Tag Archives: Seine

the IBIT DIGEST 10-28-12

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

awash coffee ceremony

©IBIT/G. Gross

HIT THE COFFEE ROAD
In addition to wildlife safaris, history and heritage, you now have a new reason to visit East Africa: coffee. An outfit called ET African Journeys is offering a 14-day tour next month called Ethiopia & the Birth of Coffee.

Don’t expect a lot of “down” time on this trip. The package includes visits to a coffee cooperative and at least three different local tribes — the Erbore, Kanso and Woito peoples. You’ll also head into the Great Rift Valley for 4×4 drives and boat rides on valley lakes, as well as the Blue Nile Falls. You’ll also be seeing two different UN World Heritage sites, the castles of Gondar and the rock churches of Lalibela.

Lest you drop from sheer exhaustion and sensory overload, they’ve also worked a couple of resort and spa stays into those 14 days, as well.

Ethiopia is where coffee was born and there are those of you who will swear it’s the best in the world. It spread east into the Arab world and then to Europe before finally making its way to the Americas and the rest of the planet.

I’ve never been a big coffee drinker, but after getting my first taste of it during San Diego’s African Restaurant Week, I can tell you this: Ethiopian coffee is the only coffee I’ve ever had that I would willingly drink black. It’s smooth, it’s flavorful and it won’t bite your tongue off.

I’ll make my apologies to Juan Valdez later.

The tour departs Washington DC’s Dulles airport on Nov. 30 aboard a long-range Boeing 777 jumbo jet from Ethiopian Airlines. For more information, go to the ET African Journeys site here.

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TRAINING FOR VACATION
These days, Amtrak has jumped with both rails into the package vacation business.

Amtrak Rail Journeys last from seven to 13 days and combine multiple destinations. Some feature famous sites like the Grand Canyon. Some are regionally focused — the Northeast, the Deep South, the West Coast, the Canadian Rockies. At least two combine rail trips with cruises.

Costing from about $1,000 to $4,000 per person, none could really be called cheap, but considering that your transportation, lodging, meals aand tours are all included in the one price — not to mention the experience of train travel itself — you may find it offers real value for the money.

Amtrak also offers much shorter (and much cheaper) Rail Getaways to individual cities in the United States and Canada, as well as national parks and attractions like Hearst Castle in California and several national parks. These tend to last no more than three days and run from about $300 to $600 per person.

If the idea of a vacation on rails gets your blood racing, check out the Amtrak Vacations page.

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AMERICAN DELIVERS…SORT OF
Think of this as a kind of pre-emptive strike from American Airlines.

We all know how much travelers resent those airline baggage fees. We also know that travelers are starting to turn toward air freight companies and luggage shipping services to get their bags picked up and delivered, thumbing their noses at the airlines in the process.

Well, before too many more folks opt out of letting the airlines handle their bags, American has decided to partner up with one of those services to offer its own baggage delivery. For a fee, you can now bypass the luggage carousel and let American deliver your bags to your home or hotel.

You can read about it here at Travel Weekly.

Sounds like a great idea, and a pretty slick move by American…until you learn that you pay for this extra service on top of the airline’s checked bag fees. That, I suspect, will be a deal-breaker for a lot of travelers.

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AIR ALTERNATIVE TO PARIS
OpenSkies is a small upscale subsidiary of British Airways that flies trans-Atlantic routes with smaller Boeing 757 narrow-body jets set up to be more comfortable for travelers willing to pay for a pricier ticket.

In addition to offering more legroom, nicer meals and seats that don’t leave you feeling you’ve spent six hours in a vise, the airline is now offering flights from New York into Paris’ other major airport, Orly.

Most international travelers, especially from North America, usually fly into Paris via the massive, chaotic and perpetually packed Charles de Gaulle international airport. If you’ve experienced CDG in the past — and would do anything to avoid a repeat of it — this may be your chance.

And now, here’s the Digest:

AIR
from SmarterTravel
You know those controversial airport X-ray body scanners? The TSA is quietly replacing them with scanners believed to be less potentially harmful. But the old machines aren’t going away, just being moved to smaller airports.

from Yahoo Travel
Coming soon to an airline near you — personalized airfares. Individual airfares based on your personal profile data and travel history. Good deal or something sinister? Read and decide.

from Smarter Travel
Eight foods and beverages to avoid when you fly. Some, like beans and garlic, are no-brainers. Others, like alcohol, are no surprise. But sugar-free gum?

from Travel Weekly
With Orbitz, you may not always know: the federal government fines the online travel agency $25,000 for failing to properly disclose airline baggage fees.

from USA Today
Feel like living dangerously? North Korea’s Air Koryo, judged by aviation experts around the globe as the world’s worst airline, launches a Web site. Apparently, the site is about as functional as the airline it represents. Pyongyang, anyone?

LAND
from the Travel+Lesure via the BBC
The five best neighborhoods in America for authentic ethnic food — and you won’t see a lot of “the usual suspects” on the list. If you have dissenting opinions, list your own nominees in the Comments section. SLIDESHOW

from SmarterTravel
Was it something you said? Five phrases never found on the lips of a good traveler. SLIDESHOW

from Travel Weekly
There’s a little less competition in the rental car business these days. Hertz is buying up Dollar Thrifty. Good news for Hertz. For the traveling consumer, probably not so much. But the feds still have to bless this merger, and there’s no guarantee that they will.

from the United Nations
UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, adds 26 new locations to its list of world Heritage Sites. Meanwhile, the crew at SmarterTravel picks its ten favorites. Your bucket list may need a bigger bucket.

from USA Today
Few visitors to New York City have reason to hit Staten Island, even with the lure of a free ferry ride from Manhattan. That could change by 2016 if plans go ahead to build the world’s biggest Ferris wheel in the Big Apple’s most ignored borough.

SEA
from Travel Weekly
This from Carnival Cruise Lines: No more saving deck chair for someone who’s not on deck.

from Travel Weekly
For those who plan ahead: The Cunard line has already set its world cruise itineraries for 2014 The cruises can last three months — but Cunard will let you buy much shorter segments, as short as eight days.

AFRICA
from CNN Travel
If unique wildlife is your thing, then Tanzania may be your place. Who’s up for a safari?

from Bulawayo 24 via Travel Comments
Ahead of next year’s big general assembly of the UN World Tourism Organization in Zimbabwe, three African airlines are adding more flights to Victoria Falls. You don’t have to be a UNWTO attendee to take advantage.

from Gadling
Forget trick-or-treat. If you want to see something truly spooky, check out the annual migration of 8 million African bats. Relax, they only eat fruit.

AMERICAS
from the BBC
New entry fees and visa requirements going into effect in Argentina and other South American countries. If you’re planning a trip to South America, don’t wait until departure day to get yourself up to speed on the new requirements. If you do, you may never get out of the airport.

from Agence France Presse via France 24
You know all that stuff you’ve been hearing about how the Mayan calendar forecasts the end of the world in 2012? Well, the Mayans say it’s all bogus and they have one word for all the folks out there pushing this myth: STOP.

from the New York Times
Want to really go New Age in Santa Fe, NM — and get healthier at the same time? Explore it by bike.

from The Guardian (London UK)
El Vilsito. Auto mechanics by day, wonderfully fixed up tacos al pastor by night. Only in Mexico City.

ASIA
from Xinhua News Agency via CNNgo
China is taking not quite $1 million to turn its first atomic bomb test center into…a theme park? Swords into plowshares is one thing but, uhh…wow. This is one new tourist hotspot that could be just that.

from China Daily
For decades, travelers from around the world have descended on Hong Kong in search of bargains. Now, te Chinese are doing it, too.

from The Province (Vancouver, BC, CANADA)
There’s a lot to see and do in Hong Kong. There’s even more to see and do outside one of the world’s most densely crowded cities. Venture out.

EUROPE
from The Guardian (London UK)
There are lots of good reasons these days to visit the Czech Republic. Here’s one you may not have heard about — good skiing, incredibly cheap.

from the BBC
In Paris, the Seine is getting a 35 million euro makeover that will make the riverbanks more pedestrian friendly and even more attractive to locals and visitors alike. It comes at the expense of daily commuting motorists, who are less than thrilled.

from CNN Travel
Ten cool and free things to enjoy in Paris, including your own guided tour with a local. Did I mention that it’s all free?

DAY TRIPPING: Escape from Paris

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First of an occasional series

chateau_chenonceau

©Mihai-bogdan Lazar | Dreamstime.com

Starting today, we’re going to look periodically at some excursions that can take you beyond big cities and major tourist destinations, none of which need take up more than a day. We start with Paris.

Actually, we start by evacuating Paris.

The most visited city in the most visited country in the world. The City of Light. The city of the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, the Seine and Notre Dame. I love Paris.

So why am I trying to get you out of it?

As wonderful as this city is, the only way to fully appreciate France is to tear yourself away from the gravitational pull of Paris, if only for a day at a time.

The French road net is fine for short jaunts, but France’s fabulous high-speed rail network puts most of France within a three-hour train ride from Paris.

The most common day trip is out to the Chateau de Versailles, about ten miles to the west, built back when French royalty considered Paris too ugly, nasty and rebellious to deal with (and it really was!). The palace itself is sheer visual overload and the equally ornate gardens behind it cover more ground than a lot of French villages.

Don’t even try to see all of Versailles in one day. Even if you succeed, you’ll kill yourself.

You can get there easily by rental car, local RATP bus or trains. I’d recommend the suburban RER-C5 express train that deposits you at Versailles-Rive Gauche, the closest train station to the palace.

TIP: Go early or late — not only in the day, but in the seasons. Versailles draws about 3 million visitors a year. Do the math.

BRIDGE OR PALACE?
Rather skip the tourist crush at Versailles? Head south instead to Chenonceaux in the Loire Valley and check out the Chateau Chenonceau, seen above. Neither as big nor as gaudy as Versailles, but just as mind-blowing.

Is it a bridge built to look like a palace, or a palace disguised as a bridge? The builders of this 600-year-old mansion could’ve taught today’s rich and famous a few things about pimping one’s crib.

From Paris, Chenonceaux is two and half hours south via local trains, less than an hour and a half via the TGV.

If art is your thing, head about 45 miles west of Paris to the village of Giverny, and pay a visit to the garden that Claude Monet immortalized on canvas.

You take a packaged tour there, drive there directly yourself, or take a train to nearby Vernon, then grab a taxi or shuttle bus for a short, pleasant little drive across the Seine to Giverny.

Now, when you return to Paris and see Monet’s works hanging in the Louvre, you’ll see them in a different light — the same light that Monet himself saw when he painted them in. You’ll never look at his art, or anyone else’s, exactly the same way again.

Farther still to the west is Normandy, on the English Chanel, and a little more than an hour from Paris by rail.

The D-Day landings here led to the liberation of Western Europe from the Nazis in World War 2, and the people who live here haven’t forgotten — even if they have a cemetery sitting above the site of Omaha Beach to remind them.

It bears the graves or more than 9,000 Americans soldiers, most of whom died on that one day.

While there, check out the pleasant country towns and villages that you can explore by rental car, to not mention the seafood (I personally can vouch for the oysters) and some of their famous cheeses, including familiar names like Camembert.

Normandy is the one region of France that doesn’t produce a single well-known wine, but what it lacks in grapes, it makes up in apples — including “hard” ciders and a serious apple brandy known as Calvados. You won’t die of thirst.

In nearby Brittany, also on the Channel coast, you can check out Mont St. Michel, the monastery built on the tiny island that you can hike to when the tide is out.

WHERE THE WINES ARE
All told, there are ten major wine-producing regions in France. Within the regions are scores of terroirs, unique French vineyards producing some of the greatest wines in the world.

Many of these vineyards welcome visitors, complete with wine-tasting lessons. Depending on what time of year you arrive, they may even let you get involved in the winemaking process.

From north (nearest to Paris) to south, you’ll find these wine regions in France:

  1. Champagne
  2. Loire Valley
  3. Alsace
  4. Chablis
  5. Cognac
  6. Burgundy
  7. Bordeaux
  8. South-West
  9. Côtes du Rhone
  10. Languedoc-Rousillon
  11. Provence
  12. Corsica

Any of the first seven are easy day trips. Eight through Eleven may be doable if you manage your time carefully and are prepared to return to Paris fairly late at night.

Only Corsica, being an island in the Mediterranean, is out of the question.

With French wine goes French cheese — somewhere between 350 and 400 different varieties from 17 regions all over France. Road trip!

Speaking of food, the good folks in Lyon would like you to know that their city, not Paris, is the real capital of French cooking.

I’ve been to Lyon. They have a case. Time from Paris via the TGV: two hours and change.

If you’re in Paris around Christmastime, jump on the TGV Est and head to Strasbourg to experience a European Christmas market in the city where the concept was born.

Time: two hours and change.

ESCAPE FROM FRANCE
Want a brief break from France altogether? Head north on the Thalys high-speed train. In less than two hours, you’ll be in Brussels. Less than three and you’re in Amsterdam.

I can’t conclude without a little irony. We’ve been talking about day trips out of Paris, but high-speed rail has turned Paris itself into a day trip…from London.

And that’s perfect, because London — or rather, beyond London — is where we’re headed next.

Home Sweet Homes

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Want to know when you begin to cross over from being a tourist to becoming a traveler?

It’s not when your first passport arrives in the mail, nor even when an immigration officer in a foreign country stamps that passport for the very first time.

It starts the moment you pick up the rhythm of life in a different place, and realize that it is also your rhythm. The moment when something in these streets, these places, these faces and voices, resonates with you in ways the travel agent back home never told you about.

“You know what?” you tell yourself. “I could live here.”

And your self doesn’t argue.

That’s when it happens.

If you’ve traveled at all in your life, there’s a good chance you’ve already got your own list of such places in in your memory.

This is mine:

NEW ORLEANS
Technically, this is cheating, since I actually did live here once. Whatever. I’ll just sue myself for an obscene sum of money and go do comedy shows in the Midwest.

What the hell, it worked for Charlie Sheen…and I’m sober.

I have a kind of love/hate/indifferent relationship with New Orleans. Sometimes, I love it. Sometimes, I hate it.

The NOLA? It doesn’t give a damn either way.

In its personality, the city is a bit like the significant other who has an unfailing ability to drive you crazy, in both good and bad ways.

Heat, humidity, pounding rain, high crime and all manner of low people in high places — New Orleans is at time aggravating enough to make the Bible’s Job go postal.

Then you sample the food, the drink, the music. You get a feel of the human spirit in the city that created all that. You walk through Audubon Park. You ride the St. Charles streetcar. You jog along the top of a levee, stroll in the shade of oaks and magnolias and willows.

And you wonder why you’d want to live anywhere else.

New Orleans may be big, but she’s hardly easy, and if you fall in love with her, it will be strictly on her terms.

NEW YORK
The first time you touch down in New York City, you understand why this had to be the United Nations headquarters.

The whole world is already here.

It’s got a rhythm, a pulse, a heart rate which, in a human being, might be cause for a trip to the hospital. When you find it in a city, it’s energizing. It lifts you up and gets you going, if only to keep you from getting run over by all those New Yorkers coming up behind you on the sidewalk.

New York is the guy in the park, jogging at a pace obviously faster than yours, who silently challenges you to keep up. You may or may not succeed, but you benefit a lot just by trying.

But all that is Manhattan, just one of the five boroughs that comprise New York City — Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island — each with its own vibe. And within each borough, multiple neighborhoods of individual personalities.

I’ve got a lot more of NYC left to get to know.

SAN FRANCISCO
The city with the conceit to think of itself as “The City” — and the beauty, romance and vibrance to vindicate all that attitude — is a bit of a tease.

There are two places in the world where you need to a see a sunset before you die. Key West is one. This is the other. Whether from the top of Coit Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge or the middle of San Francisco Bay on Treasure Island, it really doesn’t matter.

Not a lot of malls in this town, but a lot of commercial streets, packed block after block with little shops and restaurants of every cuisine, ethnicity and price range.

Right around the corner from these streets are neighborhoods that let you actually walk to do your shopping. It’s incredibly civilized.

But if you entertain the thought of actually living in one of those neighborhoods, the reality of the cost-of-living in San Francisco slaps you in the face like…well…a slap in the face!

VANCOUVER
Take all the beauty and charm of San Francisco. Subtract The City’s preening self-consciousness. Add the traditionally laid-back attitudes of Marin County or Santa Fe, NM.

Vancouver is more or less what you get.

Vancouver is so pristine that it feels more like a movie set that real people happen to live in. You have to work to find a neighborhood that doesn’t give you an oh-my-God! view of mountains or water or both.

How many other big cities in North America can you go down to a waterside park and watch airplanes take off from and land on a gorgeous bay, with occasional stops at a floating gas station? Even the airport’s on an island.

We won’t even get into the ferry runs between Vancouver and Victoria. What the rest of the world would call a scenic cruise, these folks call a commute.

It’s not just the view. People in Vancouver at times seem almost impossibly nice. Up there, rudeness marks you as a visitor, most likely from the States. It’s also extremely bike-friendly.

I’m almost afraid to sleep in Vancouver, lest I find out the whole thing was just a dream…and I wake up in Los Angeles.

LONDON
Hyper-tense, but in a good way. New York’s equivalent in terms of pace and energy, minus the collective neurosis. A sprawling world capital, but built to a human scale, for people, not cars.

Spend one day navigating around via the London Underground, aka “the Tube,” and you feel as if you own the whole town.

Just “mind the gap.”

Fresh and familiar all at once. Everything old and everything new. History and happenings, all wrapped up in the same 24/7 package. You always get the feeling that something cool is always happening somewhere — just around the way or outside the next Tube stop.

Plugging yourself into the rhythm of this global capital is easy; the hard part comes when you have to disconnect.

London just might not let you.

The major downside: You may have to rob several banks — or own one — to afford to live here.

PARIS
All big cities on the planet, no where where you find them, share one quality. Turn off almost any of their huge, sprawling, impersonal, traffic-clogged “grand boulevards” and you’re liable to find, within a block or two, a quiet, livable neighborhood.

It’s just that Paris seems to have more of them than anywhere else.

This is a city where people just know how to live. You find a cafe with the vibe that suits you and you make it your second home, your detached living room, dining room, parlor. You linger over lunch, a cup of coffee or a glass of wine. You check out the passing parade. You talk, discuss, debate, argue.

When you don’t feel like sitting, you stroll the parks, you stroll the Seine. Peruse a newsstand, browse a bookshop. You savor the string of good moments.

In between, you work and sleep.

Yeah, I could do that.

For all its history, attractions and charms, the biggest draw in Paris for me is that it seems to be a city whose people have their priorities straight. Life, and loving life, come first.

It’s no accident that I prefer staying in apartments over hotels when I’m in Paris. Perhaps more than any other metropolis in the world, you want to feel like you live here.

That’s my list.

What’s yours?

PARIS: Don’t Ask Why

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Paris is the world’s most visited city. Think you know why? I sure don’t!

Arc de Triomphe, Paris

Arc de Triomphe, Paris

Back in the 1960s, a young British rock band called The Who cut a single whose title succinctly captures my feelings about Paris:

“I Can’t Explain.”

I can tell you in three different languages that I love Paris, adore Paris, would gladly live and die in Paris. I just can’t tell you why.

There are lots of places in the world that you can enjoy, delight in, have a ball in, but your soul doesn’t necessarily connect with them. That happens in very few places and there’s no telling where or when. For some, it might be at the top of a mountain in the Alps or at the foot of a towering waterfall in Hawaii. It might be in a shady park lane in Buenos Aires, atop a sand dune overlooking an Egyptian pyramid or in a village clinic in Burkina Faso.

And for millions of travelers around the world — including this one — it’s Paris.

Eiffel Tower from the 7th arrondissement, Paris

Eiffel Tower from the 7th arrondissement, Paris

But why?

Is Paris beautiful? No question, but that hardly makes it unique among travel destinations.

Is it crammed with history and culture? Absolutely, but you can say the same of London, Madrid, Prague, Rome, Florence, Moscow — or for that matter, Washington DC.

Is it alive with youthful energy, music, great food, passion, creativity, romance? Without a doubt, but so are Amsterdam, Barcelona and San Francisco.

And yes, the Seine is lovely and charming as it wends through the various districts, but come on. Paris is hardly the only city in the world with a river running through it.

In sum, there are dozens of world-class cities that can justly lay claim to one or more of every winsome attribute that has made writers wax poetic about Paris for centuries.

And yet not one of those other cities evokes the same reaction as you get when you hear the name “Paris.”

So what is it about this town?

Are the French tourism people pumping some sort of mind-control drug into the air conditioning system at Charles de Gaulle airport? Are Parisians just better at public relations than all the rest? Is the City of Light the absolute master of urban hype? Or is there really some sort of magic to this place that captures souls like fireflies in a child’s jar?

Like the song says, I can’t explain.

Have you ever unexpectedly fallen head over heels for someone? No fireworks, lightning bolts or moonbeams. It just built up gradually, gently, until the day you woke up and realized that your heart had been quietly run over by a velvet freight train. You never saw it coming. You’re not even sure how it happened. All you knew was that someone or something had taken possession of your heart and soul, and was not about to give either of them back.

The Champs Elysee as seen from inside a shopping colonnade, Paris

The Champs Elysee as seen from inside a shopping colonnade, Paris

Paris is like that.

In a lot of ways, the place is impractical as a city. Its districts are laid out like the coils of a snail’s shell and divided by the river Seine. Its stubborn resistance to high-rise buildings keeps it chronically short of housing. The map of its subway system looks like a web spun by a spider on a bad acid trip.

And absolutely none of that matters.

The only thing you know for certain about this city is how you feel when you’re walking its tree-lined boulevards, sitting in one of its cafes or waking up in the morning and throwing open your curtains to see the Eiffel Tower looming above the rows of gabled roofs.

One other thing: Paris has a sizable population of expatriate African-Americans, including the descendants of soldiers, writers, artists and musicians whose souls have been finding refuge here since early in the 20th century.

A lot of them might tell you it’s a feeling of emotional security here, that the racism they left behind in America doesn’t follow them here. And for them, I have no doubt that that’s true.

But I don’t think that’s it.

There’s something else at work here, something deeper and even more fundamental, something that would touch anyone of any race or background.

Will you feel that same thing when you come to Paris? The smart money says yes, but there’s only one way to find out.

You know what you have to do.