Travel gems and hidden secrets from Concierge.com

by Jamie Rhein on

The winners of Concierge.com’s Million Mile Contest have been announced and their essays are posted on the website. Some essays offer a unique angle about a place where people might miss certain details if they didn’t know where or how to look.

The winner, Elizabeth Dwoskin of Brooklyn, New York wrote about Parque Lage, a jungle park in the middle of Rio De Janeiro. Within the reserve is my kind of place–Saint Teresa, a neighborhood of artists who live in 19th century mansions. Not one artist per mansion, but up to twenty. For her essay, Dwoskin won one million OnePass miles from Continental Airlines.

Here are the runners-up essays about particular places. They are quick, interesting reads that stimulate ones own memories about what made a particular travel spot at a particular time special. I’m thinking about the day I spent riding a motorbike around Skopelos, Greece.

Along with each essay are links that lead to more details about each location.

Another awesome reason to visit Greece

by Brenda Yun on

The devastating Greek riots that took place two months ago could very well be history now that there is something worth going out in the streets and celebrating. The latest news from the birthplace of modern mythology is that Zeus’s birthplace has been uncovered on the slopes of Mount Lykaion.

It has long been contested exactly where Zeus, the god of Greek gods, was born, as theorists have debated between the island of Crete and Mount Lykaion. The recent discovery was made at a site where ceremonial relics that are the earliest known to reflect that of Zeus have been found. Based on my reading of Homer’s “The Odyssey,” I imagine offering libations and drinking was involved even 4,000 years ago. The report claims that more than 50 drinking vessels were found at the site.

We all know his birth story, don’t we? Zeus’s mother Rhea gave birth to her son, but to keep her husband Cronus from eating him, Zeus was sent to a cave and raised by a shepherd. He was hidden from Cronus’s knowledge until he was old enough to contest his godly right.

The coolest thing about this new finding is that the ritual worship of Zeus likely began in this same place where he was born.

While the only ancient wonder of the world is off the coast of Rhodes, where the Colossus once stood at nearly 110 feet high above the sea, this new discovery could be a great reason to add a new/ancient Greek site to the list.

[via LiveScience.com]

Three ways to capture sense of place in a travel story

by Rolf Potts on

In my last post I mentioned how I spoke with Thomas Fox Averill‘s writing students at Washburn University — and specifically about how you can use travel experiences to improve your “sense of place” descriptions, in fiction as well as nonfiction. Of course, mere travel isn’t the only way to improve your sense-of-place writing chops — it’s also useful to use research information and creative juxtaposition to enliven your descriptions of place. From the pages of Marco Polo Didn’t Go There, here are three strategies and examples for creating a stronger feeling of place in a story:

From Chapter 9: Evoking sense of place using direct description and contrasts

“Driving along the desolate and gorgeous Sandover Highway northeast of Alice Springs, there are only two sure indicators that life exists in this parched red-orange landscape. One is the curious ubiquity of pink cockatoos, which dart out of the bush and swoop over the Land Cruiser, occasionally exploding into the grill in a suicidal puff of pastel feathers. The other is an abundance of junked cars — sun-bleached Ford Falcons and rusty station wagons that have been abandoned at the side of the road by Aborigines going to or coming from their isolated homes in the outback. In the heat of the afternoon, when the horizon shudders like a mirage and towering dust devils swirl across the highway, this place can feel like the end of the world. Perhaps seized by irony or optimism, the German immigrants who tried to settle this area in the 1920s named it Utopia.”

From Chapter 12: Evoking sense of place using historical context, description, and sense of time

“Compared to the marquee islands of the Cyclades — Santorini, Ios, Mykonos — Sifnos doesn’t have much of a reputation. According to Herodotus, the Classical Era gold and silver mines on this 30 square-mile island made it the richest in the Aegean; a century later, Sifnos won notoriety as the site where the Spartans met with the Persians to plot against Alexander the Great. For the most, part, however, Sifnos has existed as a nondescript suburb of an island, with 2000 or so inhabitants, known more for its poets and pottery than political or geographical distinction. During Ottoman rule, the Turks never bothered sending a garrison to the island, and though pirates periodically haunted the Cyclades, the patron saint of Sifnos, Panaghia Chryssopighi, is best known for protecting the island against grasshoppers. “Despite such lack of distinction, however, my boat-mates and I immediately fall in love with Sifnos. The tourist crowds have left with high season, and we have the island mostly to ourselves. Renting motorcycles, we cruise up intricately terraced valleys to the central plateau, where the houses of Apollonia town lay scattered like big white dice among blue-domed churches and olive groves. We wander out to the far coast and swim on empty beaches under ridges dotted with almond trees and clumps of wild juniper. We explore the mazelike alleyways in the hilltop fortress of Kastro, where bright pink bougainvillea creeps over shuttered windows, and stray cats blink in the sunlight. In the evening, we sit outdoors at wooden restaurant tables and dine on tzatziki, olives, stuffed peppers, lamb, and local white wine. After dark, we hike up to the empty monasteries overlooking the harbor, where we listen to the sound of the wind and the tinkling of goat bells. One day on Sifnos stretches into two in this manner, and two days stretch into three.”

From Chapter 10: Evoking sense of place using the people who populate that place

“The best belly dancing in Egypt, it is said, costs $50 a show and can be found at five-star hotels like the Meridien Le Caire or the Parisienne. At the Palmyra club, which is within walking distance of the Sultan Hotel, admission is about $1.50. The performance value (I suspect) is calibrated accordingly. “When our disheveled traveler posse arrives from the Sultan to take a table in the back of the Palmyra, a man in a djellaba and two women in chadors are happily shaking their moneymakers on the dance floor. At first I think this is a prelude to some kind of Islamic-themed striptease, until I realize that these people are just overzealous customers. The real dancer — a big-haired, large-breasted girl in a faux snakeskin jumpsuit — is at the back of the stage, idly joking with the accordion player. As my eyes get used to the darkness, I take in the surroundings. The club features tall ceilings and textured rock walls, accessorized with red curtains. If the lighting were improved and the velvety curtains replaced with, say, country knickknacks, this place could easily pass for a family restaurant in Minnetonka, Minnesota. “The crowd, however, is decidedly non-Middle America: Bedouins in red-checkered kaffiyehs and long gowns wave 5-pound notes (each about $1.45) at the edge of the dance floor; Egyptian office stiffs with wrinkled neckties leap up from their tables to clap along with the music; fat men with thin mustaches sit alone in corners, sweat stains growing out from their armpits. The band looks straight out of a David Lynch movie: the melancholy lute player who blinks and stares at the floor as he strums; the grinning, leather-faced bongo drummer who wears brown pants over white, patent-leather shoes; the keyboardist who stops playing in the middle of the song to light a cigarette. The music is rhythmic, dissonant, deafening. “Eventually, the girl in the snakeskin jumpsuit starts to dance again, humming to the music into a cordless mike. After 30 minutes of this, she yields the stage to a dull-eyed blond with feathered hair and a sequined evening gown. This new dancer is so amorphously plump that her rear end seems to start just below her neck. As she dances, the slightest wiggle sends her sequined extremities into a gelatinous fury of motion. For those of us at the Sultan table, the effect is mesmerizing and somewhat disturbing. The Egyptian men, however, go nuts, shouting along to the music and periodically jumping onto the stage to bust a few dance moves and shower the blond with 1-pound (30-cent) notes.”

Galley Gossip: The people you meet, the places you want to go – Portugal, Greece, Hong Kong, Croatia, and Dubai

by Heather Poole on

Though I have no idea when it will actually happen, I can’t decide where to travel on my next big vacation…

  • Greece
  • Hong Kong
  • Croatia
  • Dubai

That’s been my list of dream places to go for the last few years. But now I’ve got a new place to add to the list, a list that just keeps growing.

  • Portugal

Man oh man, the people you meet, the places you want to go…

Alice, my hairdresser is from Portugal, and that’s what we talk about every time I see her, which is at least once a month. It was the morning of my Las Vegas trip, and while Alice worked her magic on my hair, I sat in front of the mirror on a swiveling chair catching up on the latest travel magazines that customers before me had left behind. Of course whenever I see Alice I can’t help but talk travel while flipping through all those amazing photographs of beautiful places all around the world.

While reading an interesting article about a little town in Croatia, Alice said, “You’ve got to go to Portugal. It’s beautiful.” She had just returned from a two week vacation that very week, which explained the dark tan and the honey colored streaks in her auburn hair.

Placing a copy of Travel and Leisure on my lap, I listened as she described Vilamoura, the village by the sea where she grew up, where she had just visited, and as she described the fresh food, seafood of course, I decided right then and there I wanted to go. Soon. If you’d been there with me you’d want to go too! When my curly hair had been straightened as straight as it could get, I went home, got on the computer, and started googling Portugal.

Alice was right. Portugal is beautiful. I do want to go. But with so many places to go, and not enough time to actually go, how does one decide which place to go – first?

Greece has been on my list for as long as I can remember. So long, in fact, I can’t even remember how or why Greece initially made the list in the first place, but there it is, right at the top, where it’s been for years and years now. There’s just something about all those stark white homes against a sea of blue that leaves me yearning for more. Of course the movie Mama Mia only made me realize I need to get there sooner than later.

Hong Kong made the list last year after the husband returned home from a business trip. Initially he didn’t want to go. Complained about having to go. But then, when he finally returned, all he could talk about was going back. “It’s amazing,” he kept saying as he described the buildings and the food and the tailor who eventually shipped him three custom made suits. Then, last month an old friend from an old job contacted me on Facebook to inform me she still worked for the same company, only she was now VP of the company in Hong Kong, ending the email with “Come visit me soon,” prompting the husband to exclaim, “What are we waiting for!”

Croatia made the list five years ago after viewing hundreds of gorgeous photos taken by a young man, a budding photographer, the son of a woman who works for my husband in New York. The photos were beautiful, particularly the ones of the people who lived there – his relatives. “You can stay at one of their houses,” he offered, “While they stay at a hotel.” It was a tempting offer. We came very close to spending our honeymoon in Croatia, but then the war broke out and after 9/11 I was a little nervous about flying too far away from home. We ended up in Mexico. Since then, each and every year, we come THIS CLOSE to going to Croatia, which is really really close, before someone or something inspires us to go elsewhere. Eventually we’ll make it there.

Dubai is the most recent place to make the list. I must admit, the thought of actually traveling for that long of time on an airplane does not sound like a vacation, not to me, not when you work on an airplane for a living. The last thing a flight attendant wants to do is go to the airport, get on an airplane, and be surrounded by passengers on a day off, for any length of time. But I keep meeting passengers who absolutely love Dubai. On my flight to Vegas, the British man sitting in the first row couldn’t stop talking about the airport – the airport! Apparently it’s pretty incredible. And that’s just the airport! And on my flight to Miami, if the passengers weren’t going to Dubai, they were coming back from Dubai, or had just recently been to Dubai. I even shared a cab with a flight attendant who worked for another airline who wanted to quit and become a flight attendant for Emirates, just so he could live in Dubai (and layover in five star hotels.) With all this talk about Dubai, it had to go on the list.

There are so many great places to travel and I can’t decide where to go. Perhaps you, dear reader, can help. Please! Have you been to Dubai, Croatia, Hong Kong, Greece, or Portugal? If so, take the poll below, and don’t forget to add a comment. Tell me why you love the place you choose, and make sure to share all your favorite things to do and see. I’m dying to know.

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Photo of the Day (06/02/08)

by Kent Wien on

5 heads of 3 Euros. Life can hardly get better than that.

Bucket of lamb’s heads shot by Styggiti at the Athens Central Market, Greece. I would call it “Silence of the lambs, Part III.” They look just scary enough (especially the one in the bottom middle) that they could be used in the movie sequel, I think.
***To have your photo considered for the Gadling Photo of the Day, go over to the Gadling Flickr Pool and post it. Make sure it is not copyrighted, otherwise we can’t post it here.***