Intelligent Travel

IT travels with Scott Stuckey

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.  

Nothing but the Truth

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.

This Week's Bloggers

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).

IT Travels with Norie Quintos

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.

Guide to the Galaxy

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.

IT's Dangerous

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.

Don't Leave Home Without IT

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.

Reverse Gratuity: Maids Give Tips

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):

When Not to Go to China

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.

Hold IT Right There

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.