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Tags: Free Stuff / Travel Tips / Guidebooks / Women / Travel Books / Retirement Travel / → All Tags
Free Book For Women Travelers Teaches 25 Bandana Tips
Ladies will want to order a free copy of the conveniently purse-sized book 101 Tips for Women Travelers. The tips were compiled by Harriet Lewis, the vice chair of Overseas Adventure Travel, a company that caters to Americans 50 and older. Despite the company's audience, the tips don't target seniors. For that matter, most of the tips aren't even gender-specific.
Disclaimer for the guys: You'll find tons of good suggestions in the book that you can use, but you'll also encounter a few girly tips, like using panty liners to extend the use of your lady drawers and help you feel oh so fresh while you're on the go. But overall, the advice is good for all travelers. For example, fabric softener sheets pull triple duty by making the ripe clothes in your luggage smell good, repelling mosquitoes and warding off bedbugs. Then there are some super-specific recommendations that won't be applicable to most people, like be sure to sit sidesaddle on a camel to avoid getting a urinary tract infection.
Tags: Travel Health / CDC / Guidebooks / Medical Travel / Travel Books / → All Tags
The CDC Adds Medical Tourism To Its Travel Health Guide
Nervous about traveling abroad because you might pick up some flesh-eating illness or other? Fear no more: the Center for Disease Control has just released the 2010 edition of the CDC Health Information for International Travel, the yellow bible which contains everything you need to know about staying healthy while you're outside the United States.
This new edition has got a section on medical tourism, so you can figure out which cheaper country is the safest to get your next bit of cosmetic surgery. It's also got advice on newly popular destinations that your local doctor might not know too much about, including Mount Kiliminjaro, India, China and Nepal.
At 540 pages in hardback, this is no backpack travel guide, but instead is something you have to digest thoroughly while you're planning your trip. And while we of course advocate traveling safely and healthily, we're not quite sure we'll be keeping this book at our bedside before our next trip abroad. Perhaps someone else could read it and tell us the important bits?
Related Stories:
· International Travel Health Guidebook Gets Updated [AJC]
· Medical Travel Coverage [Jaunted]
Tags: The Mile High Club / Sex / Sex Travel / Travel Books / Books / → All Tags
You Can't Legally Join The Mile High Club, But You Can Read About It
You might not be allowed to get frisky onboard Singapore Airlines' A380 with first class bed suites, and you sure aren't fitting into a regular airplane lavatory without arousing suspicion anytime soon, but that doesn't mean you can't at least read about joining the Mile High Club.
The new book, The Mile High Club: Plane Sex Stories, is a collection of short tales recounting people's experiences putting more than just their tray tables and seatbacks in an upright and locked position.
Tags: Books / What We're Reading / Armchair Travel / Travel Books / Recommended Travel Books / → All Tags
The Best American Travel Writing 2008: Armchair Travel at its Finest
Writing about the differences between in-flight magazines got me to thinking about how often I really do read long-form travel writing, compared with the staccato bursts of stylized news briefs one might find on, say, a travel blog. The truth is, I don't often read all the great feature stories published every month, even in magazines I subscribe to. But when I finally make the time to read a lush and descriptive feature by one of today's best travel writers, I'm always glad I did. That's why anthologies like the Best American Travel Writing series are so great. I recently finished reading this year's edition - which has stories originally published in 2008 - and enjoyed it immensely.
Tags: Open Threads / Love Travel / Travel Books / → All Tags
How Does Travel Affect Your Relationships?
Eve Brown-Waite already wanted to get away -- falling in love with her Peace Corps recruiter only sealed the deal. In her new memoir First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria: How a Peace Corps Poster Boy Won My Heart and a Third World Adventure Changed My Life, Brown-Waite describes her twin loves of travel and her husband John and how it took them all over the globe.
Brown-Waite's travelin' life was not without its bumps: Right after meeting John, she was sent to Ecuador for a two-year posting which she was later forced to end early when a traumatic event made it difficult for her to complete her assignment.
Once reunited in the States, John found a great job -- in post-Amin Uganda, a "hardship posting" where snakes infested her furniture and electricity was only available for three hours. Despite the lack of creature comforts, Brown-Waite tagged along and worked to put her experience teaching about HIV/AIDS into an entirely different cultural context.
Tags: Ancient History Travel / Rome / Travel Books / → All Tags
The Belly Button of the World and Other Neat Facts About Rome
There are plenty of cities that could credibly claim to be the center of the world, but only one has gone through the trouble of marking the exact spot. The timeless city of Rome is home to the Umbilicus Urbis Romae (the "navel of the city of Rome"), a spot in the Roman Forum from which all distances in Rome and the Roman Empire were measured. Constructed by the Emperor Augustus around 20 B.C., it was once marked by a grand marble tower, but all that's left of it is a sad little pile of bricks with a plaque. Still, it represents an excellent starting point or endpoint for any Roman adventure, and it's just one of several neat facts about Rome I picked up from a new book called the Mental Floss History of the World.
Other nifty tidbits include some trivia on Roman manners. Did you know that it was considered polite in ancient Rome to vomit between meals so you could eat more? Well it was, and the mess never got too out of hand, thanks to an army of slaves charged with cleaning up the spittle. Talk about lousy jobs. Rome was also the first civilization to use central heating systems, and even had hot and cold running water (in upper class homes, naturally) so residents could switch between hot, cold, and tepid baths. Why not just find a temperature you like and stick with it?
Humanity has evolved in the ensuing generations, and some of these ideas have been embraced (plumbing), while others, like the between-meal vomiting, have been rendered obsolete (save for the occasional fashion model). Still, it's interesting to take a look at a society that's at once ancient and far removed, and at the same time mirrors our own to a frightening degree of accuracy.
[Photo: personal.ceu.hu]
Related Stories:
· 5 Things You Didn't Know About Rome [askmen.com]
· The Mental Floss History Of the World [mentalfloss.com]
· Ancient History Travel [Jaunted]
Tags: Books / Travel Books / Culture Travel / → All Tags
Free Book... If You Can Find It
Next time you're in San Francisco or London, keep your eyes peeled for a small group of books stacked neatly near a park bench, news stand or on your bike seat. You can't miss them, as they have a bright yellow cover with huge block letters that read FREE BOOK.
Don't fret, it's not some Krishna BS that you'll pick up, suddenly confronted by a little man dressed in orange robes holding a bell and flowers. The book is titled Potential Energy, and it's a self-published novel by a writer named Schist.
Tags: Travel Media / David Farley / Travel Books / → All Tags
David Farley Planning Travel Writer Meetup
Travel writer and holy foreskin expert David Farley is fed up with these wandering scribes and their jet-setting ways. So he's put together the Restless Legs Reading Series to get everyone in the same room.
Kicking off the bi-monthy event will be Tony Perrottet (author of "Napoleons's Privates: 2,500 Years of History Unzipped") and Cullen Thomas (who wrote "Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea's Prisons").
The first Restless Legs reading will be July 23 at Lolita on the Lower East Side. Farley says he'd love for it to turn into a monthly thing; we'd love that too.
Related Stories:
· Restless Legs Reading Series [Official Site]
· Q&A about the Restless Legs Series [WorldHum]
· Travel Media coverage [Jaunted]
Tags: Armchair Travel / Recommended Travel Books / Travel Books / Books / → All Tags
Armchair Travel: Sating Your Office Wanderlust
Stuck in front of your computer today? Take a mini-break with Field-Tested Books, an essay collection in which writers talk about where they were when they read a very memorable book.
Some of our favorite folks are represented in this e-anthology, but what we love the most is that the pieces are short. You can easily pack a year's worth of long weekends into an hour or two--just make sure your boss isn't peaking over your shoulder.
Our Picks:
· Stalking an Actor in Perugia, Italy [Steven Heller]
· Forgoing Sodom and Gomorrah for Ayn Rand [Ben Karlin]
· Shocking the Other Passengers on a Cross-Country Flight [Annie Logue]
· Getting Drunk in Mexico [Andrei Codrescu]
· Armchair Travel coverage [Jaunted]
[Photo: ddsiple]
Tags: Thomas Kohnstamm / Lonely Planet / Travel Books / Books / → All Tags
Book Review: Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?
After all the sniping, faux shock and criticism, Thomas Kohnstamm's book Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? is out today. Instead of rehashing old interviews and getting up on our high horse about ethics, we decided to, you know, actually read it.
We didn't get very far before stumbling across something we wish were included in that now-notorious "embassy chick" interview that upset so many people:
Author's note: For better or for worse, this book recounts true experiences. In order to distill the chaos of life down to a clear narrative, it was necessary to omit certain events, rearrange and compress chronology and combine a few of the characters.
So, yes, what you're about to read is true. Sort of.
Tags: Train Travel / Trains / Books / Travel Books / → All Tags
Train Travel: The Man in Seat 61 Now in Print
When all the airlines of the world have gone bust (which should be in, like, a few more days), we'll all be able to slow down, relax and travel the world by train. One British man has already got the hang of that, and he's a quite amazing train geek usually referred to as the Man in Seat 61, after his seating preference on Eurostar trains.
We've been following his website for years, whenever we've needed in depth train travel advice, and he's also good at giving tips on making train travel on some famous routes a lot cheaper than taking the tourist train. For example, in a recent article he gave the example of South Africa's Blue Train from Cape Town to Pretoria, explaining a local route that cost less than a tenth of the fancy tourist route.
The current big news is that the Man in Seat 61 (who also has a real name, Mark Smith) has got a book deal and his official train travel bible is coming out in a couple of months. It's going to focus on European rail travel so you'll be able to get tips on that speedy Barcelona to Madrid route or perhaps more importantly to us, find out where we can get a beer along the way.
Related Stories:
· The Man in Seat 61 [Official Site]
· My Top Train Tips [UK Guardian]
· Train Travel Coverage [Jaunted]
[Photo: Howdy, I'm H. Michael Karshis]
Tags: Recommended Travel Books / Travel Books / Antarctica Travel / Armchair Travel / → All Tags
Antarctic Penguins Want You To Visit
We admit our experience of Antarctica is limited to the kinds of cruise-ship-hits-island stories that we like to chuckle about. But we'd really love to check out the great southern continent and just haven't yet because nobody's offered to pay our way there.
Second best might be reading the latest offering from Travelers' Tales: It's a collection of travel essays called Antarctica: Life on the Ice. Featuring plenty of penguins, a few dinosaur bones, hefty blizzards and places where your footprints will outlive you, it'll surely whet your appetite for more freezing experiences. Just be sure to invite us along when you go, k?
Related Stories:
· Antarctica: Life on the Ice [Travelers' Tales]
· Antarctic Cruise Gets Stranded, Turns Notsofun [Jaunted]
· Armchair Travel [Jaunted]
[Photo: towse]
