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the IBIT Travel Digest 2.10.13

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

Hong Kong fireworks

Hong Kong fireworks — © Farang | Dreamstime.com

Wishing peace, health and prosperity to our IBIT friends in China and Chinatowns around the world as they ring in the Year of the Snake on this Lunar New Year.

EAT, DRINK AND GO TRAVEL
Every so often, I go back through old digests of mine to look for recurring themes — and if you’re a regular reader of the IBIT Travel Digest, there’s at least one you’ve spotted already. Nearly every digest, it seems, features at least one mention of food or drink.

So starting today, FOOD & DRINK gets its own section in the digest — and it kicks off with two subjects equally dear to my heart and my tastebuds.

New Orleans was a foodie town long before someone invented the term “foodie.” The word itself is out of favor these days among the blogerati (not that I give a damn), but the NOLA’S flare for flavor will never die.

From its beginnings, New Orleans cuisine has blended a mélange of influences — French, Spanish, Native American, African, Italian, Irish. Starting with the 1980s, though, a new taste fell into the city’s gumbo pot — the flavors of Vietnam.

San Diego was the first American city to receive South Vietnamese refugees en masse following the 1975 fall of Saigon, which made it the first to be exposed to Vietnamese dishes in a big way.It didn’t take long for pho and banh mi, with their fresh ingredients and vibrant mix of flavors, to become staples here.

And for you gumbo purists out there (and you know who you are): Yes, they do put in okra on request.

But while the Vietnamese cuisine tsunami was washing over San Diego, other refugees gravitated to the Gulf of Mexico to resume their lives as fishermen. Inevitably, many settled in New Orleans.

A city that already treated po’boys and gumbo as basic food groups had little trouble embracing pho soups and banh mi sandwiches. And among the Vietnamese and their descendants who grew up in the NOLA, the feeling seems to be mutual, as the New York Times recently discovered.

Today, within an easy drive from my house in San Diego are at least two Vietnamese restaurants whose menu is a mix of Vietnamese and New Orleans Creole dishes, run together by people from both locales. The nearest one features a daily special that includes half a banh mi and a bowl of gumbo.

But the best place to see the result of this marriage of cultures is in the Crescent City itself and you’ll see it below in the inaugural FOOD & DRINK section of the IBIT Travel Digest.

IBIT says: Bon appétit…or perhaps, chúc ngon miệng!

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WILL TRAVEL FOR JAZZ
Back at the turn of the 20th century, as Europe was plunging into the first of its two disastrous world wars, Paris witnessed the arrival of blacks from America, mostly soldiers, who brought with them a style of music Parisians had never heard before.

The Americans called it jazz, and Paris promptly fell in love with it. And as Jonathan Lorie discovered when he went roaming Ernest Hemingway’s old Parisian haunts for London’s The Guardian newspaper, the love still burns.

Jazz may be an American invention — perhaps the best of all American inventions — but there may be no better place to enjoy it than Paris. And as you’ll see in Lorie’s article, there are a lot of venues in the City of Light where you can enjoy it.

Lorie’s piece also links four other famed Jazz Age authors — F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Christopher Isherwood and Somerset Maugham — and their jazz hangouts from New York to Germany and even Sri Lanka.

But if all these folks were still around today, they all might leave their hearts in San Francisco. The reason is SFJAZZ, which opened late last month in the city’s Hayes Valley neighborhood.

It is the first concert hall in the United States — and maybe the world — built expressly for jazz. It features an auditorium, an ensemble room, rehearsal areas, a digital learning lab, and even a sidewalk cafe.

IBIT says: Hemingway would’ve dug it…once he got used to the no-smoking rule.

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AND FINALLY…
USA Today reports that Kate Hanni, head of the airline consumer organization FlyersRights.org, is stepping down as the group’s executive director, walking away from the outfit she founded in 2006.

You can read the entire USA Today story here.

She formed Flyers Rights after being stuck on the tarmac aboard an American Airlines flight in Austin, TX — for nearly nine hours — and getting little more than lip service from the airline. Her outspoken efforts since then led to federal regulations governing how the airlines handle flight delays.

Not surprisingly, Ms. Hanni didn’t make a lot of friends in the airline industry during her time with Flyers Rights, but she did prove that consumers who organize at the grassroots and speak truth to power can make a difference.

IBIT says: Thanks for all you did, Kate, and all you tried to do.

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And now, here’s The Digest:

AIR
from the Los Angeles Times
In the eternal hunt for airfare bargains, booking too early can be as costly as booking too late.

from Travel Weekly
You may soon be able to watch in-flight shows and movies on-demand on Southwest Airlines flights, streamed to your own personal electronic devices. That’s the good news. The bad news? You’ll be paying extra for it.

from Budget Travel
A survey of travel agents says that when it comes to booking their clients on connecting flights, Atlanta-Hartsfield is one of their most favorite airports. It’s also one of their least favorite airports. Am I confused? No. I’m just booking non-stops.

from Travel Weekly
Frequent-flier miles…from an airport? Starting in June, the parking, food, merchandise or airport hotel stay you buy at Dallas-Ft. Worth International (DFW) will count toward airline miles.

from FareCompare
When is a “free” airline ticket not really free at all? FareCompare’s Rick Seaney counts the ways, and there are five of them.

LAND
from Condé Nast Traveler
The world’s ten most beautiful train stations, according to CN Traveler, right on time as New York’s Grand Central Terminal marks its 100th anniversary. Some are classic, others ultra-modern, and some brilliantly mix old and new. SLIDESHOW

from Travel Weekly
For the third time since it first opened in 1981, San Francisco is set to expand its Moscone convention center.

SEA
from the New York Times
Lust and luxury aboard the Queen Mary 2. Just don’t call it a “cruise.” It’s just not done, you know…

from Travel Weekly
Kai Tak, Hong Kong’s old airport, where almost every landing seemed like an adventure, is returning to the travel business — this time as a gleaming $1 billion cruise ship terminal that can handle the largest vessels in the business, even Royal Caribbean’s behemoth Oasis-class ships.

FOOD & DRINK
from the New York Times
In New Orleans, they know their pho — and their yaka mein. If you don’t know either, read up. WARNING: Your mouth may involuntarily water while reading.

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AFRICA
from Travel Weekly
The Radisson hotel chain opens its first Radisson Blu hotel in Mozambique.

from TechZim (Zimbabwe)
New travel startup, Zimbabwe Bookers, aims to make finding hotel rooms easier for travelers in one of Africa’s growing tourist markets.

from Tanzania Daily News (Tanzania) via allAfrica.com
Tanzania draws up plans to aggressively promote tourism in overseas markets. Its top four markets — Britain, the United States, Germany and Italy.

from Angola Press via allAfrica.com
Angola’s environmental agency building bungalows, other facilities in the country’s national parks in a bid to boost ecotourism.

AMERICAS
from The Guardian (London UK)
When your mother takes you on a sailing excursion to Central America at the age of six, just the two of you — and it lasts for four years — school field trips may have a hard time holding your attention after that.

from the New York Times
A look at San Juan, Puerto Rico, starting with one of my favorite spots — Condado Lagoon. SLIDESHOW

from The Guardian (London UK)
Are you into “Girls?” I’m referring here to the HBO hit TV series, set in Brooklyn. A look at the neighborhoods that give the show its inspiration.

ASIA/PACIFIC
from the Washington Post
Singapore spent so many decades living with the reputation of being the straight-laced capital of Asia, that it’s hard to imagine this city-state having a quirky side. But it does have one. Yes, it does.

EUROPE
from France 24
When a man is tired of London, he is tired of…graffiti? The city’s Shoreditch neighborhood is becoming a mecca for lovers of street art.

Edited by P.A.Rice

OT: Hans Massaquoi, 1926-2013

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The life of Hans Massaquoi reminds us that not all heroes carry a gun, and that not all Black history is made in the USA.

hans massaquoi

On today, the start of Black History Month, we pause to mark the passing of Hans Massaquoi, who died last month in Jacksonville, FL.

Mr. Massaquoi achieved a lot in his 87 years. Musician. Journalist. Magazine editor. Author.

But perhaps his greatest single achievement was that he lived to be 87.

Mr. Massaquoi entered life as a biracial child in Germany, born to the son of a Liberian diplomat and a German nurse. When his father and grandfather both decided to return to Liberia, his mother opted to remain in Germany, and kept Hans with her.

He grew up learning German and adopting the culture of his birthplace, as would any other child. But he was born just as the national socialist movement was taking root in Germany, which destined him for a childhood like no other.

By the time he was seven — right around the time that Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany — the young Herr Massaquoi saw himself being as German as the blond-haired, blue-eyed kids with whom he played and went to school.

As you’ll see when you read his story, it didn’t take long for the Nazis to disabuse him of that notion.

You can read the fascinating story of Mr. Masaquoi’s life in this Los Angeles Times story here.

Throughout his German youth, Hans Massaquoi lived a kind of twilight existence, shunned and scorned as a mixed-race kid, but not persecuted in the way he surely would have been had he been born a Jew or a Roma. As he once put it:

“Unlike the Jews, blacks were so few in numbers that we were relegated to low-priority status in the Nazis’ lineup for extermination.”

Then again, he also survived the Allied bombing of Hamburg as a teen during World War 2, despite being denied entry into a bomb shelter because of his dark skin.

hans massaquoi child

Nonetheless, his biracial status may have indirectly saved his life, twice — first, when the Nazis decided he was unfit for the Wehrmacht, the German army, and again, when they apparently concluded it was not worth the effort to pack him off to a Dachau, a Treblinka or a Bergen-Belsen.

Imagine, if you can, growing up in a country where the only reason you’re alive is because the government of mass murderers that runs the place considers your life to be so insignificant that it’s not even worth taking.

He survived the war and eventually made his way to the United States. And when he became an editor at Jet and then Ebony magazine, he viewed America’s racial prejudice and bigotry through the lens of his German childhood.

And that is but part of his remarkable story, a story known to few people until 1999, when he poured it all into a book entitled “Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany.”

How do we measure greatness? We have so many yardsticks for that. Titles claimed. Championships won. Honors bestowed, fame achieved, fortunes acquired. The size of one’s house or the number of cars in its garage. The extent of one’s influence.

But sometimes, the greatest achievement of all may be simply to survive, to face life and emerge whole. Mr. Massaquoi began life as a child in the belly of the Holocaust and came out on the other side strong and sane, as a black man.

Hans-Jürgen Massaquoi died on Jan. 19…his 87th birthday. His story, like the man who made it, will survive.

Japan in pictures

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Akihabara, Tokyo
Anime eyes
Anime vendors in Japan

Since gaining international attention in the 1970s and 80, Japanese comics called manga and animated shows known as anime have won a worldwide following. But to truly delve into the heart of this pop culture phenomenon, you need to visit Japan.

Tenchi. Inuyasha. Momiji. Yu-Gi-Oh. Dragonball. Voltron. If these and similar names have meaning for you, it means you may be or may have been a fan of anime.

Anime are Japanese animated productions, ranging from TV shows to short films and feature-length movies. They are closely related to manga, the popular comics read in Japan by people of all ages.

They all share a common style — human characters with super-large eyes and faces, with the rest of their bodies often out of proportion to the head.

The storylines can be simple or complex, but often carry a moral message or delve into the struggle to find one’s way in a difficult, complex world. The images and storylines alike can range from innocent and playful to dark and sinister, or very sexy. They also often touch on themes in Japanese history and culture, as well as Japan’s relationship with the outside world.

Anime has been around since 1917, but it took the work of Osamu Tekuza, a physician who found his true calling as a cartoonist and animator, to set down what is now universally recognized as anime. The art form gained recognition outside Japan in the 1980s and its popularity now is virtually worldwide.

So why, you wonder, am I talking about Japanese animation on a travel blog? For the same reason I’d be talking about Disney characters or Harry Potter. That’s right, there actually is such a thing as anime tourism.

Just as the Germany’s Neuschwanstein Castle provided the inspiration for Disney’s Sleeping Beauty Castle in California, and Alnwick Castle in northeast England was the real-life inspiration for Harry Potter’s Hogwarts, many of the anime storylines are set in or inspired by real places across Japan.

But Ground Zero for a true anime fanatic has to be Akihabara in central Tokyo.

This district started drawing tourists in the 1970s for its dizzying array of electronics shops, selling everything from small hand-held radios to cameras, stereo equipment, cell phones, video games and much more, often including gear “not sold in any store” outside of Japan.

It was enough to earn Akihabara the nickname “Electric City.”

More recently, it’s become the headquarters for otaku, people of all ages devoted to all things manga and anime. If you’re into both anime and collectibles, Akihabara is where you want to be.

But Akihabara takes it even further with its comic cafes called “manga kissaten,” where you can watch anime DVDs and read manga to your heart’s content. Then there are the “maid cafes,” where waitresses dress up and act like famous anime characters.

Cultural kitsch to the max.

If you’re wondering if anyone in Japan runs anime tours, the answer is a definite “Hai!” The tours themselves range in length from a day to a week or more, covering one or more districts in Tokyo or multiple cities. A cursory Web search found these:

  • POP JAPAN TRAVEL
    Group tours with bilingual guides. Owned by Japanese comics publisher Digital Manga. These guys immerse you in Japanese pop culture in your choice of four cities — Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama and Kyoto. They also can hook you up with manga artists and anime studios.
  • PACSET TOURS
    Two things about this outfit caught my eye. The first was that they offer payment plans for their tours that don’t require you to buy the whole package up front (why don’t more tour operators do this?). The other was a vague Twitter reference to “anime-themed liquor.”
  • DESTINATION JAPAN
    They say their weeklong “Tokyo Anime Freedom Tour” is the most popular tour package they offer. The disastrous 2011 earthquake knocked them out two years ago, but they returned last year and are back again for 2013.

Believe me, this is only a very small sample of the tours available in Japan, but this should be enough to get you started. You also should contact the Japan National Tourism Organization, which can hook you up with tons of information on anime tourism.

Anime tours tend to run in the spring, so if this kind of Japanese visit sounds appealing, you really need to start planning now.

You come to understand ancd appreciate anything that much more when you get a look at it from the inside. An anime tour can take you deeper into this phenomenon than mere readers or viewers will ever get, and by extension, give you a richer understanding of Japan itself.

That alone is reason enough to seriously consider a wide-eyed flight into Japanese animation.

the IBIT Travel Digest 1.14.13

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

Southwest Airline Boeing 737

Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 landing in San Diego | © Greg Gross

LOOKING ELSEWHERE, LOOKING HOMEWARD
Last weekend’s Los Angeles Travel & Adventure Show in Long Beach was equal parts eye opener and reminder.

Japan, still pushing hard to rebuild its tourism after the earthquake/tsunami/radiation disaster of 2011, was the biggest country sponsor this year, with all kinds of intriguing offers, including one that never would’ve occurred to me — anime tourism.

Expect to hear more about that later on IBIT.

Turkey also had a major presence this year, as did Indonesia. Baja California destinations — from Cabo San Lucas at the peninsula’s southern tip to Tijuana, Rosarito Beach, Ensenada, Tecate and Mexicali, also were representing well, and that was good for this old Baja hand to see.

But the destination that reality hooked my attention this year was Malaysia.

How many of us ever seriously consider Malaysia as a place to visit? How many of even know where Malaysia is? Well, somebody knows, because it’s the tenth most popular tourism destination in the world.

And in this case, getting there might actually be half the fun. Its national air carrier, Malaysia Airlines, gets a five-star rating from Skytrax for its passenger service, one of only six airlines in the world to be rated that highly.

At the other end of the travel scale, and literally on the other side of the floor, there were a lot of exhibitors touting outdoor and adventure travel in places like California’s Sequoia country and Yosemite National Park. It reminded me that we have some world-class attractions right here at home that we too often take for granted.

IBIT says: Watch for more on all of this in the coming days.

DREAMLINER DIFFICULTIES
How’s this for a reality TV show: You’ve got this hot new jet, state of the art, but there are so many problems building it was three years late arriving. But now it’s finally here and flying all over the world and everything’s great and…

Wait, say what? Electrical fires? Fuel leaks?

Welcome to the very real world of Boeing and its new 787 Dreamliner.

The Federal Aviation Administration is ordering a safety review after those problems surfaced aboard Japan Air Lines 787s in recent days.

Such reports can’t help but make travelers nervous, especially those flying across oceans. However, this CNN report puts it all in perspective.

Bottom line: all new planes have teething problems. The Boeing 707 and 747 did back in the day, as do Airbus aircraft, most recently its A380 super-jumbo. When the problems arise, you jump on them, as the FAA is doing, fix them, keep an eye on them…and move on. We should do as well maintaining our cars.

Still, it does bear watching, which IBIT will be doing.

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TITANIC SAILS AGAIN?
Did you see the movie “Titanic” and come away wishing you could have sailed on that early 20th century luxury liner — minus the iceberg, of course?

Three years from now, you may get your chance.

The Associated Press is reporting that an Australian billionaire is planning to build a 21st century replica of the ill-fated vessel in a Chinese shipyard, combining old-school opulence with state-of-the-art construction, propulsion and navigation features that Capt. Edward John Smith could not have imagined back in 1912.

You can read the entire AP story, courtesy of USA Today, here.

The would-be builder hasn’t set a price tag for this project, but you know the old saying: “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”

And this guy apparently can.

Even so, other attempts to create a Titanic 2.0 have never left the proverbial drawing boards. If all goes well, however, the new and improved Titanic will hit the water sometime in 2016.

This time, hopefully, the water won’t hit back with a large, angry block of floating ice.

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BOEING 737 — SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW
For nearly haf a century, while bigger, faster, more imposing-looking airliners have grabbed headlines and captured the imaginations of travelers, the stubby, unassuming little Boeing 737, like the one above, has quietly established itself as world’s the most widely used airliner.

Every five seconds, two of them are taking off or landing somewhere on the planet. Not bad for an aircraft which began life as basically a cut-down version of the Boeing 707.

Over the decades, a steady steam of modifications have made them bigger and more sophisticated. Now, Boeing is planning to take their winged bus even further with yet another large-scale makeover. The result, called the Boeing 737 Max, should be ready for service by 2017.

To the layman’s eye, it’ll still look the same 737 that first flew in 1967. But in many ways, as USA Today reports, it will be a brand-new airplane.

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And now, here’s The Digest:

AIR
from Christopher Elliott
The merger between American Airlines and USAir seems all but official. What does it hold in store for the traveling consumer?

from the Los Angeles Times
What flight attendants really think of you. Everything you’ve always wanted to know…or maybe never wanted to know.

from the Washington Post
Jet lag is hard enough on a body in any direction, but it’s actually harder on you flying east than west. What to do about it.

LAND
from Smarter Travel via USA Today
Ten overrated tourist traps — and ten better alternatives. Agree or disagree?

from the New York Times
You’d think famed travel author Paul Theroux has been just about everywhere, but his wish list of destinations is still massively long — and many of them are right here in America.

WATER
from USA Today
The steamboats are back on the Mississippi River this summer, and the competition could be fierce.

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AFRICA
from The Mirror (London UK)
For a real off-road mountain bike adventure, with gorgeous views thrown in as an extra, consider South Africa’s Table Mountain above Cape Town. Just mind the puff adders.

from The New Times (Rwanda) via allAfrica.com
What a concept: Rwanda sets new rules enabling African nationals outside of East Africa to obtain visas on arrival in Rwanda. A big step forward for African regional travel, perhaps?

from the Namibian (Namibia) via allAfrica.com
one of Africa’s great rivers, the Okavango, and the struggle to save it from pollution.

from Bulawayo 24 via allAfrica.com
A new 5-star hotel opens on the shores of Lake Victoria, just in time for the August general assembly of the UN World Tourism Organization in Zimbabwe.

AMERICAS
from the Los Angeles Times
In the United States, bus travel is often disparaged by many. In Brazil, it’s the way to go.

from The Guardian (London UK)
If you really want to “cowboy up” for less than an American dude ranch, do it vaquero style on a working cattle ranch in Mexico.

from SFGate
Scottsdale, AZ is more than golf clubs and baseball spring training. Save some love for some seriously gorgeous desert.

from SFGate
California’s Monterey County, long known for its beautiful seashore and iconic jazz festival, has quietly become a heavyweight in another arena: wine. Could the Napa Valley natives be getting restless?

ASIA/PACIFIC
from the Washington Post
A traditional guesthouse in rural Japan, where the highlight is Italian food prepared by an Australian chef.

from the Daily Mail (London UK)
When the Iron Curtain fell for good in the early 1990s, a lot of historic, unspoiled and intriguing Central Asia opened up to the world as new nations. One of them is Uzbekistan.

EUROPE
from The Lookout via Yahoo
Birth of an island? What was nothing more than a sand bar ten years ago has now appeared as a fully formed 34-acres island off the coast of northern Germany.

from the Los Angeles Times
Now free to be creative, Russian chefs are putting a modernized touch on tradition Russian cuisine.

RANT: Does America need a tourism czar?

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http://www.dreamstime.com/-image26963455

Our haphazard, unfocused, uncoordinated efforts to sell America to the world’s tourists won’t cut it in the 21st century. We have to do better.

President Barack Obama last year signed an executive order creating a task force to design a National Travel & Tourism Strategy. It was a follow-up to his 2010 signing of the Travel Promotion Act of 2009.

Believe it or not, it’s the first time in our history that the US government has set promoting foreign travel to America as a national priority, something that most of the world’s nations, from the poorest to the richest, have been doing for decades.

To American ears, the title “tourism minister” has a quaint, even comic ring to it. To the rest of the world, however, it’s no joke, and here’s why:

Some time last month, a man or woman packed a bag and boarded a plane, train, bus or a ship to travel from one country to another, maybe for business but more likely for pleasure. That person was the one billionth traveler of 2012, the first time the world has ever seen that many people traveling in one year.

Tourism worldwide generates about $1 trillion and hundreds of millions of jobs annually. It’s growing almost in defiance of the recession. Just about every nation on Earth wants as big a piece of that action as it can get, and they’re all working very hard at getting it.

The world’s top ten tourism destinations, in order, are France, the United States, China, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Germany, Mexico and Malaysia. The US is the only one of the ten that doesn’t have a Cabinet-level official devoted to promoting tourism.

Some may argue that America has done well enough at attracting tourists without needing one. “We’re Number Two! We’re Number Two!” What’s the problem with that? Let me count the ways.

  1. Our Economy American unemployment is unacceptably high. This country has been bleeding manufacturing and other blue-collar jobs for decades and those jobs are not coming back. At the same time, you will be hard-pressed to find another industry in the world generating more new business and new cash flow than tourism. Think this economy could use some new jobs?
  2. Our Pride Since when were Americans content to be Number Two in anything?

And yet we sort of muddle our way through the business of attracting more visitors — and their money — to this country.

New York City is America’s top travel destination, and last year, the Big Apple drew a record 52 million visitors. The fact that the City of New York runs 18 tourism offices around the world probably had something to do with that.

It’s great that New York can afford to run its own overseas promotional campaign, but why should it have to? And what about all our other great cities that can’t afford to run their own foreign offices?

The Travel Promotion Act of 2009 created something called the Office of Travel Promotion within the US Commerce Department. Show of digital hands: How many of you out there ever heard of the Office of Travel Promotion before this moment?

If I dig long and hard enough, I can probably find out who runs this office and what it’s doing on behalf of American tourism — but why should I have to? Why should anyone have to?

I could easily tell you who’s in charge of tourism in Denmark, Brazil, Singapore, Botswana, or more than a hundred other countries. All the government’s efforts to bring in more visitors flow with a single, concentrated focus through that person’s office.

Who holds that responsibility in the United States? Who is the face of American tourism in Washington? Thirteen years into the 21st century, I have no idea — and I’m betting you don’t, either.

The federal government’s attempts to push American tourism abroad hasn’t even taxied to the head of the runway yet and already, it’s a hot, disjointed mess — a board here, an office there, a task force over in the corner.

Who’s running this?

Somebody needs to take charge here, a Cabinet-level official with the clout to pull all these scattered efforts together, and a profile that guarantees direct access to the President and Congress when necessary.

A tourism secretary. A tourism minister. A tourism czar. The title itself doesn’t matter, but the need for it does. Because the global competition for those $1 trillion is heating up, and the rest of the world is not waiting around for Washington to get its act together.

IBIT Travel Digest

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A roundup of the good, the bad and the bizarre from the world’s best travel media

Photo courtesy of Cathay Pacific

THE WORLD IS TRAVELING
According to the UN’s World Tourism Organization, the number of international tourist arrivals worldwide is on pace to hit 1 billion this year. Overall, international tourism was up 4 percent in 2011, coming in at 980 million arrivals.

Europe, Asia, the Americas and Africa all saw their tourist traffic rise last year, with only the Middle East showing a decline, mainly due to the turmoil produced by the Arab Spring.

Not bad for a world supposedly locked in the grip of a recession.

You can check out the details of the UN report here.

COMING TO AMERICA
President Barack Obama used a visit to Disneyworld in Orlando, FL, last week to announce a new initiative to draw more tourists — and their money — to the United States. Its ultimate aim, he said, was to make America the world’s top tourist destination.

It’s centered around streamlining the visa process and making it easier for visitors from friendly nations to come here. For you who prefer your news direct from the source, here’s the White House announcement of the actual plan.

As you might expect, the U.S. Travel Association is ecstatic over this, and for good reason.

Up to now, Washington had more or else taken US-bound tourism for granted, as if international travelers didn’t have alternatives on where to spend their vacations, and their money. The Travel Promotion Act of 2009, also signed by Obama, was the first time ever that the U.S. government set out to promote this country as a brand in the hyper-competitive international tourism market.

Given how lucrative the travel biz is, you have to wonder why.

Tourism generates nearly $2 trillion worth of revenue and 14 million jobs in this country. Any serious effort from Washington to grow those two numbers is something we all should welcome.

But it won’t be a snap. In an exclusive interview recently with IBIT, CBS News travel editor Peter Greenberg described America as “the most unwelcoming nation in the world.”

That may be an exaggeration, but not by much. Between the steep visa fees imposed on many foreign travelers after the 9/11 attacks — mostly on countries friendly to the United States whose citizens took no part in those attacks — and the shortage of immigration inspectors at the nation’s air, sea and land ports, America the Beautiful doesn’t exactly come across as America the Friendly.

We’ve got work to do.

AMERICAN AIRLINES: GOING DOWN?
American Airlines, which recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, could be the next in that long line of US-based airlines of the last two decades or so to be swallowed up in a merger.

According to the Los Angeles Times, both Delta and US Airways are eyeing American as a possible acquisition.

Not sure which of those two I’d prefer to see make that acquisition, but strictly from the consumer’s perspective, it’s hard to see how having fewer national airlines, reduced routes, fewer planes, fewer seats and fewer crews could be viewed as a good thing.



And now, here’s this week’s Digest:

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AIR
from USA Today
Starting next month, American Airlines offering free beer and wine on most overseas flights.

from USA Today
Hairline cracks turning up in Airbus A380 super jumbo jets. European aviation authority ordering inspections.

from d travels ’round
Words of travel wisdom from someone who travels for a living, a merchant seaman.

​LAND

from The Daily Meal ​
East Coast hamburger fanatics, take note: In-N-Out, the Southern California burger chain whose following borders on the religiously fanatical, is planning to expand.

from Rick Steves via Smarter Travel
Lose your bag when you travel? Don’t lose your mind. You will survive this.

from the PlanetD
Can you ride bicycles in Africa and survive? Yes, you can. There will, however, be a few unusual challenges.

from the BBC​
Ways to get around those obscenely high mobile roaming charges when making international calls while you travel. VIDEO

SEA

from News24 (South Africa)
The Costa Concordia isn’t the only hit the cruise industry took recently. The South African government, citing safety concerns, bans cruise ships from docking at Cape Town.

from USA Today
The hits just keep on coming for the ill-fated Costa Concordia. Confirmed dead now at 13, but there may have been unregistered passengers on board, which could push the final death toll higher.

from the Daily Nation (Kenya)
Some in Kenya starting to view the caves used by Mau Mau guerrillas to fight British colonialism as potential tourist attractions. But some of the former fighters themselves are uneasy about that.

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AFRICA

from the Africa Review
Are bogus Chinese constructions firms doing dirt in Ghana?

from Bikyamasr.com
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which took almost half the seats in the country’s recent parliamentary elections, is telling the country’s tourism sector to relax: No sweeping changes; booze and bikinis for tourists still okay.

from the Zambia Daily Mail
Zambian government, looking to improve all forms of transport in the country, is trying to draw more foreign airlines to Zambia.

from the BBC
Five foreign tourists shot to death in a remote, rugged Ethiopian desert. Ethiopia casts suspicions on neighbor–rival Eritrea.

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AMERICAS/CARIBBEAN

from the New York Times
If the beach crowds in Rio de Janeiro get to be too much, head for an unspoiled alternative, Praia do Rosa.

from BBC Travel
All you tokers, potheads and other recreational herbalists still have a reason to visit Amsterdam, for now — that new Dutch law that was supposed bar non-Dutch citizens from patronizing the Netherland’s famed ​”coffee shops” has been postponed until May.

from the San Francisco Chronicle
Trains don’t usually come to mind when you think of Hawaii. The Kaua’i Plantation Railway could change that.

from the Guardian (London UK)
Sleep tourism? That’s right, I said it! Grenada may be one of the world’s most beautiful places to learn how to beat insomnia. But it’s not the only one.

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ASIA/PACIFIC

from Ready Click and Go
What and where — but mostly how — to eat in China.

​from the Guardian (London UK)
And speaking of food in China, the capital of Chinese cuisine may just be Sichuan province, which may have the the most densely packed collection of restaurants and teahouses on Earth.

from ​The Japan Times
Are your favorite North American and European ski resorts unexpectedly barren of snow this winter? You might want to look to Japan to get your downhill thrills this year.

from The Japan Times
You may have never heard of Nada, Japan, but if you’re a serious lover of sake, it needs to be on your must-visit list.

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EUROPE
from the New York Times
In search of real Dutch food in Amsterdam. Even if you don’t find any, you definitely won’t starve.

from the New York Times
How to hit the ground running for a fun weekend in Hamburg, Germany’s second-largest city.

Edited by P.A. Rice

T’is the (Christmas market) season in Europe

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Christmas market, Strasbourg, FR

Strasbourg, France — Christmas market | © G. Gross

If you’ve never experienced a European Christmas market, you owe it to yourself to get out there in the cold among the bright lights and the non-stop festive cheer.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Christmas is an outdoor affair that lasts for a month or more, a public event to be shared with townspeople and tourists alike, and they draw visitors across Europe annually by the tens of millions.

The Christmas market is a tradition that may date back as far as the 1300s. Some of the first known began in the German-speaking region of Alsace, in what is now eastern France.

Since then, it’s taken hold throughout western Europe, has penetrated portions of eastern Europe — and can even be found in the United States here and there.

Wherever you’ll find them, you’ll have a blast, because that’s the whole point.

The Christmas market is a mixture of Christian and pagan traditions. The great European cathedrals are often the anchor point of Christmas markets. Nearby may be a huge, gayly decorate pine tree, a tradition we got from the pagans.

There are solemn religious ceremonies this time of year also, but mostly, this is neither the time nor the place for solemnity. Whether to mark the birth of Christ or the coming of the winter solstice, Christmas markets are all about celebration.

The bigger ones set up huge amusement-park rides. Outdoor ice-skating rinks welcome the skilled and lure the foolhardy. Street musicians and singers perform. Vendors sell tasty snacks and hot drinks, especially the hot, spiced wine known as vin chaud in France and glühwein in Germany.

This is where everyone is free to be a kid, regardless of the date on their birth certificate.

Stalls sell all manner of Christmas trinkets and decorations. As with a lot of other things around the world these days, a lot of what they sell may be mass-produced in China or elsewhere, but if you look, you can still find seasonal items lovingly handcrafted by locals.

The Christmas markets also may be where the locals come to buy their Christmas trees and Christmas lights.

If you can’t have fun at a Christmas market, check your pulse. Someone may have stolen it.

I experienced my first Christmas market a few years ago in Strasbourg, the regional capital of Alsace. It claims the title as the first official Christmas market, going back to the 1500s, and remains one of Europe’s best.

There definitely are bigger and splashier ones elsewhere, however, especially across the Rhine River in Germany.

The Christmas markets now springing up in Eastern Europe might be especially interesting to check out because they only began to appear with the fall of the Iron Curtain. So only now are people able to celebrate as they please, as their western European counterparts have been doing for centuries.

They might not be as smooth or well-organized as they are in France, Germany and elsewhere, but that spirit of new-found freedom and celebration might more than make up for that.

The European Christmas market phenomenon belongs on your holiday travel list — if not for this year, then for 2012 and beyond.

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The SUNDAY TRAVEL DIGEST

IBIT in CHINA: Tough history, tough people

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Sixth in a series

16th-century bazaar, Shanghai | ©IBIT G. Gross

If people in Shanghai seem a little more driven than their countrymen, they have their reasons. They also have a history.

You can learn a lot about folks from looking at the history of their home.

Chinese from other parts of China seem to think that folks in Shanghai are a little unusual. Always on the grind, on the hustle, driven.

What you learn from Shanghai’s history is that these are some tough, single-minded, strong-willed folks.

Shanghai begin as a nondescript fishing village on the coast of the East China Sea, plagued by Japanese pirates in the 1500s until they built a protective wall. Folks felt safer The village grew into a port town, and then a city.

But that wall wasn’t enough to keep out the Royal Navy.

When Britain forced China into the opium trade at gunpoint in the First Opium War they also forced China to turn Shanghai into a free port, where the British could do pretty much whatever.

Ultimately, Britain, France and the United States all ran freewheeling “concessions” from their posh riverfront offices and hotels known as “the Bund.”

THE SHANGHAI GHETTO
I’d heard all about the Warsaw Ghetto, but I’d never heard of the Shanghai Ghetto.

Before initiating their “Final Solution,” the Nazis allowed some Jews to leave Germany — if they could find a country that would issue them a visa. Most, including the United States, literally turned them away.

Shanghai did not. The city accepted Jewish refugees, with or without visas.

Germany’s ally, Japan, occupied Shanghai the whole time. They not only left the the Jews alone, but refused to hand them over to the Germans.

If you go today to Houshan Park in the Hongkou District, you’ll find a monument to the Shanghai Ghetto.

Shanghai became the kind of place where money flows and anything goes. It was Vegas before Vegas, baby.

When the shippers’ need for sailors became so great that they had to kidnap men off the street, the Chinese port became an English verb — “shanghaied.”

Japan invaded China in 1937. Shanghai was bombed, first by the Japanese, then by the United States. It also was brutally occupied until 1945.

After the Japanese were kicked out, Mao Zedong and the Communists moved in. In 1966, Mao unleashed his disastrous Cultural Revolution, led by the Gang of Four, from Shanghai, which somehow kept working through it.

But when post-Maoist leadership decided to open up China to full-contact capitalism, that was Shanghai’s cue to get busy.

Today, it’s China’s most populous city. World’s busiest container port. Elevated freeways. Cutting-edge architecture. Site of a 2010 world exposition. You can almost smell the money here.

But if Shanghai seems unusually determined to enjoy its good times, it may be because it’s already seen the other side.

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IBIT in CHINA: An introduction
IBIT in CHINA: Beijing
IBIT in CHINA: The Wall and The Way
IBIT in CHINA: All is vanity
IBIT in CHINA: Shanghai

The New Black in an old land

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Turkey is one of those fascinating world destinations that’s on my list. Luckily for me — and for you — I have a friend who’s been there and done that.

Awhile back, I introduced you to my friend Nicole, an American expat doing her thing in Europe and creator of the blog, “Nicole is the New Black.”

That title says a lot, because Nicole is one of that growing number of young black American women who are boldly leaving not just home, but American shores, to make their own mark — seeing the world, living life on their own terms and often by themselves.

Nicole’s blog chronicles the ups and downs of her life as a young black American female living in Germany, but it also doubles as her travel blog. And some of her travels have taken her to places I’m really interested in.

Like Turkey.

I mean, how can you not take an interest in a country that physically joins two continents and whose history has contributed an awful lot toward defining modern Western life?

Well, it turns out that travel isn’t the only interest Nicole shares with IBIT. She’s also into the whole cooking thing. And earlier this year, she combined it all with a brief excursion from Berlin to a cooking class in Istanbul, with her brother.

You can learn a lot about a place, its culture, its history — even its geography and its weather — through its cuisine. You learn how families and communities interact. You see how towns evolved, why folks settled over here and not over there.

And a hot meal you just prepared with newly made friends from another country is one of the best social ice-breakers you can find.

So take a taste — almost literally — of Turkish culture with Nicole and her brother, Jerome, and they get into Turkish cooking with both hands.

JAPAN: Faster than a speeding bullet train

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Shinkansen maglev prototype -- ©Irfannurd | Dreamstime.com

While the US quibbles over whether to drag our passenger rail service out of the 19th century, Japan is about to step deep into the 21st. Your children will be riding this one day.

Back in 1964, while Americans were acquainting themselves with a place called Vietnam, the Japanese were introducing a new concept in passenger rail service — the Shinkansen.

The world would come to know it as “the bullet train.”

It was sleek. It was efficient. It was safe. And with an initial top speed of 130 miles per hour, it was the fastest passenger train on the planet.

It’s no longer the world’s fastest passenger train, but even after nearly five decades, it’s still faster — and with only one exception, exponentially faster — than anything on rails in the United States.

Now, after decades of research and testing, Japan is about to take the next step, and it’s a big one.

The Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun is reporting that the government is finally going to link three of Japan’s largest cities, Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka, with a new Shinkansen — at speeds topping 313 mph.

But this will not be the fastest passenger train on rails. This will be a maglev train, which means there will be no rails.

“Maglev” is short for magnetic levitation. Basically, a lot of powerful magnets built into the rail cars and the track bed serve to lift the electrically powered train slightly off the ground and propel it down the line — at speeds ranging from impractical to unthinkable for a conventional train.

The technology was first developed, oddly enough, in the United States. The US, Canada, Germany and Japan all spent years testing it, and all found it to work, but it had two practical limitations.

The first is that it’s expensive as hell to build. The second is that the nature of maglev means that only maglev trains can run on it.

Still, the idea of a 300-mph passenger train was just too good to die.

Los Angeles to San Francisco in an hour? New York City to Washington DC in 45 minutes? Chicago to Dallas in two hours and change?

No need for a long ride in a pricey taxi or a crowded shuttle, because when you step out of the train station, you’re already in town — and all at a price cheaper than flying?

Yeah, I could do that. Bet you could, too.

But with American policymakers largely indifferent toward passenger rail — and lobbyists from the oil, airline and highway construction industries pushing Congress to kill it off — it was long presumed that either Germany or Japan would be the first to pull the trigger on maglev.

We all guessed wrong.

Buying German maglev technology, China stole a march on everybody, opening a maglev line in 2004 between Shanghai and its new international airport in Pudong.

Eighteen miles from city center to airport, in seven minutes? Hell, yeah!

I doubt that anyone in an official capacity in Tokyo would come right out and say it, but to see Beijing leap ahead of them that way that had to sting just a little bit.

Now, Japan is raising the bar. Their maglev would be the world’s fastest train to link multiple cities.

It’s going to take some doing. Construction is set to start in three years and isn’t expected to be finished until 2045. And it’s still obscenely expensive — $116 billion at current prices — a price tag which, thanks to inflation, is all but certain to go up.

The same arguments were made about the original Shinkansen, but the Japanese pushed ahead with it, anyway. The result was a passenger rail system decades ahead of its time, and the envy of the world.

Especially in the United States.

Meanwhile in Washington, American politicians quibble and squabble over whether to bring high-speed rail to the US, using the technology that Japan pioneered 46 years ago.

Technology that Japan is now leaving behind.

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High-Speed Rail: What We’ve Been Missing