Skywalk at the Grand Canyon

by Erik Olsen on

If you’re like me, every time you go to the Grand Canyon, you don’t think, wow, what a glorious testament to the passage of time. No, you say to yourself instead: hey, why can’t someone come up with some cheesy new tourist attraction here like some kind of glass bottom trail.

And so it goes. A new attraction called the Skywalk is being built over the Grand Canyon. It is horseshoe-shaped (several pirate ship versions with a plank were rejected) and will jut from the canyon’s lip to offer a straight-down 4,000 foot, vertigo-inducing view of the canyon floor. How much would such an attraction cost, you might be wondering. A mere $30 million. And just so you libertarian watchdog types don’t get your panties in a knot, the Skywalk will be financed by a Las Vegas businessman. So you can also be sure that the cheesiness factor will be really low. In fact, the women wearing pasties and collecting your money are being trained to say “Hello” AND “Thank you!”.

Of course, this being America, lots of folks don’t like the idea. For example a group of Native American elders is debating whether the Skywalk will disturb sacred ground. What, disturb it more than 3,000,000 over-weight tourists carrying plastic Happy Meal gew gaws already do?

Ilya and Evgeny’s Great Adventure

by Erik Olsen on

Here’s one from the pre-Borat era. It’s a book, a travelogue if you will, from two satirical writers from the Soviet Union who were writing for the Russian newspaper Pravda. Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov came to the U.S as “special correspondents” and drove across the country and back on a ten-week trip, keeping a detailed record of their journey. The book is said to be a work of humor, if such a thing is possible from two writers from the Soviet Union, and is said to be a “wonderful lost work”.

To be honest, I would LOVE to get my hands on this, to see how people viewed America not only from the viewpoint of 60 years ago, but from a Communist country. The book is titled Odnoetazhnaia Amerika or Single-Storied America. In a rather sad twist, both writers died soon after the publication of Odnoetazhnaia Amerika, Ilf from tuberculosis contracted during his travels in the States and Petrov in a plane crash while working as a war correspondent.

The Glimpse Calendar

by Erik Olsen on

Activist travel site The Glimpse has got a nice little gift idea for you. Their 2007 Glimpse Calendar is a rather unusual, but seemingly beautiful series of photos that are said to depict various family scenes in countries around the world. The list of countries includes Kenya, Cambodia, Fiji, India, Myanmar, Chile, Thailand, Ghana and Portugal.

Lonely Planet’s Blue List

by Erik Olsen on

Here at gadling, we’re all about finding new travel ideas. And equally, we’re about pointing you to places where those ideas are most abundant. Well, where abundance is concerned, I have just closed the covers on a cornucopia of ideas that, frankly, has me feeling a little exhausted right now.

Lonely Planet’s new edition of its Blue List series is a compelling page turner that, if you’re like me, will cause an immediate shortage of yellow post-its. Those post-its now cling to the inside pages of my Blue List guide, making it look a bit like a paper peacock flattened by a semi.

The Blue List guide, subtitled “The Best in Travel 2007” provides page after page of sumptuous photos and informative text about interesting places and things to do in them all over the globe. The ideas start off with a calendar section that groups together events by month. For example, December has the Festival of the Oases in Tunisia and the Hornbill Festival in India. Chances are, you’ll have to Google these for more info, but they’re a fine start.

Other recommendations in the book are broken out by activity, so if you are, for example, a fan of scuba diving, you can get a good idea of the top trips for bubble blowers. The books lists the Cocos Islands in Costa Rica and Chuuk lagoon in Micronesia among their top spots. Or let’s say you have long believed in UFOs and want to design a trip for you and your ET-loving friends? Well, you can do that, too, with their paranormal trips section.

Then savor my favorite section, called the Go List, which breaks out LP’s top picks for places to visit in the coming year. We’re NOT talking Florida and Vegas here. We’re talking about exotic, less-explored locales like Maluku, Indonesia and Gabon. Then there’s a section on gadgets and the best places to wed and dark travel and, well, more and more.

If I have any complaints, it that while the book really whets your appetite, you don’t leave feeling completly satisfied. In fact, you leave a bit hungrier than before. But as I say, maybe that’s what Google, or LP’s country-specific guides are there for. Either way, keeping to their fine tradition of helping you REALLY get out there, the good folks at Lonely Planet have done a fine job with this new book.

11 Spring Street

by Erik Olsen on

It was rather startling news for many of us who live in New York City to learn that the building at 11 Spring Street, a very famous street art canvas would soon be shut down for residential redevelopment, with all the art inside to disappear as part of the deal. So sad. I’ve walked by the building so many times and have marveled at the genuine artistry on the building’s walls.

Hopefully, they will figure out a way, other than photographs of preserving what’s there. But for now, photos are all we have, and so I direct you to this post over at Gothamist that shows the building’s interior art which, I’m sure you’ll agree, is worth some perservation effort.