Hike with Dogs–or Not

by Jamie Rhein on

I once co-owned a Russian Wolfhound. When hiking with this dog, people noticed. “What kind of dog is that?!” they’d exclaim as we rounded a mountain switchback. This dog looked flat when it lay on the ground. When hiking, he looked downright downtrodden. In retrospect, hiking may not have been his favorite pastime. Or, perhaps it was. Regardless, when we hiked, he came along.

I thought about these hiking days after I came across an article about the mountain climbers who were rescued recently on Mt. Hood. They had a dog to keep them warm. According to the article, some experts think it’s not the best idea to take a dog on hikes up mountains. Who these experts might be, or how many experts there are who feel this way, I have no idea.

There are loads of articles about the joys of hiking with dogs. One website offers a bundle of info. Hiking with Dogs tells about the best places to hike in the U.S. and Canada with your canine buddy. It looks like Canada may have more dog friendly options if you’re talking national parks, but if you like beaches for your dog outings, check out the site’s link to A Bark on the Beach, an e-book you can download.

How to Write Guidebooks

by Erik Olsen on

If you’re like me, when you travel along with your guidebook, you always thumb through it to the author bio and then fantasize momentarily about being a guidebook writer yourself. Ah, the endless travel. The meals and hotel rooms. Sniffing mattresses and checking out all the local hot and historic spots. How, you wonder to yourself, can one become a travel guidebook writer?

Well, first it helps if you can write. But it also helps if you have an understanding of how guidebooks get assembled, what the business side of guidebooks is about and how all the players are. You can sit down and spend a good deal of time researching this stuff yourself, or you can attend a useful little class on the subject like this one happening tomorrow night at Media Bistro.

The class is being taught by Robert Reid, a Brooklyn-based travel writer, who has updated guidebooks for Lonely Planet including those for New York City, Central America, the Trans-Siberian Railway, and Myanmar…the last of which must have been a real hoot.

Media Bistro (run be the ever-boa-clad Laurel Touby) puts on great little seminars and I highly recommend checking one out if you are interested in the topic and happen to live in or be in town. Cost for the three-hour seminar is $65.

Come Back Alive: Pelton’s Website

by Neil Woodburn on

One of my favorite modern day travelers is Robert Young Pelton, author of The World’s Most Dangerous Places.

Pelton specializes in places that are so far off the beaten path they tend to be mined, booby-trapped, and teeming with guerillas–such as Grozny for example. So far, he has managed to come back alive every time–although he was kidnapped once and held for ransom.

Like all good travelers these days, Pelton has launched his own website.

ComeBackAlive.com is rather self-explanatory in its purpose; it offers practical advice to those visiting dangerous lands so that they too can return home alive. Dangerpedia is one such way of dispensing this information. This wiki program allows travelers to post warnings and tips about trouble spots they’ve visited so that future travelers heading the same direction can, you guessed it, come back alive. It’s still a little weak right now and many countries are missing entries, but I imagine this will change over time.

The site also includes the typical recommendations one normally finds on travel sites, such as where to eat and sleep. This section, however, isn’t organized as well as it could be. In fact, much of site has some growing pains to work through (while other parts, such as the Dangerous Places section are excellent). It is still very much worth a stop, however, especially if you are heading off into the unknown.

“Orléans Embrace” with “The Secret Gardens of the Vieux Carré”

by Willy Volk on
Orléans Embrace is set to be published April 1, along with the currently out-of-print The Secret Gardens of the Vieux Carré: The Historic French Quarter of New Orleans. Created by documentarists TJ Fisher and Roy F. Guste, Jr., and featuring many of the images of Louis Sahuc Photo Works, the books feature 49 black-and-white and 329 color images that complement the text. Orléans Embrace is a tribute to New Orleans generally, while The Secret Gardens of the Vieux Carré explores the beauty of the French Quarter and its gardens through photos — both before and after Hurricane Katrina roared through the region.

Available on April 1, the set retails for $50 through Morgana Press, or $31.50 through Amazon. Seeing the gardens for yourself may be more rewarding viscerally, but for the armchair traveler or the civic-minded — amazingly, 100% of publisher profits will be donated to French Quarter preservation groups — this book may be the next best thing.

Great Polish Travel Writer Dies

by Neil Woodburn on

The world lost a great travel writer last week when Ryszard Kapuscinski passed away.

Kapuscinski was a highly regarded Polish journalist who, in addition to penning copious travel articles and 20 books, also covered 27 revolutions around the globe. For his part in uncovering the world at large, he was sentenced to death four separate times by various dictators.

According to an obituary in the LA Times, Kapuscinski spent quite a bit of his time “in desolate outposts of Africa in part because the Polish news agency could not afford to bring him home.”

His first trip outside of communist Poland was quite a revelation. After requesting the opportunity to report from abroad, he was finally given an assignment to go to India. Imagine having never seen anything but gray, communist Poland your whole life and suddenly finding yourself in the heart of 1956 India.

The New Yorker has thoughtfully reprinted Kapuscinski’s personal narrative of the eye-opening account of this journey. It is a rich read conveying an emotion and perspective that doesn’t really exist in this world anymore. “What was it like on the other side,” he writes. “It would, of course, be… different. But what did ‘different’ mean?”

Take a moment to relish this account of what would eventually be a seasoned traveler embarking on his first journey. And if you like what you read, you might want to check out one of his books. My favorite, Imperium, recounts the fall of the Soviet Union and is well worth your time.