If you’ve visited Istanbul or any of the country of Turkey in the past, you had to stand in line to buy a tourist visa sticker (in cash only, payable in USD or Euro) before getting in a longer line to get through border control and out of the airport. If you forgot to buy the Turkish visa first, you’d have to get out of line and hope that a nice person would let you cut back in once you got the sticker. Now, you can apply online and sail right through to the Immigration line, eliminating one step.
The new e-Visa program is available to citizens of most countries, including the United States, Canada, and European Union. Like the sticker system, it costs $20 and your visa is valid for multiple entries for 90 days (the visa is valid for 180 days but you can only stay up to 90 without applying for residency). You can apply up to 24 hours before departure, though they advise one week. If you forget to apply online, don’t worry, the old visa desk will still be available at the airport.
Russia might be the last place you’d ever think to go surfing but surfers are nothing if not adventurous. In pursuit of the perfect wave, they are liable to go just about anywhere on the planet – from the frigid Arctic waters of Scandinavia to Pakistan’s perilous Makran Coast. So when they show up on the remote volcanic coasts of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, is anyone really that surprised?
These guys from SURFER Magazine are particularly dedicated to their favorite sport, crashing through isolated Siberian forest in a military-grade off-road truck to find unexplored shores. On the way they find enough hot springs, friendly locals, pristine rivers and wild forest to satisfy anybody’s adventure travel cravings, even if sweet shallow barrels don’t get you stoked.
You know the drill. Mid-sized city revives a long-dormant warehouse district with art galleries, a baseball park, hipster bars, food trucks, even a Spaghetti Warehouse. Locals love it, then brace for a tourism boom that doesn’t really come.
But Tulsa’s reviving Brady District is different. It has Woody Guthrie.
In truth, this city in the Oklahoma hills where I grew up hasn’t offered much outside appeal since the oil wells dried up or Route 66 became a toll road. And for decades, the Brady, across the tracks from downtown, was the quietest, darkest place in a town better known for its TV evangelist Oral Roberts. In fact, the Brady might have been left for good if not for a couple classic music venues, including Cain’s Ballroom, where Bob Wills put swing into country music in the ’30s.
Now the once-abandoned red-brick townhouses are home to glass-blowing schools, violin shops, falafel stands, cafes, outdoor films and yoga classes, and even the Hanson brothers’ studio 3CG. Nora Guthrie, the frizzy haired daughter of the legendary folk hero, calls this area the perfect place for the new Woody Guthrie Center. “It’s like SoHo in 1969 to 1971,” she says of her former New York neighborhood. “There’s this budding creativity, not caring about a specific idea, just a notion to do something.”
In other words, Woody would approve.And that’s nice considering his home state long didn’t approve of him. Born in 1912 in Okemah (a 70-minute drive southwest), Woody wrote roughly 3000 songs before succumbing to Huntington’s Disease at 55 in 1967. Soon afterwards, Okemah’s little library refused the family’s offers to house a donation of Woody’s items due to the singer’s perceived “commie” leanings. (Never mind that, at the time of Woody’s birth in 1912, one in five Okies voted socialist.)
Lucky for Tulsa, it turns out. Across from Guthrie Green, the center is part museum, part archives. Its exhibits tell the tale of some of the rambler’s homes, including the Texas panhandle, Los Angeles and his final home New York City.
In an hour or two, you can peek at Bob Dylan’s hand-written scrawl of his 1961 “Song to Woody” or Woody’s fiddle marked with his well-known WWII-era slogan (“this machine kills fascists”), then see videos on the Dust Bowl, which prompted the westward Okie migration that Woody sung about on his first album “The Dust Bowl Ballads” (1940).
The heart of the center, philosophically and spatially, is devoted to “This Land is Your Land,” written near Times Square in 1943 as a sort of rebuttal to a song Woody loathed, “God Bless America.” Videos show many of the renditions of the song, including a funny German version and a bouncy Glen Campbell singing along in the ’60s in the most fanciful of green kerchiefs.
Nearby are plenty of ways to expand a day. At Valkyrie, a roomy lounge that was once used as a location in the film Rumblefish, young Tulsa entrepreneurs sip cocktails and local microbrews and debate local questions like whether Hanson are good tippers. One offered me some Oklahoma-shaped dog biscuits she makes from beer. A couple doors down, the Tavern on Brady plays up its Prohibition-era incarnation in look, but goes all-out mod in cuisine. I went with a surprisingly good banh mi salad, a breadless take on the Vietnamese sandwich with a faithful dousing of fish sauce.
If you go, look to stay at The Mayo, a ’20s art deco hotel that reopened a few years ago, and pick up Benjamin Lytal’s excellent new novel, “A Map of Tulsa,” which plays out downtown and the Brady District in the ’90s. If you write, or like those who do, spend an early Friday evening at the classic Tulsa Press Club downtown, where Tulsa World beat reporters and the like assemble to drink and talk the written word.
Just like the old days.
Robert Reid (www.reidontravel.com) grew up in Tulsa. His first time to the Brady was in the summer of ’83, when Alfie Mizer needed company to see some band from Ireland called U2. Though just as moved as Alfie, Robert didn’t rip apart his matching Ozzy concert shirt during “Sunday Bloody Sunday.”
Do you find yourself bored by the typical hotel’s amenities? Butler services, organic mini bars and other bells and whistles just don’t do it for you anymore? Well how about staying in a hotel with a vertical wind tunnel? And maybe after that you can unwind in the world’s first zero-gravity spa? It sounds pretty out there, but those features are actually part of the plans for a Space Hotel in Barcelona, Spain.
The company behind the project, Mobilona, recently announced their vision for the complex, which includes a hotel, private apartments, a 24-hour shopping mall and a marina. All of this would be built on a Dubai-style, man-made island giving guests sea views no matter which way their room faces. A stay in the 2,000-suite hotel – which looks like something out of a sci-fi movie – would cost between 300 and 1500 euros per night.However, Barcelona’s mayor insists he won’t have any of it, saying the futuristic hotel doesn’t fit with his vision of the city’s future. “We have no intention of turning Barcelona into a spectacle,” he told local media. Despite this, plans for the space-age hotel may live to see another day, with the Mobilona announcing similar projects in Los Angeles and Hong Kong.
Yesterday, 80-year-old mountaineer Yiuchiro Miura successfully reached the summit of Mt. Everest, setting a new age record in the process. Miura, who has climbed the mountain on two previous occasions, is now the oldest person to ever stand on top of the tallest mountain on the planet. But just how long he’ll hold that distinction remains to be seen.
There were some concerns about the weather conditions heading to the summit, as the forecasts had called for high winds. Bad weather could have scrubbed Miura’s summit attempt, but fortunately the predicted shift didn’t come. As a result, it was a good day for climbing and although it was cold on the summit, the Japanese alpinist and his son Gota managed to reach the top in a safe and timely fashion. They spent roughly a half-hour on the summit celebrating their accomplishment and calling home to their support team via satellite phone before heading back down.
We told you about Miura’s quest to climb Everest a few weeks back, noting at the time that he was vying for the title of the oldest to achieve that feat with 81-year-old Min Bahadur Sherchan of Nepal. Sherchan has yet to begin his climb as a stomach ailment has kept him in Base Camp in recent days. He says that he is feeling stronger now and hopes to make a summit bid next week. If he is successful, he’ll wrest the title of oldest Everest climber away from his Japanese rival. In 2008, at the age of 76, Sherchan topped out one day ahead of Miura, nabbing the record that has stood for the past five years.
Sherchan will have to have a little luck go his way, however, as the weather forecasts indicate the current summit window will close in the next few days. It is unclear whether or not another window will open before the end of the month, which traditionally sees a shifting of the jet stream that signals the arrival of the seasonal monsoons. When that happens, no one will be able to climb Everest until the fall at the earliest.