Content tagged with “travel”

“ For a couple of decades, there was a bus service from London to Calcutta, India. It took almost two months. ”

“ Uber drivers in London are embarking on a multi-year journey to pass the black cabbie test, whcih requires them to memorize most of the street in London. ”

“For an American, I’ve traveled to Europe a lot. Since my first trip to Stockholm in 2010, I’ve probably been in Europe …25 times? I went six times in 2023 alone (two of those trips were one week apart). I’ve been to a majority of the major cities. I think Madrid is the largest city I haven’t…”

“ Wales has a library combined with a hotel, so you can sleep next to the books. ”

“This is the story of several things, simultaneously. Most prominently, it’s the story of Percy Fawcett, an explorer from England who ventured into the Amazon twenty-some-odd times. He was utterly convinced there was a lost civilization somewhere therein, which he called ‘Z’ It’s also the story of…”

“All passports seems to be the same size and format, which is interesting because they’re issued by different countries. Turns out there’s an international board that standardizes things like this: the International Civil Aviation Organization . This is a special agency of the United Nations, based…”

“I bought this because (1) I loved Broad City , and (2) I have always wanted to drive across country. This is a book of essays and personal reflections from Abbi Jacobson – one of the creators of Broad City while she decided to drive across the country, from New York to Los Angeles. About a third of…”

“This is the second book of The Murderbot Diaries. Again, it’s a novella – only 149 pages. This picks up right after the first book. In this installment, she (1) helps a group of scientists get some research back, and (2) investigates a very bad episode from her past. In this sense, it’s like a…”

“This was recommended to me by a friend, and a Hacker News thread. It was recommended as a short work of fiction, and it is – it’s a novella, at best. ‘Murderbot’ (a name she gave herself) is a SecUnit – a cyborg security unit, hired to protected a surveying crew on a wilderness planet. Near as I…”

“I didn’t like this. But what bothers me is that I don’t know why I didn’t like it . I am very interested in the subject matter. This should absolutely be a book I like. I have no idea why I couldn’t connect with it, but dreaded picking it up. It’s about a journalist who wanders around the Holy…”

“I miss Anthony Bourdain. I miss his voiceovers. He was such a great writer when he was writing for himself to speak. This book is useless to me, but I still loved it. It’s ostensibly a travel guide. There’s a chapter for each country Tony went to in any of his three shows: No Reservations , The…”

“This is a fun book. It’s not gonna change your life or anything, but you’ll probably enjoy it if you accept it for what it is. It’s basically a series of short chapters – blog posts, essentially – describing some adventurer, from Charles Lindbergh to Christopher Columbus to Harriet Tubman to…”

“ Twice a week, a van makes a 16-hour, 500-mile drive from Fairbanks, Alaska, north to the Prudhoe Bay oil fields. ”

“This is a wonderful book, more for the format than the topic. First, the topic – it’s about a river. The Seine starts in southern France and flow northward through Paris to the English Channel. The book is all about this river. (I wasn’t actually interested in the topic, but there was a ‘Buy Two,…”

“ Josip Tito, the former ruler of Yugoslavia, had a opulent luxury train built for his personal use. ”

“ In 1977, a German tourist accidentally de-planed in Bangor, Maine, and spent three days thinking he was in San Francisco. When the truth was discovered, he become a brief sensation. ”

“ In 2015, shipping rates were so low that it was cheaper to move your belongings around the world on a container ship than store them in a local facility. ”

“ A travel agency for ‘ultra high net worth’ people reveals some of the absurdities involved with planning vacations for people with a lot of money. ”

“ With COVID having devastated the cruise industry, many companies are selling older ships off for scrap, thus clogging up ‘ship-breaking’ yards. ”

“ The longest contiguous train ride in the world is from Porto, Portugal to Saigon, Vietnam. Unsurprisingly, it takes a long time, and costs a lot of money. ”

“The definition of an epic sci-fi novel. This a long read, and prepare yourself for the second one, because the first one leaves a lot of questions unanswered. There are a ton of different story threads going on independently, and they don’t come together neatly in the end. It’s almost a…”

“ There is a ‘tourist gaze,’ whereby history and cultural heritage is packaged for what the locals believe tourists want to see, and what tourists believe is ‘authentic.’ Local economies perpetuate this overemphasis and misrepresentation in exchange for tourist dollars. ”

“ There’s a waterslide in Poland that rotates, so different sections of the slide become ‘down’ at different times. It’s calculated to get you to the end in a full rotation. ”

“ The story behind a viral photo of climbers waiting to summit Everest earlier this year. Multiple people died, and questions are being asked about the future of climbing the mountain. ”

“ An argument that the Louvre should remove the Mona Lisa because it causes enormous logistical problems and disappoints almost everyone. ”

“ Over-tourism is a new word to describe throngs of people clogging destination sites around the world. The larger trend at work is that more people are economically able to travel, especially the Chinese, which is a significant part of the world population. ”

“ A profile of The Explorer’s Club, which is exactly what the title implies: a century old group of adventurers that have a headquarters in NYC. ”

“ Ingress is a AR game from the people who would go on to make Pokémon Go. But it’s much more serious, and has people flying all over the the world to complete missions. ”

“Not my jam, really, but my son and his girlfriend were reading it, so I decided to give it a shot. There are a lot of characters, and time travel is involved, so the book is all over the place. At any given moment, I had the barest understanding of what was happening. Characterization was poor, and…”

“ A spectacular history of Asia. This is a book where I stopped tracking what page I was on, because I just wanted to keep reading it. Also a book that could have been boring, but the writing style is just effortless and wonderful. ”

“I had just seen the movie, so I knew what the big plot twist was. In that sense, I was reading it less for the story, and more to get a feel for how Christie wrote. Turns out, she writes well – very clear, with a minimum of fluff. And perhaps unsurprising given the context of her hero, there’s…”

“This is a book about a place. Not the Badlands of South Dakota (which I initially thought), but the ‘bad land’ of Eastern Montana. It’s the story of immigrants who settled there and claimed homesteads on the promise of dry farming techniques and decent weather. But the weather was bad, and dry…”

“A thoroughly enjoyable book discussing the five Nordic countries – Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and Denmark – and their supposedly unassailable credentials as the utopia of the world. The author is an Englishman, married to a Danish woman and living in Denmark. He deconstructs the myth of…”

“My daughter read this for school and asked me to read it too. It’s essentially the movie ‘Groundhog Day’ for tweens. I enjoyed it. It was well-written and had a nice theme of redemption and the need to be good to other people. Much like the movie, the protagonists can’t continue their lives until…”