One for the Road: Colour – Travels Through the Paintbox

by Kelly Amabile on

This book beckoned me from a front table at Artisan Books on Gertrude St. in Melbourne’s Fitzroy neighborhood. The 2006 paperback version I bought has the bold cover shown here, although I’ve seen several other versions of this book that was originally released in 2002. Regardless of what it looks like, Victoria Finlay’s Colour: Travels Through The Paintbox is a masterpiece. Just as I enjoy looking at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers again and again, so too will I delight in returning to passages from this multicolored exploration of our world.

From ochre to violet, Findlay unearths every possible facet of the rainbow. Her research takes her to Spain, for Consuegra’s Saffron Festival (yellow), to lapis lazuli mines in Sar-e-sang, Afghanistan (blue), and to Mexico, in search of the purple of the Mixtecs (violet). Finlay takes the reader along on this magical journey as she creates a spectacular canvas loaded with pigments, dyes, gems and stones. Her quest to uncover the history and origins of color reveals a rich palette that stretches to every corner of our planet. It would be wonderful to see a map painted to match the discoveries from her color expeditions.

Indie travel guides – pipe dream or way of the future?

by Leif Pettersen on

With all due respect to my generous client Lonely Planet, without whom I’d still be an obscure, broke, moonshine junkie in a forlorn corner of Romania, guidebook authors wallowing below the Sushi Line are increasingly probing new “Screw the Man” applications for their hard-won expertise – namely their very own online travel guides.

There’s certainly something to be said for a trusted brand name guidebook, but equally independently produced, digital travel guides allow authors to toss in all kinds of wacky content in addition to the usual sights/eating/sleeping content, uncorrupted by editors, guidelines, house styles and meddling lawyers.

A 2,000 word, absurdly detailed walking guide to Tijuana? Why not? A sidebar entitled “Top Ten Curse Words You Should Know Before Attending an Italian Football (Soccer) Match”? Bring it on! Why [insert your least favorite German city] sucks? I’m all ears.

This developing genre was recently augmented by the completion of Robert Reid’s online guide to Vietnam. As Reid rightly points out, the advantages of an independent online travel guide are numerous:

• It’s free – Guidebooks cost $25. Why pay?
• It’s fresher. Unlike a guidebook, turn-around time is immediate.
• You can customize it. The most common complaint guidebook users have is having to tote around 400 pages they’ll never use.
• It’s more direct, personalized. With my site I can ‘tell it like it is’.
• Anyone can talk with the author. [Just] hit ‘contact’.

In addition to this excellent resource, other free sites serving the online travel community include Croatia Traveller, Kabul Caravan, Turkey Travel Planner, Broke-Ass Stewart’s Guide to Living Cheaply in San Francisco, and (cough), the Romania and Moldova Travel Guide (now with extra moonshine).

For the time being, these independent travel guides are usually not money-making ventures (and boy do they take a lot of time to put together!), thus the current scarcity. However, as print media gasps to its inevitable conclusion – one decade, mark my words – the online stage is set for authors to leverage their expertise and provide autonomous, interactive, up-to-the-minute travel information for anyone with an internet connection.

Photos from Afghanistan

by Grant Martin on

Earlier this week I wrote a brief article on dangerous places to travel and places that I wouldn’t go, even if I had a free ticket. Afghanistan was on the top of my list of places that I’d like to see, although no time in the near future. While I’ll concede that it is a dangerous place and should be considered neither as an off-the-beaten path nor a hipster destination, I do believe that the country has a wealth of intrinsic beauty and that one day I hope it will be better accessible to us Westerners.

To that effect, a friend of mine formerly working in Afghanistan has just published photos from his time there. They are a beautiful side to a country fraught with turmoil and despair, and seeing them has helped me put my own personal issues aside, if perhaps only temporarily.

Take a look.

%Gallery-9128%

Oh, the places you won’t go.

by Grant Martin on

In a recent conversation with a traveler friend of mine, we got onto the topic of places we wouldn’t go if we were given a free ticket. Both of us being fairly adventurous travelers, it was a pretty short list on either side.

But it begs the question of what people are willing to accept as vacation. Many people I know want to go to the beach, plop down on the sand, have their feet rubbed and read the latest Dan Brown book (the cripple did it, regardless of what book you’re reading).

Others, want to get the highest “adventure” value out of their dollar and would prefer to chew on tree roots in the Peruvian jungle with pygmies. Each voyage has its own spot on the travel spectrum; I’d like to think that I lean a little further to the adventure side vs. the posh side, but there are times when I’ve broken down and checked into the Club Med.

At the top of my list of places to see if it was paid for? Afghanistan. As Cassie Biggs of the AP recently found out, the underground tourism industry in the war torn country does exist, its just a matter of having the courage and money to make the trip. Personally, I would one day like to see the site of the Bamyan Buddhas and the fields of poppies that are supposed to blanket the countryside. Some day, I guess.

The three places I wouldn’t go? Iraq, Sudan and Somalia. What are yours?

For the record, a great documentary on the destruction of the Bamyan Buddhas can be found here.

Golf Love: In Afghanistan and More

by Jamie Rhein on

Thai writer Pira Sudham wrote a short story once about a farmer who lost his rice farm to a golf course developer because he didn’t understand the terms of the contract. I can’t remember which book the story is in, but for anyone interested in understanding the lives of Thai farmers, Pira Sudham is an excellent place to start. Monsoon Country is the novel that marked his literary success. After reading Sudham’s story, one of my students at the time, a 10th grader at the Singapore American School, said that he would never look at golf courses in the same way. When a guy I once worked with said that he loves golf courses in Asia because they have the best views, I almost choked and kept myself from shouting out, “Haven’t you ever read Pira Sudham?”

However, there is one golf course in Asia that I just read about in a New York Times article by Kirk Semple, that I so want to succeed. In Kabul, Afghanistan, one man started the Kabul Golf Course three years ago in anticipation of its success. The golf course business has not gone as well as he had hoped for, but he refuses to hang up his clubs for good. The course is a symbol to him that things will get better in his country. The description of the currently grassless golf course reminded me of a golf course I went to in Jos, Nigeria with a banker that I stayed with as part of a Rotary Club exchange program. Instead of the greens, it had the browns. I don’t think my friend who likes golf courses would have liked the view from that one all that much. Personally, I was happy to see that water wasn’t being wasted turning the brown to green. In Afghanistan though, a little green wouldn’t hurt.