BCAA Travel Blog

A couple of months ago I was on a trip with an obnoxious American travel writer who remarked that she found Winnipeg to be a dangerous city. Now I suppose just about anywhere can appear threatening if you end up in the wrong neighbourhood, but this writer, who lived in New York, had already made several disparging remarks about Canada, and I decided to call her on this one. ”Well, if we’re talking about truly dangerous cities, I would say that some of the most dangerous in the world are found in the U.S. You can get killed for your shoes down there, which is a pretty disgraceful situation considering America is one of the richest nations on earth.” Not so surprisingly, she vehemently disagreed. Later, when I mentioned this verbal exchange to a couple of my friends, they also claimed that I was off base, suggesting cities like Baghdad, Kabul and Mogadishu were a lot more hazardous than anywhere in the U.S. The question remained unresolved, but this week I tried to find out in which cities you have the best chance of getting killed. The answers were quite interesting. Continue reading…

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The end of the year is fast approaching, which, as we all know, means it’s time to look back and forward at the same time, and try not to get dizzy. In this case, I’m looking back at some of the excellent travel books published in 2008 that I neglected to read, but which I plan to track down and peruse in 2009. Of course, by necessity I am relying on what others claim are good travel books. This is precisely the sort of exercise I often indulge in at the year’s end, and not only with books, but also with music and movies. I review a bunch of reviews and then decide what looks most promising. It’s not that I don’t have a mind of my own, but simply that I don’t have time to keep up with everything that is going on during the year. So, without any more preamble, here are six travel books that really sound like the sort of thing I will enjoy reading next year.

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Sometimes you don’t have to travel anywhere to find yourself in an entirely different place. The big snowstorm that rolled into Vancouver this week has dramatically changed the landscape of my world. The white flakes tumbling down from heaven have softened the sharp edges of the city’s architecture and draped the streets in a veil of silence. It’s a bit like waking up and finding yourself wandering through a fairytale. And though people keep complaining about the difficulty of getting around, I have noticed that most everyone is smiling. Instead of trudging past with a stony expression on their faces, they greet you with a twinkle in their eyes. I think that the falling snow reawakens the sleeping child in all of us and reminds us of a time when life was lived entirely in the moment.

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Not everyone in the world celebrates Christmas the way we do here in Canada, with a fat, elderly, laughing man in a red suit, who soars through the sky in a sleigh pulled by a team of magical reindeer, then lands on rooftops and slides down chimneys with a sack of toys. No sir, in some other countries they have strange Christmas customs. In case you happen to be on the road during the festive season this year it may help to know what to expect. Continue reading…

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A few years ago I travelled to Mexico to see the fabled Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza. I stayed at the Hacienda Chichen, which is located only a few hundred metres from the main gate, so I could be on the grounds the first thing in the morning. It was a wise move. By doing so, I had several hours to explore the site virtually by myself, before the busloads of tourists began arriving from the surrounding towns and the Yucatan’s infamous humidity began to melt my brain. Chichen Itza was a magnificent place, beautiful, awe-inspiring and seemingly touched by magic in the drifting mist of the dawn.

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Evidently a number of readers enjoyed my last travel quiz. Let’s see how this new collection goes over. 

1. At which Mayan city do tourists gather during the spring and fall to watch a snake slide down a pyramid?
A. Palenque
B. Tikal
C. Uxmal
D. Chichen Itza

2. What is the only country whose national flag is not rectangular or square, but rather the shape of two stacked triangles?
A. Nepal
B. Cyprus
C. Saudi Arabia
D. Cambodia Continue reading…

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The heavy weather is moving in, so let’s keep this latest instalment light. As a public service I am passing along some weird travel stories that have appeared in the news recently. There seems to be no shortage of them.

Crappy Keepsakes
Researchers at the world’s largest giant panda research centre in southwest China’s Sichuan Province have come up with a novel way to profit from panda dung: they make souvenirs out of it. The staff at the Chengdu centre has sculpted photo frames, bookmarks, fans and panda statues out of the 300 tons of excrement produced by 40 giant pandas each year. Continue reading…

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Tourists attempting to make sense of the jumble of decaying ruins in Rome once had to rely on guide books and their imagination. But this situation has changed with the creation of Rome Reborn, the world’s biggest computer simulation of an ancient city. Reproduced on satellite-guided handsets and 3-D orientation movies in a theatre near the Colosseum, the reconstruction allows visitors to navigate the Roman capital, circa 320 A.D. Using the complex software, tourists can navigate through the buildings and plazas of the Forum, fly over the Temple of Vesta, wander through the massive Basilica of Maxentius, and walk the arena floor of the Colosseum or drop below ground level to look at the elevator cages that hoisted the lions and tigers into the arena for battle. Smoke, grime, graffiti and street scenes involving 60,000 virtual characters add to the realism. Continue reading…

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There are many roads in the world that qualify as death traps, such as Kenya’s Nairobi-Nakuru-Eldoret Highway on which more than 300 people perish annually in crashes caused by speeding, improper passing and drunken driving, or Egypt’s Luxor-al-Ghurdaqah road where the vast majority of drivers never turn on their headlights after sundown, ensuring a high fatality rate. Ironically, the only thing more dangerous than driving on the road at night with your headlights off is driving at night with them on. If the bandits don’t get you, the terrorists probably will. But neither of these routes poses the risks of Bolivia’s North Yungas Road. Widely acknowledged as the most dangerous road on the planet, the North Yungas is 70 kilometres of white-knuckle terror–one unpaved lane hacked out of the mountainside, bordered one one side by 985-metre high cliffs, and a 600-metre plunge down to the rainforest below on the other. Locals call it El Camino de la Muerte, “the Road of Death.” And this is no exaggeration. In 1994, 26 vehicles went over the edge–an average of one every two weeks. Each year, between 100 and 200 people die trying to navigate its slippery, hairpin turns. Continue reading…

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What is it about the Aussies and crocodiles? First there was Crocodile Dundee, then Steve “the Crocodile Hunter” Irwin, and now there is a new $30 million theme park in Darwin called Crocosaurus Cove, whose major attraction–the “Cage of Death”–allows thrill-seekers to swim face-to-face with a massive saltwater crocodile. Tourists climb into a clear acrylic enclosure about four centimetres thick and 2.8 meters tall, wearing only a pair of swimming goggles and a swimsuit. The cage has no bars unlike the cages used in shark dives, which prevents the reptiles from gripping on, although it does not prevent them from biting the acrylic. The cage is then slid along runners over four crocodile pens, carrying a maximum of two divers at a time, and partly immersed in the water so swimmers can see the crocodiles under the water but also come up to the surface for air. Continue reading…

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