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Tired of flights that give you nothing more than precooked Beef Wellington and yet another viewing of Air Bud? Well, a couple months ago a Lufthansa flight from Tel-Aviv to Frankfurt spontaneously broke out in a PILLOW FIGHT WAR, with a flight attendant right amidships in the center of it all. How’s that for upping bitter attitudes.
In the age of Stephen Slater’s and other horrifying incidents, it’s nice to know there can be some spontaneous fun on an airplane for a change. I love the boisterous applause at the end.
Happy Friday everyone!
It’s downright horrifying to realize you don’t have your bags when you arrive in a new city. The logistics of traveling is complicated enough than to do it without your luggage, but hey, it happens.
The first thing to remember is not to panic. Take it from me, you’re less likely to make good decisions when you’re freaking out. Fortunately, there are tried and true systems in place to locate lost luggage – the airlines have been losing bags since commercial flight began and usually know just what to do.
The first thing you need to do when you realize your bag isn’t coming down the chute is to visit the airport’s baggage claims office. Every airport should have one located in the baggage claim area.
Think you’re a light packer? Be prepared to be humiliated. Essential travel writer Rolf Potts started a masterly conceived project/publicity stunt this weekend to draw attention to both the exorbitant world of modern baggage fees and to show that “what we experience in life is more important than what we bring with us”.
Potts is traveling around the world with nothing but the clothes on his back (and whatever he can fit in them). I love this not only because when I travel I always feel hopelessly overburdened, lugging around all my stuff, playing the obvious traveler with giant camera, books, cables and all sort of other creature comforts.
As you’ve probably noticed, I’m a big fan of time-lapse videos, especially ones with a sense of place that draw you in to either go there or to else reminisce on the time you’ve already spent there. I also feel it’s a great way to capture the spirit of remembering because in the minds-eye time has little relevance already, no?
Today’s selection was chosen in part to honor our sales manager Sara who is currently vacationing on a couple of the beaches you see here, and partly because so many people know and love these locations in Thailand. The video was produced by a Spaniard who visited the country in ‘09 and took shots with his DSLR to provide a stunning visual portrait of his short trip through Thailand. These are his 10 days pared down to 4 minutes.
The scenes are Koh Samui, Koh Phangan , Koh Tao, Nang Yuan and Bangkok. Have a great weekend!
The video is in HD so it may take a few minutes to get going.
One of the tricky parts about writing blogs is you need to keep up with the other bloggers out there, because they are, for the most part, the ones with all the information. It gets especially overwhelming when you take a few days off.
It took me a little while to catch up after attending the Book Passage Travel Writers Conference last week and not checking my feed. I came back to my Google Reader filled to capacity, which is good news for you because there were some great articles written over that time period.
Here is some of the travel blogosphere’s best content over the past couple weeks.
Four years ago Eat, Pray, Love hit the bookshelves and it’s fair to say that since then the novel has become quite a sensation, over the past few weeks hitting fever pitch due to the arrival of the much loved Julia Roberts. She plays the traveler/author Elizabeth Gilbert as she makes her way to three of the world’s amazing destinations and yes, her life is dramatically altered by chance encounters and oh so persuasive life-affirmations.
I have to disclose that I haven’t read Eat, Pray, Love (though I probably will at some point) but still consider it an important book, and movie, because it extols the virtues of around the world travel, a pastime we here at AirTreks have banked our entire existence upon. Hence, we adore the arrival of the Eat, Pray, Love movie with every fiber of our being. To us long term travel is as important to a healthy existence as breathing fresh Indonesian air, and the more people that know it the better.
Ever wonder what it takes to change the livery of a Boeing 747? After seeing some of the crazy dressings they give some planes I certainly have. Well, Virgin Atlantic has gone into the hangar and filmed one of their 747s getting a fancy new look and done it it in time-lapse so you can see just what it takes to complete this prodigious feat, hours boiled down to a minute and a half.
Take a look – the dance is quite poetic if you think about it.
It’s that time of year again – the Book Passage Travel Writers and Photography Conference is this weekend. And this year in addition to its longstanding focus on travel and photography, the organizers have added another entirely more delicious angle to their event: food!
The conference starts Thursday and runs through the weekend at the Book Passage in Corte Madera, CA, just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. As usual the conference will be host to an incredible selection of travel (and now food!) writers and photographers with lectures, panels, slideshows, meals and other delightful interactions to help bring people together inside its low-key bookstore setting. Don George, “legendary travel writer and editor” as dubbed by National Geographic, will be there as conference chair and chief moderator, with other notables including Rolf Potts, Pauline Frommer, Jim Benning, Robert Holmes, Tim Cahill, Jen Leo and many others. Take a look at the website for a full rundown of the faculty.
As in years past, AirTreks will again be proud sponsors of the conference and be giving away an around-the-world trip as first prize for the best writing at the event. The award ceremony will be on Sunday night and AirTreks will be on hand to deliver the award.
My experience from last year was very pleasant. I found the quality of the faculty to be outstanding, and the bookstore setting made it different from your average impersonal concrete-style conference.
The fee for attending is $635 for the full four days and comes with meals included and each class as scheduled.
Read more about the conference on Book Passage’s website or take a look at the Huffington Post article about last year’s event. If you’re in the area, please come by. We’d love to see you!
Wat Arun, “Temple of the Dawn”, Bangkok
The Khmer-era Buddhist temple located on the banks of the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok celebrated its 200 birthday last year.
The temple’s more-than-a-mouthful complete name is Wat Arunratchawararam Ratchaworamahawihan. It can be climbed by purchasing a 20 baht ticket (about $0.60). Read more about its history here.
As a traveler at heart there may be nothing better than abbreviating your day by watching a travel video, one that whisks you away ever so briefly and feeds that craving to be on the road. If you either can’t go or are desperately waiting to, it’s a way to quell that chronic and ever-present traveler’s impatience. Let’s take a second, shall we, to appreciate the people who’ve embarrassed themselves with a video camera around the world so we didn’t have to.
Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as you might think to find great travel videos on the web, ones both inspiring and worth your time to watch. So to help, I’ve put together a handful of places where you can find them and one that are often well-crafted and interesting to boot.
Here are the best 7 sites I found to watch travel videos for free. So sit back and relax, take in a film and feel that impatience ebbing away…
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