27 Places to Go Before You Die

Young Monks in Myanmar

Here's a mind blowing collection of great photos of places you want to go before you die. I've done a few, but not enough.

27 Places to Go Before You Die

Tony Wheeler Website

Tony and Maureen in 1973

I had no idea that Tony Wheeler had his own website, but here it is in all it's glory:

Why have I never been to Capri, that island, much beloved of dolce vita jet setters of the ‘50s and ‘60s, off the coast from Naples in Italy? So finally Maureen and I got there for a few days, after my Pistoia Literary Festival gig and before a few days in Naples.

▲ A Capri highlight, the majolica-tiled floor of the Chiesa di San Michele in Anacapri, here Adam and Eve get their Garden of Eden marching orders.

And it’s just fine, lots of the familiar fashion brands along the pedestrian streets of Capri town. Lots of cafes and restaurants turning out very traditional Italian food. Lots of walking possibilities, including out to Villa Jovis, the hilltop villa of Tiberius, the notorious Roman emperor for whom excess was never enough. He was reputed to have tossed discarded toy boys off the top level of the villa, hundreds of metres above the blue Mediterranean below. And then there’s the fabulous Blue Grotto, the Grotta Azzurra.

Visiting the grotto is a hoot. First there’s the boat trip (€13.50 a head) along the coast to the grotto, where a bunch of boats all mill around at the grotto entrance. Clearly there’s some sort of priority on who goes first, but to us outsiders it’s impossible to decipher. Finally it’s our turn and a collection of rowing boats pull up beside our larger boat and we climb from boat to rowboat, four or five at a time. Miraculously nobody falls into the sea, between big boat and rowing boat. We’re instructed to sit right down on the floor of the boat.

Next we’re rowed over to a boat moored by the entrance with a lineup of three ticket sellers to whom we pay €12.50 a head for the rowboat and grotto entry fee. All of this, one feels, could be organised much more smoothly, tidily and cleanly.

Tony Wheeler Website

Overland to India from Europe in 1967

Overland to India in 1967

A guidebook to the very, very early days of travel from Europe to India

Chuck Thompson is Back. Hide your your young daughters

Another Rant from Hell Holes Author

Chuck Thompson is the author of the just-released book, To Hellholes And Back: Bribes, Lies, and the Art of Extreme Tourism, a follow-up to his wickedly funny Smile When You’re Lying, a takedown of the travel writing business. So where are the hellholes? Congo, India, Mexico City and — “most feared of all,” Disney World. I asked him to explain.

What’s the common thread?

On the most basic level, they’re all places that have earned extremely negative reputations with people who have never been there. Taken together, they represent the whole spread of traveler paranoia — from crime, disease and bloodshed to standing in long lines in the Florida sun next to little Caitlins and Coopers waiting to get on the Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster Starring Aerosmith.

India’s death-or-glory salesmen and promise of GI infections intimidated me personally, but as a global outsourcing hub and magnet for terrorists, it neatly packages the worst economic, cultural and political fears of modern America. So, a book covering these places seemed like it would have both personal meaning and universal relevance.

What’s the point you were trying to make by visiting these places?

I didn’t start off with any point in mind other than to confront some of my own biases and see what happened. I try to approach everything I write about with as agnostic a mindset as possible, which, sadly, is not much the fashion these days.

The predictable and perhaps natural way to go into a project like this is to assume that you’ll come out at the other end with a cheery, hands-across-the-sea message of global brotherhood and a stern lesson about judging others from afar. But I went to these places willing to call a spade a spade. If my experience supported it, I was fully ready to say, “You know what? I was right. This place really does suck. This society is completely screwed up.”

What I finished with was something in between. The Congo and its ubiquitous AK-47s I never need to experience again. But I gained more respect for Miley Cyrus than I would have thought possible.

Of all these destinations, which one scared you the most?

Easily the Congo. For one, just the genuine threat of violence. I mean, there’s a civil war going on there.

But more than that, the complete lack of information was alarming. It turns out virtually nobody goes to the Congo. Consequently, it’s almost impossible to get an accurate idea about what’s going on there, how to get around, and so on. Even the major guidebooks devoted to Africa include only a few perfunctory pages about the country. And all the Africans I spoke to said, “Do not go to Congo under any circumstance!”

For a while I thought I’d have to abort the trip. Then I found Henri, who got me through the country, but turned out to be an adventure in and of himself.

It seems as if you’re saying as much about tourists — specifically American tourists — as you are about the destinations you visit. What are you trying to say?

My general point about American tourists is that by and large I think they’re pretty polite and open-minded and no worse than any other travelers and not at all deserving of that old “ugly American” tag.

The larger thing I discovered while traveling for this book is that while everyone seems to love bitching about the Americanization of the world — from McDonald’s to Disney to gluttonous consumerism — the reverse seems to be much more the case these days. The world is influencing America far more than America is influencing the world. And often not in a good way.

Political corruption essentially taken for granted. Religious intolerance. Municipal bankruptcy. Enfeebled currency. Military adventurism. Toothless media. In one section I used the dismal ascendancy of soccer in this country as a symbol for all of this social decay — which I know will get a lot of people thinking I’m an ass in the same way that I angered Eric Clapton fans by dumping on him in Smile When You’re Lying, but to me it’s an apt and sort of funny metaphor.

You seem to have laid off criticizing travel writing in this book, for the most part. Do you feel as if you made your point in your last book, or do you still have something to say about travel writing? If so, what is it?

I suppose I still have plenty to say about travel writing and much of it isn’t complimentary. But, yeah, I got a lot of that off my chest in Smile and so it seemed pointless to cover the same ground again.

Most tourists try to stay away from danger. Yet danger seems to be a character in this book. Should we fear danger? Or does it make for a more interesting vacation?

Sure, danger makes for a more interesting story, but I’m a tourist who enjoys a beach resort in Cabo as much as the next guy. I can have fun without danger.

But “fear” really is an interesting part of travel. In part I did want to make the point that all of these “official” and not-so official warnings about how dangerous the world is outside the United States are just plain dumb. No place is ever as bad as they tell you it’s going to be. Government bureaucrats are more concerned with covering their asses by issuing ludicrous “warnings” than with disseminating accurate situation reports.

I just got back from Cambodia. One travel advisory I looked at before going, which claimed to be quoting the U.S. State Department, told its readers never to get inside a tuk tuk or open taxi. What a joke. Tuk tuks are a perfectly reasonable way of getting around. It’s inconceivable to me that anyone who has been to Cambodia could possibly have written such nonsense.

A lot of travelers hardly leave the safety of their hotel rooms any more, and when they do, it’s to visit a guidebook-approved tourist trap. What do you think people miss when they vacation in that kind of a bubble?

They’re not missing anything more than the backpacker or adventure crowd is missing by not experiencing the gratis champagne service in first class or the sunset view of the Grand Canal from a suite in the Hotel Danieli in Venice.

To be honest, I’m pretty weary of this idea that luxury or package travel is somehow less authentic than couch surfing or backpacking or showing up in a Third World country and taking outdoor baths in plastic tubs with water dragged up from the river. Backpackers love getting their noses in the air about the legitimacy of their travel, as though the scumbags up the hill in their air-conditioned four stars are somehow not having a real cultural experience. All travel is authentic.

Captain Cook always had his own stateroom with feather pillows and silk sheets, he hobnobbed with the upper crust everywhere he went, he was a stickler for hygiene and never left home without a few cases of good port tucked away on the foredeck — and no one ever accused him of lacking for an adventurous spirit or authentic contact with the locals, what with discovering Australia and being hacked to death by natives in Hawaii and all.

Do you think you’ll ever return to any of the places you visited for your latest book?

Congo almost certainly not. India, maybe, if you paid my way. Disney World, yeah, but only with a kid in tow. Mexico City I’ve already been back to and am going back again in March. What a fantastic city, right up there with London and Hong Kong among my favorite oversized world cities. Mexico City was definitely the big surprise of this book for me. I could live there.

Is there a larger lesson about the world we live in that you want readers to take away from your book?

I make a few arch points in the epilogue, but mostly I just want people to laugh and be entertained. You know what one of my favorite things in the world is? A quick, funny, entertaining, easy read that can get me through a couple of three-hour flights without giving me a headache or boring the shit out of me. For travelers, that’s a valuable and rare commodity and it’s what I go for on every page of the book. If my stories and opinions keep readers engaged for those brutal, endless hours in coach, I’m happy, whether they care about my larger lessons or not.

“Hãy theo đuổi đam mê, thành công sẽ theo đuổi bạn.”

“Hãy theo đuổi đam mê, thành công sẽ theo đuổi bạn.”

Câu nói rất đơn giản của chàng Rancho trong bộ phim nổi tiếng của Ấn Độ – Three Idiots ( 3 Chàng Ngốc ) nhưng nó lại là chìa khóa cho những ai đang đi tìm kiếm sự thành công thật sự trong cuộc sống.

Chúng ta bị lôi cuốn bởi những dục vọng của sự thành công như: tiền bạc, danh vọng, địa vị,…

Chúng ta theo đuổi những ước mơ lớn: Tôi sẽ trở nên giàu có? Tôi sẽ trở nên nổi tiếng? Tôi sẽ tạo ra sự khác biệt?

Nhưng rồi chúng ta càng đuổi theo những điều đó thì lại càng mệt mỏi và kết quả cuối cùng là chúng ta bỏ cuộc.

Tại sao vậy?

Đơn giản đó là do chúng ta làm công việc chúng ta không đam mê, vì thế năng lượng của chúng ta không được tái tạo và tăng lên. Nó ngày càng yếu đi.

Nếu làm công việc chúng ta đam mê, năng lượng sẽ được tăng lên. Làm càng nhiều, cảm hứng càng lớn, năng lượng càng tăng. Mỗi ngày chúng ta đều khao khát được làm việc. Chúng ta cảm thấy hạnh phúc với công việc.

Hãy nghe những người thành công, nổi tiếng và giàu có trên thế giới như Bill Gates; Steve Jobschia sẻ về thành công:

“Trở thành người giàu nhất thế giới trong nghĩa trang không có gì là quan trọng đối với tôi. Đi ngủ vào ban đêm và nghĩ rằng mình đã làm được 1 cái gì đó thật tuyệt vời… điều đó mới quan trọng đối với tôi”.

( Steve Jobs)

Tony Bourdain New Show on CNN

Tony Bourdain via Bon App, not Andrew Zimmern

Here's a funny interview/PR plug from CNN via Bon App with Tony Bourdain talking about his new show on CNN, but not mentioning the water thrown through the windows after the train leaves Yangoon. This show will obviously have much larger budgets than his efforts at his previous channel, which will remain unnamed, so we hope for the best. He's funny and a former junkie. What's not to love?

The folks at Bon App have apparently never heard of a paragraph or page break, so this is the unedited mess they posted on their website. Editors, where are you? Note: I've cleaned up most of the copy, and this is a much more readable post than the link I have provided above. Tony could care less, but I like to keep things clean.

Anthony Bourdain's new show, Parts Unknown, premieres on CNN this Sunday. And right from the get-go, it's a little more ambitious than No Reservations, his long-running show on the Travel Channel. The first season has Bourdain traveling to places like Burma, Libya, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Not exactly anyone's idea of a dream vacation.

The show itself sounds fascinating, but when you're trying to make television in locations that are that war-ridden, remote, and possibly dangerous--Bourdain has already called the Congo episode "the most terrifying, stressful, physically difficult shoot of my life"--you know there have to be some good behind-the-scene stories.

So we called up Tom Vitale, the director who went with Bourdain to shoot the Burma, Libya, Congo, and Spain episodes of Parts Unknown, to ask a few questions about what it's like to make a food show in some of the world's most precarious locations.

What was the biggest punch you had to roll with for this new season?
Burma is sort of just opening up right now, and there are a lot of tourists going there. Not a lot compared to any other country in the region, but the infrastructure in Burma is totally not capable of handling the people who want to go. So even though we planned very early, we couldn't get plane tickets for the whole crew to get to Bagan, Burma's ancient capital. Which meant that half of us had to take an overnight train, which I thought was pretty cool, and we could actually film that. We were told it was a ten-and-a-half-hour ride, but it ended up being 19 hours, all pure terror. It seemed like there had been no work on the infrastructure there since the British left. We were bouncing around so much, it was a million times more terrifying, exciting, and fun than any roller coaster you would go on. We've been on a lot of old trains around the world, but this one certainly takes the cake. You would literally fly out of your seat when it was going fast, bouncing over twisted, warped, tracks with old train carriages. We had sleeping cars, and you'd wake up in mid-air only to, two seconds later, whack back down into your berth.

Was it hard to shoot in Burma?
Because they have this repressive government in Burma, we thought it would be hard to shoot there, but the access there was very cool. We had no minder, at least as far as we could tell, unlike China.

"As far as you could tell"?
The only reason I say "as far as we could tell" is that we were shocked that nobody seemed to be watching us. I mean, even just a couple years ago, if you were seen talking to a westerner in Burma, someone would take down your name, and there would be a knock on your door at 2 in the morning.

Do you typically have government minders?
In nicer places, like Vietnam, without as much political strife, you always have a minder, it's just one of those communist things. But there didn't seem to be one in Burma, unless it was someone who was very sophisticated and never got in our way. But it's sort of paranoid to think that was happening. They knew where we were going, and we stayed in the confines of the tourist triangle, not the ethnic regions on the border, where fighting's still going on.

It was really just shocking there, not just because the government wasn't involved but because the people were so involved. If you compare Burma to some places in Eastern Europe where they haven't had a communist government in 20 years but people are still paranoid, people in Burma were so open with us. We went in prepared for people to button up anytime politics came up, but that did not happen at all.

How did the decision get made to shoot in the Congo?
Part of the reason Tony's always wanted to go there is because of Heart of Darkness, which was written about the Congo River itself. Tony was a sort of armchair traveler long before he dreamt that he would see the world, and he likes a real literary adventure. So the Congo was always on his list because people wouldn't think it was possible, or give us money to go there, which made him want to go all the more. So we started in Goma, you have to go through Rwanda to get to the eastern part of the country, and then went to Kisangani, which was Inner Station, where Kurtz was, though that was obviously a long time ago. It's a big city now.

What was filming in the Democratic Republic of the Congo like?
Congo was definitely one of the more challenging locations we've worked in, but we had a great fixing team of locals who helped us get what we want. Goma was a really heartbreaking place that made Port-au-Prince in Haiti look like Club Med; I was surprised by how rough that was. But Kisangani, in the center of the country, it was still an unstable place, definitely, but one of the big surprises was how nice and friendly everyone was, considering all the shit they've had to deal with, for, I mean, 100 years.

What was the food like?
Congo is not a food lover's land, but the piri-piri peppers were excellent, spicy. There' s a lot of grilled meat you'll have, because it's one of the safe ways to not get sick, because it's cooked right there in front of you. The lack of plumbing in a place like the Congo presents a lot of issues when it comes to food safety. We never got sick, but we're all pretty good at that. You have to have a cast-iron stomach to make it on this show.

In more remote locations like that, does the crew tend to draw crowds?
In a place like the Congo, on the street, you do draw a lot of attention and people do swarm the cameras at that point, but going back to how we roll with the punches, we got a lot of interesting footage trying to get regular street scenes. Within 30 seconds, there would be about 50 kids trying to get up in the camera lens, so it just becomes a part of the show.

In Europe, nobody cares, which makes it a very easy place to film. In Asia, people know who Tony is because he's very popular there. You have a problem with people interrupting scenes for an autograph or picture. He's very gracious about it, more so than me--I just want to get back to shooting. In Congo, it wasn't about us, it was just six white people, which is a pretty rare sight for them, especially with cameras, at least in Kisangani. Goma gets more foreigners, but really very few people go to Kisangani.

Have people ever really harassed the crew, or tried to steal equipment?
The only time I've ever had a camera stolen was in Naples, and we're talking 70 shows at least. It was in the back of the van, and the driver was supposed to be watching things, but he was on the phone or something--the city is notorious for pickpockets, anyway.

Do you get much hostility from the people who live where you're filming?
In general, people treat us really really well, even in places where they don't particularly like Americans. I think it comes back to the food: we're interested in being there, we're not going there to exploit people. Tony generally wants to share a meal with people, and food is how a lot of people express a better part of themselves.

Europe is probably one of the places where we're not treated as nicely, not that we're treated poorly, but nobody cares. There's a lot of "You're not going to inconvenience our restaurant, I don't care about your TV show."

How about in Libya?
Libya was a shockingly friendly place. I think because for so long, Qaddafi was telling everyone how awful the West was and how evil they were, and everyone was just so sick of Qaddafi. Western culture in Libya, unlike some other places in the Middle East, is viewed as a beacon of freedom. We went to one restaurant, Uncle Kentaki, it was a complete rip-off of KFC-slash-McDonald's, such a bizarre place. And you see people really gravitating towards western culture there, you see that in the music and what people are wearing.

How was the food there?
When you say Libya, people think of a desert country, but most of the population is on the Mediterranean coast, and it just has this amazing bounty of unbelievable seafood. We killed, or, not we personally, but we killed a sheep at a barbecue in Misrata, which was a lot of fun. And they actually have pasta--some people claim that it's where pasta was invented, but it's more likely a holdover from the days of Italian colonialism under Mussolini. We had a very interesting sheep ragu pasta.

What's it like making a food show in places where some people might not have enough to go around?
Well, there's food everywhere. Even in the Congo, people are still eating. The question is, is it varied and different, will it look good on TV, is it colorful, will people watching at home think I want to eat that versus That's brown mush. In a place like Congo, people are eating, but they don't really have the luxury to have a lot of fun with the food. That was the thing about Burma, the country's quite poor, but still the food that we saw people eating there was really, really good. People put a lot of thought and effort into it.

Are there any places you've shot that you definitely want to go back to?
Vietnam is probably one of the most magical places I've ever been, and I'd definitely relish the opportunity to go back there anytime. There might be one day when this magical trip around the world ends, and I do something other than stay in my own bed for vacation. When you do what I do for a living, getting on an airplane is not what you do on vacation. Especially because I'm terrified of flying.

You're terrified of flying?!
Half of the crew is. That's often the most nerve-racking part of a shoot, just getting on Cathay Pacific to go to Hong Kong.

How have you stayed in this job for so long?
Compared to somebody giving you an all-expenses-paid ticket around the world, the fear isn't that bad. You just have to get over it. The fear of flying is definitely awful, and doesn't get any better, but I wouldn't let it stop me from going somewhere.

Does it mean that you tend to go for more car rides than small prop plane flights, though?
Generally the smaller planes are a little less terrifying, because you're not in this tube 70 rows back from the pilot in this claustrophobic way. The exception is places like the Congo or the Amazon where bad weather factors in, because bad weather in a small plane is really fucking terrifying.

We took a really weird prop plane in Congo, because Congo has something like the worst commercial aviation safety record on the planet. Planes go down all the time, it's really bad there. When we were trying to get from Kisangani back to Goma, we had three options: a commercial plane, a private plane, or drive. Driving was not going to work, because it takes four days through all kinds of rebel-controlled areas. And our fixer, Dan McCabe, who's a documentary filmmaker working in the Congo, asked us: "Do you want to be in a Boeing going 500 miles an hour when you crash, or a bush plane going 75?"

So we chose the bush plane. It was a very old airplane, and they told us that it was formerly Queen Victoria's flying wardrobe, which would carry her clothes when she flew around the world. That is clearly not true, since Queen Victoria died in 1901, before airplanes were invented. So then they updated it to Queen Elizabeth's flying wardrobe, but we haven't been able to verify. It was a really strange plane, just a box.

Did the flight go okay?
We had a great pilot, but just as we were about to take off, this intense thunderstorm rolled up, so we had to get out. We made it to Goma, but three days later, a big commercial plane crashed right into the city in similar weather, very close to the hotel we were staying in. So we were quite happy we took the bush plane.

Are there any locations where you still want to go, but can't?
Iran and North Korea are probably places we definitely can't go. But CNN really does open up a lot of doors, as far as what they have an appetite for, like Libya and Congo. But Tony doesn't really want to go to places just because they're dangerous, he wants to go because there's a story to tell, or a place that fascinated him. I'm sure a place like North Korea would be very interesting, but the government would have to fall first, because they're very strict about film crews. There wouldn't be much of a point in going now--there would be a minder, and they would show us a very limited cross section of the country. We do our best work when we're down with the people.

The first episode of Parts Unknown, which takes Bourdain (and Tom) to Bruma, airs this Sunday at 9 PM on CNN.

Read More http://www.bonappetit.com/blogsandforums/blogs/badaily/2013/04/bourdain-behind-the-scenes.html#ixzz2QD4mr0kC

The Sad Decline of Rough Guides

Link to Original Story

Google has bought Frommers. That rang a bell: an industry insider told me recently that Penguin quietly tried to sell Rough Guides to Frommers a couple of years ago, but “wanted too much” for it. Ho-hum. Travel publishing is in a really tricky place.

Now I’m not an industry analyst, and I’m not in travel tech, so if you want reasoned, insightful comment, stop reading now and click the links. I’m just a guidebook author. I whinge.

Disclosure: I’ve never written for Frommers. Apart from a bit of freelance editing, in 17 years I’ve never worked for any travel publishers other than Rough Guides.

Back when I started, Rough Guides were huge. They had massive brand recognition in the UK, chiefly on the back of the “Rough Guide to…” TV series – presented most famously by Magenta Devine and Sankha Guha – which ran in the late 80s & early 90s, catching people’s imagination like no TV travel show (arguably, no travel idea in any media) before or since. Lonely Planet had books everywhere, of course, but they were kind of boring, a bit earnest and mundane.

Lonely Planet was Microsoft. Rough Guide was Apple.

Then the Rough Guide founders sold the company to Penguin Books in a two-stage deal, completed in 2002. In ten years since, Penguin killed the brand. Rough Guides went from being a big fish in the small sea of travel publishing to a minnow in the ocean that is the Pearson media conglomerate. Penguin already owned DK, with a huge and globally successful travel brand of its own; RGs became an add-on, with fewer resources and a succession of managing directors who tried to crowbar it into a corporate strategy that was less and less interested in anything that didn’t sell in Jamie Oliver quantities.

Sales reps had bigger fish to fry than the 7th edition of the RG to Farflungistan, so the books – frustratingly, virtually impossible to find outside the UK anyway – began to fade from view in their home market. Cartography and other production processes were hived off to Penguin’s Delhi office: cheaper, but not better. Spinoff pocket guide series came, failed and went. Every year or two came another promise to revamp the RG website to bring it up to LP’s standard; it never happened. RGs remain pretty much invisible online. Ebooks? Digital publishing of any kind? Electronic rights? Negligible.

Those ten years have poleaxed RGs, turning it from a leader into a follower. There’s been a cull of titles, with several dozen 2012/2013 updates “postponed” (read: cancelled): one desperate author has had five of his six titles pulled. The website remains an embarrassment, with the promise of something better to be unveiled, er, sometime soon. The books have been redesigned, though – RGs now feature colour pictures throughout, just like it’s 2003.

The thing that made Rough Guides cool (or, if you prefer, successful) – the voice – has gone. Authors are punch-drunk. Editors are overworked. Even though guidebooks remain trusted (intriguingly, see here for an opposite spin) their raison d’etre has been called into question. What travel brands are cool? None. Content isn’t cool anymore: there’s too much of it.

Devices are cool. Content is just content.