Gadlinks for Wednesday 9.2.09

by Brenda Yun on


Buenos dias, Gadlingers. I want to apologize for my brief absence over the weekend. I was lodging in Colca Canyon, the world´s deepest canyon, and was therefore unavailable to post my usual Gadlinks. Fortunately, Aaron´s been holding the fort. Here now is today´s dose of Gadlinks, a quick whirl around the travel blogosphere.

´Til tomorrow, have a great evening!

More Gadlinks here.

Gadlinks for Friday 6.26.09

by Brenda Yun on


Aloha, Gadling readers! My apologies for the delayed Gadlinks for Friday. The surf here in Hawaii has been pretty swell (pun intended), so I’ve been in the water for the past few days. Really. Here’s a look at the latest travel-worthy links:

  • Matador’s given us 6 reasons to travel without a plan. I’m sure I could come up with at least four more — the first of which would be FREEDOM!
  • If you’re heading to Asia and need help planning your adventure, the New York Times has some helpful Southeast Asia budgeting tips.
  • I’ve long been a proponent of solo travel, so when I came across Beth Whitman’s perspective on solo travel, I found myself nodding and smiling.
  • Who said Latin Americans were carnivores? BootsNAll’s vegetarian tips for South America proves you can go there and eat to your vegetarian heart’s content.

‘Til Monday, have an epic weekend! I know I will!

More Gadlinks here.

Ghent proclaims regular vegetarian days

by Sean McLachlan on

The Belgian city of Ghent, long famous for its well-preserved medieval architecture and excellent art museums, may soon become a favorite destination for vegetarians. According to the BBC, Ghent has become the first city in the world to have a designated “Vegetarian Day.” Public sector workers are asked to give up meat every Thursday, and in September schools will follow suit by serving vegetarian-only meals every Thursday in their cafeterias.

The move is designed to tackle obesity and reduce the city’s carbon footprint. The meat industry is a major source of greenhouse gas, much of it coming from animal flatulence (no, really) and the city council hopes this program will become a model for other cities.

Belgium is already one of the greener nations of the world, with an efficient recycling program and a goal of having 6% of all electricity generated by renewable sources by 2010. Ghent has the largest pedestrian center of any Belgian city and boasts numerous vegetarian restaurants. As part of the new program, the city government is giving visitors free guides to veggie eateries, and there’s a copy (in Dutch) online that also includes information on the vegetarian lifestyle. An unofficial English guide to vegetarian dining in Belgium can be found here.

Dispatch from the Galapagos: The summer I gave up meat

by Jerry Guo on

Rachel Atkinson hops like a Darwin finch from one volcanic outcropping to the next, then plunges into ankle-deep mud. Squishing as she walks, the botanist with the Charles Darwin Research Station homes in on the ailing invaders: blackberry, passion fruit, and quinine bushes clustered near Santa Cruz Island’s last shrubby stands of Scalesia trees. Atkinson smiles in approval. One more blast of herbicide ought to prevent the aliens from regrowing and give the Scalesia a shot at survival after all.

We were on the front-line of an epic war being waged on all sorts of invasive species in the Galápagos Islands. Surprisingly, the culprit seems to be global warming, which is usually associated with polar bears and other sorts of cold things-not an archipelago situated one degree south of the equator.

It all started in the late 1980s, when the periodic El Niños became more frequent and severe. Of course, we do have to give some credit to the pirates and whalers who began visiting the Galápagos in the 1700s and leaving behind goats, pigs, and other animals as a living larder for future visits. That couldn’t have helped.
The torrential monsoons have since thrown the entire island ecosystem in a loop. In some cases, like what Atkinson is battling, invasive weeds have exploded. In other cases where there aren’t weeds, native plants have been doing the exploding, also a problem because that attracts goats. Godfrey Merlen, a Galápagos native and director of WildAid, says he saw “two or three” goats on the upper flanks of Isabela Island’s Alcedo volcano in 1992. When he returned three years later, he saw hundreds. “It was total chaos,” Merlen says. The goats had denuded the once-lush terrain, transforming brush and cloud forests into patchy grassland.

While I didn’t make it to the remote volcanoes on Isabela, I was able to tag along for two weeks with a National Geographic research team tracking giant tortoises. Although the tortoises were interesting (they’ve been a victim of the goats, who have eaten up their food source), I was there for the .223-caliber rifles. You see, several trigger-happy park rangers were accompanying the scientists and they were mad. Their goal was to shoot and kill any goat they saw. I learned they were part of the world’s largest eradication campaign-an $18 million effort to rid the islands of 140,000 feral goats.

But I never saw them use the rifles, for by now, ten years after the start of the campaign, they have become so fit and smart they can run down the goats on foot (and bullets cost money). The first time I witnessed the exhilarating chase, I thought it couldn’t be that hard to keep up with them. While the rangers nimbly corralled the goats into a basin depression, coordinating with each other in an elegant ballet, I had found a rock to stub my toe on. And that was that.

For the next two weeks, we feasted on goats. More accurately, the first week was a feast. Then we ran out of spices. Yet still, we were too polite not to chow down the goat soup, goat sandwiches, goat sushi (only once), and whatever else the park rangers / part-time chefs cooked up.

I stayed up late into the night talking to them about goats-and trying to digest my dinner. I learned that the national park imported hunting dogs from New Zealand and trained them to track and kill goats. Helicopters were pressed into service for sharpshooters to reach rugged highlands. To flush out holdouts, the park released “Judas” goats, including sterilized females plied with hormones to keep them in heat and attract males.

All in all, these rangers have been excellent hunters who were using the latest technology, and it’s paid off-this year they managed to wipe out the goats on Isabela. “A great battle has been won,” Victor Carrion, subdirector of the park, said to me later, though he cautioned that much more work needs to be done eradicating other invasive species.

Although one bane has been eliminated, others are at large. In northern Isabela, rats have ravaged the last two nesting sites of mangrove finches, estimated at fewer than 100. And both rats and feral cats have decimated a subspecies of marine iguana (Amblyrhynchus cristatus albemarlensis) endemic to Isabela, prompting the World Conservation Union to add it to its vulnerable list in 2004. Rangers have set out traps and poison for Isabela’s rats and are plotting eradication campaigns on Floreana and Santiago islands. An effort to poison feral cats will commence next year.
Impressive, no doubt.

But those rangers?

They were not good cooks.

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A Canadian in Beijing: Peking Duck

by Ember Swift on

Well, my trip is rounding to a close and there have been several things on my “to do before I leave” list. Eating Peking Duck is not one of them, however, but here I am poised to write about it. No, I didn’t eat any. Yes, I watched it get eaten. I heard the exclamations. I partook in the pancake portion. It was fun.

Even vegetarians can eat at a Peking Duck restaurant, I found.

My sister and (nearly) brother-in-law came to Beijing to visit a few days ago. We have been going strong with activities since they arrived, many of which were on their “Beijing-in-four-days” wish list. Since I also had my list, there were several things to check off and we’re still chipping away at the items. One of their “must-dos” was to eat Peking Duck.

I am told this is a requirement of all non-vegetarian Beijing visitors. (And all the ducks in China thank the vegetarians for their graceful exemption!)

The experience was really interesting, however, and being a witness to an age-old tradition was worth the photos and the social joy. As a bit of a farewell dinner with some of my dearest friends here, it was also filled with a lot of laughter and stories. I was so happy to be able to introduce people from my China life to people from my Canada life. I couldn’t stop smiling.

We went to a very famous Peking Duck courtyard-style restaurant called Hua Jia Yi Yuan . It was gorgeous.

The front entrance was decadant and it opened into a long corridor into a lobby with a smiling hostess that greeted us in both English and Chinese. The main courtyard was open and full of lattice work and decorative beams painted in the traditional Chinese style. Everything was made to look classic and old but it was also filled with modern furniture and beautiful woodwork that was obviously new in its polished glory.

They led us upstairs to plush red velvet, cushioned chairs and a full dining area. In fact, the place was sprawling and appeared to be nearly full on this weekend night. Everyone looked happy, I noticed, and so I knew the food would be good. Faces were multinational, which is another good sign. Places filled with only non-Chinese faces have proven (in my opinion) to be overpriced and often lacking in taste. Places with both non-Chinese and Chinese customers tend to be excellent on all counts — not too pricey and tasty.

Both proved true. The whole meal cost us each about 65 kuai or approximately $10 Canadian.

We all sat and I offered introductions all around. The connections at the table were formed instantly and the stories, food and beer flowed effortlessly.

What a pleasure it is to watch people you know and love form clear lines with people you also know and love. I have found that my friends here are not always friends with each other. In other words, I have met several different people from different backgrounds and through different scenes while here in Beijing over these three months. Putting them together at a table is not something I’ve had much chance to do. Well, at least not when I could witness the results (my gigs have been collective experiences, but I’m always on stage and not able to see or hear how things go!) and so, I sat back and watched these wonderful people engage each other and just smiled.

I felt incredibly fortunate to know them all.

Soon the food arrived. It was definitely an experience in eating! Peking Duck comes with these thin round pancakes and several cold vegetables in small piles like cucumbers, radish, lettuce (etc) as well as two different sauces, a sweet and savory option. My sister’s finance had everyone laughing when he described his “duck roll-up” as a “Chinese Fajita。” My friend Traci laughed the hardest when she followed that up by explaining that every time her boyfriend eats her Mexican cooking, he describes fajitas as “Mexican Peking Duck.” (Her boyfriend is Chinese and she is American.) We all burst into more laughter. Perspective really does depend on where you’re standing, eh?! Both descriptions are right.

Basically, you put slices of the duck meat into the pancake along with the other ingredients of your choice and then you roll it up and eat it in your hands like a little sandwich pocket. I found it fascinating. I ate a vegetarian version of that as well as several other dishes that were ordered off the menu. I was not lacking in food!

By the time we were done eating and had talked ourselves into a dull roar, I looked around and noticed that we were the only table still occupied. It was about 10:30 at night and the place was deserted. I marvelled at how insular our table had felt for me to have not even noticed a single other table depart from a once packed dining room. It made me smile all the larger. The people I was with were absorbing, to say the least. It was a great night.

When we left, we posed for photos in the lobby and chatted for awhile about the “wall of fame” and the separate room off the corridor for the live fish to swim their final rounds of fish tanks before heading for the kitchen. This is very common in China where the restaurants want to give the customers a view of the freshness of their product. I silently reminded the fish that not everyone comes there to eat them and then turned to go.

We walked out to the sidewalk still chatting and laughing, seemingly not without energy for more stories and anecdotes about China and culture and the travelling bug. This halting goodbye outside became another ten minutes before we finally filed into different taxis and waved farewell.

Duck was apparently delicious. For me, the whole night was delicious. The company, the food, the atmosphere, the vibe. I felt filled with good fortune to have met such wonderful people here and to have such a wonderful family.

Life is full.

And so were our stomachs.

[Pictured from left to right: Stuart, Traci, Me, Rui, Temple (my sis) and Steve (her finance)]