Travel Read: 100 Places Every Woman Should Go

by Brenda Yun on

I never knew there could be a book so thoughtful and inspiring for women as this one. Stephanie Elizondo Griest’s second travel book, which lists far more than just 100 Places Every Woman Should Go, is truly an encyclopedia for women travelers. It’s the kind of book that could never have existed fifty years ago, but is so refreshing that free-spirited, female travelers should feel grateful that it exists now, and fully prepared for that next trip into the wide, wonderful world.

Griest’s great book is packed with helpful historical information, inspiring stories, and travel tips. It’s broken up into nine sections — my favorite being the first: “Powerful Women and Their Places in History.” There’s so much worth digesting in each locale described. For instance, I had no idea that the word “lesbian” came from the birthplace of Sappho (Lesbos, Greece). Griest fills each description with great travel tips that often include specific street addresses for particularly noteworthy sights.What I like most about the 100 places she chooses is that she shies away from identifying places that every woman obviously dreams of traveling to, like Venice, Rome, and Paris. Instead, she paves a new path for women, encouraging us to visit Japan’s 88 sacred temples or stroll through the public squares of Samarkand, one of the world’s oldest cities in Uzbekistan.

Griest does not limit her list to concrete or singular places. Sometimes, she finds a way to take us to virtual spots like the Museum of Menstruation or creates lists like “Best Bungee Jumping Locales,” “Sexiest Lingerie Shops,” or “Places to Pet Fuzzy Animals.” These 100 “places” are really all-encompassing, and Griest manages to take us on an imaginative journey around the world, packing all her feminine know-how into each description.

I did find, occasionally, that there were some places missing from some of the identified places in her list. For instance, I was baffled as to why two Russian writers were on Griest’s list of “Famous Women Writers and Their Creative Nooks,” but Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and Jane Austen were absent. I was additionally confused that cooking classes in India and Thailand were not on the list of “Culinary Class Destinations.”

Griest’s opinions of places are somewhat biased, too. While she does a fairly good job covering the globe, a single locale in French Polynesia or the South Pacific is missing, and some places like Oaxaca, Angkor Wat, and New York are mentioned several times. Her college town of Austin landed on the list, but places like Budapest and Cairo are never acknowledged.

With every list, however, there is bound to be some bias and some personal flair and choice involved, and Griest’s original and creative sensibilities are still well-worth reading about. The great thing about this book is that you can flip to a place description, be perfectly entertained and inspired, and then tuck the book away until the next time you feel compelled to read about the places you can go. Or, you can read it in one sitting like I did and be completely blown away by the amazing places in this one world that it’s hard to imagine why we live in one city for so long and not just pack our bags and get out there and see some if not all of it.

Click here to read my review of Griest’s first travel book, “Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana.” My review of Griest’s third travel book, “Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines” is forthcoming, along with my interview with the author in early January. Feel free to jot me an email (Brenda DOT Yun AT weblogsinc DOT com) if you have a question for Stephanie.

Click the images to learn about the most unusual museums in the world — featuring everything from funeral customs, to penises, to velvet paintings, to stripping.


The Best Trips to the Australian Outback

by Kraig Becker on

The Times Online has published another great travel story today, this time listing it’s five best trips in the Australian Outback, a place that has gone back on the radar of many travelers recently thanks to the release of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia.

Each of the five trips offers it’s own particular allure and sense of adventure. For example, a visit to the the El Questro Homestead offers visitors the chance to take in the rugged, remote countryside, while staying in a luxury resort with a rustic flair. On the other hand, the Home Valley Station is considered to be more of the “Aboriginal Outback”, allowing visitors to go on a cattle drive or on a fishing excursion, often at budget rates.

The trip descriptions include information on when, and when not, to visit each location, and what you can expect to pay. There are also suggestions for a variety of activities, that can include day safaris, camping trips, and horseback riding across the vast expanses of the Outback.

While the film hasn’t exactly set the box office on fire, anyone who has seen it will tell you that it does, at the very least, inspire viewers to visit Australia. The cinematography is simply stunning at times, and with plenty of shots of countryside to lure in visitors from abroad. Just don’t expect to find a shirtless Hugh Jackman around every corner.

Will film ‘Australia’ spur tourism Down Under?

by Jeffrey White on

This past Sunday — a cold, icy day here in Connecticut — I went and saw the new Baz Luhrmann epic “Australia.”

It was indeed epic, if a little convoluted in parts and downright weird in others. Overall, I’d say it was pretty good, and full of spectacular scenery of Australia’s rugged Northern Territory and the Kimberly region of Western Australia.

Tourism Australia is hoping the movie will mean a surge in visitors Down Under, and has launched a $26 million worldwide ad campaign based on the movie, says the Associated Press.

The state of Western Australia is spending $1.4 million of its own money on another ad campaign, and the Northern Territory is throwing in $400,000 from its own coffers.

While the movie is set in the Northern Territory, many locations from around Australia feature, including scenes shot near the Whitsunday Islands in the northeast. Closer to the film’s supposed location, there are generous shots of working cattle stations at El Questro and Home Valley, the sandstone escarpments of the Cockburn Range and the must-see Bungle Bungle Range of the Kimberly (pictured).

The AP reports that various tour operators have begun offering tours of the region.

It’s probably a little too early to tell whether the movie can create the kind of interest in a place that “Lord of the Rings” did for the south island of New Zealand. For one thing, Australia’s north is not, as a travel destination, for the faint of heart.

The Sounds of Travel 10: “Read About It”

by Jeffrey White on

Here at Gadling we’ll be highlight some of our favorite sounds from the road and giving you a sample of each — maybe you’ll find the same inspiration that we did, but at the very least, hopefully you’ll think that they’re good songs.

Got a favorite of your own? Leave it in the Comments and we’ll post it at the end of the series.

“Read About It” by Midnight Oil


Midnight Oil’s “Read About It” is not a road song, really, not in the sense that the Eagles’ “Take It Easy” is a road song or Tom Cochrane’s “Life is a Highway” is a road song or the Chili Pepper’s “Higher Ground” is a road song.

In other words, you wouldn’t necessarily go to this cut first having just pulled on the highway and wound down the windows.

But for me the song, and more importantly the band, is very much rooted in a travel experience, which I guess makes it another kind of road song.

I spent half of 1998 living in Australia. That seems like a long time ago as I write this, but I can easily close my eyes and recall the details of that time, how the country’s light looked, how the country smelled, the vibes of its city streets, and how in not a few parts the sheer distances and openness you confront could make you feel very, very small indeed.

I went everywhere, from the central outback to the Kimberly to the shores of the Thursday Islands to the dense inland trails of Tasmania. I talked to people.

If that time had a soundtrack, I suppose it would have been composed of Midnight Oil songs.
I can’t think of another band that is so of a place as Midnight Oil. Midnight Oil is of Australia – its music is rooted in the land and the people, as are the topics the band sings about.

You could probably spend a weekend listening to their entire oeuvre and receive a pretty good crash course on Australian history and culture: Its artists, its colonial and penal past, its environment and geography, its industry, its media, its cities and towns, its spaces, its relationship with its indigenous citizens.

(On that last one, it’s somewhat surprising, when you really think about it, that the Oils’ biggest chart-topper in the US was a passionate song about Aboriginal land rights – “Beds are Burning” – a topic that doesn’t necessarily scream hit.)

The band does turn its attention beyond Australia at times, usually to rail against arms races or nuclear negligence or corporate greed – this is the band, after all, that played its anti-corporate railer “King of the Mountain” on the back of a flat-bed truck outside an Exxon office building in downtown New York. Yet even these songs have an Australian sensibility in that they seem like shouts from a distant place to the wider world – which is very much an element of Australian society. Things sometime have to be done louder there just get people elsewhere to listen.

Probably if I look deep inside myself, my time in Australia was the time in my life when I started becoming angry about a lot of things in the world – and that was suited for the Oils too, because their songs reflect that same kind of anger.

I don’t know whether I came to understand Australia better through Midnight Oil songs or Midnight Oils songs better through traveling around Australia. Probably a little bit of both.

What I do know is that both realities – the band and the traveling – fed off each other. Things I saw turned up in Oils songs; things frontman Peter Garrett sang about would flash at the windows of whatever buss or taxi or car I was in. You can’t really understand what “Beds are Burning” is about, for instance, until you spend some time in a place like Broome, in the far northwest of the country.

But I’ve singled out “Read About It,” I know. There’s a reason: You can’t just blithely travel through Australia. You experience it. And to get the full impact of Midnight Oil, you have to do the same — and that means live. Both encounters – with land and band – are raw, intense, visceral, big.

Veterans of Oils shows will tell you that these outings are not something you simply go to but also go through.

So relentless is the experience of a Midnight Oil concert that when it’s over you’re left standing, dazed and unsure of what has just transpired during the past two hours.

That’s how I felt when I first saw them in Melbourne, when they played this song. (Four years later I would see an entire crowd on Boston Common stand in much the same sort of depleted haze after the Oils finished up a short six-song set on Earth Day. It felt like everyone was thinking, Who were those guys?, and you could almost feel the energy rolling out of the surroundings, like a breeze along your arm, as the band left the stage.)

I think this live performance of “Read About It,” from a 2005 concert at the Sydney Cricket Grounds benefiting the victims of the Asian Tsunami, showcases a little bit of this intensity.

Is travel in Australia like attending a Midnight Oil show? I don’t want to go too far with this – I feel already like I’m treading on unstable ground.

But maybe, for me, yes, it is a little like that.

Midnight Oil broke up in 2004, and the imposing, dance-challenged Garrett is now Australia’s secretary of the environment.

But Midnight Oil’s songs, whenever I put them on, take me back to those days of travel. To me at least, the band’s music is Australia.

Aussie Backpackers Look to London Sperm Banks to Fund Their Travels

by Josh Lew on

London fertility clinics are reporting that up to one-third of their sperm donors are from foreign countries. Many of these donors are Australian backpackers on extended tours of the UK and Europe. They have found fertility clinics to be a decent source of income. Though the money is not great, repeat donors (always welcomed by the clinics because they only have to be screened once) can make more than $1200 over the course of several months.

A British law, passed in 2005, might be helping increase the demand for Australian donors. The law says that children conceived by donated sperm have the right to contact their genetic father at the age of 18. Living on the other side of the globe affords these backpackers from Down Under a bit more anonymity than local London residents.

What do British people think of the trend? Clinics welcome it. After the passage of the 2005 notification law, the number of local donors shrunk considerably. So sperm banks have no choice but to look to foreigners to fill the void.