Cruising Antarctica

by Iva Skoch on

It used to be that people who wanted to get away from it all went to their summer homes. Today, they go to Antarctica. I suppose there are not many places left on this planet where you could experience the ultimate emptiness. Not many that could be reached via cruise ship anyway.

Several cruise companies offer the so-called adventurous trip to Antarctica, yet conveniently experienced in the comfort of a luxury ship. Indeed, people seem to want to experience emptiness, but they prefer being surrounded by excess in order to fully grasp it.

The travel section of The Sunday Times had a piece on Antarctica this weekend where the author is suggesting that Antarctica will not remain pristine forever, since there are some 50 billion barrels of oil beneath the Ross and Weddell seas alone.

Not sure if the invasion of cruise ships is much better that the invasion of oil diggers, but hey – we all want to see the march of penguins first hand, don’t we? Well folks, from the tip of Argentina, it’s an easy trip and from November to March is the best time to go.

Costa Rica: Jungle for The Masses

by Iva Skoch on

Costa Rica has done a great job marketing itself as an eco-tourism country. It has been generally good to the rain forests. The country is beautiful, well-developed and super-easy to travel around.

The jungle of the Manuel Antonio park in Quepos, on the Pacific Coast, is breathtaking. It is, however, wide open to the tourists and therefore you are getting the clinically clean, safe, Disneyworld-version of the rain forest: sidewalks, safety signs, guides with telescopes and all that. No, I am not complaining. I guess that’s what you get when you want to prevent the rain forest from being cut down in order to grow coffee. So, once you can get past the Disney-quality of it, please do invest in a jungle guide (he will not come dressed in a Mickey Mouse costume, I swear). For an untrained eye, it is hard to see any animals, aside from the monkeys.

The park fee allows you to access the private beach within the park, which is small, clean and very romantic. Keep in mind that the Pacific beaches in Costa Rica are typically black, not like the white Caribbean beaches.

Speaking of coffee – make sure to stop by in Cafe Milagro in Quepos for a cup of freshly roasted, locally grown coffee. Yum.

BT Blogger Blab Post Mortem

by Erik Olsen on

So the Budget Travel bloggers blab session went off last night smashingly. I have to say I was rather amazed by three things. 1) the BT folks actually sent a black sedan to pick me up (if you missed the somewhat intriguing irony here — BUDGET Travel — then, well, there, I just gave it to you…but let it NEVER be said that I won’t be picked up in a black sedan, unless you work for Tony Soprano or something; 2) the venue: it was held in the lovely uber-hip Tribeca Cinema with lights on the wall that said Budget Travel and a marquee and free drinks and teeny little cracker hors d’ovres with chicken that were simply divine; and finally 3) the audience. There must have been about a hundred people there, all of whom either came to listen to us or for free drinks and chicken cracker things. But the thought that anyone, let alone over a hundred people, would be interested to hear what a bunch of bloggers have to say is rather mind-blowing, I think, and a sign of the times that either a) bloggers are far more important than I imagine (entirely possible) or b) most people don’t really know what a blogger is, but they’ve read a lot about them and so came to satisfy their curiosity or c) this was really some awful psychology experiment orchestrated by some PhD students at Columbia to see how people who spend too much time in front of their computers actually react to being in front of a live audience. I only suspect that c) is the answer because I swear some of the people in the crowd held clipboards and I thought I could see the collar of a white lab coat beneath what they were wearing.

So, anyway ,you really want to know more than that don’t you? OK, the story is this: it was actually quite fun. Toastmaster extraordinaire and Editor-in-Chief Erik Torkells moderated the event looking very prim and businesslike in his finely tailored suit. I was actually surprised by how tall the guy is since the photo on the BT editor’s page is usually (unless he’s dressed as a cowboy) just a headshot. Also, it’s pronounced tor-KELLS not TOR-kells, which gives the name a bit of an Irish feel even though I have no idea if he’s irish, Norwegian or what. Anyway, there we were, the four of us – Mark G. Johnson of HotelChatter, Randy Petersen of InsideFlyer, and Joshua David Stein of Gridskipper….and Torkells asked us all sorts of questions about blogging and how/whether it’s going to replace real travel journalism (no) and how we find our stories (uh, mostly magazines, newspapers and other blogs), and whether we mind if PR people send us stuff (not really, unless it’s totally irrelevant to the blog…which about 70 percent are) and so on.

Of course, we fielded these questions with alacrity and wit, knocking out answers with the ease and fluidity of A-Rod during batting practice. I have to give props to Joshua Stein of Gridskipper for being the funniest one in the group and answering questions with a kind of jaded, sardonic aplomb that nicely complimented his disheveled appearance. The oddest, but most refreshing moment of the evening came when I was approached after the session by the two bloggers who write one of my favorite blogs on the Chelsea Hotel – Debbie and Ed. This charming couple had some lovely anecdotes about living in the Chelsea, which prompted me to immediately ask if I could come and shoot a story there…something I hope very much to do.

Anyway, this is becoming a rather too lengthy post, so I’ll bring it to a close here. I am going to write another post in a bit here about the dinner I had after the event, which, when it comes down to it, was the also a big highlight of the evening for me. I was invited to dine with one of my big time heroes of the travel world: Richard Bangs, who happened to be breezing through New York doing something for Mountain Travel Sobek. But more on that later.

(photos: Budget Travel Online – that, by the way, is me, looking a bit like I just finished my third martini (untrue) and am keeling over)

Vanity Fair on the National Parks

by Erik Olsen on

It has taken me FOREVER to get to this post. I read the article a while back and have been meaning to write about it ever since. First a personal blurb: my first real job in the big, bad, plastic world (after working as a ski photographer in Tahoe and a junior rafting guide in Colorado) was with the Department of the Interior in Washington DC. Don’t ask me how I ended up there. It a rather long, convoluted tale filled with romantic notions of helping the world and crushed ideals about how one can do this inside a government agency. No matter. The point of al this is that within the Interior Department lies what is probably the best agency in the federal government: The National Park Service. The NPS takes care of all of our nations great parks, from Yosemite to the Smokies, as well as gobfulls of various monuments, recreation areas, etc. In general, they do a fine job. If you’ve ever spent time in a National Park, you know that the rangers are a dedicated bunch and the care given to interpretation and preservation is, in general, worthy of high praise. But there are problems, and the park service has typically had some difficulties with funding and upkeep, especially <slight reveal of political slant> during Republican administrations </slight reveal of political slant>.

One of the big debates this time around is whether to allow certain motorized vehicles like ATVs and snowmobiles into the parks. traditionally, most parks have been off-limits to these folks. For good reason, IMHO. They are noisy, pollution causing and, if I may throw in yet another potentially incendiary over-generalization, demographically unpleasing. I’ll not expand on that remark, but suffice it to say the parks are probably better off without motorized vehicles roaming around them.

According to this nicely done article from Vanity Fair a while back, it seems lots of people agree with me. Sadly, among them is NOT the head of the Park Service, Paul Hoffman. The article pays out the issues involved and some of the passionate characters who are fighting behind he scenes to keep the parks motor-free. Check it out and weigh in, should you feel compelled.

American Hiking Society

by Erik Olsen on

Not sure how many hikers we have out there, but I’m guessing there’s quite a few. The “hiking” sub-category here gets a fair number of hits. So in the way of helping to provide folks with good sources of information on all things hiking, I offer you this link to the American Hiking Society web site. It’s quite well done and provides information on great hiking locales around the country as well as links to ways that you can be pro-active on the hiking scene, doing things like “volunteer vacations” to improve trails and so forth. It also provided me with the heads up that September 30, 2006 is National Public Lands Day, which is as good an excuse as any to haul your butt into the outdoors and do some meandering around America’s vast public lands.