How movies and TV shows can help you travel further, better and weirder

Some travel the world in search of our natural wonders. Others, for food and culture. And then you have the movie buffs, who travel for the spots made famous by Hollywood heroes. Jo Stewart is one of those (and damn proud of it).

“Which hotel are you staying at while
you’re in Los Angeles?”

For a split-second, I consider telling a
white lie and namedropping one of LA’s cool hotels. You know the ones—hip
places dripping with street cred like The Roosevelt or Chateau Marmont. Instead,
I give the more complicated (and truthful) answer: I’m staying at a hotel in
Burbank called the Safari Inn.

A throwback to the golden age of motor
travel, the low-rise Safari Inn has been a Burbank landmark since 1955. Its
kitsch neon sign stands out in a sea of nondescript office buildings and
generic strip malls. Ever since irreverent crime flick True Romance was filmed here in the early ‘90s, I’ve always wanted
to bed down at the Safari Inn. A trip 20-plus years in the making, it’s a miracle
the small hotel was still in business.

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Sign of the times: Can Bangladesh’s rickshaw artists survive modernization?

They
bring color to the streets of Dhaka, but as populations rise and cities
modernize, Bangladesh’s rickshaws, and the traditional art that adorns them,
are at risk.

On one of Old Town Dhaka’s narrow lanes, two men toil
away in a cycle rickshaw workshop. One at a treadle sewing machine stitching plastic
appliqué panels, the other painting metal wheel rims. Beside them is a new rickshaw,
decorated with hot-pink illustrations of three film stars, a festooned hood,
metal stud detailing and handlebar streamers.

Outside, Yousuf, a rickshaw artist, unfurls a fabric
scroll revealing an illustration like the one on the new rickshaw. “This is one
of the most popular rickshaw paintings in Dhaka,” he says. The piece isn’t
destined for a rickshaw though; it was a tourist commission.

Creating art for visitors has become a new income stream—because
these days there isn’t enough rickshaw painting work to sustain Yousuf and his
family. “There are still a few other artists working here in Old Dhaka. Probably
around 12 of us.”

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The Welsh mining town transforming itself into an adventure hotspot

Once a mining mecca, then the poorest area in the country, this close-knit Welsh community is now using everything it has—from the mine shafts to the mountains—to breathe life into their town once more.

“There,” says Rich, training his torch on a miner’s caban, the typical shelter workers would have gathered in during their 30-minute break on a 12-hour shift. “Highlight of our working day, that was.”

We’re in the Llechwydd Slate Caverns’ appropriately-named Deep Mine, in the Welsh town of Blaenau Ffestiniog. The rudimentary shelter doesn’t look like much: Slates heaped around a table within the greater gloom of the chambers making up Level A.

Miners once looked forward to their half-hour in this dark den, cherishing the chance for a hot drink, gossip, news on sick or injured fellow workers, perhaps for a dig at the management that had them all working down here on a pittance of a salary. If their day’s highlight was anything to go by, the rest of it was pretty abysmal. “I started here when I was 16,” Rich, who now leads tours of the mines, says. “My father was 12; my grandfather eight. Imagine that today.”

But Blaenau is no boom-times-to-bleak-times sob story. Against the odds, the town is in the midst of a transformation into one of Wales’ biggest adventure travel destinations.

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Everything we learned about the future of travel from the Tourism for Tomorrow awards

What does the future of sustainable travel look like? Holly Tuppen heads along to the Tourism for Tomorrow Awards in Seville, Spain, to find out.

Last week I sat down with Barack Obama—or at least, I sat in the same room as him—when he addressed the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) summit in Seville.

While Obama (who loves to travel “for the universal truths
it unravels”) offered a welcome respite from today’s less-than-inspiring
political figures, he was by no means the only changemaker in the room.

In a world where sustainability is front-and-centre of the global conversation, many parts of the travel industry are taking it upon themselves to lessen their impact and improve lives at the same time.

Now 15 years old, these awards celebrate those initiatives, and the people and businesses behind them. Here’s what I took away from the whole thing.

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Meet the woman empowering Nepal’s widows to strive for a better life

Nepal’s widows are one of the least understood and most poorly-treated minorities in the world. Nicola Zolin spent time with one woman who’s doing her best to change all that.

Sunita Thapa’s husband was violent, and beat her repeatedly before leaving her with two sons and two daughters. She has never heard from him again.

Sarmila Adhikazi’s husband hung himself in their family home four years ago. He once hit her on the face with a beer bottle and damaged her right eye. Her relatives blamed her for his death.

Janaki Devi Joshi became a widow at the age of 21 when her daughter was just six months old. Her father in-law sold the house and didn’t give her a penny.

Today, Sunita, Sarmila and Janaka join hundreds of other women in the small city of Mahendranagar, in Nepal’s Kanchanpur district, to meet a woman who’s helping improve their lives in no small way. And when Lily Thapa enters the hall, every pair of eyes in the room lights up.

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Travel writing 101: How to turn your trips into a tale

If you want to turn your travels into a story, how do you take notes while staying ‘in the moment’? Writer, filmmaker and adventurer Leon McCarron shares his tips.

When I first began traveling, it was by bicycle from New York City to Los Angeles, then westwards across Australasia—with a little help from boats and planes for troublesome oceans.

For a young man, it was mind-expanding—mostly by virtue of being in new environments. I also kept a journal of everything; partly for me, and partly with a vague idea to write it all up sometime, for posterity if nothing else.

A couple of years later, in a coffee shop in northwest London, I did just that. Unfortunately, I found my own notes agonizing. “Met a man called Mike in a town called Athens in Michigan,” I’d written. So far so good. “Had a really interesting conversation with him about the decline of car industry here, and his theory of why there’s so many alien sightings. Had coffee and rode another 20 miles before camping.”

It’s not hard here to see what’s missing. What did he tell me about cars and aliens? I learned the hard way that, if a written record is to be useful in the future, the details matter. That means more work, and some discipline—and I hope, a decade later, that I’ve learned a few things.

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Don’t go hitchhiking in Canada without reading this first

Having taken 33 separate rides from perfect strangers during a solo quest across Canada, Steve Madgwick learned a thing or two about humanity. He also learned that, sometimes, it’s OK to wait for the next ride. 

I’ve never looked at a Coke bottle and thought, “Wow,
that’s a great weapon.” But right now, it’s all I have.

“Dude, where ARE you going?” I say, my voice breaking pre-pubescently.
I don’t usually call people dude or
consider weapons much either. “I’ll just get out here, thanks.” No response—again.
Shit.

He’s just swerved off the Trans-Canada Highway, down
an obscure off-ramp. Newfoundland basically has one main road and he knows this is not where I’m headed. I
grip the bottle purposefully, ready, not sure how, when or if to clobber him.
At this speed, he’ll crash the car and kill at least one of us, for sure.

He’d stopped answering my questions about 10 minutes
ago; his face betrays vague torment, void eyes dead-ahead, like a goat on
hallucinogens. At first, he asked probing questions like, “Are you meeting
someone there?” Apparently, he wasn’t pleased with my answers. Scared, but not
wanting to startle him, I invented nearby friends of considerable mass and
superpowers, but now …

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Solo travel is one of life’s greatest joys—but what if you get so sick you can’t think?

Solo travel is all kinds of liberating—after all, you get to call the shots on every aspect of your trip. But what happens when you get so ill that your decision-making abilities become practically non-existent?

It has been one of those glorious travel days. The type that makes you think, ‘Oh yes, I could do this forever. I will do this forever!’

I’m in Singapore at the end of a six-week trip around Indonesia. This morning, I took a local bus to Changi museum for a sobering history lesson, before hopping onto another bus to the pier where I boarded an old-style ‘bumboat’ ferry for the short ride to Singapore’s car-free island of Pulau Ubin.

With few facilities, Singapore’s last ‘kampung’ (village) is an antidote to the shiny city just a few miles away. And a day to myself on Pulau Ubin—cycling along quiet paths, spotting kingfishers, enjoying the views and finishing with a beer and fried rice by the water—has been joyous. It’s been a perfect day. And then it begins.

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How a volcanic eruption saved a tiny Indonesian island (from itself)

A pristine Indonesian island and a grumpy old volcano teaches travel writer Marco Ferrarese that sometimes, nature will look after herself—whether anyone realizes it at the time or not.

Bent over a plank of wood, Papa Opi expertly smudges its raw surface into a smooth, polished piece. A proud creator, his hands shuttle up and down, firmly gripping his tool’s handle. It’s only when he takes a break from the wood that he lifts his head up, and we our gazes finally meet. 

The calm in Papa Opi’s eyes belies a tragic tale of survival. The same calm emanates from his voice when Papa Opi starts telling me about the 1983 eruption of Gunung Colo. Once a mighty conic volcano, today’s Colo lays dormant on the opposite side of Una-Una island. But it’s never quiet: It’s cracked caldera still hisses white sulphurous gases, as if the volcano never wanted to stop talking. 

That slice of hell on earth is not far from where we are both standing—a 30-minute motorbike ride (there are no cars on Una-Una) across the island’s rutted jungle tracks and a dry river bed leads visitors straight to the mouth of that fire mountain.

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Baghdad 2019: A new era for a much-troubled destination?

It’s not top of the list when it comes to city breaks, but Leon McCarron was surprised—and heartened—when he visited Baghdad, a city that once upon a time was the center of the world.

“We’re going to one of the most interesting places here,” says my guide Mustafa as he drives through the streets in his silver Mini-inspired car. “You’ll see what this city is really like when we get there.”

We park up outside an old mosque with fading blue turquoise tiling and an ornate stone doorway, then walk along a broad boulevard of busy stores, people spilling out onto the road. Behind a man selling sugarcane from a wooden cart is an arched entrance to a smaller, narrower street that’s fully pedestrianized—or perhaps so busy that no vehicles dare enter.

“Welcome to Al-Mutanabbi Street!” said Mustafa. We’ve arrived in the middle of the weekly book market—Mustafa promises this will say “more about the city today than any news report.”

Even
with an open mind, this was not the scene I had expected on my first visit to
Baghdad.

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