Forbes Travel Guide announces annual four- and five-star hotel, spa, restaurant winners

The star-rating for hotels, spas, and restaurants is similar to the Academy Awards for Hollywood. If Oscar is the type prize, a five-star rating for a hotel can be called “Oscar.” Luxury properties waited with bated breath for today’s announcement from Forbes Travel Guide: the list of Four-Star and Five-Star award winners for the 2011 Forbes Travel Guide.

The list, unveiled today, announced two hotels, two restaurants, and two spas winning a coveted fifth star. The list has defined the industry’s highest standards of excellence in hospitality for more than 50 years.

The five-star winner restaurants are both in New York City (Daniel and Eleven Madison Park); the two new five-star hotels include Island Shangri-La Hotel in Hong Kong, and Falling Rock at Nemacolin Woodlands Resort, in Farmington, Pennsylvania; and the two new five-star spas are The Spa at The Grand Del Mar, in San Diego, and The Spa at Mandarin Oriental, in Las Vegas.

Forbes Travel Guide’s ratings are based on objective evaluations of more than 500 attributes. This year’s additions bring the total number of Forbes Five-Star hotels to 54. Among the 54 Five-Star hotels, six are in New York City, the most of any city in the U.S. There are five Five-Star hotels in Hong Kong, and two in Macau, where ratings were established for the first time in 2009. Forbes Travel Guide expects to further expand its rating system to include properties in additional international destinations in 2011.

The complete list of Forbes Travel Guide Star award winners can be found here.

The world’s most bizzare spa treatments

I’m not not usually a spa kind of girl. I like the occasional de-stressing massage, pore-clearing facial or special occasion mani-pedi, but mud baths, seaweed wraps, and caviar scrubs just aren’t for me. Neither are some of the bizarre and ridiculous spa treatments Forbes Traveler has rounded up from across the globe.

A few actually don’t sound that unusual. A wine and honey wrap is supposed to help you sweat out toxins, a goat yogurt facial will help clear your skin, and the cactus puree used in a massage will help reduce the appearance of cellulite. But a few others sound so off-the-wall you have to wonder who would be foolish enough to try them out.

A “cedar enzyme bath” may be a clever name, but really all you’re doing is sitting in a big tub full of sawdust. Why not save yourself a hundred bucks and head down to the gristmill? And, seriously – heated golf-ball massage? I highly doubt there are any magical healing properties contained in a set of microwaved balls.

Treatments involving animals seem equally wrong. I have a fish phobia so I wouldn’t climb into a pool and let hundreds of tiny fish nibble the dead skin off my toes. And can someone please explain to me exactly what the benefits of a “snake massage” are?

And then, for the most absurd of First World problems, there are holistic treatments. Feeling out of whack with the lunar cycle? Try a lunar treatment, which promises to help your body align with the moon. “Virtual dolphin therapy” is equally suspect. As clients watch images of dolphins on tv and listen to sonar sounds in their headphones, hey can hold a sound wave pillow for internal healing.

As the article points out “Now, though it’s considered a luxury in Japan, spreading dehydrated nightingale droppings on your cheeks doesn’t exactly scream ‘beneficial’, but geishas have been looking up at the skies for centuries, and spa owners have taken note.” Wait….so geishas have been looking up at the skies and …what…getting pooped on? No, I think I’ll skip that particular treatment, thank you very much.

I’ve no doubt that certain natural elements can help alleviate pain, relieve stress and improve skin, but that doesn’t mean that all such products should be incorporated into spa treatments. A little common sense should be used when drawing the line between beneficial and, well, birdshit.

Not-so Dangerous Destinations

“You’re going where?!” my father asked when I told him of my plans to go to Colombia. The Colombia he knows of, the one from the 1980’s, is filled with cocaine, street violence, and Pablo Escobar’s thugs. The country’s days as a dangerous destination are gone, but its stigma still remains.

Colombia isn’t the only now-safe country still considered by the masses to be too dangerous to visit. Forbes Traveler has put together a list of other destinations that aren’t as dangerous as you might assume.

Along with Colombia, the list includes places many experienced travelers wouldn’t think twice about visiting – Bangladesh, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Laos, Sri Lanka, and Ethiopia are all included – plus a few a little farther off the beaten path, like Haiti and Tajikistan. The list also includes two spots that become a lot more dangerous if you travel there illegally: Cuba and North Korea.

There’s no such thing as a completely safe destination, but still most of these spots have earned their reputations. At one point, they were lands of famine, war, and strife. Now they’ve become safer, though in some (like Haiti and certain parts of Colombia, for example) problems continue and there are still areas you should not venture.

If you plan on visiting one of these “not-so-dangerous places”, do your research and be sure you know what you are getting into. The bad reputation in some of these places can mean lower travel costs and few tourists, but there may still be an element of risk.

Escape to the world’s quietest places

Life in most places is loud. Planes flying overhead, traffic rushing through the streets, people yelling, talking, phones ringing – it all combines to make an endless racket that follows us throughout our days. If you need to get away for some (literal) peace and quiet, take a look at Forbes Traveler’s list of the World’s Quietest Places.

Many of these aren’t the sort of places where you’ll go crazy from the silence, in fact some of them are plenty noisy. But near and far, they provide places where you can get away from the aural assault of the world and revel in a quiet(er) existence.

Included on the list are destinations like the verdant Hoh Valley in Washington State and Muir Woods in California, both places that are easy to get to from major cities but seem a world away. Further from home, there’s the island of Yap, near Guam, where the “culture is built on adherence to social peace”. The Kalahari Desert, 350,000 square miles of sparsely populated sand and scrub, also makes the list.

Victoria Falls isn’t exactly silent, but the roar of the water as it plummets 350 feet (which can be heard over a mile away) is such a natural sound and so completely shuts out everything else, that it almost feels quiet. Central Park is another unlikely addition to the list. Though it’s located in the middle of what is arguably one of the world’s loudest cities, it provides a quiet solitude away from the noise of daily life.

Wild animal travel: Where the hunter becomes the hunted

There’s nothing quite like seeing a wild animal in its natural habitat. It’s why people go on safari in South Africa to see lions and elephants, trek through the jungles of Borneo in search of monkeys, and submerge themselves in steel cages off the coast of Baja California to swim with Great White sharks. But it’s important to remember that despite the precautions taken by tour guides and rangers, these are still wild animals and getting close to them in nature carries some risks. In other words: there’s a reason that safari guide carries a gun.

Forbes Traveler has put together a list of “10 Places Where Animals Eat You”, a collection of destinations where the danger of visiting wild animals in nature is greater. Among the spots that made the list are Khao Sok National Park in Thailand, where cobras kill several hundred people per year; South Luangwa National Park in Zambia, where aggressive hippos have been known to flip boats and even eat people; and Ranthambhore Bagh, India, where around 100 people are attacked by tigers each year.

The article goes on to detail other encounters with wild animals, like when the girlfriend of a Tanzanian guide had her sleeping bag dragged 30 yards by a lion, while she was sound asleep in it. It seems animal attacks can happen almost anywhere though, and the danger certainly won’t stop most people from visiting these areas to see wild animals up close. You may just want to think twice about wandering too far away from your guide.