Senior editor Scott Stuckey chooses cars over chocolate. What?!? He reports:
I'd just downed a half-pound bag of candy while watching a 3-D movie featuring kick-stepping chocolate bars when I realized there can be too much of a good thing. Earlier, when we'd checked into our hotel in Hershey, Pennsylvania, we were issued free chocolate.
A couple of months ago, a number of major news outlets got all fired up about a planned security measure at Moscow's Domodedovo International Airport. The source of their excitement? The GK1 voice analysis system, which Moscow expects to implement by July. The reports described the device as a lie detector, which the airport was quick to deny. Thankfully, IT has come along to set the record straight.
Jessie Johnston,a researcher at Traveler, has crossed international borders 27 times in the last two and a half years. Emily King, assistant to the editor, hasn't crossed a border since 2003. Unless you count Utah as a foreign country (28 crossings).
Senior editor Norie Quintos has just returned from a hacienda-hunting trip. She reports:
Mérida, in the heart of Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, is not a museum relic from the 16th century. It's a modern city, completely comfortable in its colonial dressings and deep Maya roots. Mérida lacks a beach (the nearest one is 30 minutes away by car), which has probably saved it from turning into a manufactured funland like Cancún.
What Mérida does have is true Mexican cuisine (not dumbed down for the American palate), non-touristy opportunities to encounter Maya culture (ancient and living), and a surfeit of historic buildings, many of which have been converted into hotels and restaurants.
Followers of Douglas Adams (and interplanetary travelers) have long bewailed the absence of a real-world equivalent to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Of late, it has been claimed that Wikipedia
now fills that niche. It probably does. But we were thrilled to
discover that two years before his death (and the birth of Wikipedia),
Adams participated in the creation of h2g2, a user-written online guide to Life, the Universe and Everything.
Classified
under those three blanket headings, the articles are by no means as
all-encompassing as Wikipedia's, but there is plenty to explore. We, of
course, made a beeline for the travel section, where entries ranged from the practical (what to do if you're stranded at Heathrow) to the offbeat (gift suggestions for homesick friends living abroad). IT's favorite? Instructions for an in-car game to play on UK roadtrips. We'll never again be bored on the motorway.
In conversation with a college friend who studied abroad in Bolivia,
IT was fascinated to hear about a working mine, open to tourists, where
visitors are encouraged to purchase and detonate their own dynamite.
Ever skeptical, we trolled the Web and did in fact come across numerous accounts of visits to the Cerro Rico silver mine in Potosí.
Sure enough, stalls at the entrance to the 461-year-old mine sell not
only dynamite and fuses, but the coca leaves miners chew all day to
stave off hunger and exhaustion while underground.
It
seems most tours ask travelers to purchase dynamite and other items as
gifts for the miners, though, not for their own use. However, at least one company appears to demonstrate the explosives on their tours. We assume their business is booming.
The day Jessie left for China (we know, another
China posting, but it's worth it, we promise), our books editor
received the new Knopf MapGuide to Beijing in the mail. She passed it on to Jessie, who slipped it into her carry-on before making tracks to the airport.
And
boy was she glad she did. The small, slim volume—containing six foldout
maps of major neighborhoods—was so useful Jessie left it with her
hostess at the end of her trip. Not only are the new guides easily
portable with clearly legible maps, but they contain practical details
(prices, opening hours) about key sites in each area, as well as
map-specific recommendations for restaurants, bars, shopping, even
massage parlors. The series covers favorite cities from Miami to
Marrakech, as well as a few larger destinations, including Normandy and
Majorca. Tuck one in your left cargo pocket, and you're good to go.
IT generally hates press releases. Not only do they clutter our desks, but we feel guilty trashing them, contributing evermore to this country's paper waste problem. That said, when we do get something worthy of sharing with our readers (one in, say, 200), we are surprised and tickled. Here goes it:
Cleaning 101… National Trust Historic Hotels of America offers ideas on how to achieve a home you'll be proud of for all seasons. A tip or two from these professionals, who tackle hundreds of rooms every day, will ensure that you'll pass the white glove test every time.
Here are our favorites (and a few accompanying thoughts):
In a nutshell, don't go when we did. Not that IT's resident Canuck didn't have a blast during her recent week in Beijing, but she could have planned it a little better, timing-wise.
She made two mistakes. First, by arranging to visit during her English-teaching friend's vacation, Jessie unwittingly arrived during one of China's three "golden weeks", nationally observed seven-day holidays that occur around the Chinese New Year (in January or February), International Workers' Day (May 1st), and China's National Day (October 1st). All students, all teachers, and most workers get these weeks off, and many of them take the opportunity to travel.
During
her ongoing exploration of the World Wide Web, chief researcher Marilyn
Terrell happened upon a nifty piece of pseudo-science. Consumerist
recently spent a week calling 15 major airlines once a day, and
measuring how long it took for a living, breathing agent to pick up.
The Time to Human experiment's loser (by a wide margin) was Midwest Airlines,
which averaged a 17-minute wait and peaked one day at an
apoplexy-inducing 22 minutes, 14 seconds. Looks like they take their
slogan ("the best care in the air") a wee bit too literally. The
promptest responders were AirTran (average 12 seconds), which placed in the top four all five days. Delta (27 seconds) and JetBlue (35 seconds) also seem to have done a good job explaining this new-fangled "telephone" technology to their employees.
If Consumerist's report doesn't shame Midwest and fellow poor performers like Alaska Airlines (five minutes, 16 seconds) and United (four minutes, 13 seconds) into increasing their call-center staffs (cuz, let's face it, according to the chart, Mellissa could really use a hand over there), IT hopes they'll at least take a page out of Air Canada's book.
We recently spent more time than we would generally choose on hold with
the Canadian carrier. To our utter astonishment, however, their
soundtrack of Asian-infused electronica was genuinely catchy, and while
speaking to a human would have been preferable, we must confess that
grooving to the beat for five (or was it ten?) minutes was a
not-unpleasant way to pass some time.
Michael Shapiro, the writer of our May/June cover story about Wales, thinks the Guest Driver program is booked up for 2006, but if you contact the Ffestiniog Railway in northern Wales, they may let you sign up for 2007. You pick the locomotive and what kind of carriage you want to pull; they give you one-on-one instruction for a whole day. Up to six of your friends and family are welcome to ride on the train you drive; plus, they give you an Engineman's Lunch and a driving certificate at the end. IT suggests you take your tots, especially since the locomotives look just like Thomas the Tank Engine. And the conductor? We see a resemblance to Sir Topham Hatt. If you'd rather ride than drive the train yourself, the Ffestiniog Railway and the Welsh Highland Railway offer scenic trips.
In the days of bankrupt airliners and crippling fuel prices, IT is happy to relay the news of airline enterprise. DayJet Corp. plans to launch a flying-taxi service between small cities in the Southeast. Many business travelers spend their lives on the road (how sad!), driving from 100 to 700 miles to reach various regional outposts. "DayJet's 'Per-seat, On Demand,' business jet service will turn hours of wasted travel time into valuable business and personal time," promises their website. "Just imagine," they continue, "having a productive breakfast meeting with your best client in one location, lunch with a new customer hundreds of miles away, and getting home in time for a dinner meeting, a concert, or your child's soccer game." DayJet will match-up and coordinate their clients' schedules so that each flight can carry a few people from different companies (think: an airport shuttle that picks up Joe before swinging by to pick you up). The downside, perhaps, is that you must be willing to share a small space with other passengers (a snoring Joe) and pay more than you would for your average flight. The company says a round-trip DayJet flight will be comparable in price to an overnight stay—which in their lexicon means round-trip airfare, one night in a hotel, and per diem expenses. Is your kid's soccer game really worth the price of a seat at this year's World Cup?
IT
has mixed feelings about zoos. On the one paw, we do love getting a
little face time with our fuzzy, be-tailed brethren. On the other, the
bars always end up pulling focus from the bears, and we inevitably
leave feeling a little like Tondalayo,
the depressed Sumatran orangutan (only without a pet cat to cheer us
up). This is probably why we have yet to make the 20-minute walk to
visit Tai Shan, the National Zoo's no-longer-a-baby panda. Thanks to our fence phobia, we were thrilled to hear about the London Zoo's new "barrier free enclosure" for its squirrel monkeys.
Or should we say scoundrel monkeys?
Once they moved into their new home, the monks found that "barrier
free" goes both ways. Sure, it lets human visitors feel a closer
connection with their fellow primates. But as far as the monkeys were
concerned, the main perk was the opportunity to steal cell phones!
Apparently the flashing and beeping devices were too much for the
rascals to resist, and they were observed trying to snatch them from
the hands of visitors holding them out take pictures. The zoo undertook
a simple training exercise (cell phones covered in monkey-unfriendly
sticky substances were put into the enclosure) that has nipped the
creatures' klepto tendencies in the bud. Which is good. After all,
aren't monkeys supposed to stand for honesty?
Emily King, a native Utahn, is the Assistant to the Editor at Traveler. Her dirty little secret? She aspires to write an Insiders Disneyland. Jessie Johnston is a researcher at the magazine. A Canadian expat, she acts as Traveler's tenuous link to the French-speaking world, and go-to gal for staff chocoholics.
Inside Traveler is the latest addition to our online domain, a "travelblogue" we'll regularly update with frontline travel info from our staff, contributors, and savvy readers. We'll take you behind the scenes—into our in-boxes, staff meetings, and suitcases—to give you the minute-we-hear-it info that can't wait for the newsstand.
First up: BlackBerry thumb massages have spread beyond their birth-state of Arizona. Those suffering from deQuervain's tendonitis—the malady afflicting compulsive e-mailers—can now find relief at spas from Toronto to South Beach.
Oddly, D.C. has yet to catch on, so ed-in-chief Keith Bellows, our very
own BlackBerry buff, will have to wait to partake in the trend.
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