Matterhorn; courtesy Ron Layters, flickr.com

Will wonders never cease? Not apparently if Bernard Weber has anything to say about it. Following up on the runaway success of his global contest to select the New Seven Wonders of the World in 2007, the Swiss-born Canadian entrepreneur and founder of the New Open World Corporation, is now running a campaign to choose The New Seven Wonders of Nature. If you want to cast your vote, simply log on to http://www.vote7.com/n7w&nbsp  where you will find photos and descriptions of all the finalists.

Niagara Falls; courtesy Insight, flickr.com

The contest, which was lauched in 2008, has since whittled a list of 261 nominees down to 28. On July 21, 2009, a panel of experts chaired by Federico Mayor, former chief of UNESCO, picked the 28 finalists based on geographical balance, diversity and the importance to human life, from a list of 77 nominees that had collected the most votes in an early round of polling. The world’s top seven natural wonders will be selected by a global poll conducted using the Internet, phone and text message, with the official final announcement slated for 2011.

The list of finalists includes a wide range of natural wonders including rivers, islands, waterfalls, forests and rock formations, and hail from all corners of the Earth. Among the more familiar wonders are Australia’s Uluru (Ayers Rock), the Great Barrier Reef, the Amazon Rainforest, Africa’s Mount Kilimanjaro, Switzerland’s Matterhorn, Germany’s Black Forest and Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands. Canada is represented by two wonders: Niagara Falls and the Bay of Fundy. The only site included from the U.S. is the Grand Canyon.

In addition to the usual supsects, a number of obscure locales made the list, such as Lebanon’s Jeita Grotto, Azerbaijan’s Mud Volcanoes, Poland’s Lake Musurian District, Korea’s Jeju Island, the United Arab Emirates’ Bu Tinah Shoals, Puerto Rico’s El Yunque Rainforest, and Nigeria’s Zuma Rock.

Uluru; courtesy Becky E.; flickr.com

Judging by past evidence, the voting will be intense. About 100 million people cast ballots in the selection of the seven man-made wonders in 2007. The winners were Rome’s Colosseum, the Great Wall of China; India’s Taj Mahal, Jordan’s Petra; Rio’s Christ the Redeemer Statue; Peru’s Machu Picchu; and the Pyramid at Chichen Itza, Mexico.

Weber says he expects more than a billion people  to participate in the voting this time. ”This campaign should contribute to the appreciation–to the knowledge—of our environment and not just the one in our country but worldwide,” he told the Associated Press. “If we or our children want to save anything, we should first appreciate it.” Weber declined to give any numbers of votes so far. But the organization plans to release detail about voter profiles later, he added. Registration on the Web site aims to prevent people from voting twice.

New Zealand's Milford Sound; courtesy Swisscan, flickr.com

Although the contest is to pick the “New” Seven Wonders of the Natural World, there is actually no consensus as to what constitutes the original seven natural wonders. There are several lists floating around on the Internet. The most popular one includes Mt. Everest, the Great Barrier Reef, the Northern Lights, the Grand Canyon, Mexico’s Paricutin Volcano, Victoria Falls, and the harbour of Rio De Janeiro.

So which natural wonders do you think deserve to make the final seven? Let us know.

Lead image by benisntfunny; flickr.com

courtesy Kerry Banks

The heron was hunting for fish in one of the ponds near Jericho Beach, a wetlands habitat that is home to several species of waterfowl as well as turtles, frogs, muskrats and beavers. My main purpose for visiting Jericho is to take pictures, but since the area is rife with birds, I find that I am slowly and unintentionally joining the ranks of what is North America’s fastest growing hobby: birdwatching.

It’s a development that my family regards with some bemusement. My wife has begun calling me “Nature Boy” and my teenage daughter is less than impressed. At dinner the other night as I was describing some of the birds I’ve seen at Jericho, she said, “You seem to know a lot about them. Have you given them human names yet?” Her final retort, as she left the table, was “Birds are boring.” I can’t agree. They sing, screech, swim, waddle, fly, fight and hunt. And when you actually stop to examine their plumage it is hard to deny their beauty. Most things, with the possible exception of Brittany Spears, become more interesting the more you know about them, and I find this to be true of birds.

I’m not alone in this opinion. About 70 million North Americans currently participate in birdwatching, a hobby that employs more than 60,000 people in the retail and nature tour trades, and generates more than $25 billion dollars annually. Spending on bird watching is on the rise around the globe. For example, the birders who flock to Kuşcenneti National Park at Lake Manyas in Turkey are estimated to spend as much as $103 million annually. Guided birding tours have become a major business with at least 127 companies offering them worldwide. There are now several websites that cater specifically to bird watching enthusiasts who are keen to travel, such as www.travellingbirder.com and Where Do You Want to Go Birding Today? www.camacdonald.com/birding/birding.htm.

courtesy Kerry Banks

Some of these birdwatching trips venture to remote and inhospitable regions. One of the popular destinations for Birdseekers, an English company that offers bird-watching tours at some 30 different global locations, are barren, windswept islands in Alaska’s Bering Sea. The company’s founder and director, Steve Bird (yes, that’s his real name) says that his clients are willing to pay $16,000 or more for a 25-day trip to Alaska for the chance to spot a Bristle-thighed Curlew, McKay’s Bunting, Smith’s Longspur or Red-legged Kittiwake.

The term “twitcher,” is reserved for those who travel long distances to see a rare bird that is then “ticked” off on a “list.” According to Wikipedia, the usage of the term twitcher began in the 1950s, originating from a phrase used to describe the nervous behaviour of Howard Medhurst, a British birdwatcher. Prior to that the term used for those who chased avian rarities was “pot-hunter,” “tally-hunter,” or “tick-hunter.”

My budding interest in birds pales in comparison to the extreme behaviour of hard-core birders. A couple of years ago, the appearance of a rare type of turtle dove drew a flood of twitchers to a remote island in the Orkney Islands. On the first day of the dove’s sighting there were 27 car-loads of birders on the ferry, charter flights from England and dozens on scheduled flights. In the space of 10 days around 1,000 twitchers came and went. Among the onlookers was Lee Evans, who earned himself a Guinness Book record entry for the number of bird species seen in Britain in a year (359 in 1990). When a reporter asked him why he does it, Evans said: “We’re sad gits, really. We’re misfits, anti-social obsessives, and I know I’m one of the worst because even the other birders say I’m mad. I’m quite prepared to admit it, but don’t ask me to stop because I can’t, even though I know I’m too old now to ever be number one.”

courtesy Kerry Banks

There are about 10,000 species of birds and only a small number of people have seen more than 7,000. Many birdwatchers have spent their entire lives trying to spot all the bird species of the world and some have lost their lives in the process. One of the most famous is Phoebe Snetsinger, a globe-trotting American woman who set off on an almost non-stop series of journeys to exotic locales after being diagnosed with malignant cancer. When her cancer went into remission, she continued travelling, surviving an attack and rape in New Guinea, before finally dying in a road accident in Madagascar in 1999. She observed as many as 8,400 species, a feat that no fellow twitcher is near to challenging.

Predictably, Great Britain produces some of the planet’s most fanatical twitchers. In 2008, Alan Davies and Ruth Miller, from North Wales, set a new world record by observing an amazing 4,327 different species during a year-long tour, easily exceeding the previous record of 3,662, set by an American spotter in 1995. In an interview, Davies, 47, said: “Birds are my passion, always have been. From a very early age, birds have been the focus of my life. They have been reason to suffer altitude sickness in the Andes to see an Ecuadorian Hillstar, trek across the Karoo desert in 45 degrees Celsius to glimpse a small grey Eremomela, empty my stomach over the side of a small boat with engine failure just to see an Isabelline Wheatear. To see birds in wonderful places is what I live for.”

courtesy Kerry Banks

The two ecccetrics sold their houses to fund the trip, which began in Arizona on January, and spanned British back gardens, Asian rainforests and Arctic ice floes, among other terrains. The adventure was not free from setbacks. While in Vancouver, in April, they had possessions stolen from their car, including a camera, mobile phone and video camera featuring footage of many of rare birds they had ticked off their list. After a brief return to their rented flat in Wales, the couple spent Christmas in the Ecuadorian jungle, where they proudly spotted such species as the Vermilion Tanager, Green Jay and Saffron-Crowned Tanager. On their blog, they wrote: “Highlights along this track included Bearded Guan, Black-and-Chestnut Eagle. A female Masked Trogon added a splash of colour. Leaving the park behind we headed for our lodgings at Madre Tierra at Vilcabamba (the Valley of Longevity) and had our Christmas supper of roast turkey.”

However (and this must be quite a blow), while the pair carefully documented their expedition through the blog, photographs and film, their achievement will not enter the record books, as they were not accompanied by an independent adjudicator.

Lead image by Kerry Banks

courtesy of A Boy Named Hugh (flickr.com)

Yes, the Stanley Cup really gets around. In fact, the trophy has logged more than 400,000 miles during the past five years. As well as making the rounds with the members of the championship team, it also travels 250 days per year to charity events and NHL promotional activities. When the chalice is travelling, a replica takes its place in the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. How can you tell the difference? The real Cup has about a dozen misspelled names, such as the name of goalie Jacques Plante, and the word Boston in the 1972 engraving. All the errors are corrected on the replica.

The Cup’s wanderings have grown increasingly exotic since European-born players began sipping champagne from it. In 1997, the Detroit Red Wings’ Russian stars Igor Larionov, Slava Fetisov and Slava Kozlov took the trophy to Moscow’s Red Square and tried to take it into Lenin’s Tomb. Josef Vasicek of the 2006 champion Carolina Hurricanes transported the Cup to Havlickuv Brod, a town of 25,000 in the Czech Republic. There, the chalice was driven to the Vasicek family home, then to the outdoor arena where he played as a teenager. In 2007, Anaheim Ducks sharpshooter Teemu Selanne’s trip with the Cup to his native Finland included a stop at a Helsinki sauna and a cooling dip in the Baltic Sea.

courtesy of wstera2 (flickr.com)

The ritual of spending 24 hours with the Cup began in 1995, as did the rule that it always be accompanied by white-gloved custodians. Before that the celebrated silverware was not always treated with such reverence. After the Ottawa Senators won it in 1927, the Cup spent much of the summer in King Clancy’s living room, where it served as a receptacle for everything, including letters, bills, chewing gum and cigar butts. When the New York Rangers won the Cup in 1940, some of the club’s executives reportedly celebrated by urinating in it. Winger Clark Gillies of the 1980 New York Islanders allowed his dog to eat from it. In his defence, Gillies noted, “He’s a nice dog.” Fellow Islander Bryan Trottier took the Cup with him to bed. He said, “I wanted to wake up and find it right beside me. I didn’t want to think I’d just dreamed of this happening.” In 1991, the Cup was found at the bottom of Pittsburgh Penguin Mario Lemieux’s swimming pool. In 1994, New York Rangers captain Mark Messier took the Cup to Scores, a famous strip joint. According to Scores spokesman Lonnie Hanover, “It was the first time I’d seen our customers eager to touch something besides our dancers.” And in 1996, Sylvain Lefebvre of the Colorado Avalanche had his newborn daughter baptized in it.

During its 105-year history, the Stanley Cup has been dented, dismantled, left in a snowbank, kicked into a canal and used as a flowerpot. It has also been stolen a couple of times, and in another memorable incident–nearly stolen. During the 1962 playoffs, a Montreal fan, unhappy that Stanley was in a glass case in the lobby of Chicago Stadium, opened the case, snatched the Cup, and headed for the exit before police apprehended him. The thief claimed he was merely “taking the Cup back to Montreal, where it belonged.”

Yet, despite such abuses, it perseveres; the oldest and most famous trophy competed for by professional athletes. So, after defeating the defending champion Detroit Red Wings, where will this year’s winners, the Pittsburgh Penguins, take old Stanley? Judging by the varied birthplaces–Kiev, Magnitogorsk, Pizen, Chelyabinsk–on the team’s roster, there will be is some international stops on its summer itinerary.

In fact, this year’s tour has already started. On JUne 14, a group of Penguins players took the Cup on an impromptu visit to several Pittsburgh nightclubs, causing a traffic jam as delighted fans called friends and urged them to rush down to see it. During the Cup’s evening on the town, some players ate hot wings from it–wings, get it?–and held it aloft from a second-storey balcony. The next day, they showed it off at PNC Park prior to a Pittsburgh Pirates–Detroit Tigers baseball game. Coincidentally, the Pirates were paying tribute to the 100-year anniversary of their 1909 World Series victory over Detroit, also decided by Game 7 in Detroit.

For Stanley, it seems, the party never ends.

courtesy Kerry Banks

Fortified with sugar and caffeine we climb in the car and start driving toward the Similkameen Valley, which lies to the west of the southern Okanagan Valley. The farther south we go, the more desert-like the landscape becomes. The Similkameen has a rich history dating back to the heady gold rush days of the 1800s, but today the scene is mostly orchards, horse and cattle ranches and, increasingly, vineyards.

For years most of the grapes grown in the Similkameen were sold to wineries in the Okanagan, quietly contributing to their awards lists, but now some determined entrepreneurs are attempting to awaken people’s perceptions to the agri-tourism potential of the valley by producing first-rate wine. Grape-growing country begins on the benchland above Keremeos and extends east and to the south to the heart of the region around the tiny hamlet of Cawston.

courtesy Kerry Banks

The Similkameen’s climate is comparable to the south Okanagan, producing similar annual temperatures to Osoyoos and Oliver. The long hours of sunshine and hot summer temperatures make a large range of grape varieties possible, from heavier reds on the bench land to aromatic whites on the cooler parts of the valley floor. However, the absence of a lake to moderate the temperatures means the area is susceptible to summer heat and also to the risk of cold winter freezes similar to what is experienced in Oliver.

The amount of vineyards in the valley has increased from 207 acres in 2004 to 580 acres in 2008. Considering the lack of space and the exorbitant price of land in the Okanagan proper, the Similkameen is certain to continue growing and add to its current inventory of 11 wineries. Eight of the valley’s wineries have joined together to form the Similkameen Wineries Association, in an attempt to emulate the marketing success of the Naramata Bench Wineries Association. The new association is launching its very first event today as part of the Spring Wine Festival, a meet-and-greet wine-tasting party near Cawston.

When we arrive the session is in full swing, complete with a country band. We park beside a huge carved dragon that looks like it just flew in from a Lord of the Rings movie set and head inside. The first person I meet is Rhys Pender, who is also an aspiring Similkameen vinter. He hands me a glass. It’s time to start drinking again.

The event is hosted by Rustic Roots Winery, which recently began producing four types of fruit wines. But while the wine-making may be new, that adjective doesn’t apply to the farm here. The Harker (nee Manery) family settled in the Similkameen Valley in 1888, just 17 years after British Columbia became Canada’s sixth province. The farm that the winery is situated on has been in the family for five generations, and has hosted a variety of different enterprises over the years, including horse rearing during World War I, a dairy business and organic fruit growing. The Rustic Roots label depicts a rare, 110-year-old heritage Snow Apple tree that is still producing apples on the property. The roots below the tree represent the six generations of Harkers to farm in the Similkameen.

courtesy Kerry Banks

Our hosts from the previous evening, John and Virginia Weber of Orofino Vineyards, are on hand, and I take the opportunity to chat and help myself to another glass or two of their addictive Red Bridge Red, a Merlot that their website describes as a “rich, seductive wine that is full of ripe black cherry flavours, sweet vanilla, hints of coffee and a touch of smoke.”

The couple purchased their vineyard in 2001, and moved here from Saskatchewan, where John was a high school teacher and Virginia was a nurse. They have become very passionate about wine. Virginia has a horticulture diploma and has taken wine courses offered by the Okanagan University College, while John has completed courses in viticulture, winemaking, and wine marketing from OUC. He was the first recipient of the Frank Supernak Bursary, sponsored by the Canadian Vintners Association and OUC. The award is given to the student who shows potential in B.C.’s wine industry.

Besides turning out fine vino, the Webers’ operation has another distinction—it is Canada’s only strawbale winery. That’s right, the entire structure is constructed over hay bales–890 of them to be exact. As John notes, “There isn’t a straight line in the place.” The Webers chose this ecofriendly building method after much research and planning. Earthy, 21-inch thick walls provide superior insulation qualities–ideal for manufacturing constant barrel room temperatures and for keeping cool in the summer heat.

On the drive back to Penticton I review the mini-films I have shot on my new camcorder. To my surprise there are 21 in all. Some, however, are little more than fragmented blips, lasting less than 10 seconds. I discover that I recorded four videos at Rustic Roots, all of them noisy and chaotic. One clip, and I’m guessing it may have been the last one, probably best captures the event. Part of it is filmed upside down, while other sections appear to have been shot from somewhere inside my jacket. About the only clear and constant image is of my arm repeatedly raising a glass of red wine. I suppose I was filming without being aware of it. I’d like to think of it as “stream of consciousness video.” If I can ever figure out how to download this stuff on to my computer, I may post it on my blog.

Lead image by Kerry Banks

We are standing in a vineyard, listening to Rob Van Western discuss the geology of the Okanagan. Van Westen is a third-generation farmer in the region. His parents and grandparents cultivated peaches and cherries, but he has taken up the challenge of growing grapes. The vineyard’s first vintage was released in 2003 and Van Western has enjoyed considerable success, winning numerous awards locally and nationally for his handcrafted, small-batch quality wines.

courtesy Kerry Banks

When people come here as part of the Naramata Unfiltered tour they learn how different soils affect the profile and taste of a wine and are shown how to plant, leaf pluck and prune a vine. Because this is spring, there are no vines to inspect–the first pinkish buds are just making their appearance. It’s hard to believe that such bounty can spring from such simple beginnings.

Talking with Van Western gives you a sense of the delicate balancing act that viticulture can be in these parts. Because the growing season is relatively short in comparison to most wine-growing regions, there are narrow margins for error. “Some times we will only have a day or two to do a harvest,” admits Van Western. When the weather doesn’t co-operate, he will often have to perform a major cull of his vines. This may occur when they are exposed to a stretch of hot, windy conditions. “The grapes shut down to preserve moisture and photosynthesis stops happening,” he explains. The plants that are cut are tossed on the ground to rot, a necessary sacrifice in order to ensure quality. “My father, who was a long-time fruit grower, could never understand how we could do that,” he says. “But he’s come around now.”

Van Western has set up a couple of bottles of his Viognier under an awning. Once virtually unknown in B.C., this white wine, which originally comes from Condrieu in the northern part of German’s Rhone Valley, has been growing in popularity in recent years. However, it still hasn’t made major inroads into the mainstream consciousness, quite possibly because most people don’t know how to pronounce it. The correct pronunciation is VEE-own-YAY, which is not so difficult, and certainly easier than the challenge of growing the grape. Mildew is a persistent problem and yields are modest and seldom predictable. But Van Western’s handcrafted version is a revelation–golden in colour with fresh aromas of apricot, peach, honeysuckle and citrus.

We have a couple of hours of free time before dinner and I use it to stroll around Penticton. My route takes me down Riverside Drive (Penticton’s so-called “Sunset Strip”) past the faded 1960s-style white stucco motels that were once the staple accommodations in the area. The “peaches and beaches” family vacationers still come here, but their numbers are dwindling, replaced by a clientele with bigger bank accounts and more demanding tastes. Not only is Penticton the hub of the booming wine tourism business with 88 wineries located within an hour’s drive, it’s also become a haven of festivals. Besides the Elvis shindig and the four annual wine festivals, there is also the Beach Blanket Film Festival, the Dragon Boat Festival, the Peach Festival, the Meadowlark Festival, the Ironman Canada Triathlon and the Pentastic Hot Jazz Festival.

courtesy Kerry Banks

Before returning to the Ramada Inn, I stop to snap photos of the restored SS Sicamous, the largest remaining steel-hulled sternwheeler in Canada, which Penticton bought from the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1949 for $1.00. She was built in 1914 to accommodate passengers in luxurious style while also moving large cargo and providing daily mail service. Farther down the shoreline I come upon the 203-room Penticton Lakeside Resort, Convention Centre and Casino, which represents the opposite end of the historical spectrum. Outside the complex stands a 60-ton granite sculpture by local artist Pat Field that is cantilevered on a 100-ton concrete horizon pool. The title of the mammoth piece, “Who’s in Charge?” relates to the question is it man or nature?

Our dinner is at Amante Bistro, a hip and stylish restaurant that was opened in 2007 by Mexican-born chef Abul Adame and his wife, Rose Amante. The bistro has teamed up with John and Virginia Weber, the owners of Orofino, a small Similkameen Valley winery, for a five-course Winemaker’s Dinner that is part of the Spring Wine Festival. It’s a dynamic combination: the wine is first-rate and the food is delicious. It’s easy to see why Amante has become the hottest dining spot in town, and why Orofino, although it has only been making wine since 2005, has attracted a devoted following and won several awards. Its Riesling has captured gold medals in each of the last three years at the Canadian Wine Championships.

courtesy Kerry Banks

Tonight’s dining experience includes sampling a “flight of wine.” A “flight” is a term used by wine tasters to describe a selection of wines, usually between three and eight glasses, but sometimes as many as 50, presented for the purpose of sampling and comparison. Our flight consists of three different vintages of Orofino’s Beleza, the winery’s signature Merlot-Cabernet blend. Beleza is a Brazilian Portuguese noun which evokes a feeling of contentment and bliss. This is precisely the state I find myself in as I finally weave my way back to the Ramada.

(To be continued …)

Lead photo courtesy Kerry Banks.

courtesy hubpages.com

Everyone seeks something different in travel. For some it begins and ends with foreign food. Others prefer art and museums. Some take their pleasure in exotic nightlife. For many, the quest involves a beach. I have my own special thing. I always go looking for the local sport. I enjoy sports for their own sake, but I also find that they often offer revealing insights into national culture.

On Malaysia’s east coast that meant standing in a village square watching a top-spinning contest. The Malaysians call this peculiar sport main gasing. The participants use long ropes to violently snap their discus-sized tops onto a mound of packed clay. Then a teammate scoops up the six-kilogram top on a wooden paddle and transfers it to a metal-tipped bamboo stand. Soon there are several gasing “asleep” (as the Malaysians describe a fast-spinning top) on their stands. They sleep for more than an hour. Main gasing may not be Wide World of Sportsmaterial, but it’s definitely different. In North America, you don’t often see the athletes squatting on their haunches smoking cheroots in midgame.

Sumo was high on my itinerary when I flew to Japan. Ancient and mysterious, sumo is half sport and half religion. The ring, the sand that is used, the referee’s robe, his ceremonial dagger, the salt-tossing and the wrestlers’ thunderous foot-stomping are all drenched in Shinto tradition. Unlike most sports, sumo is as much about anticipation as it is action. The rikishi spend up to four minutes simply preparing to do battle. When they finally get to grappling, the bouts rarely last more than 20 seconds. The violence is a release of tension, not just for the wrestlers, but for the crowd as well. When the flesh collides, the usually reserved Japanese cut loose.

When I visited Holland, I went to a bar to watch a World Cup soccer match. The Dutch were playing Brazil and the room was ablaze with Dutch orange. Calling the place noisy would have been an understatement—to order a beer you needed a bullhorn. Once more sport provided a socially acceptable excuse for a normally stoic race to raise hell. The Dutch lost the game, and they rioted that night in Rotterdam.

Thai Kickboxing - thaiphotoblogs.com

In Bangkok, I spent a night with the eight-armed warriors. That’s how the Thais describe kickboxers. Almost anything goes in this savage sport: punches, kicks, elbows, knees, leg trips and wrestling throws. Tough as it is, it was tougher in the old days when boxers would put ground glass into their leather hand wrappings to better maim their opponents. Rituals play a major part in Muay Thai. Before commencing hostilities, the fighters perform a slow-motion dance that is part prayer and part psych. A band composed of pipe, cymbal and drums plays throughout the bout. It’s eerie snake-charmer stuff. Stranger still, the music mirrors the pace of the combat. Adding to the unholy din is the crowd. The spectators bet furiously with one another, shouting wildly and flashing hand signals as the odds shift from round to round. How they sort it out at the end is a complete mystery to me.

Many years ago in Barcelona, I set aside a day for bullfighting, if only to hail a taxi and say, “Plaza de toros, por favor.” People kept telling me that the best stuff was on display in Madrid, but they seemed to take it pretty seriously in Barcelona too. The highlights from the arena played on the TVs in most of the city’s bars. In North America, they show goals and home runs. In Spain, they show deaths. Six bulls died three times a week. Still, squeamishness didn’t keep all the tourists at bay. The day I attended, a young American girl stood up at one point and cheered, “Yay, bull! Go bull!” She was making a statement, but I’m not sure she had thought it through. When the bull wins, the matador gets eviscerated.

Bullfighting may be Spain’s most famous sport, but it isn’t the most authentic item in Catalonia. I found the genuine article one afternoon in an old stone building just off La Rambla, a 1.2-kilometre, tree-lined pedestrian mall. The game was jai alai, or pelota, as it is often referred to in Spain. Jai alai (pronounced “high lie”) is also played in Miami, Tijuana, Macao and a few other places, but it began in the Pyrenees with the Basques. Some claim it’s the oldest ball game in the world. Most everyone agrees it is the fastest. The ball reaches speeds of up to 300 kilometres per hour.

Jai Alai - nytimes-institute.com

The ball is slightly smaller than a baseball but harder than a golf ball. The players catch and fling it against a wall with a cesta, a slim, hook-shaped wicker basket that is attached to their wrists. The three-walled court, orfronton, is long, high and narrow. The front wall is 15 metres tall. A screen prevents the spectators from getting creamed by the speeding orb. Even without knowing the rules, I could recognize the high level of skill involved, but that’s not what impressed me the most. It was the atmosphere; the fronton was such a relaxing place. Shafts of sunlight filtered down through the clerestory windows. The walls of the arena were made of nut-brown wood. Some spectators smoked cigars; some wore suits. All of them were men.

Jai alai is a big gambling game. It was once described as “a lottery with seats.” But the betting in Barcelona wasn’t conducted at pari-mutuel windows. Instead an attendant walked back and forth in front of the stands with a couple of split tennis balls in his hands. When someone indicated that he wanted to make a bet, the attendant tossed the ball up to him with a piece of paper tucked inside. The gambler wrote his wager on the paper and tossed the ball back.

Intimate was the word that came to mind. This cathedral of leisure wouldn’t have seated more than 200 people. A small standup bar served beer and spirits. There were no cheerleaders, no video replays and no commercial breaks; just the crack of the ball on the wall, the hiss of the cestas, and the occasional burst of appreciative applause.

Ninety minutes in the fronton put me in an entirely different place. I left convinced that I had touched the rhythm of Spain.

Photo Credits:

#1: telegraph.co.uk

#2: thaiphotoblogs.com

#3: nytimes-institute.com

According to marketing experts, boomers are significantly different travel consumers than their parents, and they are expected to maintain those differences as they age. For example, boomers are much keener on travelling overseas and more confident in doing so than the previous generations. Most–but not all–have more money than their parents, and have higher expectations that apply at both the budget and luxury ends of the spectrum. And they are always looking for something different. By the time they reach their senior years, many boomers will have had their fill of packaged vacations and typical destinations. Instead, there’s a big appetite for more specialized educational and experiential travel, including hobby vacations, cargo-ship cruises, “voluntourism” and literary-themed travel.

What other travel characteristics do travel experts apply to boomers? I have compiled a list of what industry insiders claim are their 10 most notable traits. It makes for interesting reading, even if you aren’t employed in the travel business.

1. Boomers demand immediate gratification. Unlike their Depression-era parents, boomers grew up in times of plenty. Easy gratification bred a desire for still more and quicker rewards. As a result, boomers don’t wait to take the trips they want. If they don’t have the money, they simply use plastic. The instant-gratification lifestyle means they don’t book travel as far in advance as their predecessors. But when they are ready to book, they want to do it NOW. Finally, it’s important to remember boomers invented the question, “Are we there yet?” They have little patience for long, uninterrupted stretches of road time. Tourism efficiency, such as at hotel registration desks or airline check-in counters is a key to understanding baby boomers, who quickly become frustrated with inefficiency and are not afraid to complain.

2. Boomers are travel-savvy. The empty-nest syndrome of the baby-boomers’ parents is being replaced by people who seek to get on the road, who are not afraid to travel and who may well be seeking to recapture their pre-family years when they were free to wander the world at will. While their parents first visited Europe when they retired, boomers criss-crossed the Continent as students. Been-there-done-that is one reason adventure travel appeals to them. Because boomers are interested in bettering themselves, intellectually stimulating travel also holds appeal.

3. Boomers like creature comforts. This is the first generation in the western world that has never known real poverty. As such, baby-boomers tend to be willing to pamper themselves. Boomers want prestige items, upscale events, and even seek the chic in the outdoors when they are roughing it. A tent is OK, but it better have a great view and great food. They even have a term for it–”glamping”–which means “glamorous” camping trips where the tour operator does all the hard work, with comfortable tents and catered meals.

4. Boomers think they are special. Boomers like things that reinforce their feelings of specialness, so they are attracted to credit cards that offer preferred theatre seats or tours that give them after-hours access to a museum. They also want products designed to fit their individual needs, so customization, or the illusion of it, is important. One travel firm that has capitalized on this trait is Boston-based Elderhostel which offers 8,000 educational travel programs in 90 countries for 160,000 travellers aged 55 and older each year. One of its most popular programs is Criminal Forensics, which allows CSI-inspired travellers to visit a morgue and learn about blood spatter and determining time of death. The company’s Behind the Velvet Curtain program allows groups in London or New York to see a theatre production, go backstage to meet the cast and crew and even sit in on auditions.

5. Boomers are wary of group travel. What boomers definitely do not want is herding. To many boomers, group travel has the faint aroma of a cattle drive. This has prompted some operators to drop tours from their names. Others have pared down group size, either by forming smaller groups or breaking larger groups into subsets which engage in different activities simultaneously. Organized group travel becomes valuable to boomers when it’s a physically or mentally challenging adventure, and they don’t have the skill level to do it themselves, or when safety and cost make travelling with a group more practical. To attract boomers, tour operators must emphasize their expertise. Guides must become like personal trainers and demonstrate the skill and knowledge that boomers will respect and pay for.

6. Boomers will pay for luxury, expertise and convenience. ATM fees, nannies and bottled water prove boomers are willing to pay for what they want. They are demanding consumers who seek quality service and knows how to complain when the service is denied. While this generation is willing to spend money, it is not willing to settle for second best. Locales and tourism entities that provide second-rate service, poor security and poorly trained personnel will quickly lose clientele.

7. Boomers see themselves as forever young. “Adult teenagers” is the way Phil Goodman, co-author of the Boomer Marketing Revolution, described boomers. As Goodman notes, “Boomers will always try to act much younger than their chronological age.” As a result, boomers still want to fulfill the dreams they had at 25–even if their bodies aren’t always willing or able. This cult of youth also affects boomers’ choice of travel suppliers and companions. They don’t identify with people older than they are, after all, their credo was “Don’t trust anybody over 30.” Now well past 30 themselves, boomers still don’t want to be like their parents. That means mixing the two generations in the same tour group probably won’t work. Early-bird specials and senior discounts hold no appeal for boomers because they won’t think of themselves as seniors until they are in their seventies.

8. Boomers are not passive. They want a measure of control in designing their travel experience, and, once on the road, they want to choose their activities. The challenge for travel marketers is to make it clear that their product offers plenty of options. Boomers also want interactivity in the travel experience. They don’t want to hear about panning for gold, they want to do it themselves.

9. Boomers are time deprived. To get relief from their stressful schedules, boomers vacation at spas where they can do absolutely nothing but be pampered. Or they may go to the opposite extreme, choosing adventures that are physically or mentally challenging–or both. Letting somebody else deal with all the details is very appealing, but the hang-up for boomers is trust. They wonder whether they can rely on somebody else to plan their kind of trip. When booking travel, boomers also need time-saving devices. They like 800 numbers, the Internet, videos and virtual reality because they offer convenience and interactivity.

10. Boomers prefer to associate with people like themselves. As noted earlier, boomers do not identify with people older than themselves. They look for outfitters or operators who share their values and so they are very selective about who they’ll use. The industry can respond to these needs by not mixing age groups in the same tour and using younger images and words in their marketing materials. They should stress the flexibility and participative nature of the experience as well as hype the expertise of their staff and guides. Boomers definitely want to avoid anything that smacks of being stuffy or stodgy. More youthful models should be selected because boomers relate better to younger images.

Photo Credits:

#1: meethere.com

#2: img.timeinc.net 

#3: yumsugar.com

#4: 1stadventure.net

The findings were announced at a news conference on September 22, by Tim Darvill, of Bournemouth University, and Geoff Wainwright, president of the Society of Antiquaries. The two professors, who recently completed the first archaeological dig inside the ring since 1946, said they believe that Stonehenge was a centre of healing to which the sick and injured travelled from far and wide to be cured by the mystical power of the bluestones, the smaller rocks set in the centre of the monument’s inner ring.

An abnormal number of the corpses found in tombs near Stonehenge display signs of serious physical injury and disease, and analysis of teeth recovered from graves show that around half of the corpses were from people who were not native to the Stonehenge area. “Stonehenge would attract not only people who were unwell, but people who were capable of healing them,” Darvill told the BBC.

All the stones used to build Stonehenge came from far away before reaching the Salisbury Plain. The 17 sarsen stones, or sandstones–left from a set of about 30 that form the outside of the main monument, stand four metres high and weigh about 25 tonnes each–are believed to have been brought from Marlborough Downs, 30 kilometres to the north. However, even more intriguing is the mystery of the bluestones. They came from a quarry in the Preseli Mountains in southwest Wales, nearly 385 kilometres away. How these stones, each weighing four tonnes, arrived at Stonehenge is still debated. Popular theory suggests they were rolled to the Welsh shore, carried on rafts around the coast and into the River Avon at Bristol. They would have then been transported down local rivers and then back to land, where they were once again rolled to Salisbury Plain.

Originally, there may have been as many as 60 bluestones, but only a few still stand today. The stones were placed in such a way that they increased in size towards the centre and alternated in shape between tall, thin pillar-like stones and stones of a tapering obelisk shape. These bluestones are now severely weathered and covered in lichen. They may not look blue now, but if freshly broken most would have a slate-blue colour.

Why were they brought here? Darvill and Wainwright contend it was because the ancients were convinced that the stones had magical healing power, a belief that persisted into the Middle Ages. “The stones meaning and importance to prehistoric people were sufficiently powerful to warrant the investment of time, effort and resources to move them from the Preseli Hills to the Wessex Downs,” Darvill said. The professors claim that these hills were home to healing centres and holy wells for thousands of years and that a river running through the Preseli Hills had been dammed to create pools for the sick to bathe in. Nearby prehistoric art and burial cairns strengthens the connection between Stonehenge and healing properties. Interestingly, the excavation this spring unearthed hundreds of small fragments of bluestone seemingly taken as lucky charms by visitors to Salisbury Plain.

The research team also pinpointed the construction of the inner circle at Stonehenge to 2,300 B.C. The date correlates with the grave of the so-called Amesbury Archer, an adult male with a healed head wound and an injured left leg who was excavated in 2002. The radiocarbon date is said to be the most accurate yet and means the ring’s original bluestones were erected 300 years later than previously thought. By dating fragments of charcoal to 7,330 B.C, the team also found that hunter-gatherers were here 4,000 years earlier than previously thought.

The findings of Darvill and Wainwright, intriguing as they may be, won’t likely end the debate about Stonehenge’s true purpose. And when you consider its construction went through several phases and spanned 2,000 years, it is probable that the site had several uses. But personally I’m not putting any money on the spaceship landing pad theory.  

The incident was just one of the misadventures that Vaughan and Minvielle experienced during their five-week, 16,000-kilometre odyssey in the 2007 Mongol Rally, an event that requires teams to drive comically unsuitable one-litre engine vehicles from from London, England to Mongolia’s capital, Ulaan Bataar. Entrants slog across windswept deserts, chug up steep mountain ranges and navigate some of the worst roads on the planet with no crew support or high-tech aids. Besides battling topographical terrors, past participants have been robbed at knifepoint, arrested as spies and chased by bandits. And unlike conventional car rallies, there is no winner. All teams receive the same reward no matter where they finish—which is nothing.

Run by the profit-making, but socially conscious League of Adventurists, this oddball motor challenge requires all participants to raise money through private and corporate sponsorships for charities that aid needy children in Mongolia and Eastern Europe. Vaughan and Minvielle also raised funds for the Canadian Cancer Society. The decision to enter the rally was a radical leap for both men, neither of whom had ever travelled overseas. Minvielle, a 37-year-old insurance broker, had mused for some time about injecting some excitement into his life. When he read about this “crap car rally” it seemed the perfect fit. He found a willing accomplice in his neighbour, Vaughan, a 36-year-old waste management sales manager, who was intrigued by the madcap scheme. As he notes, “Where else can you see 21 cities in a month?”

Team Saskatchewan’s mode of transportation was a 1993 Geo Metro purchased from Vaughan’s mother for a loonie that they dubbed the Hosermobile. The pair, who both have young children, spent nine months acquiring visas and upgrading their aging rust bucket, which had already logged 286,000 kilometres and reeked of dog and cigarettes. They would spend close to $25,000 on the trip, a sum that included transporting the Hosermobile by container ship to England. “We’re the only team to ever ship a car to the race,” says Minvielle. “I think it’s also the first time in history anyone has shipped a Geo Metro across the Atlantic.”

Despite carrying an array of car parts, tools, duct tape, hockey sticks and Cabbage Patch dolls that Vaughan’s daughters wanted them to photograph at various landmarks, they were woefully unprepared in other ways. “We had two maps and one guide book of Turkey,” says Vaughan. Getting lost became routine, especially since Team Saskatchewan chose the toughest route possible–through Europe to Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Russia, before the final trek across Mongolia to Ulaan Bataar.

To save money, they camped most nights, using an Impi roof tent donated by the Great Canadian Expedition Company. The company also supplied them with a compact dry toilet and a hot shower system. Hot showers were rarely needed, as the Balkans and central Asia were gripped in a fierce heat wave that saw temperatures soar into the mid-40s and beyond, eventually reaching a blistering 54 degrees in the Karakum Desert, which they crossed, suffering from dysentry, faces covered in bandanas, while listening to a Neil Young CD.

Their flags and decals, their rally lights and Saskatchewan plates drew curious crowds wherever they went. “Suddenly we knew what it was like to be Brad and Angelina,” says Minvielle. The adornments also made them easy prey for crooked police in the Czech Republic, who repeatedly pulled them over and issued fines for imaginary traffic offenses. But that difficulty paled in comparison with a nightmarish, 19-hour ferry ride across the Caspian Sea with a crew of thuggish ferry workers who refused to sell them food or water and would not allow them access to their car to get their own supplies. The decision to book a room to escape the heat and hassling offered scant relief. The room was hot as a furnace, the beds were full of red mites and the sheets were stained with blood.

As tough as the trip was, the pair also experienced some tremendous highs: the way the eyes of poor Turkish children lit up when they were given stuffed animals, the beauty of the Turkmenistan capital of Ashgabat and its friendly people, and the visual thrill of a night spent camping under a brilliantly clear sky in Kazahkstan in which they saw shooting stars, satellites and the Space Shuttle attempting to rendezvous with the International Space Station.

Although Vaughan and Minvielle made several logistical mistakes, only one proved fatal. After reaching a junction on Mongolia’s western border, they opted to take the northern route to Ulaan Bataar. After hours of banging over a moonscape of jagged rocks, craters and rivers without finding any semblance of a road, they returned to the junction, only to discover a huge gash in the Metro’s fuel tank. The fuel pump was destroyed as well. With heavy hearts they left the Hosermobile with a local family, caught a ride to the airport at Olgij and made the last 1,300 kilometres of the trip by plane, eventually walking into Dave’s Bar in Ulaan Bataar, the rally’s designated finish line, 23 days after leaving London. They were the 26th team to arrive of the 180 that began the race. Although grateful their diarrhea was finally abating, the Regina duo was bone-tired and disappointed they had to abandon their beloved Metro short of the finish.

“The real celebration occurred when we got back home and reunited with our families,” says Vaughan. And while he admits that the trip “gave us a new appreciation of the professionalism of the RCMP, the people who make sure our food and water is safe, the good roads, the social safety net and the drive-through Tim Horton’s,” he also says: “I would suggest that everyone do something like this at least once in their lifetime. I hope to do it again with my son when he’s old enough.”

If you fly, you are contributing to the problem. Let’s say you’ve just jetted from Vancouver to Toronto. Each passenger, including you, has just accounted for an additional tonne of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases per person pumped into the atmosphere. That’s twice as bad as driving the trip in a gas-guzzling SUV.

Feeling guilty? Well, there is something you can do to relieve that guilt. To make up for the carbon dioxide your trip creates, you can support programs for planting trees, which consume CO2, or energy-saving projects that reduce CO2 emissions elsewhere. You can do this by buying a carbon offset. As the name implies, carbon offset programs are designed to “offset” the impact of environmentally unfriendly activities such as flying or driving by putting a dollar value on damage done to the environment and then investing an equal amount of money in environmental programs, initiatives or technologies that help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, such as building windmills, installing solar water heaters or retrofitting buildings with more efficient lighting. Dozens of web sites now offer carbon offset programs (the David Suzuki Foundation offers a list) that allow you to calculate just how much CO2 your jet-setting will spew.

Proponents claim offsetting can help in the fight against global warming and is making people reflect on the impact they have on the environment. Eager to look green, airlines and other travel companies are jumping on the bandwagon. In fact, a growing number of airlines now offer to calculate how much carbon dioxide your trip has generated and how much money should be given to projects that, in theory at least, will reduce emissions by an equivalent amount somewhere else in the world.

Silverjet, which began flying in January 2007, was the world’s first airline to go carbon neutral–the British all-business class airline levies the environmental cost for each passenger on their flights and include it in the ticket price. British Airways, Scandinavian Airlines, Qantas, Virgin Blue, Delta and Continental have all introduced carbon offset programs. Canadian airlines have also jumped on the bandwagon.

Air Canada signed a deal with Zerofootprint under which ticket buyers can voluntarily pay a small fee to the non-profit environmental organization, based on the CO2 output of their flight. Air Canada doesn’t get any of the cash; it simply facilitates the transaction. The money raised is used to plant trees in British Columbia. Visit Air Canada’s Carbon Offset page www.aircanada.com/en/travelinfo/traveller/zfp.html) and click Offset Now. You’ll be taken to a Zerofootprint Web page. Enter your departure and destination cities and, presto, it gives you a carbon-dioxide emission tally and a price tag for offsetting your CO2. For one passenger on a Montreal-Paris return trip, for example, the total CO2 emissions are 1.2 tonnes; the cost of offsetting it would be $19.20. Enter your credit card information and you’re good to go. Read about Zerofootprint’s environmental initiatives on its website (www.zerofootprint.net), where you can also calculate how much your other activities contribute to global warming.

WestJet does things a little differently. It has an arrangement with a non-profit organization called the Offsetters Climate Neutral Society. When customers book WestJet tickets via www.offsetters.ca, WestJet gives a small amount to Offsetters, which invests the cash in renewable energy and energy efficiency projects that would not have taken place without its involvement. For example, if you use WestJet to go from Montreal to Orlando, Florida, your total carbon offset cost would be $16 per passenger. The customer doesn’t pay extra for flying carbon neutral; WestJet pays the fee out of the price of the ticket.
Offsetters, founded by two UBC professors, is working with other groups as well, including travel agencies.

Even so, the concept does have its critics. Opponents say offsetting gives people the mistaken impression that they can keep on polluting or that such individual efforts can solve global warming, when much more fundamental change is needed. They contend that carbon offsets are a method of easing company and consumer guilty consciences with financial contributions while continuing to pollute the environment.

It is also still unclear how many customers will accept the idea of adding yet more fees to already pricey tickets. According to a recent survey, only 23 per cent of Canadians surveyed said they would likely pay an extra $10 for carbon offsets. And, judging by the Silverjet example, you have to wonder how effective a marketing tool the pledge of carbon-neutral really is. Silverjet closed its doors in May 2008, citing the rising cost of fuel.

If you want to further investigate the concept, you may want to check out these web sites:

Terrapass.com, a carbon offsetter working with Expedia.com and other companies.

Carbonneutral.com, which features good explanations of how carbon offsetting works and handy carbon-footprint calculators.

CleanAir-CoolPlanet.org, which includes a consumer’s guide to carbon offsets.

Carboncatalog.org, which offers a list of carbon offset providers.

Highway 61, immortalized by Bob Dylan’s song and his album of the same name, as well as other blues singers, actually begins in Thunder Bay, Ontario.

Highway 61 is an Ontario highway extending for 61 kilometres from a junction with Highways 11 and 17 and the Harbour Expressway in Thunder Bay, Ontario to the Pigeon River Bridge, where it meets Minnesota State Highway 61 at the Ontario-Minnesota border. The highway continues south all the way to New Orleans. The road is known as the Blues Highway because it runs through the Mississippi Delta, which was an important source of blues music. The junction of Highway 61 and Highway 49 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, is said to be the famous crossroads where, according to legend, guitarist Robert Johnson sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for mastery of the blues.

The world’s largest wildlife sanctuary is located in Canada.

Most people would guess it had to be in Africa, but in fact, the Chapleau Game Preserve, which spans an astounding 800,000 hectares, is situated in northern Ontario. The preserve provides habitat for 119 species of birds and 50 species of mammals. Here you have a good chance of spotting the tallest animal in North America, the moose, and possibly also the smallest North American mammal, the pygmy shrew. The number of moose in the preserve is estimated at 2,500; black bear number around 2,000. There are also numerous timber wolves, mink, pine marten, lynx, otter, bald eagles, ospreys, blue herons and loons.

More than 100 billion tonnes of water flow in and out of the Bay of Fundy twice daily–more water than the combined flow of all the world’s freshwater rivers.

That, my friends, is a lot of water. This 270-kilometre long and 80-kilometre wide bay, located between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, is famous for having the highest tides on the planet (16.2 metres). It is also celebrated for its coastal rock formations, extreme tidal effects (vertical, horizontal, rapids and bores), as well as being a critical international feeding ground for migratory birds and a habitat for rare and endangered right whales.

Chicago Mobster Al Capone once had a secret hideout beneath the streets of Moose Jaw.

Under the streets of Moose Jaw lies an extensive network of tunnels, constructed in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s so that staff could move from one building to another and keeping the furnaces going, without having to go outdoors in the frigid winter weather. Eventually Chinese migrants lived and worked in the tunnels, providing cheap labour while existing in a sad state as the city’s subterranean society. Then along came prohibition and bootleggers and gangsters. Alcohol was legal in Canada and with ready access to Chicago by rail, it was a relatively simple matter for Al Capone to distil and ship alcohol in great quantities directly to the Windy City for sale to fund his criminal empire. When in Moose Jaw, Capone reportedly lived in a motel across the street from the CPR depot and freight yard and used the tunnels as a hideout. The tunnels are now a tourist attraction, with two interactive guided tours available. One tour, called the “Passage to Fortune,” tells the story of early Chinese immigrants in Canada. The other tour, the “Chicago Connection,” recounts the local history of bootlegging, including Capone’s visit in the 1920s.

North America’s oldest operating lighthouse can be found in Nova Scotia.

Built in 1759, the lighthouse on Sambro Island, Nova Scotia, has stood guard for two and half centuries. It was originally fitted with one of Canada’s most intriguing alarm clocks, a cannon, to awaken the lighthouse keeper. The gun was fired daily in the morning all the way from Halifax–nearly four kilometres away. Built of stone and sheathed with wood shingles to protect the mortar from deterioration in the salt atmosphere, the tower was originally white. It was painted with three red stripes in 1908, so it would be more visible in snow. The lighthouse was declared a National Historic Site in 1937. A $20 silver coin featuring the lighthouse was issued in 2004 by the Royal Canadian Mint, and Canada Post announced a permanent stamp honouring the site in December 2007.

In 2005, a panel of experts from National Geographic Traveller magazine voted Gwaii Haanas in B.C.’s Queen Charlotte Islands the best national park in North America.

The designation recognized the 1,470 square km wilderness park for its pristine environment and sustainable management practices. “High cultural integrity,” said one panelist. “Haida are very involved in park management. Residents display a real stewardship ethic.” Another said: “Beautiful and intact. A great model for other regions.” As, far back as 10,000 years ago, the land of Gwaii Haanas was home to the Haida people. Today, there are remnants of old ancient villages and Haida totem poles located throughout the Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve. Contrary to many visitors’ expectations, the poles and historic artifacts are not preserved, but instead are left to decay as part of their natural evolution.

At the eastern tip of Prince Edward Island, there is a spectacular golden sand beach that sings when you walk on it.

Actually, the sound is closer to a squeak, but it’s distinctive and mysterious. It’s a phenomenon that scientists still don’t completely understand. Located east of the town of Souris in Basin Head Provincial Park, many consider this to be the best beach on the island, and not only because of the music it makes. “Singing Sands” have been reported on beaches in the North of Wales, on the little island of Eigg in the Scottish Hebrides and at a number of beaches along the Atlantic Coast. Studies have found that squeaking or whistling sand is found where quartz sand is very well rounded and highly spherical.

Saskatchewan’s Little Manitou Lake is a saltwater lake with a density greater than that of the Dead Sea.

Little Manitou Lake is not only easy to float in, it’s also impossible to sink in. Located about 100 kilometres southeast of Saskatoon, the lake was formed by receding glaciers during the most recent Ice Age. It is fed by underground springs, and has a mineral content high in sodium, magnesium and potassium. Since the 1800s, Native people have been bringing sick people to the lake that they named after the spirit Manitou. The earliest known practice of using this water to heal was when some Assiniboine people who were afflicted with smallpox were miraculously cured after drinking and submerging themselves in the lake water.

The world’s largest collection of pingos are found near Tuktoyaktuk in the Northwest Territories.

Pingos are cone-shaped mounds of earth-covered ice found in the Arctic, subarctic, and Antarctica that can reach up to 70 metres in height and up to two kilometres in diameter. These low hills are the result of frozen ground being forced upward by the pressure of subterranean water. The world’s largest concentration of them, more than 1,400 in all, are found in the Tuktoyaktuk area of the Mackenzie Delta. Some are as old as a thousand years. Hollow pingos were apparently used by Inuit hunters as meat freezers! Two of the region’s best known pingos are Ibyuk, 50 metres high and about 1,000 years old, and Aklisuktuk (“the one that is growing”), first sketched by explorer John Richardson in 1848.

The world’s only official Flying Saucer Landing Pad resides in St. Paul, Alberta.

The town of 5,400, located 200 kilometres east of Edmonton, built a Flying Saucer Landing Pad to celebrate Canada’s centennial in 1967. The Hon. Paul Hellyer, Canada’s Minister of Defense, even flew in by helicopter to officially open it. The construction cost was donated by members of the community and the land was provided by the town. A UFO Interpretive Display has been opened in the adjacent tourist information centre. There’s even a toll-free UFO hotline. Although St. Paul’s UFO landing pad attraction has never been fully embraced by the community, with only two businesses adopting an alien theme–UFO Pizza and the Galaxy Motel–this sitation may soon change. A recent proposal from a town marketing committee calls for alien-themed garbage cans on St. Paul’s main street, providing information on crop circles and cattle mutilations, painting six blocks of sidewalks bright green, erecting alien statues in parks and hosting UFO conferences.

I’m not the only person to be swept away by the book. To date, On the Road has sold more than 3.5 million copies and has been translated into 25 languages. Nearly 51 years after its publication, it is still selling more than 100,000 copies a year, and shows no signs of slowing down. As Tony Long wrote recently in Wired magazine: “Fifty years along, On the Road still resonates for those of us possessed of a restless spirit, who see gray conformity as spiritual death, who place the value of the individual above the mere possession of things.”

The romantic appeal of On the Road was also fuelled by the myth of its creation. According to the legend, Kerouac pounded out the manuscript in a 20-day binge of benzedrine, nicotine, caffeine and jazz in April 1951, typing the novel in “spontaneous prose” without paragraphs or page breaks onto a 36-metre long scroll of paper. When Kerouac submitted the opus to his editor, Robert Giroux of Harcourt-Brace, he reportedly announced, ”There’ll be no editing on this manuscript. This manuscript has been dictated by the holy ghost.”

In truth, Kerouac heavily reworked On the Road; first in his head, then in his journals between 1947 and 1949, then again on his Underwood typewriter. Between 1951 and 1957, he tinkered with as many as six drafts in a desperate attempt to convince editors to publish his book. But the part about the scroll is true. Kerouac, who typed about 100 words a minute, taped sheets of tracing paper in twelve-foot sections so they would run through his manual typewriter without having to change individual sheets, enabling him to keep his flow of writing uninterrupted. “Went fast because the road is fast,” Kerouac wrote in a letter to his friend Neal Cassady, describing the marathon session that produced On the Road. “Rolled it out on the floor and it looks like a road.”

The novel, however, was repeatedly rejected by various publishing houses until a new crop of young, receptive editors—and enthusiastic response to On the Road excerpts printed in The Paris Review—helped persuade Viking to publish it, but only after Kerouac agreed to substantial revisions, deleted sections (including some sexual depictions deemed pornographic), added smaller literary passages, and agreed to obtain signed release forms from its main characters. Eventually, Kerouac assigned everyone aliases: Neal Cassady became Dean Moriarty, the poet Allen Ginsberg appeared as Carlo Marx, and Kerouac christened himself Sal Paradise.

Even so, there was no pot waiting at the end of the rainbow. Viking offered a paltry $900 advance; Kerouac’s agent, Sterling Lord, talked the publisher up to $1,000, but Viking, fearing the author would squander the money, insisted on doling it out in $100 instalments.

Just as Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises spoke to a so-called Lost Generation, Kerouac’s book spoke to a young Beat Generation which rose up poor and bewildered and “beat” after the Great Depression and World War II–an opinion that first appeared in a glowing New York Times book review by Gilbert Millstein in 1957, which (literally overnight) made Kerouac famous. Before the Times review, Kerouac was borrowing bus money from his girlfriend, Joyce Johnson. Afterwards, he was embarrassed to be mobbed at parties. Women wanted him to make love to him and men wanted to fight him, no doubt confusing him with the novel’s central protagonist, Dean Moriarity, whom Kerouac described as “trim, thin-hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent—a sideburned hero of the snowy West.”

However, it wasn’t the vicissitudes of fame that eventually killed Kerouac, but a weakness for alcohol. When he died in 1969 at age 47 from an alcohol-abetted hemorrhage, induced by a bar brawl in St. Petersburg, Florida, he left behind a catalogue of 24 novels and books of poetry, and an estate valued at $91.00. The scroll of On the Road passed on to Kerouac’s third and last wife, Stella Sampas, and remained forgotten in storage for many years, as Kerouac’s estate gradually grew in value and became the subject of assorted legal wrangles. Then, in 1999, Tony Sampas, a nephew of Stella, inherited the scroll and decided to sell it.

On May 22, 2001, the yellowed and frayed scroll was bought at a Christie’s auction for $2.4 million, the highest amount ever paid for a literary manuscript. The buyer was Jim Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts football team. Fortunately, Irsay didn’t choose to keep the relic locked away. Recognizing its historic importance, he offered to exhibit the scroll across the United States in a 13-stop, five-year national tour of museums and libraries. “My goal all along was to have it and share it with all those who want to see it, whether it’s in this country or other countries,” Irsay told the Associated Press.

The official tour of the Kerouac Scroll began in Orlando in January of 2004 and is scheduled to continue to the end of 2009. So far, the exhibit has been drawing huge crowds on its journey across America. And last year, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the novel’s publication, the original scroll version of On the Road was published by Viking in book form for the first time, minus chapters or paragraphs. As well as containing material that was deleted from the original draft due to its explicit nature, the scroll version also uses the real names of the characters.

However, one mystery remains–exactly how Kerouac concluded the story that he bashed out in that three-week frenzy in 1951. The last part of the original scroll of On the Road is missing. All that remains is a ragged edge. In explanation, Kerouac scribbled a note in pencil in the margin, “Ate by Patchkee, a dog.”

Was he joking? We’ll never know. But in retrospect, those missing words and the notion that the book has no ending, like the open road, is a perfect epitaph.

“The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.”

”Ever wonder about those people who spend $2.00 apiece on those little bottles of Evian water? Try spelling Evian backward.”

“If a man smiles all the time, he’s probably selling something that doesn’t work.”

“The very existence of flame-throwers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, you know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.”

“I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older; then it dawned on me–they’re cramming for their final exam.”

Well, I wonder how George fared. As you may have heard, Carlin died on June 22 in Los Angeles of heart failure at age 71. I expect he is keeping everyone in stitches in the Great Beyond.

Carlin began his career in comedy as a jacket-and-tie kind of guy, with a partner, Jack Burns, but in the 1960s, he went solo with his act, donning a beard and a ponytail, and went on to redefine standup comedy, shattering taboos and becoming a counterculture icon. He constantly pushed the envelope with his humour, particularly with his famous routine, “The Seven Words You Can Never Say On TV.” When Carlin uttered all seven at a show in Milwaukee in 1972, he was arrested for disturbing the peace. And when they were played on a New York City radio station, they resulted in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1978 upholding the government’s authority to sanction stations for broadcasting offensive language. “So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I’m perversely kind of proud of,” he said earlier this year.

During his long and productive career, Carlin produced 23 comedy albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, a couple of TV shows and appeared in several movies. He also hosted numerous episodes of Saturday Night Live, including the show’s first, on October 11, 1975, about which he noted on his website that he was “loaded on cocaine all week long.”

The targets of Carlin’s acerbic and cerebral commentary were many: organized religion, political correctness, unscrupulous advertising, baby boomers, politicians, hypocrisy, and the English language, to mention just a few. Two of his funnier diatribes were about the airlines and their silly announcements and the absurdities of airport security. In case you haven’t caught these two routines, I am including the links to the pages on YouTube where you can view them. Take note: They include a few words and phrases that some people may find objectionable.

Click to watch the video on airline announcements

Click to watch George Carlin on airport security

Only two North American cities can truly boast rock and roll museums that are major tourist attractions: Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Seattle’s Experience Music Project (EMP). The latter, which opened in 2000, has become a city landmark due in large part to its unique and controversial architecture, which is meant to symbolize the energy and fluidity of music. The wildy undulating, rainbow-hued, steel-swathed building was designed by Toronto-born architect Frank Gehry, whose other noted works include the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Dancing House in Prague.
Gehry claims he drew his inspiration for the design from a pile of guitar parts he had acquired from a Seattle guitar-maker, and that the entire shape pays tribute to the Fender Stratocaster, the guitar of choice of Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Mark Knopfler, Stevie Ray Vaughan and host of other famous axemen. Even the colours of the building’s exterior derive from classic electric guitars–pastel blue, brilliant red, silver, gold, and a shimmering violet dubbed “purple haze” in reference to Hendrix’s famous song.

The opening of this museum of music was greeted by Seattle residents with a mixture of acclaim and derision. Its detractors pulled no punches. New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp described it as “something that crawled out of the sea, rolled over, and died.” Forbes magazine called it one of the world’s 10 ugliest buildings. Others suggested that it resembled “open-heart surgery gone awry.” Gehry answered his critics by stating, “This building is supposed to be a lot of fun. That’s what Paul Allen wanted. Fun. It’s supposed to be unusual. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum in Cleveland wanted a straight-forward corporate look. Paul didn’t want that. He wanted what he called “a swoopy building.’ Nobody has seen this before or will see it again. Nobody will build another one.”

Paul Allen, is of course, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, who commissioned and paid for the flamboyant $240-million structure. Allen, who is a guitarist with his own rock band, called Grown Men, had originally conceived the idea of a museum dedicated to his favourite musician, Seattle’s own Jimi Hendrix, who had no shrine in the city, save for a commemorative rock at the Woodland Park Zoo. In 1992, in anticipation of constructing a Hendrix museum at the Seattle Center, Allen began buying Hendrix memorabilia including shards of the guitar that Hendrix destroyed during his incendiary performance at the ‘67 Monterey Pop Festival and the guitar on which he played “The Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock. Al Hendrix, the guitarist’s father, initially supported the idea, but Allen and the Hendrix family later had a falling out and the museum evolved into the far larger, costlier and more innovative EMP.

EMP’s mission is to celebrate “creativity and innovation in American popular music.” To do that, it combines concert halls, exhibits–even a ride–with a myriad of hands-on activities. The celestial “Sky Church” room in the building’s interior pays homage to Hendrix’s vision of a Sky Church where all kinds of people–regardless of age, background or interests–could come together to appreciate music. This dramatic reception/performance area features a stunning 12-metre-high, 21-metre-wide video screen and an 18-panel montage of images.

The permanent exhibits include the Northwest Passage which is a hall containing exhibits on the history of popular music in the Pacific Northwest. There is also the Guitar Gallery, dedicated to the history of the guitar; the Sound Lab, in which museum-goers can take virtual music lessons on the guitar drums, and keyboard; On Stage, where one can play in front of a virtual audience of 10,000 screaming fans in a simulated rock concert experience; and Costumes from the Vault, a collection of performers’ costumes.

There is also a collection of thousands of artifacts from the history of popular music, including the signed contract for Nirvana’s original recording deal; Bob Dylan’s 1960 harmonica; Grandmaster Flash’s original turntable; the mixing board from Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios; Elvis Presley’s black leather jacket; R. Crumb’s original cover art for Big Brother and the Holding Company’s 1968 album “Cheap Thrills”; and the files from the FBI’s two-year investigation into the Kingsmen’s song “Louie Louie,” which was prompted in 1964 by complaints from parents and the governor of Indiana about the tune’s supposedly obscene lyrics.

The EMP is currently hosting a new exhibit devoted entirely to Hendrix. Through film footage, instruments, memorabilia, and electronic equipment–Jimi Hendrix: An Evolution of Sound–traces the evolution of the guitar god’s music, from his upbringing in Seattle through his stint in the military; his years working on the chitlin’ circuit; his experiences in New York and London; and his meteoric career as a rock superstar, before his sudden death in 1970. The hands-on exhibit invites visitors to manipulate recording-studio equipment just as Hendrix did in his own studio, as well as the effects-pedals he used to produce his psychedelic guitar sounds. The show runs until February 7, 2010.

Let’s start with the global beat …

• London: It is illegal to flag down a taxi if you have the plague.
• Liverpool, England: It is illegal for a woman to be topless in public except as a clerk in a tropical fish store, or in a bank if handling foreign currency.
• Switzerland: If you live in an apartment, it is illegal to flush the toilet after 10 p.m. In addition, a man may not relieve himself while standing up, after 10 p.m..
• Sweden: Prostitution is legal but it is illegal to use the services of a prostitute.
• Denmark: No one may start a car while someone is underneath the vehicle.
• France: No pig may be addressed as Napoleon by its owner.
• Israel: Picking your nose on Saturday is forbidden.
• Haifa, Israel: It is illegal to bring bears to the beach.
• Saudi Arabia: From Jiddah to Riyadh there are two highways: one for Muslims, another for “infidels.” If a Muslim is accompanied by an “infidel,” both are required to use the highway for infidels.
• Singapore: Oral sex is forbiddden unless it is used as a form of foreplay.
• Australia: It is illegal for children to purchase cigarettes, condoms or alcohol, but they may use them.
• Thailand: It is illegal to leave your house if you are not wearing underwear.
• Paraguay: A man who catches his wife with someone else in bed is legally permitted to kill his wife and her lover providing he acts immediately.

Closer to home …

• British Columbia: It is illegal to kill a sasquatch.
• Alberta: It is illegal to set fire to the wooden leg of a wooden-legged man.
• Nova Scotia: You can’t water your lawn when it is raining.
• Quebec: Margarine producers can’t make their margarine yellow.
• Toronto: You can’t drag a dead horse down Yonge Street on a Sunday.
• Montreal: You may not swear in French.
• Oshawa, Ontario: It is against the law to climb trees.

South of the 49th …

• California: It is a misdemeanour to shoot at any kind of game from a moving vehicle, unless the target is a whale.
• Chicago: The law forbids eating in a place that is on fire.
• Utah: It is illegal to detonate any nuclear weapon. You can have them, but you just can’t detonate them.
• Montana: It is illegal to have a sheep in the cab of your truck without a chaperone.
• South Dakota: If there are more than five Native Americans on your property you may shoot them.
• Alaska: It is illegal to push a moose out of a plane while it is in motion.
• Florida: Having sexual relations with a porcupine is outlawed.
• Ironton, Ohio: It is illegal to get a fish drunk.
• Connorsville, Wisconsin: No man shall shoot off a gun while his female partner is having a sexual orgasm.
• Natoma, Kansas: It is illegal to practise knife-throwing at men wearing striped suits.
• Iowa: One-armed piano players must perform for free.
• Vermont: Women must obtain written permission from their husbands in order to wear false teeth.
• Oklahoma: It is unlawful to put any hypnotized person in a display window.
• Idaho: You may not fish while sitting on a camel’s back.
• Kentucky: It is illegal to carry a concealed weapon that is over six feet in length.
• Texas: Criminals are required to give their victims 24 hours notice, either orally or in writing, and to explain the nature of the crime to be committed.
• Hawaii: It is illegal to place coins in your ears.

“Book ‘em, Danno!”

Passenger Paul Trinder was snoozing on a Delhi to London flight when he was woken by a commotion and opened his eyes to see airlines staff wedging a body into a seat. “I didn’t have a clue what was going on. The stewards just plonked the body down without saying a thing. I remember looking at this frail, sparrow-like woman and thinking she was very ill,” said Trinder. “She kept slipping under the seatbelt and moving about with the motion of the plane. When I asked what was going on, I was shocked to hear she was dead.”

The woman’s daughter and son-in-law arrived soon after and began grieving. “It was terrifying,” Trinder recalled. “I put my earplugs in, but couldn’t get away from the fact that there was a woman wailing at the top of her voice just yards away. It was a really intense, primal sound. “I felt helpless.” Trinder, a business executive who holds a BA gold card and travels more than 200,000 miles a year with the airline, became particularly concerned about the state of the body. “When you have a decaying body on a plane at room temperature for more than five hours there are significant health and safety risks,” he said.

After the jet landed, those in first class remained on board for an hour before police and a coroner gave the all-clear. “The police even started interviewing me as a potential witness, although I had no idea what had happened to the woman. I just kept thinking to myself: ‘I’ve paid more than £3,000 for this.’” When Trinder filed a complaint, the airline told him he would not be compensated and that he should “get over” the incident. However, after he went to the newspapers with his tale, British Airways issued an apology, explaining that the dead woman was moved into first class because the rest of the plane was full.

Other carriers use different procedures. Singapore Airlines recently introduced “corpse cupboards” on its Airbus 340-500 aircraft. Cabin crews use the locker, which is long enough to store an average-sized body, if there is no empty row of seats to place a corpse. The aircraft operates on longest non-stop route in the world: a 17-hour, 7,900-mile journey between Singapore and Los Angeles, which makes emergency landings difficult.

Airlines are not required to track or report the medical incidents they handle, so an exact tally of in-flight deaths is hard to determine. MedAire, an Arizona-based company that staffs doctors on the ground to advise flight crews in a medical emergency, counted 89 deaths for the flights they handled in 2006, which represents about one-third of the world’s commercial flights. If the death rate is similar for the rest of the flights, annual deaths on airplanes could exceed 260.

MedAire advises flight crews not to place the body in a lavatory. In the past, that has made it difficult to remove the remains from the tiny space after rigor mortis has set in. Apparently this advice is evidently ignored by some airlines. Last month, flight attendants discovered the body of a 61-year-old woman in the restroom of a Delta Airlines plane shortly before the flight landed in Atlanta. It was unclear how the woman died or how long she was in the restroom.

In an even stranger case in 2005, an airline passenger died in the restroom during a flight and wasn’t found until two hours after the plane had landed, when a cleaning crew came aboard. The passenger, Taisuke Matsuo, 66, apparently had a heart attack on an American Airlines flight from Tokyo to Chicago during the first leg of a trip home to Indianapolis. His wife, Carolyn Watts, filed a lawsuit, accusing American Airlines of negligence and seeking damages of $150,000. I’m not sure about the legal basis for damages (insult to a corpse?), but you really have to wonder about the actions of flight crew, as the bathroom was locked from the inside. Aren’t they supposed to check these things before leaving? Watts had some unanswered questions too. “How could you lose a passenger?” she said to a reporter from to The Indianapolis Star. “If I was somewhere on that plane, I would hope someone would notice.”

Kohnstamm’s book is a memoir about how he bailed from Manhattan corporate dronedom (stuck in a soul-crushing job helping lawyers find loopholes for white-collar criminals) and a crumbling relationship with his girlfriend, to take an offer to update northeastern Brazil for an upcoming edition of the Lonely Planet guide book series. Kohnstamm’s assignment required that he cover 1,000 miles of coastline, write 100 pages of copy including 150 hotel reviews, plus more than 150 bar and restaurant reviews and update a dozen maps–all within a span of a mere four weeks. As well, he was instructed not to accept freebies while during his research. Kohnstamm describes how his early idealism soon hit the wall of a cold, hard disillusionment: that the time and money the publisher provided for him to collect an enormous amount of information about a vast territory was completely inadequate.

As a result he cuts corners, writing about locales that he doesn’t visit, swapping freebies for favourable copy, selling Ecstasy to finance part of his trip and employing euphemistic phrases in his reviews, as in the following example. “The waitress suggests that I come back after she closes down the restaurant, around midnight. We end up having sex in a chair and then on one of the tables in the back corner. I pen a note in my Moleskine that I will later recount in the guidebook review, saying that the restaurant “is a pleasant surprise . . . and the table service is friendly.” Along the way, the author indulges in a lot of excessive drinking, shacks up with a Brazilian prostitute, befriends an Israeli mercenary, and has a .38 revolver stuck in his mouth. More about the writer and his personal dilemmas than Brazil, the book reads like a work of fiction, which, considering Kohnstamm’s reputation, much of it may be.

Kohnstamm generated considerable buzz for his book by admitting in an interview prior to the book’s publication that he invented copy on all three of the Lonely Planet South American guides that he worked on and never actually went to Columbia. “They didn’t pay me enough to go to Colombia,” he said. “I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating–an intern at the Colombian consulate.”

Lonely Planet obviously wasn’t happy with Kohnstamm’s admissions, nor were those readers who had previously regarded the series as some sort of backpacker’s bible. Still, with six million guide books sold annually, the company can afford a few kicks in the keister.

Chuck Thompson isn’t a fan of Lonely Planet either, citing the company’s books’ ceaselessly strident PC tone and snooty sermonizing. But then Thompson rips into a whole slew of subjects in his hilarious and vitriolic memoir: Smile When You’re Lying. Thompson calls New Zealand “a junior-varsity version of the Pacific Northwest,” disses the entire Caribbean as “a miasmic hellscape” with “an artificial culture,” and gleefully puts the boots to TV travel host Rick Steves. “Every description sounded as if it had been lifted from a feminine-hygiene-spray commercial,” he writes of one of Steves’s Eastern European video tours. “Seas glistened. Cities sparkled. Hungary was a ‘goulash’ of influences. And, of course, the Croatian city of Split was the usual fascinating blend of ancient and modern.”

Thompson proclaims himself “suspicious of almost all travel writing” and dismisses most of it as boring, overheated, clichéd pablum dictated by the need to please advertisers. He seeks to take a different approach in this book. “I wanted to write about travel the way I experienced it,” he states in his introduction, “not the way the travel business wants readers, wants you, to imagine it is. The presumption that readers have the intellectual curiosity of a squirrel monkey and the moral range of an Amish yam farmer has worn thin.” In between firing off acidic broadsides, Thompson, a veteran freelance travel journalist and the founding editor of Travelocity’s short-lived magazine of the same name, recounts his seedy and sometimes harrowing misadventures, including getting robbed in Thailand, running afoul of customs inspectors in Belarus, experiencing the penis Olympics in Japan, and standing on a deserted stretch of highway in the Philippines at 3 a.m., desperately waiting for an arriving bus, as eight machete-wielding men emerge from the brush and approach for a friendly chat.

Although it isn’t really the no-holds barred exposé of the travel writing industry that is advertised on the inexplicably bland book jacket, Smile When You’re Lying is a crackling good read that will have you choking with laughter.  And for those who appreciate practical advice when they read about travel, Thompson even serves up some helpful tips, such as how to resurrect dead batteries. “If your batteries die while you’re in the air, rub them briskly for a minute or two on your pants leg. The static electricity will give them a recharge that’ll last as long as an hour or two. This also works in cheap hotels where they never change the batteries in the remote.”

Tired of the same old boring hotel accommodations? Then you may want to consider the Propeller Island City Lodge in Berlin, Germany. You can stay here in a different room every night for a month and never see the same decor twice. All of the hotel’s 32 eccentric theme rooms were created by the owner, German artist Lars Stroschen. Believe me, this guy doesn’t want you make you feel at home. Enjoy gazing at yourself? Check into the diamond-shaped Mirror Room which is covered in glittering sections of reflective glass. It creates the impression of living inside a kaleidoscope. Want to sleep the sleep of the dead? Slip into the creepy Gruft Room, where you can slumber beneath closed lids–the two separate beds are white coffins. Looking for a skewed perspective on reality? Try the Upside Down Room, where all the furnishings hang from the ceiling and you sleep and sit in boxes beneath the floorboards.

Propeller Island is another example of one of the fastest-growing trends in travel–theme hotels. In a recent New York Times article, Mary Tabacchi, professor of hotel management at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, noted: “There’s a whole market segment of travelers in Europe, the U.S. and Asia who are no longer just looking for a place to hang their suit and plug in their laptop. They want a hotel with interesting things to do.”

There are concepts for every whim and wallet size. For a mere $1,700 a night at the Winvian Hotel in Morris, Connecticut, you can reserve a barn-like cabin dominated by a meticulously restored 1968 Coast Guard helicopter and watch TV in the chrome-and-steel fuselage. The Golf Cottage has banked walls and a green shag rug that varies in thickness so you can grab a putter and play the course that snakes through the bedroom. A cheaper alternative, at $400 a night, is the Library Hotel in midtown Manhattan, where room numbers are based on the Dewey decimal system of classifying books (900.004 for the Asian History room). If you dream of nebulas and liverworts, then the ‘Astronomy’ and ‘Botany’ rooms on the Math and Science floor were created with you in mind. According to the hotel staff, Erotic Literature is the most requested room. Next in line on the demand scale–the Fairy Tales room.

Quebec, Norway and Sweden have carved out a niche in the thematic marketplace with Ice Hotels, lodges constructed each winter out of tons of snow and ice. Inside, the prevaling colour scheme is’usually a translucent blue. Thankfully, you don’t sleep directly on the frozen stuff–remember, these places are considered luxurious. There’s a wooden plank between the ice and a plush mattress, plus you’re insulated with a’sleeping bag that can withstand the harshest climes, which in this case can mean -8 degrees Celsius. People who have stayed inside these chily chambers claim they wake up feeling exhilirated. Then again, it could be they are merely thrilled to stlll be alive.

At Le Monde Hotel in Edinburgh, Scotland, you can circle the globe without leaving the property. Each of the 18 rooms has been designed to conjure’the impression that you are in a specific city somewhere else in the world. There are also themed bars to create the sensation that you are a globetrotting party animal. And, of course, there are theme restaurants with cuisine from the city around which they are based: dine in Paris, drink in Shanghai and then drift off to sleep in Miami.

For more specific tastes there is the Hard Day’s Night Hotel in Liverpool, England. A four-star establishment housed within a 19th century mercantile building, it aims to provide everything a Beatles’ fan could desire’from the Yellow Submarine jukebox in the lobby to the rare photos on the walls. Predictably, Beatles music plays in the lobby, the restaurant, and even the restrooms. The rooms, which start at $340 a night, are decorated with artwork by American painter Shannon, “The World’s Greatest Beatles Artist” a title bestowed on her by the Lord Mayor of Liverpool. If you want to splurge, you should book one of the two penthouses–the Lennon Suite and the McCartney Suite. The centrepiece of Lennon’s is a white baby grand piano, while McCartney’s contains a full suit of armour.

One of the latest trends to emerge in this eclectic field is the prison hotel. Last year, Boston welcomed the Liberty Hotel, a former jail that used to be filled with Beantown’s most notorious prisoners. After a $150 million restoration, it’s a luxury hotel at the foot of Beacon Hill. Across the Atlantic there’s the Malmaisson Hotel in Oxford, England, a high-end hotel featuring converted jail cells as guest rooms, apartments and a bar/restaurant complex. Its website boasts “divine dining, astounding wine and dangerously good cocktails.”

At the other end of the spectrum is the Karosta Prison in Latvia, which caters to a very different clientele. Far from luxurious, this hotel brags that it is “unfriendly, unheated, uncomfortable and open all-year round.” This former brutal KGB jail has just everything it had when it was a functioning detention and torture centre, barbed wire included. Dinner is a stale hunk of rye bread, pickles and sweet Russian tea. The bed is a hard palett in a dank cell. And you are treated like an actual prisoner throughout your stay, complete with threats and warning gunfire and sobbing fellow inmates. Just what the warden ordered, eh?

Other innovations include a “water screen” that will be positioned between the hotel and the shore, with coloured lights and images projected on its surface at night. Guests will be protected from the Mid-East’s broiling sun with artificial clouds, produced by a giant fog machine above the surface. The mega-complex will also house three bars, a cosmetic surgery clinic, a marine biology research institute, a library, a museum, prayer rooms, a private cinema, retail shopping and three 150-seat restaurants. The security features include a missile-detecting radar system and watertight doors that can seal off entire sections of the facility. Projected price for a room is up to $5,000 a night.

Hydropolis’s German architect, Joachim Hauser, has stated, “My general plan was to create a living space in the sea. We want to create the first ever faculty for marine architecture because I believe that the future lies in the sea, including the future of city planning. I am certain that one day a whole city will be built in the sea. Our aim is to lay the first mosaic by colonising the sea. We are sure that this hotel will set a precedent.” In fact, Crescent-Hydropolis is now planning a chain of underwater hotels, and nine countries have shown interest. One sister project is slated to open in 2009 in Qingdao, China. The 200-room HydroPalace will be anchored in the Yellow Sea in water that is 16 to 20 metres deep at low tide. Guests will arrive at the hotel by yacht, which will also transport them a land-based hydrotower.

Another aquatic resort due to open near Shanghai in 2009 is the Shimao Wonderland Hotel. Built inside a beautiful water-filled former quarry, the 400-bed, five-star hotel will reach from the bottom of the lake to the surface of the 100-metre deep quarry. Two stories of the hotel will be under water, 17 will be within the cave and two will be above ground. It will incorporate conference facilities for up to 1,000 people, a banqueting centre, restaurants, cafés and sports facilities. An aquatic theme runs through the design both visually and functionally. Curved wings of the main body of the guestrooms enclose a naturally lit internal atrium, which uses the existing rock face with its waterfalls and green vegetation. This will be overlooked by guestroom balconies and contain restaurants and cafés at the base. The underwater levels will house a restaurant and guestrooms facing a 10-metre deep aquarium. The lowest level will contain a leisure complex with a swimming pool and water-based sports. An extreme sports centre for activities such as rock climbing and bungee jumping will be cantilevered over the quarry and accessed by special lifts, while the 16th floor will contain hot springs. 

Meanwhile, Poseidon Resorts will soon open a smaller, luxury underwater hotel off the coast of Fiji. Situated 12 metres below the ocean’s surface, all of its 24 suites will feature Jacuzzis, flat-screen televisions and fortified, transparent acrylic walls that look out onto coral gardens. Push-button controls will allow guests to adjust the lighting of the marine worlds outside their windows and to release food for fish swimming just outside. The Poseidon Undersea Resort also has 48 beach bungalows in case you feel like being closer to sea level. Apart from relaxing in their suites, guests can spend their days exploring the sea in a personal, 1,000-foot Triton submarine, scuba diving or indulging in spa treatments. There will also be an underwater library, a wedding chapel and several restaurants. The cost? $15,000 per person per week, based on double-occupancy. The hotel is now taking bookings and according to the Poseidon Resorts website, “the first 1,000 guests will have their names permanently inscribed on two monuments one on the island, and one on the floor of the lagoon.”

These fantasy playlands for the wealthy are at the cutting edge of an emerging trend: hotels that promise not just a getaway but a major experience. “People are looking for the wow factor, the bragging rights,” said Rick Swig, a hotel consultant and president of RSBA & Associates in San Francisco. “They want to come back from these places saying, ‘You won’t believe what I did this weekend.’”

In the next instalment we’ll take a look at some unique land-based theme hotels that are bona fide destinations in themselves.

(To be continued …)

I can’t remember anything else about that day—only those few magical minutes in the van. But it is precisely these sorts of totally unpredictable and spontaneous incidents that make travel so rewarding. The thought of such moments stay with you long after the experience of the historic landmarks, the art museums and the swank hotels fade from memory.

Why do we travel? What do we hope to find out on the open road? Take a look at this collection of my favourite quotes on the subject and see which ones ring true for you.

“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” — Aldous Huxley”

“Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” –- Miriam Beard

“Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.” — Lawrence Block

“The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.” — G.K. Chesterton

“I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you only have the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.” — Bill Bryson

“One of the gladdest moments in human life is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the slavery of Home, one feels once more happy. The blood flows with the fast circulation of childhood.” — Sir Richard Francs Burton

“Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” — Pat Conroy

“Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” -– Paul Theroux

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” — Mark Twain

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” — St. Augustine

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things–air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky–all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” — Cesare Pavese

“Strange travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”– Kurt Vonnegut

“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.”– Robert Louis Stevenson

“What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do–especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.” — William Least Heat Moon

“A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” –- John Steinbeck

“Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” -– Benjamin Disraeli

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” — Marcel Proust

“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.” –- Pico Iyer

At least he had some leg room.

Mutlu’s multi-million dollar lawsuit is just the latest in a recent spate of legal actions launched by cantankerous passengers against airlines. Some may be legitimate, but others are pretty ridiculous. Check out these examples and see what you think.

What’s the Buzz? A woman filed a lawsuit against Delta Air Lines for public humiliation after a security agent approached her on the plane before takeoff and informed her that something in her checked bag was vibrating. Renee Koutsouradis was then escorted off the plane in full sight of onlookers to identify the suspect device. She told the agent it was probably a sex toy that she had bought on her trip. The agent instructed her to hold the device up and turn it on. When she did, the agent and three male Delta employees nearby “began laughing hysterically” and offered “obnoxious and sexually harassing comments.” Koutsouradis sued Delta for compensatory and punitive damages for intentional infliction of emotional distress. Although she got the names of 10 witnesses for her case, the court ruled in favour of Delta, explaining that the testimony from the airline’s employees contradicted the lawsuit’s allegations.

Nutty Terror: A Long Island opthamologist has sued American Airlines for serving peanuts on her flight, thus engandering her allergic four-year old son. Tehmina Haque says she was assured several times that peanuts would not be served, but flight attendants changed the plan without notice during her trip from New York to Los Angeles. Her lawsuit claims: “For the entire flight the plaintiff remained fearful, tense and anxious as she watched over her son’s every breath and body twitch, concerned that at any moment her son could have an anaphylactic reaction while imprisoned 35,000 feet into the air.” The airline’s peanut allergy policy reads: “American recognizes that some passengers are allergic to peanuts. Although we do not serve peanuts, we do serve other nut products and there may be trace elements of unspecified peanut ingredients, including peanut oils, in meal and snacks. We make no provisions to be peanut-free.”

No Wiggle Room: Philip Shafer, an attorney from Ashland, Ohio, filed a lawsuit against Delta Air Lines claiming that he suffered “embarrassment, severe discomfort, mental anguish and severe emotional distress” on a flight from New Orleans to Cincinnati by having to sit next to a passenger so overweight that they were “figuratively married from the right kneecap to the shoulder.” Shafer sued Delta for what he said was a breach of its contract. That is, he didn’t get what he paid for–a full seat. The matter was later settled out of court, but Shafer insisted the issue was never money. Instead, it was about forcing airlines to establish policies that recognize the rights of standard-size passengers.

Racist Rhyming: Southwest Airlines is known for its humorous announcements and antics, but flight attendant Jennifer Cundiff ran into trouble when she made the following announcement to get everyone seated before departure from Las Vegas: “Eenie, meenie, minie, moe. Pick a seat, ’cause it’s time to go.” At the time, there were only two women still standing, a pair of African-American sisters, and they took offense to the nursery rhyme, which once had very different wording. They sued Southwest, alleging that they were victims of racial discrimination and had suffered physical and emotional distress as a result of the rhyme. A jury cleared the airline of any discrimination. Fuller criticized the verdict, insisting that the all-white jury had conspired against her and her sister.

Expensive Hangover: On a United Airlines flight from Buenos Aires to New York, inebriated investment banker Gerard Finneran went totally bonkers. First he demanded more alcohol from the flight attendants and when they refused, he began helping himself to the liquor supply. After being cut off a second time, he became irate. He pushed one flight attendant, verbally threatened another, then walked up to the first-class cabin, dropped his pants and defecated on a food cart in plain view of the passengers and crew. Then he smeared the walls with his feces. Finneran was arrested upon landing. The airline sued, demanding that he refund every passenger’s first-class ticket. Finneran countersued, saying it was the airline’s fault for serving him too much alcohol. His suit was dismissed and he eventually pleaded guilty to assault and was sentenced to two years probation. In addition, he was given 300 hours of community service and a $5,000 fine and was ordered to pay $50,000 in restitution to the airline, and to reimburse fellow passengers for the price of their tickets, which worked out to about $100,000.

Trapped on the Tarmac: An Arkansas woman stranded for more than 13 hours on an American Airlines flight in December 2006, has taken legal action against the airline. Catherine Ray’s lawsuit charges, among other things, false imprisonment, negligence and breach of contract. Flight 1008 had departed Oakland on time and was scheduled to arrive in Dallas at 11:30 a.m., but American diverted the flight to Austin, where passengers were held on the plane for more than 13 hours. American claimed that stormy weather over Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport delayed the flight, but the lawsuit insists that flights were delayed for fewer than three hours by bad weather. Ray says the plane became filthy and intolerable from human excrement, body odour, lack of water for sanitation, and the lack of adequate food or hydrating drinks. The suit accuses American of having a corporate policy of confining and imprisoning passengers on aircraft of excessively delayed or cancelled flights to prevent “passenger migration.”

A Sticky Situation: A 21-year-old Texas woman has filed a $200,000 lawsuit against American Airlines, claiming that employees on a flight to Los Angeles failed to protect her from another passenger who masturbated to her and ejaculated in her hair. Destined for a Spring Break visit with family and friends on March 19, 2008, Centava Dozier flew from Houston had settled into her seat for the last leg of flight 2074 to Los Angeles about 11 p.m. She slept most of the flight, but awoke about 20 minutes before landing when the pilot announced the plane was on its descent. When Dozier opened her eyes, she saw that a stranger had moved into the seat next to her and was staring at her while he masturbated. Dozier turned toward the window in embarrassment and in an act of nervousness began to run her fingers through her hair where she noticed “a substantial amount of an extremely sticky substance.” She began to cry and tried to get the attention of a flight attendant, but was unsuccessful. When the plane landed, the airline called airport police and the man was arrested. The suit contends that airline staff saw the man take the vacant seat but did nothing to make him return to his assigned seat.

The non-profit New7 Wonders Foundation, which Weber established in 2001, claims it is committed to investing 50 percent of excess revenue in global good causes related to monument preservation and reconstruction. It has relied on private donations, the sale of merchandise such as T-shirts and cups, and revenue from selling broadcasting rights to obtain funds. The foundation’s first foray in large-scale marketing was a complicated and often contentious venture. The multi-stage process to select the seven new wonders lasted several years. To be included among the nominees, all the wonders had to be man made, completed before 2000, and in an acceptable state of preservation. By November 25, 2005, there were 177 monuments up for consideration. A panel of experts, many of whom were architects, then narrowed the list to 21 sites from which the public selected the top seven.

The contest sparked a wide spectrum of reactions. Some countries enthusiastically touted their finalist. Brazil’s President Lula de Silva addressed his people on radio telling them how to vote for Rio’s statue of Christ the Redeemer, while the government of Peru opened computer terminals in public places and exhorted its citizens to vote for the ancient city of Machu Pichu. Other nations downplayed or criticized the contest. After supporting the New7Wonders Foundation at the beginning of the campaign, The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) distanced itself from the undertaking in 2007, slamming the project as unscientific and undemocratic. “This initiative cannot, in any significant and sustainable manner, contribute to the preservation of sites elected by the public,” UNESCO said in a statement.

Egypt was especially outspoken in its opposition to the contest, perhaps because it heard that the Great Pyramid of Giza–the only surviving member of the original seven wonders of the world–was not among the frontrunners in the voting. Egypt’s leading antiquities expert haughtily proclaimed that the pyramids are a “symbol of the genius of the ancient people”–and therefore were above any sort of online poll. As a result of Egypt’s protests, the organizers struck a compromise–the Great Pyramids were granted honorary status, in addition to the new seven wonders.

Which landmarks came out on top? The super seven include India’s Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Jordan’s ancient city of Petra, the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru, the Colosseum in Rome, the Maya city of Chichén Itzá in Mexico and the 38-metre-tall Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Not surprisingly all of them are major tourist attractions. Left out in the cold were such marvels as Moscow’s Kremlin, Greece’s Acropolis, Sydney’s Opera House and Cambodia’s Angkor Wat.

After the winners were unveiled at a star-studded gala at Lisbon’s Benfica Stadium, Weber boldly stated that he plans to send three-dimensional photo data of the new seven wonders burned onto a golden compact disc or an iPod into outer space. “I think it would be worthwhile to conserve this memory at the beginning of the third millennium in the best possible way and make sure that even if the world gets destroyed, it will be retained somewhere.” Weber said the disc might be fired into space by a rocket, but did not offer any details on how or when this will happen.

Whether you agree with the choices or their method of selection, there is little doubt that the ancient seven wonders were due for an update. Not only can very few people recall their names–Great Pyramid of Giza, Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Colossus of Rhodes, Statue of Zeus at Olympia, Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, Mausoleum at Halicarnassus and Lighthouse of Alexandria—they were a distinctly Mediterranean compilation. Six of them suffered ignoble fates—leveled by earthquakes, destroyed by fire, or sacked by invading armies, leaving the world virtually wonderless.

The organizers of the 2007 competition stated that their aim was to use part of the revenue from merchandise and broadcast sales and use of the voters’ database to set up, or contribute to various restoration projects in the world. After the final results were tallied, however, New7Wonders said it didn’t earn anything from the exercise and barely recovered its investments.

One has to question the accuracy of that claim, as the New7Wonders Foundation is now organizing another contest—this one to select the world’s greatest seven natural wonders. Suggestions are already posted by continent on the foundation’s web site (www.new7wonders.com/). Internet voting will continue to the end of 2008. In early 2009, the 77 sites that have amassed the most votes will go before a panel of experts, which will choose the 21 finalists. People will then be able to vote by the Web, text message or phone, on the final seven. The winners will be announced in late 2010.

More than 300 suggestions from six continents have been received so far. The Amazon Rainforest, the Northern Lights, Mount Everest, the Great Barrier Reef, the Grand Canyon, Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park, Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands and Australia’s Ayers Rock, are just some of the main contenders. According to Weber, the new natural wonders should be places with striking natural beauty. As he told the Associated Press, “The closer we bring the beauty of our planet to the people, the more likely they will say, ‘Oh, we have to do something to conserve it.’”

Unfortunately, it’s happening more frequently every year. According to U.S. Department of Transportation statistics, in 2002, there were 3.8 reports of mishandled baggage for every 1,000 passengers in the U.S.. In the first nine months of 2007 alone, the rate was 7.3 per 1,000 passengers–nearly double. The total figure is astounding: 3.45 million reports in those nine months. Worldwide, an estimated 42 million bags were lost or mishandled. That’s a serious load of Samsonite.

Some airlines are notorious for luggage screw-ups. British Airways lost more baggage per flight last year than any other major airline in the world. The British air carrier temporarily or permanently waylaid 26.5 bags per 1,000 passengers, compared to a European-wide average of 16.6. And the data shows that BA’s performance is getting worse. The airline lost an extra 3.5 bags per 1,000 in 2007 than it did in 2006. Other European airlines that had a worse-than-average loss of luggage included Lufthansa, Alitalia and Air France.

Fed up with after having luggage lost or damaged on British Airways, three U.S. citizens, including two from Washington state, are fighting back. They launched a legal challenge against the airline in 2007. A Seattle law firm, Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP, known nationally for high-profile, class-action lawsuits, contends the airline has been knowingly reckless in its baggage handling and that a limit of $1,500 in compensation, set under an international air-travel agreement called the Montreal Convention, should not apply.

Two of the travellers involved, Donald and Joan Smith, are from Tacoma. On a British Airways flight to Italy in June 2007, their luggage went missing for weeks and was eventually found wet and damaged beyond repair in Naples. Another traveller, Aydan Kayserili of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, lost her luggage on a British Airways flight to Madrid. Since the original filing of the lawsuit, 10 other plaintiffs have joined the fray, and more evidence has surfaced of the airline’s negligence.

The suit claims that British Airways’ conduct was egregious, constituting recklessness in their knowledge that so much damage occurs regarding lost luggage. The law firm cites studies showing that travellers on British Airways have a 1 in 36 chance of having the carrier lose their luggage–the argument being that this qualifies as reckless behaviour. If the court approves the case as a class-action lawsuit, thousands of passengers could receive court-ordered compensation from the airline.

Although there is no foolproof method to prevent your luggage from being lost or misdirected, industry experts offer some tips to help decrease the odds of it happening.

1. Place tags with your name, address, e-mail address and phone number on, and also inside each of your bags.

2. Put a copy of your itinerary in your bag, or even tape it to the outside of your luggage. This way airline handlers will know the bag’s ultimate destination, even if they can’t reach you.

3. Arrive early at the airport. If you check in at the last moment you may make it, but your bags may not.

4. Get a claim check for every bag that you check. Also, make sure that the agent processing your bags attaches a destination tag to each bag.

5. Follow the rules. It may be annoying to check in any bag with more than three ounces of liquid, but if you try to bring forbidden items in carry-on luggage, you’ll have to check the bag. At that point in the boarding process, it may be too late to get your suitcase on your flight and it will be bumped to a later one.

6. Most bags look very similar. Mark yours with a ribbon, colourful tag or some other identifying trait so others won’t mistake it for their own. It will also make it easier to find on a crowded carousel.

7. Remove old tags. They can confuse the automated sorting system and even human baggage handlers.

8. Keep a detailed list of what you packed in your suitcase to facilitate any future claims for compensation.

9. Take a picture of your bag with your cell phone, or print it out or keep a copy with your passport. If you have to report a missing bag it will help if you can show the airline personnel what it looks like.

Lost your luggage and need a laugh? Check out this routine by Welsh comedian Rhod Gilbert about his mind-boggling baggage mishap on a flight to Australia.

In the end I opted to stay put. I had done some research about Schiphol before my departure and it seemed to have a healthy number of diversions. Besides, I’d already been to Amsterdam twice before and seen all the major sites. In retrospect, I think I made the right decision. The airport was quite a revelation.

Schiphol is the fourth-busiest airport in Europe. Last year, it served 48 million passengers. The 126-acre facility, which is run by Schiphol Group, a private company whose shares are 75.8 percent owned by the Dutch government, 21.8 percent by Amsterdam and 2.4 percent by the city of Rotterdam, operates according to an “aerotropolis concept,” which assumes that an airport should not merely be a stop in the travel process but a unique experience. Evidently, the approach is working. Schiphol pumps billions of dollars into the Dutch economy and provides directly or indirectly more than 100,000 jobs.

The airport’s design is clean and slick with wide corridors, white-tiled floors and high glass windows that allow travellers to keep an eye on the airfield and gates. The layout is consistent throughout and there is signage wherever you happen to be. Each screen gives you a live “walk time” from the gates–and this time value changes depending where you are in the airport.

Because more than a third of the airport’s passengers are in transit, awaiting connecting flights, Schiphol has repeatedly sought new ways to reduce the boredom and stress of layovers. The airport has installed a gymnasium, a computerized golf course, showers and hotel rooms in the terminal that can be rented by the hour, and a nursery with muted light and little cribs that babies can sleep in. For those who just need a quiet spot to catch a nap or gather their thoughts, there are banks of black leather snoozing chairs and a meditation room.

Art lovers will be pleased to learn that Schiphol is the first airport in the world to house a museum in its terminal–and not just any museum. It’s a branch of Amsterdam’s world famous Rijksmuseum. Set on two pillars to minimize vibrations from airplane takeoffs and landings, the galleries are protected by bulletproof glass. The museum maintains a permanent collection of Dutch art from the Golden Age, as well as temporary exhibits, and admission is free. There is also a gift shop at which you can purchase souvenirs featuring the work of the Dutch masters.

The airport also boasts an in-terminal gambling casino. Operated by Holland Casinos, a private company, the Schiphol casino is open from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. It has a roulette table, three blackjack tables, 75 slot machines and accepts 15 currencies in exchange for chips or tokens. Winnings are paid in Dutch guilders, which can be exchanged for other currencies at the casino or at the 24-hour airport banks. Unlike other casinos, which encourage lingering, the casinos display clocks prominently on the wall to help passengers catch their connecting flights.

As one might expect, Schiphol offers plenty of shopping and dining opportunities. There is a mall with a 24-hour grocery store, a hair salon, restaurants and shops selling everything from tulip bulbs and toys to lingerie, luxury cosmetics and electronics, and a caviar and champagne bar called Bubbles. Other amenities include chair massages, wireless Internet access, full-service business centres and a children’s play area with free video games. If you feel you need some pampering, there is also a beauty and wellness centre. Supposedly the first of its kind at any European airport, the spa offers treatments tailored to the length of time passengers spend at the airport and include massages, manicures, pedicures and facial treatments.

Even Schiphol’s washrooms are noteworthy. A number of them feature cheery murals of Amsterdam cityscapes, canal houses and flowers. The men’s urinals have an added bonus–a house fly etched in the bowl just to the left of the drain. This is not simply an amusing artistic touch—it serves a purpose. Most men instinctively aim at the fly when they urinate. Research conducted at the airport found that the fake-fly technology reduced spillage by 80 percent, saving a bundle on cleaning bills.

However, not every trend-setting concept has been embraced by Schiphol. In 2000, in anticipation of the official legalization of brothels in Holland, Theo Hueft, the owner of an Amsterdam brothel called Yab Yum, filed an application to open a men’s club at the airport to relax–or perhaps reinvigorate–weary and stressed travelers with champagne, caviar and erotic massages. “They could pop in before going home to the lady wife,” suggested Hueft. His application was turned down.

So, how did I spend my time here? Well, since the relaxation club was not an option, I limited myself to some light shopping, grabbed a meal and a few Heinekens at one of the bars, then sacked out on one of the black recliners. The chair was remarkably comfortable, but it was difficult to drift into dreamland because of the women’s voices emanating from the airport loudspeakers. Well-modulated and precise, they delivered their messages with cool efficiency. “Mr. Bunkhead, travelling to Glasgow, please proceed to Gate D6A.” This notice was followed a minute later by another slightly more stern announcement: “Mr. Bunkhead, you are delaying the flight. Please report to Gate D6A immediately or we will begin to offload your luggage.” The process was repeated throughout the afternoon with a parade of tardy travellers.

But even more distracting was the computerized voice of the sidewalk lady. Each time someone approached the end of a nearby moving walkway, her mechanical voice rang out in a clipped singsong, “Mind your step.” The phrase reverberated in my brain for days afterwards.

There are more than 900 roadside attractions littered across the Canadian landscape, ranging from a 25-metre tall easel holding a reproduction of Vincent Van Gogh’s famous painting of sunflowers in Altona, Manitoba, to a giant, red fiddle in Harvey Nova Scoitia, dedicated to internationally renowned fiddler Don Messer. Clearly we can’t cover all of them here, but we can take a closer look at a few of the more interesting examples.

World’s Largest Hockey Stick and Puck, Duncan, B.C.

The puck and stick were built in Penticton from Douglas fir beams. The 62-metre stick weighs in at a whopping 28 kilograms, 40 times the size of a regular hockey stick. Commissioned by the Government of Canada for Expo ‘86 in Vancouver, the puck and stick were later donated to the province of B.C.. After a competition, the Cowichan Community Centre in Duncan was chosen from over 30 organizations to display the artifact. Eveleth, Minnesota, once tried to discredit Duncan and claim the title for itself. The muckraking Yanks contended Duncan’s stick was more of a sculpture, and was therefore not eligible for the record. This all became moot in 2001, when Eveleth’s stick was removed for public safety reasons, only to be chopped up into tiny pieces and sold off as souvenirs.

Starship Enterprise, Vulcan, Alberta

“Beam me up, Scotty.” Anyone driving through Vulcan can’t miss spotting the Vulcan Tourism and Trek Station and replica of the Starship Enterprise. Situated at the main entrance to town, this starship model was built and unveiled in 1995, and is based on the original USS enterprise from the Star Trek series. The Tourism and Trek Station, which opened in 1998, looks like something out of a science-fiction fan’s worst peyote hallucination. Each June, the Albertan town hosts Vulcan’s Galaxyfest, a three-day convention featuring Klingon karaoke, a Star Trek fashion show, an Intergalactic Fan Fiction Exhibition and Vulcan Space Adventure, a virtual-reality game that takes players inside a recreation of the bridge of the Enterprise. Just to avoid any confusion, a plaque welcomes visitors in English, Klingon and Vulcan.

Giant Goose, Wawa, Ontario

Wawa in the Ojibway language means “Wild Goose.” Fittingly enough the town has erected a huge Canada Goose monument, the largest of its kind in the country, standing guard over the junction of the Trans-Canada Highway and Highway 101. The goose was the brainchild of a local businessman as a means of luring travellers off the highway and into town. The original plaster sculpture, which was erected in 1960, could talk. If you pressed a button on the stand it would tell you its history. However, its wire and plaster construction did not stand up to the harsh Northern Ontario climate and it was replaced in 1963 by a more hardy steel statue. The world famous Wawa Goose was immortalized by Stompin’ Tom Connors in his song “Little Wawa.”

Jumbo The Elephant, St. Thomas, Ontario

This statue honours the memory of Jumbo, a six-ton African elephant, born in 1861, that became the star attraction of the Barnum & Bailey Circus. On the night of September 15, 1885, “the Greatest Show on Earth” was playing in St. Thomas, Ontario. The circus’ 29 elephants had completed their routines and all but two had been led from the big top to their waiting railway cars. Only the smallest, Tom Thumb, and the largest, Jumbo, remained to take a final bow. After the completion of the show, as handler Matthew Scott guided Tom Thumb and Jumbo along the tracks, an unscheduled express train hit the beasts. Jumbo was crushed; his skull reportedly broken in over a hundred places. Still conscious and groaning, even with the massive injuries, the mortally wounded elephant was comforted by Scott until it died. In 1985, on the 100th anniversary of Jumbo’s death, the city erected a life-size statue of Jumbo near the Elgin County Pioneer Museum.

World’s Largest Tomahawk, Cut Knife, Saskatchewan

Getting clubbed with a tomahawk this size would certainly leave a lasting impression. It is 16.4 metres long, 12 metres high, weighs 5.5 tonnes, and is cantilevered through the top of a nine-metre-high concrete teepee. The tomahawk handle is an actual fir tree and the ax head is fiberglass. The monument was created in 1971 during Saskatchewan’s “Homecoming” commemoration of Indian treaties signed in 1871, and is meant to symbolize unity and friendship between the area’s populations. The nearby Clayton McLain Memorial Museum features a collection of 11 buildings that display Native and pioneer artifacts dating back to the Riel Rebellion of 1885.

Big Mosquito, Komarno, Manitoba

Buzzzz. Komarno, a village of 125 people located 70 kilometres north of Winnipeg, bills itself as the mosquito capital of Canada, an itchy claim that few other places would want to advertise. In fact, the name Komarno is Ukranian for mosquito-infested. The town’s major tourist draw is this 4.6-metre long mosquito statue. Built in 1984, it revolves on its base, doubling as a weather vane. During the summer, about 15 visitors each day drop by to see it, some from as far away as France. Not to be outdone, the Ontario town of Upsala constructed its own giant mosquito monument in 1991–it depicts a 4.9 metre long mosquito flying away with a terrified man in its clutches. To drive home the message, the mosquito is also holding a knife and fork.

Giant Squid, Glover’s Harbour, Newfoundland

The giant squid is one of earth’s most menacing and elusive creatures. Amazingly, the first photos of a live giant squid were not taken until 2004. Once thought to be a mythical creature, the first substantiated report of one of these denizens of the deep was in 1873. The animal was reported to have been attacking a minister and a young boy, near Bell Island, Newfoundland. Five years later, on November 2, 1878, scientists received their first giant squid specimen, when a carcasse washed ashore in Glover’s Harbour, Newfoundland. The largest squid ever recorded, its body measured 6.1 metres, one of its tentacles extended 10.7 metres and it was estimated to weigh 2.2 tonnes. Guaranteed to terrify young childen, the 16.8-metre concrete replica, which stands just off the main road in Glover’s Harbour, was built in 2001.

Anyone interested in seeing more photos of Canada’s roadside attractions should check out these two websites:

www.roadsideattractions.ca
www.bigthings.ca

The scary aspects are all the stuff you don’t know about travelling. Take the simple act of getting a drink of water on an airplane. Unless you actually see the flight attendant physically open a new bottle of water and hear the snap of that cap, don’t drink it. Why? Greenberg says that “many airlines do not stock enough bottled water on their flights, and when they run out, flight attendants have been known to go back to the galley and refill those bottles with water from the plane’s holding tanks. And those tanks are the bacteriological equivalent of the bar scene from Star Wars!”

Of course these days you can’t bring your own water onboard unless you buy it in an airport shop and have it sealed in a plastic bag. However, from personal experience I know that this only solves one part of the problem. You still have to open the sealed bag once you get on the plane, and with all sharp objects removed from your person this is no easy task. It helps if you have razor-sharp teeth.

Here are some other insider secrets from Greenberg:

Airline Tickets
Did you know that there is a specific time and day when airline seats are likely to become available at a cheaper fare? The optimum time is just after midnight on a Tuesday night (early Wednesday morning) in the city where the airline is based. Why? As Greenberg explains: “Airlines like to do all their discount sales over the weekend to see who’s going to match them. All the matching finally ends on Monday, and as you know, once you book a ticket you’re given 24 hours in which to purchase it, so on Tuesday night all those discount tickets purchased by people who booked tickets on Monday, but didn’t pay for them, come flooding back into the computer system.”

Luggage
Because Greenberg believes there are only two types of luggage–carry-on and lost–he avoids checking bags whenever possible. Instead, he has them sent ahead by courier so that they are waiting for him at his hotel. If you do it at least three days in advance, you get a substantial discount. However, if you insist on checking bags, Greenberg offers a few tips. Due to the way baggage is handled, he says, “Don’t just put you ID on the outside of the bag, because conveyor belts like to eat those tags for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Instead, put your ID on the inside of the bag.” He also advises that travellers open their bags as soon as they come off the carousel, instead of rushing out the exit. This is because baggage thieves do not steal bags, but rather take individual items from bags, and if you wait to get home to find out that something is missing, it’s too late.

Checking In
Greenberg has a formula for avoiding long lines and other hassles when you arrive at the airport. It goes as follows: Print your boarding pass on your home computer the night before. When you get to the airport (especially for a morning flight), don’t go to the departure level. It will be a zoo. Besides, you have no baggage to check and you already have your boarding pass. Instead, head for the arrivals level. In the early morning, no one is there. Then take the escalator upstairs and go through security to your gate.

Hotel Bookings
When reserving a hotel room, don’t get fooled by thinking you are getting the best bargain by booking online. Websites such as Orbitz, Expedia and Travelocity buy rooms at a discount price but then charge you a markup of 24 to 48 percent. Instead, Greenberg says, “If you see a hotel room advertised online for $100 a night, call the hotel directly and offer $85. At the typical markup, you have to figure the hotel is offering it to the discounter at about $65. The hotel still stands to make a $20 profit by booking it from you rather than through the website.” And when negotiating it helps to deal directly with the on-duty manager or sales director rather than a desk clerk.

Jet Lag
Greenberg travels an average of 420,000 miles a year, yet claims that he never suffers from jet lag. He recommends avoiding airline food, alcohol and drinking only bottled water while airborne. But most importantly, he says, it is what you do once the plane lands that will make the crucial difference in your battle to avoid jet lag. “No matter what time you land, no matter how long the flight, you must stay up until at least 11 p.m. local time. This is the most difficult, but most also the most important, challenge you’ll face. If you succumb to the temptation to take that 4 p.m. nap, no one will see you for three days. Will you totally cycle? Most likely, you will average about five hours of sleep. But on the second night, again staying up until 11 p.m., you will sleep your normal cycle.”

We have all seen them at some point during our global travels. I’m referring to the street sign, advertisement, instruction or safety warning rendered in badly mangled English. There are thousands of these fractured phrases on public display. People collect them, stick them in photo albums and post them on the Internet. Here are some of the funniest examples that I‘ve been able to find using various online sources.

On the menu of a Swiss restaurant:
Our wines leave you nothing to hope for.

In a Rhodes tailor shop:
Order your summers suit. Because is big rush we will execute customers in strict rotation.

In an Acapulco hotel:
The manager has personally passed all the water served here.

In a Japanese zoo:
Children found straying will be taken to the lion house.

In a Bucharest hotel lobby:
The lift is being fixed for the next day. During that time we regret that you will be unbearable.

Outside a Hong Kong tailor shop:
Ladies may have a fit upstairs.

In a Copenhagen airline ticket office:
We take your bags and send them in all directions.

In a Beijing barber shop:
Haircuts half-price today. Only one per customer.

Outside a Paris dress shop:
Dresses for street walking.

In a Czechoslovakian tourist agency:
Take one of our horse-driven city tours — we guarantee no miscarriages.

On an Italian hotel brochure:
This hotel is renowned for its peace and solitude. In fact, crowds from all over the world flock here to enjoy its solitude.

In a Bangkok temple:
It is forbidden to enter a woman even a foreigner if dressed as a man.

In a Paris hotel elevator:
Please leave your values at the front desk.

In a Nairobi restaurant:
Customers who find our waitresses rude ought to see the manager.

In a Japanese hotel:
You are invited to take advantage of the chambermaid.

In a Swiss mountain inn:
Special today — no ice cream.

In a Belgrade hotel elevator:
To move the cabin, push button for wishing floor. If the cabin should enter more persons, each one should press a number of wishing floor. Driving is then going alphabetically by national order.

In the office of a Roman doctor:
Specialist in women and other diseases.

In the lobby of a Moscow hotel:
You are welcome to visit the cemetery where famous Russian and Soviet composers, artists and writers are buried daily except Thursday.

At a Bangkok dry cleaner:
Drop your trousers here for best results.

In a Tokyo bar:
Special cocktails for the ladies with nuts.

On a Hong Kong restaurant window:
Come broil yourself at your own table.

In the window of a Swedish furrier:
Fur coats made for ladies from their own skin.

In a Vienna hotel:
In the case of fire, do your utmost to alarm the hotel porter.

In a Roman laundry:
Ladies, leave your clothes here and spend the afternoon having a good time.

On a brochure of a Tokyo car rental agency:
When passenger of foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage then tootle him with vigor.

In an Athens hotel:
Visitors are expected to complain at the office between the hours of 9 and 11 a.m. daily.

On a Polish tourist brochure:
As for the tripes serve you at the Hotel Monopol, you will be singing its praise to your children as you lie on your death bed.

The awards recognize excellence and innovation among individuals, businesses and organizations at the forefront of the province’s aboriginal tourism industry. As Brenda Baptiste, the chair of ATBC, noted in her welcoming address: “Aboriginal tourism is founded on a spirit of collaboration, a drive to create economic opportunity, an urgency to support cultural stewardship, and an excitement to strengthen a sustainable tourism industry in the international marketplace for the benefit of all British Columbians. This event is a tribute to those who are leading the way.”

Awards were presented in nine categories. You can check out the winners at ATBC’s website: www.atbc.bc.ca

Surveys indicate that aboriginal tourism is one of the fastest growing sectors of the tourism market worldwide. B.C. leads the way in Canada, with more than 200 aboriginal tourism businesses operating in the province. These ventures currently generate about $35 million a year in revenues, but this total has been forecast to increase to $50 million by 2012.

According to a study commissioned by ATBC, a third of visitors to the province indicated that they had visited aboriginal sites, attractions and events on previous trips to B.C. And 63 percent of these tourists indicated that they planned to return to B.C. for aboriginal tourism within the next three years.

Travellers taking part in aboriginal tourism in B.C. tend to be:
Well-educated, upper middle-income wage earners, female baby boomers.
Visiting from primarily North American and European destinations.
Including aboriginal tourism in their B.C. travels for the first time (65%).
Taking part in aboriginal tourism in places beyond B.C. (64%).
Spending more money per trip than other tourists.

Compared to other B.C. travellers these aboriginal tourists are more apt to:
Spend more trip days in B.C. (average of 13 days).
Include aboriginal experiences on more of those trip days (average of 3 days).
Visit more than one aboriginal location on B.C. trip (average of 2.2 sites).
Visit aboriginal interpretive centres (24%), attractions (22%) and museums (21%).
Travel in larger parties (average of 3.6 persons).

All in all, it’s a highly desirable demographic.

Sticking with the subject of aboriginal tourism and awards, I just learned that I won second prize in The Northern Lights Awards for an article that I wrote about aboriginal tourism iniatives in B.C.. The piece, entitled “Chief Destinations,” appeared in the summer 2007 issue of Westworld magazine. Westworld also captured first prize in another Northern Lights’ category for Daniel Wood’s story, “North of Everything.”

This competition, which is judged by Carleton University, is open to magazines, newspapers, independent writers and photographers and Internet reporters in North America who have generated tourism-oriented coverage on Canadian destinations in 2007 in either French or English. You can visit the Northern Lights site at www.canadamediamarket.org/ctc/

In addition to giving me a cheque for $400, the event’s organizers will also fly me to Los Angeles to attend the Canada Media Marketplace convention and the Northern Lights Awards luncheon, held from April 7-9, 2008, at the Beverly Hilton. This landmark hotel, which was built in 1955 by Conrad Hilton, the former husband of Zsa Zsa Gabor, bills itself as where “the glamour of the past merges with the technology of the 21st century.” Talk-show host and real-estate mogul Merv Griffin owned the place from 1987 to 2003, and according to the hotel’s website, a galaxy of Hollywood stars and every U.S. president since JFK has stayed here. Reputed to have the largest swimming pool in Beverly Hills, the hotel hosts 175 red-carpet extravaganzas each year, including the prestigious Golden Globe Awards in January. I suspect that next month’s trip to Beverly Hills may turn out to be a bit of a bizarre adventure. It certainly sounds like prime fodder for this blog. Stay tuned.

To begin with, Niyazov took the name Turkmenbashi (“leader of all ethnic Turkmen”) and declared himself president for life. He then proceeded to name the country’s main airport, its largest port city and dozens of schools and streets after himself. The president also renamed the month of January after himself, and April after his mother. A planet in the Taurus constellation, a crater on the moon and a mountain peak were named after him. In 1998, when a 330-kilogram meteorite landed in Turkmenistan, scientists named it Turkmenbashi.

His influence permeated every sphere of Turkmen life. When he quit smoking after major heart surgery in 1997, he ordered all his government ministers to do the same and prohibited smoking in public places. He also banned gold tooth caps and gold teeth and suggested that tooth preservation could be more easily accomplished by chewing on bones. “I watched young dogs when I was young. They were given bones to gnaw. Those of you whose teeth have fallen out did not gnaw on bones. This is my advice.”

In 2004, he announced a crackdown on young men wearing beards and long hair, and decreed that newscasters could not wear makeup. Why? Because he said he couldn’t tell the male and female news readers apart and this made him uncomfortable. Opera and ballet were outlawed as “unnecessary.” So too was the Internet, video games, opposition political parties and pensions for the elderly and disabled. Listening to car radios and the playing of recorded music on television and at public events was forbidden. He even ordered a ban on lip-synching at all cultural events and even at private parties, citing “a negative effect on the development of singing and musical art.”

Not known for his modest tastes, Turkemenbashi had a French-designed, $100-million gold-domed palace built for himself in central Ashgabad. Outside the capital, 22 luxury hotels, which he commissioned, now sit empty on a road leading out of the city and bound for nowhere. He also ordered the construction of a palace made of ice to house a lavish skating rink in the Karakorum desert, where temperatures often reach 50 degrees Celsius.

He squandered millions of dollars erecting monuments to himself, including a gold-plated statue atop Ashgabad’s tallest building that rotates to face the sun at all times. His picture appears on the airplanes, on the money and on the national vodka. His image looms over workers in the field, over children in school and over drivers on the road. His face is also used as the logo of all three state-run TV stations, and is legally required to appear on every clock and watch face. When he dyed his hair black, he made it illegal to own watches that showed him with grey hair.

In 2001, Turkmenbashi wrote a 400-page book–a combination of poetry, revisionist history and moral guidelines–called Ruhnama (“Book of the Soul”). It was required to be prominently displayed in all bookstores and government offices, and to be placed next to the Koran in mosques. Memorization of the book is required to graduate from school and to get a state job or even a driver’s license. Schoolchildren must spend one entire day every week reading it. Since all Soviet-era books have been banned, most Turkmen libraries have only the Ruhnama and other books penned by Turkmenbashi. In 2006, he made reading of the Ruhnama a requirement for entry into heaven, which is not likely the place where Turkmenbashi now resides. Despite Turkmenistan’s vast income from natural gas exports, when the despot died in December 2006, he left behind an impoverished, famine-stricken nation of four million where 45 percent of the population lives on less than $2.00 per day and where an estimated 60 percent of the inhabitants are unemployed.

Turkmenbashi was replaced as president by his personal dentist, Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedov, the former deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers. Several international news agencies have reported that Berdimuhammedov is actually Turkmenbashi’s illegitimate son, a perception bolstered by an uncanny physical resemblance between the two men. Interestingly, one of Berdimuhammedov first acts as president was to change the country’s constitution to prevent the political participation of Turkmenbashi’s legitimate son, Myrat. More murky intrigue is bound to follow.

Before abandoning the subject of African wildlife safaris, I want to make mention of a YouTube video entitled “Battle at Kruger,” which some have described as the best nature video ever shot. This rivetting, eight-minute piece of footage depicts a clash between a herd of Cape Buffalo, a pride of lions and a crocodile at a watering hole in Kruger National Park in South Africa. The video has drama, suspense and a twist ending with a lesson for everyone.

First posted on YouTube in May 2007, it quickly became one of the hottest uploads in web history that didn’t feature a naked celebrity or a politician making a career-ending gaffe. As of January 1, 2008, the video had attracted more than 22 million views and 20, 000 comments and had been covered in Time magazine. This fall, the National Geographic Channel plans to air an hour-long special documenting the story.

The clip was filmed during a guided safari in September 2004 by American tourist David Budzinski, who enjoyed spectacular timing and luck, especially considering that he barely knew how to turn his camera on. As the Texan told ABC News, “It’s a camera that I had used maybe once a year. Even today, I have to practise with it to remember which buttons do what. I truly was blessed at the time to hold it steady and catch what I did, because very easily, I could have missed so much.”

Ironically, Budzinski did not post his video on YouTube. In fact, he didn’t even know what YouTube was. Jason Schlosberg, a fellow vacationer on the safari that fateful day in 2004, asked Budzinski for a copy of the video, because he’d “never seen something so amazing.”For more than two years, the Battle at Kruger remained something Budzinski and Schlosberg occasionally shared with family and friends when they stopped by for a visit. Then, in May 2007, Schlosberg finally decided to share the clip with a friend of his from South Africa who’d moved to Ohio and had been pestering Schlosberg to see the video. To avoid long lines at the post office, Schlosberg put the clip on the Internet and a global phenomenon was born. Let me know what you think.

Although a blog may sound like an alien life force that Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk encountered on their intergalactic explorations, the noun is actually an abbreviation of weblog, defined by Merriam-Webster’s dictionary as a “site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks provided by the writer.”

Blogs have been multiplying at an epidemic rate. A recent estimate pegged the number of them currently circulating on the Internet at 112 million, with 120,000 new ones appearing each day. That’s right–112 million! It is a mind-boggling figure, especially when you consider that the first blogs only began to surface in the mid-1990s. This phenomenon has become so huge that are now search engines devoted entirely to blogs, such as Feedster, Technorati and blogdigger, According to the latest statistics, between 40 and 50 million blogs originate in the U.S.; Canada, in contrast, has about 700,000; China has 6 million; Japan, 5.5 million; Poland, 1.5 million; Israel, 100,000; while Greece, with a mere 5,000, has fewer bloggers than bouzouki players.

Blogs deal with a myriad of subjects. Although many simply showcase the impulsive ramblings of individuals, and exist primarily for their own private amusement, others, in the fields of business, technology and politics, have large readerships and are quite influential. Because blogging has become so fashionable, celebrities such as Barbara Streisand, Jeff Bridges, Pamela Anderson and Rosie O’Donnell are now pumping out online diaries. Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the National Basketball Association’s Dallas Mavericks, has one too, a platform which he often uses to attack the incompetence of NBA officials. Other blogs are intriguing simply because of their quirky titles. A fast Internet search turned up the following gems: “Dr. Fong’s Blog of Mysteries,” “The Good, the Bad and the Decapitated,” “dog.ate.this,” “Queer Switzerland,” and “the slow end to everything.”

We can assume that a catchy title draws attention. My travel blog does not have a title as yet, and the precise content is still evolving. Among other things, I plan to offer anecdotes and insights into stories that I have penned for Westworld magazine and other publications, as well supplying commentary on articles by other writers. There will be stuff about what’s in the news on travel-related subjects and about what isn’t, but should be. I will profile intrepid adventurers, delve into the topic of travel literature and my favourite scribes, discuss the hazards and pleasures of travel and also provide some insider tips. From time to time the site will feature photos and podcasts, which I am told are similar to radio shows. Testing. Testing. Is anyone out there?

Of course, one of the key aspects to blogs and their incredible popularity is that they offer readers a chance to interact with the author. This blog is no exception. I welcome comments, suggestions and questions, but just keep in mind that I am not a travel agent. This means I won’t be able to steer you to the best package deal on your next vacation to Hawaii. But hopefully I can entertain and edify and maybe even make you laugh.