Lawmakers Plot To Limit Travel Abroad And At Home

by Chris Owen on

As we make plans for summer travel abroad and at home, concerns turn to the cost of fuel and how it might affect our projected budget. When studying global destination information, we focus on security matters, currency exchange rates and tips from trusted sources. Getting a good handle on all these topics is part of the travel process.

Now, a new concern may affect some travelers. A transportation bill making its way through Congress could allow the federal government to prevent Americans who owe back taxes from leaving the country.

The provision is part of Senate Bill 1813, also called the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act, was introduced by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) in November and passed by the Senate on March 14. This far-reaching transportation bill allows the federal government to revoke the passports of citizens the IRS claims owe taxes.

Aimed at those who have a seriously delinquent tax debt in excess of $50,000, even if passed, the new law would not affect most people. Still, there are those that fear fundamental rights possessed by Americans to travel, unrestricted, within the USA borders who may be up for review.

“Be aware that once they allow the IRS to block international travel is there one among us who does not believe it will then be extended to travel within the United States?” asks the Beaufort Observer.

Concerned about laws affecting backpackers, runners, bikers and even walkers, Rails to Trails is a nonprofit charged with creating a nationwide network of trails from former rail lines. They are concerned that the same bill limits continued focus on trails, walking and bicycling opportunities.

“We anticipated some of the terrible provisions; others were simply shocking in scope and shortsightedness,” Rails to Trails (RTC) said in a statement urging us to contact our representatives now, using an online form, and ask that they speak to colleagues on the US House of Representatives Transportation and Infrastructure (T&I) Committee.

Given a moment to breathe, on March 29, two days before the previous extension of our nation’s multi-year surface transportation bill expired, congress passed another 90-day extension.

But what the future will bring for international travel by those who owe taxes – or even domestic travel by someone simply looking for a new place to hike – is unknown right now.

On the international travel front, Forbes says, “If he were in charge of travel, the Soup Nazi might say, ‘No Passport for you!'” In real life, travel may seem unrelated to taxes, except perhaps for those annoying airport taxes on international destinations. But a bigger tax and travel connection could keep you at home – permanently.”

Rails to Trails believes in rights to partake in domestic hiking, backpacking, riding and walking. “For a tiny sliver of transportation funds – less than 2 percent – these programs have provided affordable, healthy transportation options, generated jobs and economic development and preserved historic and environmental assets that provide the quality of life that Americans want and deserve,” Kevin Mills, vice president of programming at RTC told Gadling late last year.


[Flickr photo by Moyan Brenn]

Atlanta Airport To Become A Global Portal

by Chris Owen on

When the Atlanta airport’s new Concourse F international terminal opens on May 16, it will add 12 international gates and create a new entry-exit point for travelers on the opposite end of the airport from the main terminal. The new facility will address a number of current issues but the $1.5 billion addition is more geared toward future travel needs.

As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) reports, the project is tasked with anticipating a new travel industry. “You can’t build something today that meets your needs for today,” said airport general manager Louis Miller. “We’re building for the future.”

When the project began in the late 1990s, initial cost estimates of a few hundred million dollars had the new Maynard H. Jackson Jr. International Terminal opening in 2006. Now six years late, the facility will eliminate the current baggage claim setup for Atlanta-bound international travelers, who must recheck their baggage before a train ride to the distant main terminal after clearing customs.

That’s a good, immediate improvement for international travelers but the additional gates will not only provide more capacity for international flights but also open space for domestic flights.

“At peak hours, we have a need for additional facilities,” Miller said. “But we’re really looking toward the future.”

Delta, the airport’s biggest airline, thinks the new concourse will operate near capacity several times a day. Spokesman Trebor Banstetter told AJC that operating flights out of the new concourse would give its top customers access to the “world-class facility” and its new Sky Club lounge.

“We want our best customers to be in this facility,” Banstetter said.

Colorado-based aviation consultant Mike Boyd believes future growth in Atlanta’s operations will continue, propelling the facility into much more than it is today.

“The reality is, if we don’t build these things, you’re going to find yourself way behind the curve,” Boyd said. “Atlanta is still going to grow … Delta is going to turn Atlanta into what we call a global portal, where there will be enormous amounts of traffic flows going all over Latin America and all over Asia.”

[Flickr photo via redlegsfan21]

Best Airlines For Traveling With Surfboards

by Kyle Ellison on

Let’s get real: baggage fees are a pain.

It’s no secret that commuters across the country despise having to pay $25 or $50 for the right to bring their underwear on vacation with them. So much so, in fact, that the very first article I ever penned for Gadling advised travelers on how to leave the plane with more bags than you boarded with.

More than just commuters, however, you know who REALLY hate baggage fees?

Surfers.

While commuters may be able to sacrifice their favorite V-neck sweater when packing for a flight, surfers traveling without surfboards are in for a long vacation filled with swimming and skipping rocks.

Sure, there are lots of surf destinations where you can rent boards, but what if you’re going feral to a location without board rental? What if you’re a traveling pro surfer who needs his/her same quiver of boards to compete for contests?

Bottom line is you’re going to have to pack them on the plane, and depending where in the world you are, that can be a costly situation. I had a landlord once pay $650 in board fees flying Indonesia to Hawaii, and as you might expect, he was not exactly pleased.How do kite surfers get around this dilemma? Throw all the gear into a golf bag and make use of a loophole, which waives fees for golf bags. (Seriously, who needs the baggage break more, poor surfers or rich golfers?).

Loopholes aside, in the Spring 2012 installment of Board Bag Blues posted on Surfline, the surf forecasting team has compiled a helpful and thorough rundown of global airlines and what they charge for transporting surfboards.

The winners?

Air New Zealand, Qantas, British Airways, LAN, Air Tahiti Nui, Singapore, Sri Lankan Airlines, South African Airlines, Malaysian, Virgin Atlantic, Air France, Aer Lingus, Air Emirates and Interjet. All transport boards for free though conditions apply.

Losers?

Cathay Pacific ($600!), United ($100-$200), Delta ($150) and a host of others.

Costs are usually per board and though you’ll sometimes get away with cramming three boards into a windsurf board bag, don’t be surprised if they make you open it up and count the boards.

Need more inspiration? Check out Surfline’s travel section to get you planning your next surf trip. Then, of course, good luck deciding which airline is the best bet to get you there.

Travels In Myanmar: Under A Night Sky

by Jeremy Kressmann on

I had no idea what to expect that morning in Yangon. Inside the city’s once grand but now decrepit train station, a few lonely bulbs fought weakly against the dark. Across the arrivals hall was the silhouette of my transport, an intimidating iron locomotive. I moved hesitantly towards this slumbering rusty giant, past anonymous passengers squatting on the cracked cement floor, huddled in the chill of pre-dawn. The station’s shadows whispering with nervous energy. Who knew where this day was headed?

In the vague outlines of my journey, only one detail was certain: I was in a country called Burma (or was it called Myanmar?) and determined to witness a mysterious festival of “Fire Balloons” in a distant Shan State town of Taunggyi. Beyond that, I knew little. The previous day I had wandered into a travel agency hoping to find a way to get to the festival. Buses and flights there were full, and the agent had suggested heading north to the rail depot at Thazi to arrange further transport. It sounded like a half-baked plan. But with dwindling options and a burning desire to witness this strange festival, I had agreed.

As I considered my uncertain itinerary, the shaky locomotive rumbled its way out of the station in a fog of anxious dawn. The ancient carriage embraced a landscape of endless, monochrome-green farm fields, shrouded in a mist of faint light. A treacherous white-hot sun soon pierced the horizon, igniting a furnace of unrelenting heat. Out the window I could make out distant water buffaloes lumbering across shimmering rice paddy fields, trailed by men hidden beneath sun hats. Amtrak this was not.

Inside the train car, red-robed monks stripped to the waist in the warmth, fanning themselves with wilting sports pages. Meanwhile, men puffed on fragrant cheroot cigarettes, the smoke curling its way into every orifice and fabric. Young boys roamed the aisles hawking glistening nooses of freshly plucked chickens, while the heat painted sweat stains in mosaics on my pants and shirt. I sat stewing in this pungent mixture of sweat, billowing cheroot smoke and grease, drowning in second thoughts as the reality of the unknown journey inched forward.

My motivation for visiting Burma had so far escaped introspection. Romanced by visions of countless travel writers and the exotic, I had left my job and life behind, traveling alone to this reclusive Southeast Asian nation in search of something different. I wanted to have an adventure and discover some deeper meaning to my journey. But as the hours bobbed and squeaked past tiny wooden villages and muddy brown farm fields, fat and thick with monsoon rain, I felt invisible and wracked with uncertainty. I desperately craved something familiar – an anchor to the reality I had discarded far behind in my relentless search for discovery.

Twelve dripping, exhausted hours later, a small triumph shook me from my daze. Thazi! I made it! But Burma wasn’t ready to let me off easily. The plan was to meet some other travelers in Thazi and find a ride – but I was the only one there. Come to think of it, Thazi didn’t even have a bus station. It was no more than a dusty main road littered with stray dogs and wobbly Japanese pickups. It was nearly dark and I was fenced in by my stupid choices. Growing nervous with dwindling options, I stumbled to a nearby pickup truck owner and pleaded for assistance.

“Can you…take me to Taunggyi?” I asked haltingly. The man sized up the tall foreigner in his midst, grinning at his luck.

“Maybe tomorrow. 20,000 kyat.” he spat out, with a smile.

My shoulders sagged. The vehicle was barely upright, let alone roadworthy – the cream-colored exterior was polka-dotted with rust. Four balding tires looked ready to deflate or burst, I couldn’t tell which. But the prospect of spending the night in that strange city, alone, drove me to further action.

“I’ll pay 10,000, and I want to leave tonight,” I countered.

The owner grimaced and crossed his arms in thought. Meanwhile a visibly intoxicated man and several kids crowded behind us, intrigued by the transaction. The cost was worth less than a dinner back home, but it felt like something large was at stake.

“OK, we go – but very far. You pay 15,000.”

Adrenaline surged. Taunggyi was now within my grasp! How naive I was. The truck still needed to fill with passengers and goods before it would depart. We waited for what seemed like hours. Six women climbed into benches in the back. Three more men perched themselves above the truck’s metal scaffolding. A precariously stacked bundle of wicker baskets was lashed to the roof. The truck looked less like transport than a vehicular Jenga game ready to topple. I sat on the curb, eyes wide and mouth agape. The drunken man from earlier hovered over me babbling, gesturing at the pickup and chuckling.

The evening was well under way before we departed. I climbed into the pickup’s front cabin with the owner and a young camouflage-clad man named Mikey, my knees jammed against the dash and head poking against the cabin’s roof, backpack shoehorned beneath my knees. The intimate seating arrangements encouraged Mikey to strike up a conversation.


“Where you come from?” Mikey inquired in his halting English.

I got asked this question a lot while I was in Burma. Frequently the desired answer had less to do with learning your citizenship than simply conjuring your state of mind.

“Man, it’s been such a long day, I can’t even remember anymore” I groaned.

We set off shakily, our pickup struggling to gain speed with its massive load. A horse-drawn cart rolled past, leaving our shaky vehicle in the dust. Shortly after departing Thazi, the pickup had its first breakdown. An hour later, the owner stopped to secretly siphon gas into the tank from a roadside oil drum. As we drove, Mikey chain-smoked unfiltered cigarettes blowing smoke in my face in between eruptions of flatulence and cackling giggle fits with the driver. Spending the night in Thazi began to look like an attractive option.

Despite the setbacks, I realized my earlier anxiety was gone. Each unexpected stop seemed less like a challenge than a bizarre novelty. I found myself smiling at the ridiculousness of it all. Mikey even bought me a can of iced coffee, trading a grin and thumbs up of solidarity. As I sipped my shockingly sweet Coffee King beverage, I happened to glance up at the night sky, which had unfurled itself behind the Shan foothills like a blanket of twinkling brilliance. Sparkling meteorites zipped and swooshed with startling frequency. Distant constellations seemed to pulse and move like the rhythm of a cosmic ocean. In my semi-lucid state, I stared in wonder, mouth agape. At that moment, all the doubts, insecurities and vanities of my journey faded. This was exactly where I needed to be.


After each repair, we were back on the road, our ride wobbling ever higher in the foothills of Shan State. The smooth pavement became a dirt road treacherous with potholes. It was not much more than a single car wide, and we had to share with the hulking Chinese semis lumbering past, showering our vehicle with aromas of diesel fumes and dust. It was all I could do to keep from gagging on these noxious clouds, fortifying myself with the knowledge that clean night air would soon return to my window, along with that luminous sky.

Seven hours passed before the lights of Taunggyi shined in the distance, glittering like a city on a hill. It had been over 20 hours since I left Yangon that morning. I found the nearest guesthouse, banged on the door until it opened and collapsed on a bed. My longest day soon faded into the memory of the stillness of night.

Life frequently requires us to make decisions without fully understanding their impact. I keep asking myself the same questions about my purpose and finding no clear answers. Where am I headed? What’s the point? With so much uncertainty and doubt, it’s easy to believe I’ve lost my way. Except that I haven’t. Whenever I have these moments of doubt I remind myself to take a deep breath, and look up at the night sky. Suddenly I find myself transported back to that night in Burma when I rediscovered my purpose, gazing up at a blanket of stars shimmering with light.

Culinary Cab Confessions: The Search For Tacos And ‘Authenticity’ In Mexico

by David Farley on
The first taxi driver I met in Puerto Vallarta had other plans for me. “You want to go to peliculas?” he asked, looking at me through the rearview mirror. I didn’t particularly want to go to a movie. Especially not the kind he had in mind. “It’s a good movie,” he said in Spanish and then laughed in the way that would have required him to rub his hands together if they weren’t occupied with dodging pedestrians and dogs, as we tore through the streets of this seaside Mexican town.

“Okay,” he said. “Chica? You want a chica?”

“No,” I said. “I already told you. Quiero comer.” I want to eat.

And just then, he poked his head out the window at a short-skirt-wearing, twenty-something female standing on the sidewalk and said “Yo quiero un taco!” and laughed again. He jilted his head back at me and said, “Que una pussy!”

I was hoping to do another installment of my Culinary Cab Confessions in which I test the theory that taxi drivers are a knowledge repository of the best (and cheapest) places to eat, the out-of-the-way gems that you just don’t stumble across. Except this rotund, randy cab driver I was currently with was a knowledge stockroom of other carnal pleasures. Just not the kind I was seeking. I grew up in southern California where Mexican cuisine has become something of a default comfort food. Having lived in good-Mexican-food-deprived New York City for the last nine years, I relish the moments when I’m in a place that has good Mexican food (like, say, Mexico, for example). I just had to find a cab driver who would show me the right place.

When I arrived in this city of 250,000 I immediately had jumped in a cab and pointed it toward the old town. The driver recommended I eat at El Moreno, a taco stand in the Zona Romantico, the cobblestone-street-and-tourist-laden part of town. I found El Moreno, and then I found another taco cart. And another. Two hours later, I had eaten octopus tacos, steamed marlin tacos, several variations on the theme of pork tacos, and unidentified fish tacos. I swore by the time I left I’d be encased in tortilla shell myself. Some of the tacos were good. Some were excellent. All included a requisite gringo or two eating with me.

There were several questions that were nagging at me: Where could I go in town with fewer gringos? Did it really matter? Would my experience be more “authentic” if I were the only non-local? I asked the concierge at my hotel (about where I could eat without encountering other tourists). “No,” she said, shaking her head at me. And then another question arose: was I just being a culinary traveling snob?

“These places don’t exist,” said the concierge when I repeated the question on where I could find good tacos in a gringo-less environment. “We go to the same places the gringos go.” Or, rather, gringos go the same places the locals go. Still, I persisted. There had to be a taqueria-crammed neighborhood that tourists don’t venture to. “No, no, no,” she said. I sighed and walked away.
And then I got in a cab. I explained to the driver what I wanted and he knew immediately where to take me. La Aurora, a neighborhood that was about 10 minutes away.
He let me off at Universo, a street-plaza that was lined with food carts. There were carnitas tacos, porklicious tortas and a guy making Frisbee-sized hamburgers. (I’m not exaggerating.) I settled in at Taqueria Don Roque and ordered the house specialty: the al pastor tacos, the meat of which was shaved off of a huge hunk, like at a shwarma joint. The spicy pork in the tacos was intermingled with chunks of pineapple, an additional taste stratum that I very much appreciated. I ordered two more.
There was a fat man lounging in front of a grill on the corner of the intersection across the street. I wandered over and realized my presence had just roused him out of a sleep. He said he was from Michoacan and was selling a typical snack of his home region: roasted chickpeas. I bought a bag and strolled around the plaza gawking at what to eat next. The chickpeas were still in their encasing, making eating them a tad difficult but worth every juicy chickpea stream that was running down my forearm. I still had no answers to my questions about travel and the “authentic” experience some of us seek. I did, though, have one answer: I’d found the place I was looking for.