of Brazil’s Bahia state. It’s made the city not only one of Brazil’s principal travel destinations, but has turned it into a major magnet for black expats looking to reset their lives outside the United States or Europe.

A recent archeological find, however, may soon be shifting some of that historic and cultural focus to Rio.

Two years ago, workmen started excavating land in the Saúde district of downtown Rio to install a new drainage system, part of plans to transform Rio’s bedraggled old port district into a spiffy new tourist and business center, in time for the Olympics.

A HALF-MILLION SLAVES
What they found could transform the history of Brazil’s African slave trade — the long-lost remains of Cais do Valongo, the Valongo Wharf.

This was more than just a wharf. This was a sprawling complex of buildings and structures devoted to the buying and selling of human beings. Within a 12-year span, from 1818 to 1830, about a half-million West African captives landed here, to be warehoused and sold to slaveowners throughout the country.

If the United States owes much of its modern-day wealth to the work of African slaves, Brazil may owe even more. For more than three centuries, anywhere from 3 million to 5 million men, women and children were forcibly shipped here in the holds of squalid slave ships — as many as half of all the slaves ever sent to the Americas.

Brazil didn’t abolish slavery until 1888, practically within sight of the 20th century. After that, the government decided to bury that part of Brazil’s past. That meant burying Valongo Wharf.

Literally.

HIDDEN HORRORS
Like churches built atop the ruins of ancient mosques in Europe, Rio razed the old slave dock and built a new structure, the Rio Empress’ Wharf, on its remains. Out of sight, out of mind.

But not out of history. This place was known and described in detail, as the London newspaper The Guardian pointed out:

“The British clergyman Robert Walsh detailed the horrors of Valongo wharf following a visit in 1828. ‘The poor creatures are exposed for sale like any other commodity,’ he wrote in Notices of Brazil in 1828 and 1829, describing how slave buyers would manhandle the slaves as if ‘buying a dog or mule’.
‘They were all doomed to remain on the spot, like sheep in a pen, till they were sold; they have no apartment to retire to, no bed to repose on, no covering to protect them; they sit naked all day, and lie naked all night, on the bare boards, or benches, where we saw them exhibited.’ “

According to Brazilian writer Leonardo Martins, the very location of Cais do Valongo was an act of denial, chosen so that the members of Brazil’s royal family wouldn’t have to see it. Evidently, they were perfectly comfortable with slavery…so long as they didn’t have to witness the process of enslavement.

Says Martins:

“With the revitalization of the place, they saw the opportunity to redeem this part of the story and they talked with Mayor to obtain this. The biggest surprise was to see how (well) preserved it was, too.”

TREASURE TROVE
Brazilian academicians have known about Cais do Valongo, but with it having been covered up, no one knew for sure how large or extensive it was. When word of the find reached them, archeologists descended on the site and started digging.

In addition to the structures, they’re finding personal items that belonged to the victims of the “peculiar institution.” Wooden toothbrushes. Broken pottery. A purse made of chain mail.

But Valongo Wharf was not the only discovery. A short distance away in the Gamboa neighborhood, Martins said a woman remodeling her house started finding human bones.

She called police, fearing that she had stumbled upon a crime scene.

In a sense, she had.

What she had found was a place known as the Cemitério de Pretos Novos, a 19th century burial ground for African slaves. Researchers had always known of its existence, according to Martins, but its location had been a mystery…until now.

According to CNN, the cariocas, as Rio residents are known, treated the slave cemetery as a garbage dump back in the day.

“Bones, pieces of ceramic, bits from construction, tiles, animal remains, bits of food, society threw all sorts of things in here,” according to archeologist Renaldo Tavares. “Slaves were considered garbage by society.”

The lady has since donated her house to become a museum and nearby houses have been expropriated by the city as part of what is now deemed an historic site, Martins tells me.

“OUR ROMAN RUINS”
The 19th century’s trash — human and otherwise — has become the 21st century’s treasure. By the time the digging is done at the wharf and the cemetery, Rio de Janeiro could be home to the largest collection of African Diaspora artifacts in the world.

But they’re not waiting for that.

Brazilian historians, with the active support of Rio’s city fathers, are making Cais do Valongo and the Cemitério de Pretos Novos into focal points of a new Historic Circuit of African Heritage.

Meanwhile, locals are bracing for still more finds around the city. Some are suggesting that these sites need to be investigated by lawyers as a way of taking on the thorny issue of reparations. They seem determined to bring this dark part of their country’s past into the light.

Said Rio’s mayor, Eduardo Paes: “These are our Roman ruins.”

Which means Rio de Janeiro has just climbed several places on my must-see list. And when I get there, I’m going straight to Cais do Valongo and the Cemitério de Pretos Novos. Before the beaches. Before Carnaval. Before Sugarloaf Mountain and the statue of Christ the Redeemer. Before anything.

For any black man or woman whose family tree has slaves among its branches, this is sacred ground.

ALSO CHECK OUT:
The Rio Times
The Guardian (London UK)
CNN
Leonardo Martins’ Flickr page

Edited by P.A.Rice

the IBIT TRAVEL DIGEST 11.11.12

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The good, the bad and the bizarre from the world’s best travel media

RETURN OF THE SLEEPER
Back in the 1860s, a fellow named George Pullman felt that overnight trains were well short on comfort, so he decided to do something about it. The sleeping car he created would make his name synonymous with luxury rail travel for the next hundred years.

Pullman is long gone, but according to Yahoo Travel, the company that bears his name is bringing those cars back.

Pullman Rail Journeys is now offering rail excursions in fully restored sleeper, dining and lounge cars between Chicago and New Orleans.

If you love rail travel, and especially if you love the idea of following the Mississippi River by rail from the Second City to the land of “laissez les bon temps rouler,” this one needs to go to the top of your bucket list.

But this also is a trip back into “our” history, because Mr. Pullman’s plush railcars also gave rise to the Pullman porters, who played one of the most important — and least-known — roles in the black American struggle for civil rights.

You can learn about that struggle in Chicago with a visit to the A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum.

What about the other end of the journey, you ask? This, I can tell you from personal experience: A train is one of the two most enjoyable and satisfying ways to arrive in or leave New Orleans (the other being via cruise ship).

For more details, visit the Pullman Rail Journeys Web site here.

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WHEELS OF FORTUNE
Actually, more like wheels that will cost you a fortune. NBC News serves up its list of the world’s ten most scenically glorious, luxuriously glamourous — and heart-stoppingly expensive rail journeys.

Not surprisingly, four of them are in Europe, with two in the Asia/Pacific region and one each in North America, South America and Africa. And on each, the trains are practically destinations in themselves.

Keep this list handy for that day when you hit the lottery. SLIDESHOW

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LIGHTEN YOUR LOAD
In the ongoing struggle to get travelers to pack less — for the sake of their backs as well as their wallets — the folks over at Smarter Travel started looking at what travelers typically bring with them.

The goal, to identify things you should leave at home and buy during your trip.

They came up with seven items, which they put in a slideshow.

Doing this not only can lighten your luggage, but if approached in the right spirit, can become a mini-cultural adventure. You can learn a lot about a place when you go shopping in a different part of the world for something other than souvenirs.

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PRICELINE SAILS OFF WITH KAYAK
The consolidation in the online travel industry continues. After Google bought up the Frommer’s travel Web site, online travel auctioneer Priceline now joins the party by purchasing price comparison site Kayak for $1.8 billion.

Travel planners aren’t likely to notice much difference at first, so long as Priceline sticks with its plan to allow Kayak to continue to function as an independent entity. Sooner or later, however, all of these massive mergers are going to make a difference in how we shop for travel online — and how much we pay for it.

You can check out the details in this USA Today story here.

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RHINO POACHING — LOCAL TRADE, ORGANIZED CRIME
In southern Africa, the ongoing tragedy of rhino poaching not only continues unchecked, but is accelerating to tragic levels, driven by well-financed organized crime.

African Arguments reports that Asia’s growing middle class has more disposable income to spend on folk medicines made from rhino horn and increasingly is doing so, ignoring all scientific evidence that such medicines have no medicinal value at all.

The poachers aren’t quite having it all their own way, though. At least one poaching kingpin recently got 40 years in prison.

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AND FINALLY…
When someone says “Greenland,” what comes to your mind? Frozen tundra? Glaciers melting under the effects of climate change? Icebergs floating menacingly offshore in the Atlantic?

I’m guessing the one thing you don’t think about is fine dining. But Greenland — which, under all that melting ice and snow, actually is green — has this new cadre of creative chefs who would love to change your mind about that.

The London daily newspaper, The Guardian, sent one of its writers, Tim Moore, to see if there was anything to this notion of one of the coldest nations on Earth as a hot foodie destination. Did he find culinary nirvana? Did he stay warm enough to taste anything, or did his frozen fork get stuck to his hand?

Read the Guardian story and find out.

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AND NOW, HERE’S THE DIGEST:

AIR
from Travel Weekly
Congress is siding with US airlines that are balking at the European Union’s plan to charge airlines a carbon tax.

from Smarter Travel
Free concerts. Yoga room. Golf course. Brewpub. A slide four stories high. All this and more at…the airport? If you’re at the right airport, yes. SLIDESHOW

from Travel Weekly
Flight attendants at Southwest Airlines approve a change in their contract that will allow Southwest to fly over water. What does that mean to you? For one thing, it means Southwest is one big step closer to offering flights to Hawai’i.

from Smarter Travel
Has your flight in Europe been cancelled or delayed more than three hours? You have rights, including the right to “get paid.” How do I love thee, European Union? Let me count the euros…

from the BBC
Is supersonic passenger air travel poised to make a comeback? If you’ve ever flown from LAX to Delhi or Papeete to Paris, you’re praying that the answer is yes. Check out the possibilities.

LAND
from Travel Weekly
Tour operator Tauck and PBS documentary filmmaker Ken Burns are teaming up to create an 11-day Mississippi River tour package, including a week-long steamboat cruise.

from the Los Angeles Times
The Space Needle is now a half-century old. If you saw it when it was new, that thought might be a little scary. If you’ve never seen it, it’s a good excuse to visit Seattle. That and the coffee, of course.

from USA Today
Ten places to get away from the cold-hearted winter wrath of Mother Nature. SLIDESHOW

from the New York Times
A Caribbean Carnival crawl, one island at a time.

SEA
from Travel Weekly
Cruise lines are increasingly going “green” these days. A surge in environmental consciousness after years of fouling the world’s oceans, or outreach to increasingly eco-conscious passengers?

from USA Today
When the cruise ship formerly known as Carnival Destiny emerges next spring from its $155 million makeover, it will have been renamed Carnival Sunshine and its attractions will include…wait for it…a water park.

AFRICA
from the Washington Post
Want to see the real East Africa? Bag the safaris and head for the cities, because these days, the “real East Africa” is urban.

from allAfrica.com
The Lonely Planet travel writers vote the ancient Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa as Africa’s top travel destination. See if you agree.

from allAfrica.com
A group of adventure travel enthusiasts is traveling the length of the Mother Continent by motor convoy — from Cairo to Capetown. They’re now in Tanzania.

from allAfrica.com
Uganda is world-famous for its rare mountain gorillas. As a tourist attraction, however, they’re gradually being eclipsed…by birds. Surprised? Don’t be. Birdwatching is huge in Africa.

AMERICAS
from the New York Times
Another chocolate tour — this time of the Caribbean.

from the Los Angeles Times
Ecuador is making a strong push these days to draw more visitors, and one of their lures is the old colonial charm of the newly freshened historic center in the capital, Quito.

from the New York Times
The Corn Islands off Nicaragua have no glitz, no glamor, no huge over-the-top resorts. They’re keeping it real out there. Real, rustic, tranquil Caribbean ambiance.

from the BBC
Can a man be buried in two places at once? Two intriguing travel destinations, one on each side of the Atlantic, claim to be the final resting place of Christopher Columbus.

ASIA/PACIFIC
from CNNgo
Go big or stay home. South Korea is planning a massive — and I do mean MASSIVE — new city devoted entirely to tourism and aimed straight at the Chinese market. If it’s built — and its projected pricetag of $275 billion makes that a very large “if” — there will be nothing else like it anywhere.

from CNNgo
A food writer goes on a six-food foodie odyssey in China, and comes back with a list of favorite cities for favorite dishes. If you’re planning a China trip, keep this list handy.

from the BBC
Chimelong Paradise is China’s largest theme park. Amusement at your own risk.

EUROPE
from Travel Weekly
Up a lazy, intimate, luxurious river. Barge cruising in the Alsace-Lorraine region of France.

from Rick Steves via SFGate
How to enjoy — and survive — a European road trip.

from Typically Spanish News
If you get sick or hurt while visiting the Spanish city of Málaga and you don’t speak Spanish, you might want to avoid Carlos Haya Hospital. They just fired their seven staff interpreters, whom they plan to replace with…a telephone service? What we may have here is an unhealthy failure to communicate.

Edited by P.A.Rice