Melbourne-based Intrepid Travel – known for its cultural and food-focused trips to remote corners of the planet – is now offering 20 percent off over 350 of their trips, including the newly-launched Food Adventures. The discount is good for all trips departing before August 31, 2013.
Last fall, Intrepid partnered up with The Perennial Plate, which documents these culinary adventures in bi-weekly video clips. If that’s not inspiration enough, check out these “Summer of Adventure” trips on offer: Northern Spain (Barcelona to San Sebastian), India (Delhi to Goa), and Vietnam (Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City).
The trips run from four to 14 days, and have been designed in collaboration with renowned chefs, cookbook authors and other food experts, including Susan Feniger and Tracey Lister. Trip prices include accommodation, ground transportation, a local guide, activities listed on the itinerary and, in many cases, cooking classes, meals with locals and trips to local markets.
Cherry blossoms mark the true beginning of spring, along with the arrival of glorious sunshine, refreshing breezes and all around spectacular picnic weather. Within Seoul, the most talked about place to see the blossoms is on Yeouido, a large island on the Han River where many of the tallest skyscrapers in Korea are located.
Yeouido’s Spring Flower Festival, which centers around the cherry blossoms, provides great views of the river, with streets closed off to car traffic, an impressive amount of food vendors and over 1,400 cherry blossom trees in less than a 4-mile stretch.
Sunset is the absolute perfect time to view cherry blossoms.
An entire evening can be set aside during cherry blossom season just to walk amongst the trees. It makes for a calmingly beautiful after-dinner treat and hardly gets boring, not even for those that never pay flowers any attention during the rest of the year, like myself.
While up close they aren’t remarkable; all together they make for an amazing sight.
Cherry blossoms are definitely worth planning a trip around, and crops like these aren’t only limited to Asia and Washington D.C. In Korea, the season typically runs from the end of March through almost all of April and there are numerous festivals built around them all over the country.
Streets all around Seoul are lined with beautiful rows of cherry blossoms.
After night falls on Yeouido, the trees are bathed in colored lights, heightening their light pink hues. It’s no wonder why so many photos are taken.
Yeouido lights up the trees at night, giving the flowers surreal colors.
As with most things even mildly popular in Seoul, there is always an enormous crowd on Yeouido during the peak blooming times.
Cherry blossoms are endlessly photogenic.
Unfortunately, cherry blossoms are incredibly fleeting and are now disappearing throughout Korea. No longer are the streets lined with gorgeous white flowers nor the light falling of its petals, marking the one time of year when gutters are actually beautiful.
A picnic under a cherry blossom tree is the perfect way to spend a spring afternoon.
As always, for more on Korean culture, food and oddities, read more from the Kimchi-ite here.
After driving for miles on a dirt road through the pitch darkness and seeing no signs of life anywhere, I was certain we were lost. It was a perfect early August evening in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and we were looking for the Thursday night square dance in Glencoe Mills, a blink-and-you’ll-miss it hamlet in Cape Breton’s untrammeled interior. The road was so dark and so eerily quiet that when I finally saw another car coming towards us from the opposite direction, I flagged the driver to stop.
“You’re almost there,” said the old man.
“But how will we know when we’ve arrived?” I asked.
“Oh, you’ll see all the cars,” he said.
And he was right; the whole area was so eerily silent because on Thursday nights in the summertime, almost everyone within a 20 mile radius descends on the community center in Glencoe Mills to dance to traditional Gaelic fiddle music. We paid our $5 entry fee and stepped into a large hall that was filled with men, women and children from age 5 to about 85 dancing in pairs and in big circles as a band on a small stage played soul stirring traditional Gaelic fiddle music. Almost as soon as we sat down, a man in his 70’s came over and swept my wife onto the dance floor, where she remained for most of the night. On Cape Breton’s Ceilidh Trail in the summer, the music and the strong sense of community are infectious, and there are no spectators, only participants.
As the weather finally warms up and I start to think about where I want to go this summer, I can’t think of another place in North America I would rather return to than Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. With dramatically situated sandy beaches, fresh seafood, scenic drives, great hikes and a rich musical heritage, it’s easily one of the continent’s most distinctive places, blessedly devoid of tacky strip malls and hi-rise hotels. From the U.S., Cape Breton isn’t that easy to get to- it’s a three hour drive from Halifax to the south end of the island-but the payoff is that it’s far less crowded than the Maine coast and other coastal retreats on the eastern seaboard in summer.
In the southwest corner of the island, you’ll find the Ceilidh Trail, (pronounced kay-lee) Cape Breton’s music heritage trail, where you’ll have a blast taking in ceilidhs and square dances in the summer. Ceilidhs are social gatherings and in the Cape Breton musical parlance, the term is usually synonymous with a concert. The square dances are, in my estimation, more fun because they feature live music but also plenty of dancing. From mid June through the end of August, you can take in ceilidhs and square dances nearly every night of the week, and you should plan your itinerary around the music calendar.
We spent a few nights in Mabou at the Mabou River Inn ($110-170 in the summer, less offseason) and found it to be a comfortable base for exploring the Cape Breton music scene, which is reflective of the region’s rich Scottish heritage. The Red Shoe Pub in Mabou has great food and even better live music nearly every night of the week in summer and during the annual Celtic Colors festival each October, when hundreds of Gaelic musicians descend upon Cape Breton for a nine-day celebration of traditional Gaelic music and culture.
There’s a square dance in West Mabou on Saturday nights year round, but the other dances are only held in the summer. The Normaway Inn in Margaree Valley has square dances and concerts on Wednesday night in July and August, and on Friday nights from June 28-Ocobter 20. Other than those dances, the best ones are Thursday night in Glencoe Mills and Friday night in Southwest Margaree. (And there are great ceilidhs in Mabou on Tuesday nights and in Judique on Wednesday nights).
West of the town of Mabou, you can hike along the coast in the Cape Mabou Highlands area, with is lovely. The Ceilidh Trail ends just up the road in Margaree, and that’s where the scenic Cabot Trail loop begins. The trail loops around and through the Cape Breton Highlands National Park and features dramatic cliffs and Kodak moments around every bend.
As you head north, the linguistic terrain transforms from Gaelic to French. Nova Scotia was the epicenter of a larger maritime territory French migrants called Acadia. Their descendants still live in a string of villages north of the Ceilidh Trail – Belle Cote, Terre Noire, Cap Lemoine, Cheticamp – and speak a peculiar French dialect.
We stayed in Cheticamp, then drove clockwise around the trail, staying near Ingonish, which has a nice beach, and in Baddeck before heading back to Halifax, which is also a great place to spend a couple days. In many ways, Cape Breton reminds me a lot of the Scottish Highlands, only with better weather, less unintelligible accents and colder beer. (No knock on Scotland, of course, which I adore) You won’t find scorching hot weather, even in July or August, but when we lived in sweltering D.C., the 70 something temperatures we found on Cape Breton felt like a gift from God.
Note: There is no better primer for a trip to Cape Breton than picking up a copy of the Smithsonian Folkways album “The Heart of Cape Breton (Live).”
The Courtauld Gallery in London has opened a new exhibition of two of the smallest Bibles you’ll ever see.
“Dess Alten Testaments Mittler” and“Dess Neuen Testaments Mittler” are tiny illustrated Bibles produced by two sisters from Augsburg, Germany, in the late 17th century. It was a time of increased private devotion, when people looked for more from religion than the rituals in the church. Personal Bibles and images hung in the home became popular for those who could afford them and were used as the individual’s way to reach the Divine.
Tiny Bibles like these were generally for children, but the fine quality of the engravings on these examples hint that they were for adults. If you won’t make it to London this summer, you can turn the pages of one of the Bibles and admire the detailed yet miniscule artwork at this webpage.
The exhibit is part of the “Illuminating Objects” series, prepared by postgraduate students on their area of study. “Dess Alten Testaments Mittler: Dess Neuen Testaments Mittler” runs from May 1 to July 22.
Yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of the first American to summit Mt. Everest, the tallest mountain on the planet at 29,029 feet in height. That successful venture came ten years after Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay made the first ascent of that mountain, but in the decade that had followed only four other climbers had managed to stand on top. The 1963 expedition would not only put an American on the summit for the first time, it would also open an entirely new route that had never been climbed before. That expedition would also go down in history as one of the most daring and successful ever, setting the standard for those that would follow.
Ironically enough, the expedition was actually led by a transplanted Swiss climber by the name of Norman Dyhrenfurth. He took a team that consisted of 19 Americans, 32 Sherpas and 909 porters carrying 27 tons of gear and equipment to the mountain. In those days there was no airport in the Everest region, so that trek began in Kathmandu and covered 183 miles on foot. It took a month just to reach Base Camp, which was where the real work would begin.
In the early weeks of the expedition the team concentrated on acclimatizing to the altitude and preparing for the challenges of climbing the South Col route pioneered by Hillary and Norgay. Those efforts payed off early on when 34-year-old Jim Whittaker of Seattle, WA, and his Sherpa guide Nawang Gombu, planted the U.S. flag at the summit on May 1. It was a huge day for Whittaker personally and an even bigger one for American mountaineering.But the expedition was far from over. On May 22, three weeks after Whittaker’s historic climb, four more Americans would head to the top of the world. Barry Bishop and Lute Jerstad would once again go up the South Col while their companions Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld would attempt a difficult new route along the West Ridge. No one had ever approached the summit from that direction before and it would be a true test of their skill and endurance. Not only did Hornbein and Unsoeld successfully manage to complete that route, they met Bishop and Jerstad on the summit. Those two men had endured an eight hour climb in high winds to reach the top as well, and while there they managed to capture the first ever video footage from the summit of Everest.
Any mountaineer will be quick to tell you that the summit is only the halfway point and the four men still had to get back down safely. They started to descend just as the darkness of night settled over the mountain, making an already treacherous experience even worse. At one point, the two groups became separated and Bishop and Jerstad had to stand in place for several hours, calling out to the companions in an effort to help lead them with the sound of their voices. Eventually they were reunited, and the descent would continue, but after stumbling along in the darkness for several more hours they decided to risk bivouacing for the night.
Using a rock outcropping as shelter, the men huddled close for warmth. Without tents or a sleeping bag, they knew their chances of survival were slim, but they didn’t relish the idea of falling down the South Col in the darkness either. The high winds subsided some, bringing a small measure of comfort. But they were all freezing, exhausted and hungry. Their chances of survival looked grim.
But survive they did and the dawn brought them new hope. Resuming their descent they came across teammate Dave Dingman, who had abandoned his own summit bid to search for his missing friends. Dingman and a Sherpa brought bottled oxygen for the team and then helped to safely lead them back down the mountain. Unsoeld and Bishop had suffered severe frostbite to their feet however and would need to be evacuated as quickly as possible. In the end, Unsoeld would lose nine of his toes and Bishop would lose all ten, plus the tips of his little fingers.
When it was over the expedition set a new standard for high altitude mountaineering. The U.S. team had put five climbers on the summit, more than any other before it. It also opened a new route along the West Ridge, which remains one of the greatest achievements in mountaineering history. The summit push marked the first time that two teams simultaneously approached the summit from different routes as well, something that others would do in the years that followed.
The five-minute video below was released by National Geographic following this important climb back in 1963. It spotlights some of the difficult conditions the American team faced while on Everest. Today, there are hundreds of successful summits each year on that mountain, but back then it remained an elusive and deadly challenge.