Free Accommodation in Paris

by Iva Skoch on

If you are into mixing culture with adventure travel, Paris is the new hot location. Apparently, you can pitch your tent right on the banks of the Seine these days.

Friends who just honeymooned in Paris sent me this picture, actually a series of pictures. Look closely – yes, those are all tents of the homeless along the Seine.

This is what they said: “How on Earth can these folk camp around The Pompidou Center? At the shore of the Seine beneath the Musee D’Orsay? With dogs. Fires. Reading newspapers. Playing instruments with competence. One bloke in the Palais de Tokyo was charging his phone, playing Nintendo GameBoy, rolling smokes and sipping a six pack of Belgian blond beer. Is this a common phenomenon for…art galleries?”

Well, after a glasses of chilled Chablis, I guess you could call this a postmodern approach to housing. I hear that the views are great, but the service is so so. And, of course, it is always BYOB.

BT Blogger Blab Redux

by Erik Olsen on

OK, so I have to finish up from my last post about the Budget Travel blogger roundtable I participated in last week at the Tribeca Cinemas here in New York City. So, yes, it was all very interesting and informative and I was able to chat with lots of folks who, in some form or another, have made travel part of their jobs. The BT folks did a marvelous job making us feel important and learned, even if nothing could be further from the truth. But I want to talk about my dinner after the event. You see, at the bloggers blab session, I spoke with a nice young lady who happened to work for one of my favorite outfitter companies around: Mountain Travel Sobek.

Over the years I’ve received through the mail several Sobek catalogs, and let me tell you, if you’ve ever wanted to be inspired and beaten down depressed at the same time, get your hands on one. The catalog is filled with the most wanderlust-inducing photos and trips you will ever see. Sadly, you will probably not find the time or the money to do many of them. But anyway, the company was started over 30 years ago by a group of guys who wanted to help people see the world, to EXPERIENCE it. One of these guys is named Richard Bangs

Bangs went on to do many other notable things with his career, and I’ve followed several of them over the years. First of all, he founded Terra Quest and then went on to become a founding executive at Microsoft’s Expedia, the online travel site that was sold off to (I believe) Barry Diller’s Interactive Corp. Then he started what I still regard as one of the best online travel magazines ever put together: Mungo Park. What’s sad is that the site no longer seems to be available and instead links to the Expedia site. Tragedy that, because the stories would still be lovely to read now. Mungo Park did some killer trips and pioneering Web journalism: they went riding motorcycles with Lyle Lovett in Chile, to the Triobriand Islands with Dr. Ruth, to Newfoundland with Martha Stewart. Oh, how we might long for the days when Microsoft threw money at online content.

Anyhow, Bangs then, or at some point thereafter, went on to do many other things, but most recently he hosted one of the first multi-media-based travel shows on Yahoo. This was at the time when Yahoo was all about original content and their newly-hired TV exec Lloyd Braun headed up a couple of Web-only programs. Kevin Sites’ Hot Zones was one of them, and the other was Richard Bangs’s Adventures. We’ve blogged about the show a bunch of times here. Why? Because it was great, absolutely great. But there was a problem with it: you couldn’t see it on a Mac. The Yahoo yahoos for some impossible-to-comprehend reason didn’t support Macs. Retarded! And then just recently, as we dutifully reported, they pulled the plug on Bangs’s show in part because it wasn’t getting the traffic they expected.

Double-retarded.

So anyway that is a LONG way to go (if you’re still reading) to discover that I arrived at dinner that night, and who is seated next to me at the table, but Richard Bangs. Imagine my delight. Honestly, this was like meeting Jay-Z or Steve jobs for some people. And there I was for the whole evening, quaffing beer and talking about travel, the Internet and all manner of other things with Bangs. A real treat, let me tell you.

Well, I’ve gone on long enough, but I have to say it was exciting for me and if you’ve read this far, well, thanks a lot. And do me a favor and send Yahoo a nasty note telling them how lame they are.

Fall Issue of Planet Magazine Out Now

by Adrienne Wilson on

Every time Planet mag hits the shelves I feel as if I have this reader loyalty type thing to spread the word and paint the town with the news. If you’re not a subscriber I suggest you sign-up today. With just four issues a year it’s easy to let one slip by and well, you don’t want that do you? So how about I stop sounding preachy and things on the glossy and just tell you what’s inside this issue?

There’s the usual Satellite, Diary, Divinity, and Greenspace pages, but also inside, especially for fall and the 5th anniversary issue are pieces on Élodie Bouchez, Roberto Rossellini, Baptiste Ibar, Kirby Dick, and Katharine Hamnett among many others. As far as I’m concerned Planet magazine nails it when it comes to global culture!

And that’s my two cents for now.

Motoring Through Indochina

by Iva Skoch on

A friend recommended an adventure that I’m dying to do: a week motorcycling throughout Vietnam. He’s done it two years in a row, and recommends an outfit called Explore Indochina. The outfit is apparently run an Aussie and a Brit that act as tour guides and speak fluent Vietnamese.

They host a couple of rides each month, and cover different areas of the country (as well as Laos and Cambodia). They put together only small groups (5 or less).

Picture this: 6+ days straddling a 125cc two-stroke Belorussian motorbike, rolling through the beautiful scenery of Vietnam. It’s muddy, it’s wet, it’s real. That’s my idea of cruising!

Makes me want to dust off that copy of Jupiter’s Travels.

Atomic Museum is a Blast

by Erik Olsen on

One of the best history books I’ve ever read is The History of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. I say that as a flat out fact. The story of the development of the ultimate weapon of mass destruction is one of the most fascinating tales of genius, intrigue, politics, war and personality ever written. Whenever I get a chance to pick up an article or visit a place associated with the atomic bomb, I do so.

And so it came as a pleasant surprise to the this piece in the Wall Street journal about the Atomic Testing Museum, which lies not far from the Las Vegas Strip. It is a place that both celebrates and ruminates over the difficult, but deeply intriguing history of nuclear testing in the United States. The 8,000-square-foot museum opened in March of 2005, and is the work of the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation. It sounds cool and kitschy, if such a thing can be said about a place that celebrates a technology that could wipe life off the planet. The ticket booth resembles the site’s guard station; the movie theater looks like a bunker. “Countdown to next show,” flashes an ominous red clock. A roar and a blast of air greet visitors in the concrete theater simulating, one would guess, the shock wave of a blast rather than the guest’s chair at the Bill O’Reilly show. Ha ha. The museum sketches the history of the nuclear age, which started with the first atomic bomb test in the New Mexico desert in 1945.