GadlingTV’s Travel Talk 010: Paragliding, Tijuana, USS Midway, Stone Brewery & surfing the Bruticus Maximus!

by Stephen Greenwood on

GadlingTV’s Travel Talk, episode 10 – Click above to watch video after the jump
Travel Talk has hit double digits!! To celebrate, we have an incredible lineup of adventures from San Diego, California – including a short dash over the border to Tijuana, Mexico!

This week we talk about Kim Jong-Il as a fashion icon, a new great way to hail a cab in NYC, and share a book that covers how to travel by freight ship! We have an answer in the debate of whether or not sarcasm exists in every culture, and of course we’ll show you pictures of the disruptive Eyjafjallajökull (Icelandic Volcano) that has shut down flights throughout Europe this week.

Stick with us as we try paragliding for the first time, learn how to brew beer from the masters at Stone Brewery, and do our best to surf the Wave House’s Bruticus Maximus. We’ll also take a peek onboard the USS Midway and show you how tourism has affected Tijuana in the past 5 years. Enjoy!

If you have any questions or comments about Travel Talk, you can email us at talk AT gadling DOT com.

Subscribe via iTunes:
[iTunes] Subscribe to the Show directly in iTunes (M4V).
[RSS M4V] Add the Travel Talk feed (M4V) to your RSS aggregator and have it delivered automatically.

Links
CabSense iPhone App – ‘the smartest way to find a cab’.
Amazing pictures of Eyjafjallajökull in action – Boston.com Big Picture.
Kim Jong-Il noted as world fashion icon.
Read the book! Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World.
LiveScience article on sarcasm.
Interested in hang gliding?? Check out this movie about the history of the sport!

Hosts: Stephen Greenwood, Aaron Murphy-Crews, Drew Mylrea
Special Guests: Ken Wright, Bill Liscomb, Bob Puetz, & Vern Jumper.
Produced, Edited, and Directed by: Stephen Greenwood, Aaron Murphy-Crews, Drew Mylrea

Special Thanks: Torrey Pines Gliderport/ Stone Brewery, Escondido / Wave House San Diego / USS Midway Museum
%Poll-45000%

Music:

Stone Brewery
“Got it Made (Burn L.A.)
the Pacific
http://myspace.com/thebixbyknolls

All other music used in partnership with nonstopmusic.com

Berkeley diary: The way of the tortoise

by Don George on

I’m sitting at Berkeley’s Caffe Strada on a sun-washed April morning, surrounded by the clamor of students and espresso machines. In front of me, a trio of young men is conferring earnestly in Korean and English over biology textbooks; to my right two women — one clearly American, the other fervently French — are planning their weekend en francais; and behind me what must be a hot-button seminar is unfolding in a flurry of flying hands and impassioned outbursts in Spanish and Ingles.

A week ago I sat at this same table, cloudy and clouded, recalling an afternoon almost a decade before when I stood on a hilltop in Umm Qais, Jordan, looking out over Syria, Israel, the Golan Heights, Lebanon, the Jordan Valley and the Sea of Galilee. I remembered thinking how indistinguishably the landscape of one country flowed into the other, and how confounding it was that people raised in such similar environments, confronting so many of the same challenges of soil and climate, could be so intractably divided.

“Intractable divisions,” I wrote in my journal, “delineate our world still.”

I recalled a scheme I’d dreamed up a few years ago: I’d called it The 1000 Dinners Project. The idea was that we would bring 500 families from Iran to the United States and 500 families from the U.S. to Iran. Each family would spend the day with a host family, going to the market to select the food for the evening’s dinner, then preparing that dinner in the host family’s home and finally sitting down together to enjoy it.During the course of the day they would learn about the ingredients and routines of each other’s everyday lives; they’d share concerns and dreams and hopefully little jokes as well. And slowly, slivering cracks would appear in the stereotyped images each had brought to their encounter, and by the end of the day they would have formed a bond, however frail and fledgling, with someone who had once been branded the “enemy.” And some of them, at least, would return to their villages and towns and tell their friends, relatives and neighbors that those foreign people were not so foreign after all, and seeds of tolerance and peace would be planted.

Of course, it was impractically hard to organize and fund this dream, and it fell by the way.

But on a deeper level, that dream has inspired and defined my life as a traveler and as a travel writer. For the past quarter-century I have been dedicated to the proposition that travel seeds understanding, and that understanding nurtures open-mindedness and compassion — and that these pave the pathway to peace and progress. As a wandering pilgrim, I have come to worship in the church of insatiable inquiry and unconditioned kindness.

Still, last week I looked at the world’s headlines and wondered: Are we really learning anything? Are we any closer to the catechism of kindness than before?

Then in the ensuing days my wife and I attended the screening in Berkeley of a wondrously moving documentary called The Miracle of the Colored Light, by Japanese filmmaker Fumiko Irie; Irie-san had flown from Japan to attend the screening and graciously opened her heart to the audience afterwards, answering questions in Japanese and English. David Farley flew to Oakland from New York and we dined a block from my house in culinary Italy, savoring authentic salumi, porchetta and arancini at a corner eatery called Adesso. I toured Canada in San Francisco at a conference with more than 100 enthusiastic travel folks who had convened to convey the riches of their country, from Newfoundland to the Yukon. I edited dispatches that took me to France and Nepal, and read tales of food adventures sent from Syria, Mexico, the Netherlands, Morocco, the Philippines, Sweden, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Japan, Wales, and the Micronesian island of Fais. And I taught a writing workshop where students were shaping life-changing journeys in Brazil, India, Germany, and other far-flung places.

Now I sit at the Strada reflecting on this gloriously global week and realize, once again, that the world is interwoven all around and through me in a way that would have been unimaginable even a half-century ago. I look around this sunny cafe and see tangible evidence that the world is growing closer. It’s just that when change is tectonic, molecular, you have to be attuned to the slightest movements.

I open my journal and write: “Hard as it sometimes may be to discern from the headlines, I have to believe that humanity is evolving, plodding tortoise-like across the Galapagos of time, toward some enlightened end. Step by step, we lumber, a moving film here, a bridging encounter there, seeds of goodwill and understanding borne around the globe. The end is not in sight, but on this April day, I’ve found renewal of spirit to keep plodding on the way.”

Letter from Kathmandu: Brokedown Palace

by Jeff Greenwald on

Waiting at the ticket booth to Narayanhiti — Nepal’s Royal Palace — I felt like a Chinese commoner entering the Forbidden City for the first time. It’s not too much of a stretch. Nepali Kings, like Chinese Emperors, were touted as divine rulers: avatars of the Hindu god Narayana, the Great Preserver.

Ever since my first visit to Kathmandu in 1979, I had glimpsed Narayanhiti only through its high gates, or past the tall trees that shelter the grounds from view. But in February 2009 — less than a year after the former Kingdom became a Republic — the private residence was converted into a public museum.

Nepal was under royal rule for most of the past 500 years. What we need here, just to get it out of the way, is a brief history of Nepal’s king situation over the past 50-odd years.

In 1955, King Mahendra took the throne. He was an interesting guy who enjoyed black-and-white photography, admired Elvis Presley, and teased his subjects with the notion of democracy. Mahendra and the former kings didn’t live in Narayanhiti; they stayed in the old palace, or durbar, in what’s now Kathmandu’s historic quarter.

Shortly after Mahendra died in 1972, his eldest son — Birendra — was coronated, and moved into the recently completed Narayanhiti. As a leader Birendra was rather like George W. Bush, but without the wit and charm. The intelligentsia got fed up and in 1990, a massive “Peoples’ Movement” wrested power from the throne. But Birendra remained on as king; he was allowed to stay in Narayanhiti with his wife and family, serving as a unifying symbol of ethnically diverse Nepal. When he was killed in 2001 (more on this below), his brother, Gyanendra, took over. Nobody liked this guy — so in 2008 there was another People Power revolution. Gyanendra was shown the door, and the Palace became a museum. Whew.

After checking my daypack and passing through security, I entered the sprawling, grassy grounds. Far behind me, beyond the silver gates, lay Durbar Margh: Kathmandu’s frenetic boutique boulevard, sort of a cut-rate Champs d’Elysees. Its taxi horns and motorcycles faded into the background.

The architecture of Narayanhiti is hard to describe. Completed in 1969, it was designed by an American architect named Benjamin Polk. The building is grand without being impressive, stately without conveying any emotion, and the first reaction most people have when beholding the building is, “Hunh?” Still, it was a thrill to approach the sequestered palace and climb the marble stairway flanked by statues of horses and mythical beasts.

Though the building is grand from the outside, the inside felt cloistered and cold, with small windows, dark paneling and shabby decor that looks as though it hasn’t been changed since Paul McCartney and Wings recorded “Live and Let Die.” With its narrow corridors and stuffed tigers (not to mention crocodiles, deer and rhinoceroses), the place has a strange juju. One cannot use the word “comfy” to describe a single room. This applies especially to the bedroom for the “First Lady of the Visiting Head of State,” which features a macabre poster showing a little girl morphing into a wrinkled crone. Below, in Nepali, is the phrase (roughly translated) “Yikes! This is Our Fate!”

Knowing Birendra’s fate, it’s a poignant experience to stand at the roped-off threshold of the late king’s office — a retreat as modest as the throne room is ostentatious. There’s a large wooden desk, a middle-of-the-line bookshelf stereo, and shelves filled with a strange assortment of books: Freedom in Exile, by the Dalai Lama; 1001 Wonderful Things, by Hutchinson; Hindu Castes and Sects. There is a picture of Mount Kailash on the wall. The image of the holy mountain, long a pilgrimage spot for Tibetan Buddhists, intrigues me. Was Birendra a spiritual man? A king of hidden depths? We’ll never know — but I’m inclined to doubt it.

Perhaps the most surprising room in the palace is the office of former King Mahendra, with its art deco furniture, vintage photographs and large globes of the planet earth and celestial sphere. I’m not saying I could live in it, but it would be a great set for a sitcom about a gay Nepali ad man.

Much of it you’ve seen before, in other former palaces. There are the usual salons lined with glass cases filled with useless gifts from visiting dignitaries: bronze medallions, filigree peacocks, a crystal paperweight from New York City Mayor Edward Koch. The walls are arrayed with photographs of distinguished visitors — even the humblest of them more significant, on an international scale, than their host.

The opulent Gorkha Hall does everything it can to contradict this bit of realpolitik, with its soaring, Gaudi-esque columns and — most important — Ceremonial Throne. Every King needs one of these, and this one is a beauty. More than half a ton of silver and 30 tolas of gold (nearly a pound) were used to build the settee-sized, velvet-cushioned seat of power. Silver elephants support the legs. A canopy of nine gold nagas (snake gods) shaded the King’s head, and thick gold serpents served as his armrests.

But even these nagas, despite their best intentions, could not protect Birendra from his own son. On June 1, 2001, during a social function at the Palace, the drunk and besotted Crown Prince Dipendra allegedly went insane, and gunned down his entire family — the King, Queen Aiswarya, his sister, and several other relatives — with automatic weapons.

The venue for the infamous Royal Massacre, it turns out, was a separate building: an older complex of rooms on the grounds behind the palace. That structure has now been demolished. Only the foundation remains, as if it were an ancient ruin. Cardboard signs indicate, by number, the overgrown sites where the murders occurred – including the little garden bridge, still standing, upon which Dipendra reportedly took his own life. These landmarks are weird abstractions, and a sobering reminder of how the new government immediately destroyed every shred of evidence that might shed light on the real motives for (and perhaps the real perpetrators of) the killings.

It’s often true in Asia that places look better from a distance. I left Narayanhiti feeling underwhelmed and a bit sad. Partly it was for the palace itself: a place that seemed devoid of any warmth or vibrancy. But I was sad for Nepal as well. The one thing the floundering country most desperately needed, and truly deserved, was a great king, a leader who, like Thailand’s King Bhumibol or Bhutan’s Jigme Singye Wangchuck, inspired their subjects by example.

Instead, Nepal got kings like Mahendra — who told one of his engineers during Narayanhiti’s construction, “It is worthless to give grandeur to my palace, because the people will never be ready to admire it even if I make something as grand as the Taj Mahal.”

It’s bad practice, among kings, to blame your subjects for your own lack of imagination. That was Nepal’s story for the past few centuries. Today, the new republic’s commoners stagger out of Narayanhiti in a daze, having spied at last the man behind the curtain. He put on quite a show — but the show is over. I hope they find the heart, brains and courage to take over from here.

Jeff Greenwald is a writer and performance artist. His books include Mr. Raja’s Neighborhood: Letters from Nepal, Shopping for Buddhas, and The Size of the World. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, and Salon.com, among other publications. For more, visit jeffgreenwald.com.

Lalibela: Ethiopia’s ancient jewel

by Sean McLachlan on

For an agnostic I’ve certainly been to a lot of holy places.

I’ve always been skeptical of received wisdom, and fascinated that so many people dedicate their lives to a deity they can’t see, can’t prove exists, and who has left them in the lurch on more than one occasion. I’m also fascinated that this strange behavior called religion often makes people better people, and just as often is used to justify appalling crimes. Nor am I impressed by atheists who claim to “know” there is nothing higher, since that’s unprovable too.

So when I travel I always end up at the holy places–camping among the 70 million pilgrims at Kumbh Mela, or sitting with sadhus at the burning ghats in Benares, or discussing Islam in the shady courtyard of a mosque in Isfahan, or climbing up a dubious-looking rope to reach the clifftop monastery of Debre Damo.

One of my friends, a devout Catholic who likes to debate theology as we go on pub crawls, is convinced my interest in religion means I’m going to convert. I could tell him that devoting his academic life to studying the works of Samuel Beckett means he’s going to become a nihilist, but that hardly seems sporting.

I wish he’d been along for my visit to Lalibela, because not only is the town a monument to Ethiopia’s faith in God, but it also brews the country’s best tej. We would have had a hell of a metaphysical boozer.

Lalibela is off the main highway and reached after many miles bouncing along ass-punishing dirt roads. It is here, starting in the 12th century, that a series of churches were dug out the bedrock. This construction-in-reverse was the brainchild of Gebre Mesqel Lalibela, a king of the Zagwe dynasty. The eleven churches he dug here were meant to be a New Jerusalem, in response to the Muslims capturing Jerusalem and making it difficult for Christian pilgrims to visit. The river flowing through Lalibela is called the River Jordan and a pilgrim can visit the Ethiopian version of Bethleham, Golgotha, and the Holy Sepulchre.

The most grand is Biet Medhane Alem, the largest rock-hewn church in the world. It’s a massive block of stone with 72 towering pillars symbolizing the 72 disciples of Christ. A stone passage leads to Biet Mariam, possibly the first to be built and easily my favorite. As our eyes adjust to the dim interior we see 800 year-old frescoes decorating the walls and ceiling. They show scenes from the Bible and their rich colors blend with the shadows to create a soothing, otherworldly effect.

%Gallery-90277%The most famous of the churches, the one seen in all the tourist brochures, is Biet Giyorgis. It blends with the surrounding stone even while standing out and dazzling the eye. It’s retained the same color as the surrounding rock–none of the churches are painted on the outside–and the builders cleverly left the roof pitching at the same angle as the rest of the slope, making the church seem like a natural part of the ground. At twelve meters high, it is the highest (or I should say deepest) of Lalibela’s churches.

At each of the churches a priest will come out on cue, bearing an elaborate medieval silver cross and wearing his colorful raiment. While this makes for great photos, I feel it cheapens the place somewhat, a bit like the monks trotting out illuminated manuscripts at the monasteries on Lake Tana. Still, it’s their choice how they respond to tourism, and tourist money helps maintain the churches and monastic libraries.

Lalibela is one of the most touristy places in Ethiopia. Touts and self-appointed guides abound. While this is nowhere near as annoying as the situation at the Pyramids or the Taj Mahal, it can still be hard to find a decent guide. If you already have a driver, like we hired from Abey Roads, he can find you a reliable local guide. We went with Taye Abebe, who was knowledgeable, spoke good English, and took me to extra places for no additional charge simply because he knew I was interested. He can be contacted at taye_lalibela@ yahoo.co.uk.

On the second day of our visit, Taye takes me to a predawn mass. I leave my wife asleep in the hotel, skip breakfast, and go with him through the darkened town to Beit Gabriel. It’s Gabriel’s holy day today. Because of the steep incline of the original slope one wall of the church seems to soar to the sky. The Ethiopians call it the “Stairway to Heaven”. We cross a narrow stone bridge, with a sheer drop several meters down on either side, and enter the packed interior.

Inside, the rough stone walls are aglow with the light of candles, and resonate with the sound of chanting. Everyone is wearing white, from the aged priests leading the service to the village women leaning wearily against the pillars, exhausted from having spent the night in prayer. We stand next to a religious class of sleepy-eyed kids who take turns reading aloud from a holy book written in Ge’ez. None of them take the slightest notice of me, the only foreigner in the room. Instead they concentrate on puzzling through the ancient liturgical language.

The head priest comes out of the holy of holies bearing an elegant silver cross. One by one the faithful go up to him and kiss it, and he rubs it along their bodies to give them a blessing. We stay and watch as the sun rises and beams its first golden light into the interior. At last we go, but the priests and townsfolk and pilgrims stay. They’ve been praying all night, and they’ll pray all day too.

For the rest of the day I wander around more of Lalibela’s churches, amazed that people can be so sure of something they can’t prove that they’d dig out more than a dozen buildings from solid rock. I’ve met atheists who sneer at such feats, saying it’s a means of social control, a waste of money and effort to worship something that doesn’t exist. But that’s missing the point. People need these festivals and rituals and grand monuments. It takes them out of their day-to-day life and shows them something higher. Even a religion hater like atheist author Sam Harris says spirituality is an important part of life. And that’s what these places provide, even for a cynic like me. Because every now and then, you need to feel that rarest of emotions–awe.

And you don’t have to believe in God to figure that out.

Next time: Addis Ababa: Ethiopia’s New Flower.

Check out the rest of my travel articles about Ethiopia.

Love the past? There’s a new website for you

by Sean McLachlan on

Hotels have review sites, restaurants have review sites, heck even strip clubs have review sites, so why not ancient monuments?

The folks at Current Publishing, who publish two of the UK’s most popular archaeology magazines, Current Archaeology and World Archaeology, have started a website so people can review archaeological attractions in England, Scotland, Ireland (North and Republic), Wales, and the Isle of Man. Reviews cover everything from museums to stone circles and there are interactive maps based on subject, region, or managing organization. There’s a special section for Stonehenge and its surrounding area, as well as Hadrian’s Wall.

There’s also a section reviewing archaeological digs that accept volunteers. Volunteering on an excavation is a different and rewarding way to spend a vacation.

Called I Love The Past.com, this site has a nice, clean layout without a lot of the flashy features that distract the reader and clog up bandwidth. It’s simple to navigate and the maps make it easy to discover places near where you’re traveling. The downside is that as a new project, most sites only have one review, and some important sites are not yet covered. There’s nothing on the archaeologically rich Orkney Isles, for example. A forum would be a nice addition too, as it would encourage discussion and probably lead to more reviews being posted. Still, it’s an interesting concept and different than the flashier and bigger Heritage Key, which focuses on articles and well worth a look if you have a fast connection. If you’re a museum or ruins junkie, I Love the Past has some potential.