Photo Of The Day: Copan Carpet In Honduras

by Jeremy Kressmann on

This Sunday marks the Easter Holiday in much of the world, and worshippers everywhere are marking the day with uniquely local traditions. As evidence check out this photo taken by Flickr user Aldaberto.H.Vega in Honduras. As part of Semana Santa locals lay out brilliant “carpets” on the streets composed of colorful sawdust and flowers documenting the Stations of the Cross. The Gadling team liked the eye-catching visuals of the scene so much that fellow blogger Meg Nesterov used almost exactly the same image in a photo during Easter 2011. Seems like quite a sight to see, whether you’re a practicing Christian or simply curious about the world.

Have any great photos to share from your own travels? Why not upload them to our Gadling group on Flickr? We might just pick one of yours as our Photo of the Day.

Tubohotel Takes Exotic Camping To The Next Level

by Jessica Festa on

Just when you thought you’d seen it all – tree hotels, salt palaces, undersea lodges and enormous boot-shaped bed and breakfasts — something new comes along that tests the limits of accommodation possibilities. Located in Tepoztlán, Mexico, is the Tubohotel (shown right), a unique experiential property that allows guests to sleep in massive tube pipes stacked like pyramids.

In line with ecotourism, the tubes are made of recycled tube pipe materials. While this may sound like you’ll be sleeping in a sewer, the company claims the experience is actually very comfortable. The rooms each come with a queen bed, fan, desk light, storage compartments under the bed, a towel rack with towels, a plush comforter and soft sheets. Furthermore, the tubes are apparently quite warm. Or, as Tubohotel says, the rooms maintain a “comfortable, almost tubo-licious temperature during the day and night.”

While you won’t be able to bathe in the room, the property boasts two clean, spacious bathrooms with hot water, private showers and toilets, although you will have to bring your own robes and slippers.

No matter how nice the rooms at Tubohotel are you’re not going to want to spend all day sitting in a pipe. Luckily, the hotel also has an onsite Infinity pool and can arrange for cultural cooking classes with celebrity chef Ana Garcia. Nature activities like mountain climbing, hiking and biking are also abound. Not to mention, a bar and restaurant are coming soon to the property.

Prices start at 300 pesos (about $24) per night, based on double occupancy. Click here to learn more or make a reservation.

Whole Foods To Ban Sale Of Unsustainable Seafood: The Global Impact

by Laurel Miller on

In a landmark move, Whole Foods has just announced that starting on April 22 — Earth Day — it will no longer sell seafood from depleted or otherwise unsustainable fisheries, or species harvested with ecologically damaging methods such as trawling. The industry ratings for these species are determined by the Blue Ocean Institute and California’s Monterey Bay Aquarium, which produces a popular “Seafood Watch Recommendations” pocket guide and phone app for shoppers. Say bye-bye to Atlantic halibut, skate, octopus and sole.

It’s a bold move for the world’s largest, most powerful green grocery chain to defer customer demand for better buying practices, but according to Whole Foods’ seafood quality standards coordinator Carrie Brownstein via an AP article, “In the long term, what we’re really looking to do is help reverse trends of overfishing and by-catch, so that really we can move the industry as a whole toward greater sustainability.”

So how does what you eat here at home have a global impact? Depletion of any fishery always has a negative effect on the food chain because of a ripple effect. Foreign fisheries may also employ unsound fishing methods that increase by-catch (think dolphins and other aquatic species, albatross, etc.). You may love Chilean sea bass (it’s actually Patagonian toothfish) but it has long been a fishery on the verge of collapse and by purchasing it at the store or ordering it at a restaurant, you create demand for that product. Once a species is extinct, it can seriously throw a marine ecosystem out of whack. Plus, you know, extinction kind of sucks.

It’s harder for world travelers to be on top of what’s sustainable and what’s not, especially if, like me, you love street food. In developing nations, especially countries with a coastline, fishing is usually a key part of the local economy. But saving our rapidly depleting oceans trumps putting a few pennies in local pockets: they’re not looking at the big picture, which is the more seafood we consume, the less there is to sell.

Order something besides seafood unless you’re positive it’s caught in a non-environmentally degrading way, from a healthy fishery. Go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Recommendations site for a global guide to what’s sustainable and what’s not. It offers alternatives, so odds are, you can travel and have your lobster dinner, too.

[Photo credit: Flickr user Eneas]

Travel magazines target the 1%

by Dave Seminara on

An image of a striking, leggy blonde standing in the shadow of a seventeenth-century church in Mykonos graces the cover of the March issue of Condé Nast Traveler. She’s wearing a short, silky dress and, as we find out on page 122 in the magazine’s “where to buy” segment, it costs $6,900.

And if you like dresses that cost ten times the per capita GDP of Haiti, you’ll love Condé Nast’s suggested nine-and-a-half hour day trip in Mykonos, which will set you back $3,140, not including accommodation.

I like to indulge in the fantasy world of glossy travel magazines as much as anyone else. But I’ve always disliked how many of these publications cater to sybarites who stay in hotels that charge more for one night than most people pay in a month’s rent — the kind of people who view travel as nothing more than an excuse to go shopping. It can be fun to see how the other half lives, but it can also be depressing.

I can’t help but feel poor every time I read Afar, Travel & Leisure, Condé Nast and other magazines. Let’s face it, the pages of most glossy travel and city magazines these days are awash in conspicuous consumption – eat, shop, drink, spend, consume. For every nugget about the people the writer met, there are ten about all the expensive places they ate/drank/slept/shopped.

I’ve been a compulsive traveler for decades and the question I always get from friends is, “How can you afford to travel so much?” But in nearly 40 years of traveling around the world, I have never, ever spent more than $200 per night on a hotel. Maybe I’m missing out, but I don’t feel that way.

I understand that these magazines are trying to lure high-end advertisers and are targeted toward people who have more money than me. It’s also undeniably true that $800 per night hotel suites and $78 entrees look more appealing on a page than Motel Six and diner food. And I don’t fault anyone who likes to travel in style or treat themselves to $7,000 dresses.

If you’ve got the cash, go for it. The global economy is built around consumer spending so we need you to get out there and do your thing. But the relentless focus on luxury in the travel media contributes to the false notion that travel is for the rich.

I reviewed one recent issue of six national travel magazines and made some calculations on the cost of recommended accommodations. This is not a scientific study but I think it gives a pretty accurate snapshot of the lifestyle that’s being promoted on the pages of these magazines.

Below you’ll find the median starting price for recommended hotels along with general observations about each magazine.Afar– $392- 16 hotels mentioned in March/April 2012 issue

Afar is one of the most visually appealing magazines in the world but all that beauty doesn’t come cheap. The March/April issue has a delightfully vulgar spread on luxury tents, including a place called Banyan Tree in the Maldives that runs a cool $3,165 per night, and the Oberoi Rajvilas Jaipur, where one night of luxury camping will cost you just a bit less than what the average Indian makes in a year. There’s nothing like retreating to an $898 per night tent after a day spent experiencing India’s grinding poverty, right?

Even most of the volunteer opportunities Afar recommends are beyond my budget. One offers guests with $1,190 to spare the opportunity to spend three nights in a boutique hotel in Cambodia that helps feed and educate children, and another, Liz Caskey Culinary and Wine Experiences, charges guests $550 per day for the chance to take a food and wine tour and help build shelters for earthquake victims in Chile. Hopefully they build the shelters first and drink the wine afterwards.

Condé Nast Traveler– $310- 29 hotels recommended in the March 2012 issue

The pages of CNT are filled with great writing and compelling photography but are also saturated with hotels, restaurants, and products I can’t afford. There is one recommended hotel where rates start at less than $100 and 11 with rates starting at more than $400. They also endorse: a navy Louis Vuitton jacket that goes for $3,050; an ugly, ostentatious, $1,850 Proenza Schouler camera case; and a $256 tasting menu at Noma, a swanky restaurant in Copenhagen.

Zimbabwe is supposed to be a more affordable safari destination compared to South Africa or Namibia, but CNT contributor Joshua Hammer admits that his 10-day trip costs $6,708, or just about 10 times what a Zimbabwean makes in a year. Good for Hammer, though. He may have singlehandedly provided a jolt to Zimbabwe’s faltering economy.

Travel & Leisure– $210- 46 hotels recommended in April 2012 issue

T + L is always jam-packed with good travel tips and they slum it with more moderate hotel recommendations than some of the other magazines. But it’s still a showplace for wildly expensive hotels, restaurants and products. The April issue offers some T + L “reader exclusives,” like a $500 per night hotel in Dublin (K Club Hotel & Spa) and a $329 per night hotel on Lake Como, (Grand Hotel Tremezzo) that aren’t exactly a steal.

T + L also recommends Noma, along with a $3,200 snakeskin leather purse, an $845 nylon jacket by S’ Max Mara, and the Il Pellicano Hotel in Porto Ercole, Italy, where room rates start at $819 per night, not including breakfast.

National Geographic Traveler– $227- 10 hotels recommended in March/April 2012 issue

This is my favorite travel magazine and not just because they once flew me to Oaxaca, Mexico (from Macedonia, no less). You won’t find many examples of mindless consumerism in NGT but their hotel recommendations are still usually of the high-end variety.

Lonely Planet Magazine– $151- 48 hotels recommended in March 2012 issue

This U.K.-based magazine manages to look pretty while featuring plenty of moderately priced accommodation and dining options. The Lonely Planet guidebook series has tried to go more upmarket in recent years but you won’t find $3,000 purses and the like here. Still, only 10% of their recommended lodging options start at $100 or less.

Budget Travel– $122- 6 hotels recommended in March/April 2012 issue

I love this magazine, which is geared towards skinflints like me, but where are all the advertisers? At 76 pages, its most recent issue is considerably skinnier than the others mentioned above, which suggests that advertisers don’t give a damn about reaching people like me.

Perhaps all the high-end recommendations the glossy travel magazines make are just good business sense. And I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t like these magazines. They’re all worth reading, especially in light of the fact that they’re all pretty much giving away subscriptions these days. Still, it’d be nice to see a bit more on places and things I can actually afford. What about you, would you like to see travel publications focus a bit more on moderately priced travel options?

Note: The rooms at the hotels surveyed could cost a bit more or less depending on when you book, how many are in your party, etc. A few of the recommended hotels include half or full board or other amenities but the vast majority does not.

Images via Nelson Theroux, Carendt242, and John Picken on Flickr.

Video: a road trip from Rhode Island to Costa Rica

by Jessica Marati on

“In the fall of 2004, three friends were given a choice: get a job to pay off student loans and settle down, or fix up an abandoned pop-up camper and take a drive from Rhode Island to Costa Rica.”

It’s a pretty easy decision, at least for us here at Gadling. The boys of Gnarly Bay Productions apparently agreed, and they documented their trans-continental adventures in //finding forever//, a highlight video posted two years ago on Vimeo but recently rediscovered by our friends at the Nomading Film Festival.

The short film showcases snapshots of life on the road, from time-lapses of the natural splendor of the Americas, to cut-away shots of laughter, breakdancing, headstands, surfing and drinking. At times, the guys play up the “bro” factor a bit too hard, but otherwise, it looks like they had a great adventure. If you need motivation for your next road trip, take a peek.

Now about those student loans…