12 historic sites in danger of disappearing

by Kraig Becker on

The Global Heritage Fund has released a new report that lists 200 World Heritage Sites around the globe that are in danger from a variety of threats, turning the spotlight on 12 in particular that could disappear altogether due to a lack of funds, neglect, and mismanagement.

The 12 sites listed in the report include Palestine’s Hisham’s Palace, Turkey’s Ani, and Iraq’s Nineveh. Hisham’s Palace, the remains of a royal winter retreat built in 747 AD and the ancient city of Nineveh are both under threat from encroaching urban development, while Ani, an 11th century city on Turkey’s border with Armenia, finds many of it’s ancient structures literally falling apart on their foundations.

Other Heritage Sites that make the list of “most threatened” include Mahansrhangarh, the oldest archeological site in all of Bangladesh and Mirador in Guatemala, which is a pre-Columbian Mayan ruin which sits in a remote jungle location. Haiti’s Sans Souci Palace suffered damage during the recent earthquakes that hit the country, while the Maluti Temples in India suffer from years of neglect. Kenya’s Lamu Village, Famagusta, located in Cyprus, Pakistan’s Taxila, Intramuros and Fort Santiago in the Philippines, and Chersonesos in the Ukraine round out the list.

The GHF’s report recommends that the countries in which these historic sites are located invest in restoring and preserving the ancient places. While those repairs could cost millions of dollars to complete, the sites could potentially generate that income back through tourist dollars, although UNESCO representatives say that caution should be taken when going down that road, as sustainable tourism is not always an easy thing to accomplish and there are a lot of factors to consider before proceeding.

One thing that everyone agrees on however is that these amazing sites need to be preserved for future generations to visit and explore. Just how that will be accomplished remains to be seen.

[Photo credit: Christian Koehn via WikiMedia]

GadlingTV’s Travel Talk – Torontonian Exploration!

by Stephen Greenwood on

GadlingTV’s Travel Talk, episode 30 – Click above to watch video after the jump

For those of you that attended this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, you may already know just how cosmopolitan Canada’s largest city is. Upon arriving, it’s safe to say that we completely underestimated the fifth most populous municipality in North America, but quickly realized its vast cultural offerings upon exploration.

There’s more than meets the eye in Toronto, so watch as we shake off the Virgin America party from the night before and explore the exciting neighborhoods of the world’s ‘most diverse city’!

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

Subscribe via iTunes:
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Links
Check out Gadling’s own guide to budget travel in Toronto!
Visit the tallest free-standing structure in the Western Hemisphere! The CN Tower.
And whatever you do, don’t miss out on Kensington Market – full guide available here.

All images used under a Creative Commons license. All music used courtesy of Nonstop Music.

Wanderfly.com travel-planning site launches in beta

by Meg Nesterov on


A new travel-planning website and booking engine is launching this month in beta, and I was excited to give it a test run, having first heard about the site this spring at a EuroCheapo travel happy hour. Wanderfly.com is a “personalized recommendation engine” that takes your interests, budget, and even social network connections to give you inspiration and help you plan your next vacation. Flights and hotels are pulled from Expedia, with restaurant recommendations, activities, and sightseeing descriptions culled from Lonely Planet, FourSquare, NileGuide, and Yelp.

Let’s say you have a week to travel in early September for Labor Day. Budget is under $1,000 per person for flights and hotels, and you’re interested in culture, beaches, and food. Plug all those into the search engine and you’ll get a series of destinations to review, refine, share, and book. While the site still has a few bugs (budget busters would sneak through the filters, the help feature is not fully enabled), the interface is slick and user-friendly, the features are thoughtful, and the content is reliable.

What’s cool about the site:

  • Since I’m currently based in Turkey, I loved that your point of origin could be pretty much anywhere in the world so I could run searches from New York and Istanbul to get a wide variety of places convenient for different parts of the world.
  • A wide (1,200 and growing) network of destinations gave me some ideas I’d never considered or even heard of (Kalingrad, Russia; Azemmour, Morocco; Krabi, Thailand), as well as some more tried-and-true vacation spots(Sunny Isles Beach, Florida; Mykonos, Greece; Split, Croatia).
  • Weather and news tabs give you an idea of the current climate (could be too hot on that Egyptian beach) and happenings, though you might come up with nothing for more obscure destinations. I also love that many of the news feeds are through Twitter accounts like @visitbritain, giving up-to-the-minute quickie items.

What will be cool about the site:

  • Ability to share trip ideas and plans with friends via email or Facebook is great for planning a trip with multiple people or getting feedback on a destination. Currently, Facebook Connect will tell you who you know in a given place, but I’d probably remember if I had a friend in Lutsk, Ukraine.
  • Festivals and special events come up via Eventful, but on the beta site event dates will pop up well after your search range so don’t plan around that blues festival just yet. There are also plans to add destination reviews, currency converters, and travel tips.
  • After all the searching, sorting, and sharing, you can actually book through the site, though only if you have a US credit card. The booking interface is also easy to use and gives options for frequent flier numbers, seat and meal preferences, and room types.

All in all, Wanderfly is a nifty new tool for dreaming and planning your next trip. If they could find a way to integrate time-sensitive deals, local blogs, and multiple-destination trips, this could be the only travel site you need.

Five local customs we just can’t follow

by Sean McLachlan on

Travelers are a pretty tolerant bunch. Travel actually breeds tolerance because it gets rid of the ignorance on which tolerance is based. There are times, however, when we can’t bring ourselves to follow certain local customs. Here are five things a lot of people find a bit too hard to swallow, in one case literally.

Using your hand as toilet paper
Using the left hand to wipe your posterior is a time-honored tradition in many parts of the world. It’s probably more common than toilet paper, and is certainly more ecologically sensitive and effective. With a bit of finger work and some water, your bum will be sparkly clean. As a Pakistani friend explained to me, “Imagine you were covered in shit. Which would you rather have me do–wipe you down with paper towels or hose you off?” Impeccable logic. I’m still not going to do it.

Eating dogs, cats, and rats
Exotic dining is one of the great pleasures of adventure travel, but sometimes it can get too exotic. We’ve been trained since birth that certain animals are food, and certain animals are cute and cuddly and should be named Pookums. It’s hard to rewire the brain after such training. I’ve never been offered dog, although considering some of the places I’ve eaten I may have had it without knowing, but I’d have some trouble downing a Doberman or chomping on a Corgi. There are other animals we’ve been taught are unclean, like rats and insects, yet rats and insects are popular food in many cultures. I’ve tried pureed ants. Not bad, but I’ll skip the rat soup. User heyduke2009 over at Gadling’s flickr pool was brave enough to order it, but his photo doesn’t show any bite marks!

Disrespecting women
Call me politically correct, but I happen to think women are equal to men and should be treated accordingly. Some cultures think of women as property or sex objects. While parts of the Middle East can be bad with this, northern India consistently ranks at the top of the list of places where women travelers are harassed. One favorite trick is to “accidentally” brush against a woman in a crowd. Women can expect to be felt up on a regular basis, like once every few minutes in some places. This treatment isn’t just reserved for Western women either. I complained about how my wife was being treated to a female Indian friend and she just sighed and said, “Yeah, it started happening to me when I was about ten.” Strangely, when my wife went to southern India for three weeks, it didn’t happen once!
And yes, our culture has a way to go too, but at least in the West a woman can go shopping without getting groped.


Mentioning God every other sentence
This is an annoying custom we find right here in the good old U S of A. “I’d like to thank God for helping me make that touchdown.” “I missed my bus and it was in an accident. God saved me!” “This can won’t open. God damn it!”
OK, assuming there’s an all-knowing, all-powerful being who created the universe, I really doubt it (not “he”, there is no Celestial Penis) gives two hoots about some football game. Yet we constantly bring God into the most trivial aspects of our lives, and the not-so-trivial too. Good luck getting elected to public office if you don’t mention God in your campaign speeches. The only other place I’ve seen this custom get so rampant is the Middle East. There should be a survey of political speeches of Arab and American politicians to find out which ones invoke God more often. Much of the rest of the world, especially Europe, finds this habit of ours weird and a wee bit creepy.

Talking during movies
Spain is my adopted home. I love the Spanish–they’re attractive, funny, and know how to party, but they commit one cardinal sin–THEY TALK DURING MOVIES!!! Why would you plunk down good money to go to the cinema and then not pay attention to the film!? A friend of mine who likes opera says they do it there too, so this isn’t a class thing. Once some people sitting near her got into such a loud argument that she couldn’t hear the singer, yet nobody told them to shut up. It’s considered completely normal. This noise pollution is made worse by the fact that when Spaniards are in a group they all yammer away at the same time, only half listening to everyone else.

Are there any local customs you just can’t follow? Gripe about them in the comments section!

Finding the expat community and what travelers can learn from them

by Meg Nesterov on

No matter how well-traveled you are, moving to a foreign country and living as an expat is a whole new ballgame. Your priorities and standards change, and hours that you may have spent as a traveler in a museum or wandering a beach are now spent in as an expat search of an alarm clock or trying to distinguish between eight types of yogurt. You become like a child again: unable to speak in complete sentences, easily confused and lost, and constantly asking questions.

Enter the experienced expats who can help navigate visa issues, teach you dirty words in foreign languages, and tell you where to buy pork in a Muslim country. Finding the local expat community is not about refusing to integrate or assimilate in your new country, but rather meeting a group of like-minded people who understand what you are going through and can provide a bridge to the local community and culture.

So what can the traveler learn from an expat? How about where to buy souvenirs that are actually made nearby and well priced, restaurants not mentioned in any guidebooks, bizarre-but-true stories behind local places and rituals, and inside perspectives on community news and events? And those are just the Istanbul bloggers.

Read on for tips on finding the blogs and a few of the must-reads for travelers.Where to find the expats:

  • Expat forums such as ExpatFocus, InterNations, and Expat Blog are good starting points for finding and connecting with expats, though some forums may be more active than others.
  • Local English-language publications: Many big cities have a Time Out magazine in English and local language, often with frequently-updated blogs or links to other sites. In Istanbul, the newspaper Today’s Zaman has an “expat zone” full of useful articles.
  • Guidebook writers are often current or former expats, so if you read a helpful guide or travel article, it’s worth a Google search to find if they have a blog or Twitter account.

Some stellar expat bloggers around the globe:

  • Carpetblogger: sarcastic, insightful blogger based in Istanbul but with lots of coverage on Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Indonesia. Stand-out post: expat guide to duty free shopping.
  • Miss Expatria: prolific writer and instantly-loveable American in Rome, a joy to read even if you have no plans to visit Italy, but you might find yourself buying tickets after reading about her life. Stand-out post: Italian idioms.
  • CNNGo: great round-up of finds in Asia from Bangkok to Tokyo with everything from restaurant reviews to a look at Tokyo’s elevator ladies. Stand-out post: Japan’s oddest vending machines, a favorite topic of Mike Barish, who has chronicled some of the vending machine beverages for your reading pleasure..
  • Bermuda Shorts: Enviable (and crushworthy, too) travel writer David LaHuta covers all the goings-on in Bermuda and all things Dark n Stormy-related. Stand-out post: name suggestions for new Indiana Jones movie set in Bermuda Triangle.
  • Fly Brother: Series of funny and poignant misadventures in Brazil and around the world from the African American perspective. Stand-out post: how an afternoon of seemingly simple errands can take up to seven hours.

The next time you plan a trip abroad, consider reaching out to a fellow American (or Canadian, Brit, etc.) for some advice or even a coffee meeting (assuming you aren’t a total psycho). I, for one, am happy to offer Istanbul tips and tricks, and I’d be even more amenable to helping a traveler who comes bearing Boar’s Head bacon.

Any expat blogs you follow or travel tips you’ve learned from them? Expat bloggers want to share your websites and your insights for travelers? Leave a note in the comments below.