Today is St. Brendan’s feast day. To the Irish, St. Brendan needs no introduction. For those less fortunate in their birth, let me tell you that he may have been Ireland’s first adventure traveler.
Saint Brendan was an Irish holy man who lived from 484 to 577 AD. Little is known about his life, and even his entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia is rather short. What we do know about him mostly comes from a strange tale called “the Voyage of St Brendan the Navigator,” written down in the ninth century and rewritten with various changes in several later manuscripts.
It’s an account of a seven-year journey he and his followers took across the Atlantic, where they met Judas sitting on a rock, landed on what they thought was an island only to discover it was a sea monster, were tempted by a mermaid, and saw many other strange and wondrous sights. They got into lots of danger, not the least from some pesky devils, but the good Saint Brendan used his holy might to see them through.
They eventually landed on the fabled Isle of the Blessed far to the west of Ireland. This is what has attracted the attention of some historians. Could the fantastic tale hide the truth that the Irish came to America a thousand years before Columbus?
Sadly, there’s no real evidence for that. While several eager researchers with more imagination than methodology have claimed they’ve found ancient Irish script or that places like Mystery Hill are Irish settlements, their claims fall down under scrutiny.
But, as believers like to say, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and there are some tantalizing clues that hint the Irish really did journey across the sea in the early Middle Ages. It’s firmly established that Irish monks settled in the Faroe Islands in the sixth century. The Faroes are about halfway between Scotland and Iceland. Viking sagas record that when they first went to settle Iceland in the late ninth century, they found Irish monks there. There are also vague references in the Viking sagas and in medieval archives in Hanover hinting that Irish monks made it to Greenland too.
%Gallery-155425%From Greenland, of course, it’s not much of a jump to North America. The monks wanted to live far away from the evils of the world and were willing to cross the ocean to do so.
How did they sail all that distance? In tough little boats called currachs, made of a wickerwork frame with hides stretched over it. One would think these soft boats with no keel wouldn’t last two minutes in the open ocean, but British adventurer Tim Severin proved it could be done. In 1976, he and his crew sailed a reconstruction of a medieval currach on the very route I’ve described. The boat, christened Brendan, was 36 feet long, had two masts, and was made with tanned ox hides sealed with wool grease and tied together with more than two miles of leather thongs. While Brendan says sailing it was like “skidding across the waves like a tea tray,” the team did make it 4,500 miles across the ocean. His book on the adventure, “The Brendan Voyage,” is a cracking good read.
Although Severin proved the Irish could have made it to America, it doesn’t mean they did. Severin had the advantage of modern nautical charts and sailed confident in the knowledge that there was indeed land where he was headed. So until archaeologists dig up a medieval Irish church in North America, it looks like St. Brendan’s voyage will remain a mystery.
I’ve felt an odd kinship with Malta ever since I created a minor international incident with the tiny island nation by dressing up like Colonel Gaddafi in an 8th grade model U.N. exercise in 1986. When my teacher decided to throw me a curveball by assigning me the task of dressing up like a citizen of Malta, I was initially displeased. In the pre-Internet age, it wasn’t easy to ascertain how the Maltese dressed if you lived in Buffalo, New York, as I did.
I dressed up like Gaddafi because Malta and Libya seemed close enough on the map and I had no better ideas. A photo of me in Arab garb made it into The Buffalo News and once the Maltese got wind of it, they were none too pleased. In their indignant response, Mario Cacciottolo, the private secretary of the Prime Minister of Malta, told me that I should try to correct the misperception I’d created regarding their country. But I was a 13-year-old kid living in Buffalo. How was I going to do that?
My school was alarmed by the letter and sent it to the State Department. Several months later, the Desk Officer for Malta sent me a letter encouraging me to consider a career in diplomacy. I did just that in my 30’s. Over the last quarter of a century, I’ve traveled extensively in more than 50 countries, including most of Europe. All this time, Malta’s been on my radar, but I’ve been circling the place without actually landing there.Over the winter, I attempted to secure a phone interview with Mr. Cacciottolo via the Maltese embassy in Washington, but the Maltese ambassador said that the matter was closed. Mario accepted my apology but he didn’t want to speak to me. I wondered whether the embassy actually passed on my request and, if they had, why Mario didn’t want to talk to me.
In February, I watched a documentary on the Costa Concordia disaster and decided to look into going on a Costa cruise, with the idea that they’d be offering bargain rates. Perusing their website, the cheapest cruise I could find also happened to make a full day stop in Valletta, Malta’s capital. I was hooked.
Seeing the old port of Valletta, with its picturesque sprawl of shipping cranes and indestructible, uniformly sandstone colored buildings set against a perfectly blue sky had me chomping at the bit to explore the city that had been looming in the back of my consciousness for more than one-fourth of a century.
I was the first person off the boat and made a beeline for a tourist information hut in the port. It was 7.45 a.m. and 21-year-old Kathleen Polidano was having a coffee and getting ready for the usual onslaught of map-requesting tourists when I ambled in with photocopies of myself representing Malta in the St. Gregory the Great School Model U.N of 1986 and the indignant response I received from the Maltese.
I explained my story and as soon as I pulled out the photocopy of the press clipping, she burst out laughing.
“This is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said.
I told her I was looking for Mario Cacciottolo, and showed her the address and phone number I’d found in an online phone directory. Without my asking, she said, “Can we call him? I want to hear what he has to say.”
It rang and rang but Mario didn’t answer. I chatted with her a bit and she reassured me that I wasn’t the only foreigner who was clueless about Malta, a nation of just 122 square miles that’s been ruled by Greeks, Romans, Arabs, the Hapsburgs and the British, among others.
“A lot of people don’t even know we’re an independent country,” she lamented. “We’ve been independent from Great Britain since 1964, but I guess the news travels slowly for some people.”
I walked uphill towards the old town and immediately noticed the British influence – hotels with British names, bright red British phone booths and an entrance to the city called Victoria Gate. And most people I stopped to ask for directions could speak English, in addition to Maltese.
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Watching Valletta wake up was joy – old men labored to raise the shutters on their storefronts, women filed quietly into the St. Paul Shipwreck Church and murmured responsorial psalms, and a pleasantly quiet buzz pervaded the beautifully decaying streets. The streets are called triqs in the Maltese language, which sounds like an exotic, melodic mix of Italian and Arabic.
After a stroll through the Upper Barrakka Gardens, which offers a stunning panorama of the city, I saw a line of men outside a stall called Champ on the Old Theater Street near St. John’s Cathedral, and decided to join them. I followed their lead and ordered a Maltese ricotta cheese pastry called a pastizzi, one of the Malta’s national treats, and a coffee. They use the euro in Malta and the bill came to 70 cents – 40 for the coffee and 30 for the pastizzi.
I can’t remember the last time I had a cup of coffee for less than $1, let alone 50 cents, and the pastizzi’s artery clogging goodness was so satisfying that I ended up getting a second one. Every street I wandered down seemed to have new discoveries – a crumbling piazza, an old man in an ancient looking workshop, a time warp café that looked like a WW2 era postcard.
But I wasn’t in town to frolic on the ancient streets; I wanted to know what was going on in Malta in 1986, when I got the letter, and I wanted to find Mario. I paid a visit to the National Library and met Carmen Muscat, a Maltese librarian who wasn’t as amused by my story as Kathleen was.
“What were you thinking?” she asked, when shown the photo of me dressed like Gaddafi.
“I was only 13,” I replied, more than a little defensive.
“But we’re closer to Sicily than Libya, why didn’t you dress up like an Italian?”
The real answer is because it’s more fun to dress up like Gaddafi than an Italian, but I let it slide. Carmen read through the letter from Mario and then called her husband on the cellphone to see if he knew him.
“My husband used to know him,” she reported back. “But they lost touch a long time ago. My husband studied Public Affairs and so did Cacciottolo.”
She pulled out the local phonebook to look him up and found a different entry than the one I found online. She was certain that the entry she found was the correct one.
“Look, here,” she said, pointing to a line in the phone book. “He has a B.A. and a Diploma of Public Affairs, so this must be him.”
She explained that in Malta, people listed their degrees in the telephone book, and Mario had a Bachelor of Arts degree and a DPA, a Diploma of Public Affairs, listed after his name. She jotted down the rest of the address to me but it made no sense. She wrote, “Il Holma, Triq Xmiexi, Msida.”
Carmen explained that “Il Holma” means “The Dream” in Maltese. His home had a name, not a number. The street he lived on was called Xmiexi, which is pronounced shhh-mee-she in Maltese. Msida was a town just outside the center of the city. We tried to call the number listed for Mario in the phonebook, but once again, he didn’t answer.
I met up with my wife and children and spent a few hours visiting Malta’s stunning old capital, Mdina, a half-hour outside of Valletta. As we arrived back in Valletta, my wife said that she had no interest in tracking down Mario, so I was on my own. I bought a box of chocolates for him and felt a bit like a nervous schoolboy heading off to first date as I alighted onto a public bus bound for Msida. But would I find Mario, and if I did, what on earth would we say to each other, after all these years?
Millions of people get around Istanbul each day via dolmuş, a shared taxi. Similar to the colectivo of Latin America or the dollar vans of New York City, a dolmuş is generally a mini-bus or van that follows a fixed route for a fixed price. At the beginning of the route, the bus waits until it is full of passengers (dolmuş means stuffed in Turkish) before departing. You hand your money (theoretically a share of a private taxi’s rate, but usually 2-3 TL) up to the driver, and hop out whenever you get to your destination; there are rarely official bus stops.
The video above may look like it’s from the 1950s, but it’s actually from 1986. As recently as a few decades ago, the dolmuş vehicle of choice wasn’t the large yellow van you see today, but classic American cars from the mid-century and pre-war. Some of the vintage cars were customized with a third bench to stuff in more passengers!
For those interested in keeping vacation weight off while also doing something good for the planet, the Cottage Lodge in Brockenhurst, United Kingdom, is offering a unique amenity. Instead of allowing guests to turn on the television the old-fashioned way, the bed and breakfast features a pedal-to-power LCD television in their Standing Hat room.
The purpose of the unusually active method of television powering is purely environmental. While you’d think some travelers may not be happy about having to work to turn on their TV, the accommodation has actually received positive feedback, especially from cyclists.
“I focused on three things when constructing the room: reducing waste, minimizing pollution and using resources with the lowest impact possible,” the hotel’s owner, Christina Simons, explained to the Telegraph. “I also wanted to show that being green can also be exciting and fun, and guests love cycling on the bike.”
And for those with low stamina, don’t worry, you also have the option to make use of the electric supply generated by photovoltaic cells on the roof, so you’ll still be going green while you travel. In fact, the hotel utilizes many sustainable features, like solar panel heating in the summer, heating via a wood burning stove in the winter, low-impact building materials and furniture created by a local tree surgeon from a single fallen beech tree.
Images of sinking ships aren’t normally the best advertisements for cruise lines, but after watching the Discovery Channel’s documentary on the ill-fated Costa Concordia, it made me want to book a cruise. And not just any cruise – a Costa cruise. Why?
I’ve traveled extensively in more than 50 countries over the last two decades on almost every imaginable mode of transport – cars, trains, ferries, planes and buses – but I haven’t been on a cruise since a family trip way back in 1985. I had a blast on that cruise but somehow in the intervening years, I acquired this fuzzy notion that cruises were for families, senior citizens and inexperienced travelers incapable of exploring on their own.
But after reading Pico Iyer’s convincing story, “Confessions of a Cruise Convert,” about the merits of cruising in Conde Naste, I resolved to give it a shot. With the Costa Concordia crash in January, and an engine room fire aboard the Costa Allegra in late February, it’s been a rough year for Costa. But while others were recoiling in horror while watching the NatGeo and Discovery documentaries on the Concordia this spring, I still wanted to check out Costa on my own.I checked Costa’s website and, sure enough, found some great deals. Prices for a seven-night cruise departing from Savona, Italy, aboard the recently renovated Neo Romantica started at just $399 for adults and $159 for children for a mid-April departure. The itinerary included stops in Barcelona, Palma di Mallorca, Valletta, Catania and Naples. I did the math and realized that we might spend more money on our own, staying in hotels, eating at restaurants and traveling by train around Italy.
I don’t take the safety issue lightly. Particularly because I’m traveling with my wife and two children, ages 2 and 4. But my parents have traveled with Costa before and had nothing but good experiences, and, in light of the Concordia fiasco, I guessed that there’s probably no safer time to travel on Costa than right now. What follows is a brief review of our experience on the Neo Romantica.
Safety. In the wake of the Concordia disaster, Costa now distributes red cards to each passenger that they have to turn in to prove they attended a security procedure briefing prior to departure. I had an opportunity to interview Salvatore Donato, the ship’s captain, and he was quite candid in discussing what went wrong on the Concordia.
“We are more than safe,” he said. “Safety for us first, before everything else. We all have families and want to go back home safely.”
Donato has been with Costa since 1990 and knows Captain Schettino, the Concordia’s captain who is now under house arrest and is facing criminal charges in Italy.
“We all know Schettino, and still, none of us can believe he would act as he did,” he said. “Every one of us, we are still asking ourselves, why, why. I think he lost his mind after the incident, not before. After he hit the rock, too much information arrived in his brain and the light switched off. The light switched off.”
During our cruise, we encountered some brisk winds and mildly inclement weather at times, but none of us ever felt seasick. In fact, the gentle swaying of the boat helped us sleep at night.
Moving past the Concordia. Our ship had a capacity of 1,800 and there were 927 passengers on board, with only 28 from English speaking countries. The majority of the ship’s passengers were from Italy, France, Germany and Switzerland, but we met people from around the world, and most seemed motivated by Costa’s prices. No one I spoke to was the least bit concerned about safety issues.
Jacomien Melis, a woman we met from The Netherlands, told us she booked her cruise before the Concordia sank, but didn’t think about canceling for a moment.
“You can crash at any time, doing anything,” she said. “Riding in a car, on a bus, on a plane.”
At the port in Savona, a family from Kelowna, British Colombia that had just completed a cruise on the Costa Atlantica told me that Costa sent them a letter after the Concordia disaster offering them the opportunity to cancel their cruise with a full refund, but they elected not to cancel and were happy they didn’t. They said their cruise had 1,600 passengers out of a capacity of 2,500.
Staterooms. The Neo Romantica was completely renovated in 2011, after a fire aboard the Romantica, and the ship was beautifully remodeled. I had an opportunity to check out a variety of cabins (see videos below) and I thought they were all quite smartly designed and furnished. The beds have memory foam mattresses, which are superbly comfortable, water pressure in the showers is excellent, and the rooms come equipped with brand new, 47-inch Samsung flat-panel TV’s. The toiletries they leave in the room are super high-end and the housekeepers leave ice and fresh water in the room every day.
Food. One of the advantages of choosing an Italian ship is the food, which we found to be almost uniformly excellent both in the main dining room and the buffet. Every evening, I looked forward to returning to our cabin, where we’d find that evening’s menu in our mailbox. I went a bit crazy, I have to admit. At most dinners, I ordered 1-2 appetizers, a cheese plate, 1-2 pastas, 1-2 entrees, gelato, plus another dessert, if I was feeling particularly gluttonous, which I usually was.
Our kids are extremely picky eaters, but the staff was willing to make them anything they wanted, within reason. The kids’ menus featured standards like hot dogs and chicken fingers but also gourmet items like braised leg of Spanish spring lamb and chicken Milanese.
As one would expect on an Italian ship, the pastas and gelato were outstanding. Potato gnocci, pumpkin ravioli and agnolotti with a Piedmont style meat sauce were a few of my favorites. The ship also has a pizzeria with Neapolitan style, wood-fire pizzas, at a cost of 7 euros for as much as you want.
Service. The mostly Filipino waiters and housekeepers are extremely friendly and outgoing. Diner in the dining room takes about 1.5 hours per night, a challenge for families with small children, but that’s what you get when you order 5-10 courses per night, as we did. If we ate more modestly, it wouldn’t have taken so long.
Ports. For me, Malta was a highlight, so I was happy we had a full day in Valletta. We also had a full day in Palma, which I was lukewarm on, and half days in Barcelona, Catania and Naples. If you don’t take the ship’s excursions, it’s hard to go very far from the port in Catania and Naples on your own without worrying you’ll miss the departure.
Entertainment. The floorshows weren’t my cup of tea but they had a few musicians that I loved – a classical ensemble, a flamenco guitarist and a blues/folk singer from Poland.
Room for Improvement. Internet access is an issue on most cruise lines and I found the speed on the Neo Romantica to be hit or miss. At times, it was quite good and other times it was practically unusable. If you buy access in three-hour increments, it costs 8 euros per hour, which isn’t bad by industry standards.
The only other issues I had with the ship probably come down to its size and concept. The Neo Romantica is Costa’s smallest ship, and that has both plusses and minuses. We found out after booking that the Neo Romantica is probably the least kid-oriented ship in the fleet, and indeed, there isn’t a lot for kids to do on board. They have a kids’ club, but it’s only open to children age 3 and up. We have a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old who’s almost 3. I’m told that the best Costa ships for kids are the Costa Favolosa and the Costa Fascinosa.
Conclusion. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the Neo Romantica but it’s probably best suited for families with older children, couples and seniors. If you’re looking for a nicely renovated ship, with quality staterooms, great food and an interesting itinerary at great prices, it’s probably a great option for you.
