Intelligent Travel

India: Life in the Fast Lane

National Geographic Magazine has a fascinating story in the October issue about the building of India's Golden Quadrilateral highway system, a 3,633-mile roadway which will stretch between the country's four corridors. Check out this video to get a taste of the careening, cow-dodging drive that is simultaneously enhancing the infrastructure of the country and tearing apart traditional farming communities. But as one official quoted in the film says, "Once the roads come, the economic activity improves and the quality of life improves." We hope that that is indeed the case.

Update:  There are four more short video episodes on this India story:  Car Culture (blessings and racing), The Luxurious Life (for some), Human Impact (farmers protest), and The Filthiest Job (truck driving).  Enjoy!

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All Roads Film Project Comes to L.A. and D.C.

As our friends at the All Roads Film Project prepare to kick off their 5th annual festival, we will be featuring clips from some of the films on the blog along with Q and A’s with the filmmakers. 

All Roads is a National Geographic program created to provide an international platform for indigenous and underrepresented minority-culture artists to share their cultures, stories, and perspectives through the power of film and photography.

The festival begins September 25 at the Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles, CA with a live performance by Somali-born hip-hop artist K'NAAN and runs through September 28. The festival comes to Washington, D.C. from October 2-5 and will be held at the National Geographic headquarters. 

Can’t make it to the festival in Los Angeles or Washington, D.C.?  You can find many of the films on the newly released All Roads Film Festival 5th Anniversary Collection DVD Set.

We'll be spotlighting some of the films and filmmakers on the blog in the coming weeks.

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Cinematic Road Trip: Maryland and Delaware

This week, John Ur heads south to explore the cinematic offerings from Delaware and Maryland.

I consider myself a movie snob. But even I give in occasionally to the hilarious lowbrow humor in some comedies, and I have to admit that Wayne's World is one of my guilty pleasures. One of my favorite scenes is where Wayne and Garth stand in front of a green screen “which magically allows them to travel through time and space.” The screen flashes a photo of New York. “I got a gun. Let’s go to a Broadway show,” Wayne jokes, in an atrocious New Yawk accent.

They crack lines on Hawaii (“Mookalakeheemee, cmonyawannaleime”) and Texas (“let’s raise and rope broncos”) and then comes the line that cracks me up every time I see it. “Imagine being magically whisked away to… Delaware,” Wayne says, as a postcard from the state flashes up on the screen. He loses all humor in his face, and deadpans: “Hi, I’m in Delaware,” with zero enthusiasm. Anytime I’m in Delaware or passing through, I repeat that line to myself and I laugh a little…usually to the bewilderment of any traveling companions.   

This may be Delaware’s seminal film moment. Looking at their filmography, few famous movies crop up. The one notable exception is Dead Poets’ Society. This Oscar winning film, starring Robin Williams, presents an unorthodox English teacher trying to help his students buck the trends of conformity. Drama ensues between the students, their overbearing parents, the administration and Williams’ character, John Keating. Though set in Vermont, the film was shot at St. Andrews School in Delaware, a Christian college prep school, and many of the students were used as extras in the movie. And although the school has exactly the look necessary for the film – antiquated Gothic architecture that has become a signature trope in academic movies – I have to wonder, were there no schools in New England that also could have fit the bill?

Cinematic Road Trip: New Jersey

John Ur pauses his Cinematic Road Trip for a moment in New Jersey, where he was born and raised, to discuss several films from New Jersey's native sons.

Along our journey I’ve tried to avoid painting us into a corner. I’ve tried to cross a border from one state and leave through another. This way, while you’re out on the road, you can follow along this route without ever having to backtrack. Unfortunately, there are two problem states – Maine, which only shares a border with New Hampshire; and New York, which divides New England from the rest of the country. Today, we make the jump from Connecticut through the Empire State down into the Promised Land – New Jersey.

Most people don’t think of wilderness when they think of “the dirty Jerz.” But if you were to take Route 80 out to the west of the state towards Pennsylvania, you’d find a sparsely populated land with rolling hills which lead to the Delaware Water Gap, which separates New Jersey from Pennsylvania. Here you could fly-fish the river in the morning and hike up hills along the Appalachian Trail in the afternoon.

You can see some of this area in The Station Agent. This movie was directed by NJ native Tom McCarthy, who has acted in TV shows like "The Wire" and "Boston Public."  It’s a lesser known film, a hidden gem, that tells the story of a man who inherits a rundown train depot in the middle of nowhere (Newfoundland, NJ) and goes there to escape the hustle and bustle of Hoboken. Though the movie hits up different spots of rural NJ (Dover, Hibernia, Lake Hopatcong, Rockaway), the majority of it is filmed at the Newfoundland train station, which can be found off of Route 23 and Green Pond Rd. The film offers a glimpse not of complete isolation but small town New Jersey: a place where you can walk out onto a railroad bridge over a river and let your feet hang down as the water rushes below.

You may already be familiar with the industrial urban north east of the state, home to Frank Sinatra and made famous for its gangsters on the large and small screens in "The Sopranos"  and Donnie Brasco. In the southern half of the state, farms dominate most of the land – it is called the Garden State for a reason. In season, taste the tomatoes, blueberries or corn and you’ll have a tough time convincing yourself they’re not the best you’ve ever had. You can also visit the Pine Barrens, a forest of pine trees famous for the legend of the Jersey Devil – a hideous creature that will eat your livestock. But the heart of the state, in my opinion, lies in Central Jersey.

Cinematic Road Trip: Connecticut and Rhode Island

Once again, I find myself in a position that may be insulting to some people. At times it’s harsh generalizations. At other times, it’s pointing out a lousy movie or two. But like the Dakotas, and Vermont and New Hampshire, this insult is combining Connecticut together with Rhode Island in one column. Anyone who lives in Connecticut or Rhode Island would be well within their rights to start shouting at me that I shouldn’t be sticking them together solely because of their proximity.

But the point of this article is landscape, scenery, the view. And by those accounts, RI and CT are just not far enough apart for me to justify writing a separate column for each. Both states exhibit that New England charm that is also quintessential to the experience of Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. It’s the red, orange, and yellow leaves of autumn trees. It’s the small town, laid-back feel you get when driving off the beaten path. It’s the colonial architecture. It’s brick buildings and cobblestone roads. It’s things that look and feel antique even though they're being used in the modern day. And it’s the coastline.

Like Massachusetts and Maine, Rhode Island tends to have a rocky coastline dotted with lighthouses to help their adventurous and hard-working fishermen and sailors find their way safely to shore. I’ve enjoyed a few trips to Newport, where you can tour the mansion vacation estates of the Astors and Vanderbilts – you know, to see how poor people used to live. The Cliff Walk around the edge of the city next to the ocean is a beautiful hike.

Although mostly filmed in Jamestown, Dan in Real Life did make some brief stops in Newport. The story revolves around a self-help writer/widower from New Jersey who is struggling to keep his own daughters from rebelling against him. He takes them up to Rhode Island for the annual family vacation with his parents and brothers and sister. You can actually rent the house – Riven Rock - where the movie was shot and spend a week looking out on Narragansett Bay. 

The shoots around Rhode Island tend to center on building locations and exteriors, but you can still spot some of the wonderful natural coastline. Dan (Steve Carell) is pulled over by a cop while speeding along Ocean Avenue in Newport, looking for his daughter. Behind him is the rocky coast of the state and Rhode Island Sound stretching out towards the Atlantic Ocean. Other city/town locations include Westerly, Providence, East Greenwich, and West Greenwich. You should be able to spot the Jamestown and Jamestown-Verrazano Bridges in some aerial views of Dan driving his car over Narragansett Bay. I'm going to conveniently jump over the fact that this is a romantic comedy and pretend that because funnyman Carell is in it, that makes it all ok.

Cinematic Road Trip: Massachusetts

John Ur pahks his cahr in Massachusetts for this week's Cinematic Road Trip column.

Ask any Massachusetts resident where they live and the answer will almost always be measured by their proximity to Boston. Like its rival to the west (New York), Massachusetts has a tough time establishing its identity outside of its largest city. And, being about 1/5th the size of New York by total area (and in the throes of a major baseball rivalry) it's hard not to occasionally think of the state as having a bit of a Napoleon complex.

But this is not to denigrate the rest of the state. In the west are the Berkshires, one of the state’s largest tourist attractions any time of the year. Thousands come to the area to stay in the rustic B&Bs in the highland hills, where rivers slice through the many valleys. And just try to make it out onto Cape Cod's classic beaches (locally referred to just as “The Cape”) during a summer weekend and you’re likely to be backed up in traffic for a few hours with about 100,000 of your closest friends. Like the Hamptons, or the Jersey shore, you do whatcha gotta do to get to the beach.

But there are few cities in the country that have as strong a cultural identity as Boston. You don’t need me to tell you that Boston has a storied history. Founded by Puritan colonists in 1630, the city has come a long way from its conservative beginnings – as any of my Irish brethren who’ve celebrated St. Paddy’s Day there will tell you. Though its population is only 560,000 compared to New York’s 8 million, Boston imparts on you a sense that it is just as big and just as important as the next guy.

How to best see Boston on screen? There is the obvious answer: Good Will Hunting. The Academy Award winning story of janitor/genuis Will Hunting (Matt Damon) is spliced with classic shots of Boston and Cambridge: Will and his counselor, Sean Maguire (Robin Williams) have a heart-to-heart in the Public Garden. Will rides the Red Line T train through the city to MIT, where he mops floors and solves math problems on the side. Will drinks and jokes and horses around with his buddies (played by Ben and Casey Affleck) at Woody's L Street Tavern in Southie, then heads up to Harvard's Dunster House to hang with his girlfriend (played by Minnie Driver). But beware casual viewer! Those shots that you don’t seem to recognize from Boston may very well not be; several scenes, including those in the lecture hall and the college bar, were shot in Toronto.

Cinematic Road Trip: Maine

John Ur is back this week with a tour of the many sides of Maine.

John Ur sits with his head in the clouds in Maine

Maine is a state filled with illusions. There are beautiful pine tree forests (appropriate for the Pine Tree State), gorgeous mountains, and picturesque coastlines. But hidden behind those inviting postcard vistas are rough and tumble environments, about which casual visitors may not be aware. The White Mountains extend up from New Hampshire and include the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, Mount Katahdin. Though this mountain may seem inviting, it is a monster of a hike, with scraggly rock slopes that make every step into a chore.

And then there's the coast, all 3,478 miles of it, if you count the inlets and offshore islands. The coast is home to Acadia National Park, the first National Park established east of the Mississippi River. The park began as an illusion in 1604, when Samuel de Champlain pronounced that the region's mountains were ‘all bare and rocky’ and dutifully dubbed the place Isle des Monts Deserts. It wasn’t until much later that people started to discover the beauty hidden behind the rocks. National Geographic magazine ran an article on the park in November of 2005, and with it, some wonderful pictures.

Depending on your disposition, you have two movies to choose from to see Maine’s coast. On the show tune, fairy tale side, there is Carousel, the 1956 Rodgers & Hammerstein musical directed by Henry King. On the more realistic, darker side, there is In the Bedroom, helmed by Todd Field in 2001. Carousel was not as popular as some of R&H’s other hits (The King and I, Oklahoma, South Pacific, Sound of Music) because of it’s decidedly darker tone than the others. In contrast, In The Bedroom makes Carousel look like, well, a musical, with its grim, unflinching look at a son’s death.

Roughing It: Mongolia

A few months out of college, longtime friends Chris Rufo and Keith Ochwat decided that the workaday world wasn’t for them. So they picked up and headed to Mongolia to shoot a travel documentary, an eight-week journey that had the pair trying to track down a tribe of nomadic reindeer herders in the Siberian taiga, drinking bowls of yak vodka at a traditional Mongolian wedding ceremony and going head-to-head with an Olympic wrestler. After returning to the States, the pair spent the next year editing film and pitching their show to TV stations across the country. Their hard work paid off: “Roughing It: Mongolia” was picked up by PBS over the winter and is scheduled to air nationally this summer. (Click here for your local listings.)

The pair traveled light (just the two of them and a camera) and focused on finding off-the-beaten-path travel experiences and meeting “the most compelling characters in the most compelling contexts.” Though the program is less polished than more established travel shows, it succeeds in capturing honest scenes with unique personalities—from a traditional throat singer to a fortune-teller who sees into the future with the aid of sheep knuckles. Since producer-director Chris and host Keith market their show on their ability to find authentic experiences and meet interesting people wherever they go, IT decided to pick up some travel advice from these 23-year-old globe-trotters.

How did you discover your love for “roughing it”?

Keith: Our first “roughing it”-type trip was the summer after our sophomore year of college. We were going to teach English together in the southeastern part of China, but the day we were set to depart we got a phone call from the program director, who said the school had been closed due to a food poisoning outbreak. Chris and I already had our visas, so we bought plane tickets and left a few days later and we roughed it across China, and that got us hooked. We’re both happy at home in America doing our own things, but that adventure really instilled in us this desire to rough it. Not just travel, not just spend a summer in Rome, or Paris or something, but really get off the beaten path and explore.

Chris: And we had a good chemistry on the road. Things fell into our laps that were absurd and adventurous and one of a kind. We made a cameo appearance in a Chinese rap video, we hitchhiked all through the Himalayas in the back of a dump truck, we went through the Three Gorges Dam right before everything got flooded. And we met really interesting people.

Follow the jump to learn why Chris and Keith don't actually hope you go to Mongolia, and to read their tips for authentic and sustainable travel.

Cinematic Road Trip: Vermont and New Hampshire

John Ur is back this week to enlighten us about the film history of two of the Northeast's wedge states: Vermont and New Hampshire.

This week, I tried to pull a slick journalistic move. I was going to prove the lack of geographic knowledge among Americans, e-mailing my friends with a question: “Which state is further west: Vermont or New Hampshire?” It’s not a trick question and most of them got the question right: Vermont. Those that got the question wrong shall remain nameless and will also soon be contestants on “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?”

Vermonters and New Hampshirites might be a bit upset that I’ve grouped these two states together. They might argue that the states or the people have different personalities, political preferences, and different landmarks. Frankly, I’m not buying it. These states are New England to the core – pine trees, covered bridges, apple orchards. They share their northern borders with Canada, their southern with Massachusetts, and each other's colonial charm.

Residents of the rocky West would probably scoff at the idea of an East Coast mountain. Mount Mitchell in North Carolina is the highest point east of the Mississippi at over 6,000 feet. Colorado has more than 50 peaks over 14K. So to say Vermont is famous for its ranges might be a bit of an East Coast bias. But with its Green Mountains (the root of the state's name comes from the French explorer Champlain, who dubbed it "Verde Mont"), Vermont is a great place for hiking or skiing, particularly at Killington, Stowe, Sugarbush and other slopes. Did you know Vermont has a Koppen climate classification of Dfb, similar to Minsk, Stockholm and Fargo?  Yeah, me neither.

Chatsworth Estate: Oh! What a Lovely Garden

Multimedia Intern Ally Burguieres was in England last week for a linguistics conference held at the University of Sheffield. While there, she found some time to enjoy the countryside . . . (And if her academic adviser is reading this, she attended plenty of talks on language ideology and political discourse, too.)

When the weather is nice in England, there is no better diversion from the thrills of the northern town of Sheffield than the nearby Chatsworth Estate. The site was a primary filming location for 2005’s Pride and Prejudice film, and reportedly inspired Jane Austen's original description of Mr. Darcy's home, Pemberley, in the book, first published in 1813. For centuries Chatsworth has been one of England's most spectacular and visited attractions.

"[Elizabeth] had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste," Austen wrote in her novel. The words ring true today—the magnificent house, filled with treasures of antiquity as well as modern art, is curated with an informal though luxurious touch, and the gardens, at once impeccably manicured and wholly organic, are often called the UK's finest.

The 300-year-old Cascade fountain runs from the top of a hill toward the house, and visitors are welcome to splash (along with their dogs) in all 400 yards of it. Most of the property is open grassland, where visitors picnic along the banks of small streams and sit nose-to-nose with grazing sheep (seriously), but the gardens themselves take hours (if not more) to fully explore. “We’ve lived in Sheffield for 27 years,” a man reading the paper in the rose garden with his wife, told me. “And we’ve never been to this part of the garden.”