GadlingTV’s Travel Talk – Torontonian Exploration!

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.

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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.

Lake Erie’s secret: Pelee Island

The southernmost inhabited bit of Canada is Pelee Island, a 36-square mile island in Lake Erie just 90 minutes from Sandusky, Ohio by ferry. To its south is an even more southerly uninhabited Canadian island, Middle Island, which was a safe haven for rumrunners during Prohibition, but Pelee is Canada’s southernmost community.

Pelee is very quiet and (how shall I put this?) truly out of sync with the urgencies of contemporary life. For the first two days of my stay on Pelee I tried to find a pocket of wireless Internet access. I was unsuccessful. “We’re working on it,” said a clerk at the police station. “You can use my computer,” the owner of Connerlee Bakery offered. “Nowhere on the island,” said the guy at the register at Pelee Island Winery. “This is your vacation! Relax! You’re as bad as my husband,” said the proprietor of Comfortech Bike Rentals. Her husband, it turned out, is Pelee’s mayor.

We were on Pelee to celebrate a belated birthday and to chill out. Both goals were accomplished. We rented two adjoining houses at the north end of the island and spent our time biking, swimming, and eating. We had all our meals at home save a few bakery runs and our final night’s dinner, which saw us sampling Anchor & Wheel Inn‘s C$16.95 all-you-can-eat fish fry.

On balance, Pelee is a very affordable place to vacation. Our house rental ran about C$160 per person for the week. Beyond housing, bike rentals (C$20 per day), and the final night’s dinner (about C$20 per person) there were no costs beyond market and bakery runs.

Actually, that’s not quite true. There is a fabulous Heritage Centre on the island, and we spent a few dollars (adult admission C$3) to check it out. Opened in 1988 by founder Ron Tiessen, it contains well-curated exhibits on various aspects of Pelee’s cultural and physical history. The Heritage Centre has helped pioneer organic farming on the island and also operates an annual event in early May called Springsong, which celebrates birds and birding and typically features a banquet with Margaret Atwood, a long-term part-time resident of the island. Ron is a Pelee expert, and talkative to boot, and the Heritage Centre functions as a tourist information center as well as a museum.What is there to do on Pelee? In springtime there’s Springsong (see above.) During the summer, there is above all biking to be done. Pelee is a flat island, perfect for biking. It’s good, then, that there’s a bike shop right by the main ferry pier. Bikes at Comfortech Bike Rentals begin at a rather steep C$20 per day. In addition, visitors hike, swim, fish, take photographs of the island’s churches, visit Pelee Art Works, and sample island wines at the Pelee Island Winery. Pheasant hunting season in October and November closes out the season.

There is some great local produce to sample as well. Plenty of local producers sell the fruits of their labors at little roadside stands, and there is also a Saturday farmer’s market. Pelee feels on the ground and looks from the air like a set of farms plopped down into Lake Erie.

Pelee is charming, of course, but what sets it apart from dozens of other North American islands full of rental cottages is its sense of being apart from the rest of the world, its lack of resorts, and the fact that it has so few traditional tourist amusements. It feels like a little secret, tucked away for residents and the few people who make the trek. That it barely markets itself surely has something to do with the impressions it sustains.

There’s a giddiness in extreme communities, places on the edge of nations or continents, and Pelee is no exception. Visitors hike stealthily through Fish Point Nature Reserve to walk to the very tip of Canada’s southernmost inhabited island. A secret of sorts, Pelee shows no sign of morphing into something unrecognizable or overdeveloped anytime soon.

Pelee Island ferry information can be found here.

Top ten traits of an excellent hostel

I’ve spent nights in hostels that were probably just fronts for drug operations, and hostels that I wish I could live in. What makes a hostel good is fairly basic: cleanliness is the biggest issue, followed by orderliness and friendliness.

But a few traits separate the good from the excellent when it comes to hostels. Here’s what I’ve determined are the factors:

1. Good ventilation: It is so gross to open the door into a dorm and be hit with a wall of humid halitosis. It doesn’t matter how clean the room is; you just can’t cleanse the air of a dozen people sweating and breathing. A window (with a screen to keep the bugs out) and a fan work wonders.

2. Towels: Even threadbare ones are a nice break from the damp, mildewey clumps that backpackers are loathe to pull out of their packs and “dry off” with.

3. Separate male and female dorms: Boys are smelly. Girls can’t hang out in their underpants with boys around. And I appreciate being able to change in my room, rather than carry all my clothes down the hall to the bathroom, try to change without getting my feet or the bottoms of my pants wet, and then carry my jammies back (waking everyone else up in the process as I go in and out of the door).

4. Drinking rules: Don’t get me wrong – I like to party as much as the next 19- (or 33-) year-old. However, lax rules tend to lead to noisy late-night sessions, with giggly guests lounging around the common areas. At the least, drinking rules encourage folks to get out of the hostel and experience wherever they’re at. Even if it’s just the local pub.5. A big kitchen and a staff that cleans it daily: Unfortunately, you just can’t count on every guest to do their own dishes. And you definitely can’t count on them to wipe the counters and sweep the floors. A kitchen that gets a scrub down once or twice a day is a wonderful thing to behold.

6 Non-metal, non-creaky beds: Not everyone has the bladder capacity of a camel. Which means that not everyone is going to sleep through the night without creeping down the ladder to relieve themselves. And you’re gonna have folks who had a late night, or people who have an early flight to catch. It helps when the beds are a nice, quiet natural wood. And they don’t have plastic sheets on them, either.

7. Local knowledge and the ability to book tours: Three words: One-stop shopping.

8. Nightly activities: Canadiana Backpacker’s Inn in Toronto has at least one weekly activity a night, whether it’s karaoke Monday at a local bar, game night, or a Friday tour of a brewery. Some of the activities, like karaoke, are free, which encourages everyone to participate. It’s a great way to get out of the hostel and meet some other travelers.

9. A nightly/weekly limit: It’s been my experience that hostels without a stay limit attract folks who aren’t necessarily travelers, but rather are people in transition, trying to relocate to the city. That’s not exactly a bad thing, but it’s a different vibe than the regular traveler scene. And in one unnamed Alaska hostel, it meant a bunch of 50-year-old unemployed criminals men, selling cocaine and stealing cash from guests. True story.

10. A decent breakfast: It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, but I’ll take a bagel and cream cheese over Wonderbread toast and jam any day. Decent coffee, brewed slightly strong, is a thousand times better than instant coffee. Put out a donation jar; I’ll gladly throw in a buck or two to feel full and awake for a couple of hours. HI Austin receives day-olds from a local bakery, which means that hostel guests can help themselves to almost-fresh doughnuts, french breads, and whatever else the baker made that day.

[Photo credit: Flickr user Barnacles Hostels]

Vegetarian child stranded in airport, fed burgers

Julien Reid, at only nine years old, is used to air travel. He routinely flies between his parents in Ottawa, and San Francisco, so he’s seen it all … well, he has now. Reid was forgotten in a children’s waiting room in Chicago, where he spent eight hours waiting and hoping to be discovered.

According to the Ottawa Citizen:

He was in a “tiny, little room cramped with kids,” where they played the same video on a loop all day, he said. The only food he’d been given was McDonald’s, a less than satisfactory option for a vegetarian like him. He said he and the other children were yelled at “to stop being kids.”

Meanwhile, the flight left without Reid. How did it happen? Among the many calls made to find out what was happening, Reid’s mother, Genevieve Harte, spoke with the United Airlines attendant tasked with keeping an eye on the kids. According to the Citizen, “It was this frazzled attendant who let it slip, Harte said, that no one had come to fetch Julien to put him on his flight.”

Citing something of an airline “omerta” policy, Harte, who suspects her son was bumped from a crowded flight, told the citizen: “It’s a lot easier to have a kid that’s not going to say anything than an adult who has a business meeting that’s going to scream at you in front of everybody.”

United said it’s going to give Harte “a refund for the childcare fee and an undisclosed goodwill gesture.”

[photo by FHKE via Flickr]

Top five weekend travel media stories

Here are five interesting stories from this weekend’s newspaper travel sections around the world.

1. In Melbourne’s the Age, Andrew West writes about a fabulous train journey from Jakarta to Yogyakarta to Surabaya and then back to Jakarta.

2. Sophie Cooke extols the pleasures of Sarajevo and rural Bosnia in the Guardian.

3. In the New York Times, Jaime Gross spends 36 hours in Salt Lake City and fills readers in on the buzz on SLC’s new organic dining scene.

4. Jay Jones does the Wisconsin artisan cheese tour circuit for the Los Angeles Times.

5. In the Globe and Mail, Bonny Reichert writes an ode to backcountry canoeing and camping in Ontario’s Algonquin Park.

(Image: Flickr/johovac)