Travels in the Riel World

Well, yes, if Humoud Yakobi has his way. The chairman of the Iraq Board of Tourism, Yakobi has a vision of legions of tourists returning to Iraq. Not decades from now, but in the near future. The NY Times reports on Iraqi dreams of building a tourist infrastructure.

Humoud Yakobi gazes at the rubble-strewn parking lot, the maze of blast walls and the clusters of dusty palm trees on the island around him and sees hotels, restaurants and shopping malls, with throngs of people enjoying refreshments by the swimming pool or playing a round of golf.

“I always imagine it as some kind of heaven,” he said.

Mr. Yakobi, the chairman of Iraq’s Board of Tourism, is charged with attracting foreign visitors to his beleaguered country. Jazirat A’aras, an island in the Tigris that is just across from the fortified Green Zone and the new American Embassy, is central to his plans. He is seeking investors who might want to spend $2.5 billion to $4.5 billion to build on the island…

Some might argue that Mr. Yakobi’s vision is premature, if not absurd. Despite a drop in violence in Baghdad in recent months, Mr. Yakobi still cannot leave his office on Haifa Street without a convoy of armored cars and bodyguards. During an hourlong interview at his office recently, the lights blinked off, then on again, as the building’s generator kicked in, an event repeated many times a day throughout Iraq. It was not so long ago that American forces sometimes had to escort the workers at the Tourism Board home, shielding them from the firefights in the street.

Mr. Yakobi, however, is by his own description an optimist, and he says he has some reason to believe that Iraq, known for its holy sites and antiquities, will once again be a tourist mecca.

Other Iraqis are a bit more pragmatic about the possibilities.

Hassan al-Fayadh, head of the tourism board’s media relations department, was more skeptical.

“Western visitors are very sensitive to bombings and things like that,” he said. “You can’t achieve the tourism industry without security.”

Yes, tourists tend to be sensitive to bombings. Still, you have to admire a person with a vision.

There is an interesting and in-depth interview with travel writer Rolf Potts on World Hum. Potts covers a variety of topics and it’s worth checking out the entire piece, especially if you’re interested in travel writing. But here is a small excerpt from the interview about the transformation of travel in recent decades.

What major changes have you noticed in travel in general?

Electronic communication has radically transformed the travel experience. Fourteen years ago I took my first vagabonding trip, eight months around North America. That was before the ubiquity of email and cell phones; communication meant sending a postcard or jamming quarters into a pay phone, which meant I was usually out of touch with family for weeks at a time. Five years later, I was paying $15 an hour to send emails from a slow dial-up connection in Luang Prabang, and it seemed like a communication miracle. By contrast, just last month I was traveling with an AT&T BlackJack in East Africa, and I could use it to call home or check my messages in Juba, Sudan. This wasn’t just a one-way thing: The people in Juba may not have much in the way of indoor plumbing, but they love their cell phones, too; I lost track of how many little thatch-roofed kiosks I saw selling phone credits.

So that’s the main transformation I’ve seen. There have been other big developments in the past decade, including the boom in online travel-planning resources and the rise (and possible fall) of cheap airfares. But communication technology stands out. 

The new challenge here, of course, is learning how to wean yourself off this new technology as you travel. The charm of leaving home has always been that it transports you into new places and vivid moments; it makes you slow down and take note of your new surroundings. This can be hard to do if you’re always checking your inbox or texting your friends back home. If you can actually do that—if you can cut the electronic umbilical cord and embrace the moment on the road—travel can still be as amazing as ever.

A fast-growing travel niche is religion-based tourism, which caters to people who want to have a pilgrimage experience during their journey. This NY Times article has more information.

Some 16 feet beneath the present-day street level of Damascus, the Syrian capital, just off the Street Called Straight, is a cramped, artificially lighted chapel with roughly cut stones for walls and a few modern pews as furnishings. The grotto was once part of a home where — 2,000 years ago — Saul of Tarsus is said to have taken shelter after he was blinded by a heavenly light, the incident that converted him to Christianity. He emerged from that home as the Apostle Paul.

On a recent sultry summer evening, that historical event was very much on the minds of the 20 or so worshipers who watched reverently as a priest stood in front of a modern altar at one end of the small room, arranged the liturgical items he had brought with him, lighted the candles and celebrated Mass. “In the tradition of legions of pilgrims, we find ourselves doing what the early Christians did,” the Rev. Cesare Atuire said during his homily…

To many present-day pilgrims … nothing quite compares with the experience of traveling the road to Damascus. “It’s one thing for Christians to read the Holy Scriptures, quite another to come see where things happened,” said Father Atuire…

Of course, Christians aren’t the only ones showing an interest in religion-based tourism. Participants in the Kumbh Mela, a rotating Hindu festival, have reportedly topped 75 million, and each year, some two million Muslims make a pilgrimage to Mecca, in Saudi Arabia. Nor is Damascus the only place where Christians are heading these days. Lourdes, France, which the Pope will visit in September, draws an average of six million a year … and San Giovanni Rotondo, home to the shrine of the mystic monk Padre Pio, lured eight million to Puglia, Italy, in the last year.

Father Atuire has some thoughts about the surge of believers searching for the roots of their faith. “In times of epochal change, people sense a greater need to find points of reference,” he said while a bus lurched along a Syrian highway to the town of Malula and the Convent of Sts. Sergius and Bacchus, another popular pilgrimage site and one of the few places in the world where Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus, is still heard. “But at the same time many are looking for untraditional forms of expression and a pilgrimage allows you to approach a religious experience from a different perspective.”

Who are the best behaved and most liked tourists in the world? According to one recent survey, it’s the Japanese.

Following the Japanese as most-liked tourists were the Germans, British and Canadians. Americans finished in 11th place alongside the Thais.

The survey was carried out among employees in 4,000 hotels in Germany, the U.K., Italy, France, Canada and the U.S. for the French travel website Expedia.fr. The study asked respondents to rank clients by nationality on criteria of general attitude, politeness, tendency to complain, willingness to speak local languages, interest in sampling local cuisine, readiness to spend money, generosity, cleanliness, discretion and elegance.

The least well-behaved tourists? According to this survey, which only took 21 nations into account, it’s the Chinese, Indians and French.

The website New West has an interview online with Heather Hansen, co-author of the new book, Disappearing Destinations, which looks at the environmental challenges that are plaguing popular tourist destinations worldwide. An excerpt from the interview:

How did you come up with the idea for Disappearing Destinations?

Kim and I were at a conference in Denver, talking about the book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, which had just come out. We tossed around the idea of “1,000 Places to See Before THEY Die.” Once we started looking at our favorite places in that context, we became obsessed with writing a book that could help travelers see their dream destinations as whole places with real issues that affect the lives of the people who live there and, ultimately, the viability of the locations themselves.

Global warming seems to be the cause of many of the problems you describe … Do you think it’s more difficult for local people to respond to the situation when the cause is so widespread?

In the case of climate change in this region, there’s plenty that people can do on a daily basis to mitigate its effects…It may be difficult to see immediate results but that doesn’t mean we aren’t making a marked difference at a critical time. As Gerald Meehl, a climate modeler at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder says in the book: “The longer we wait, the worse the problem gets. Every day we’re committing ourselves to climate change in the future. When you view it that way, it’s not something that you should just give up on…

Since our expertise is in how to travel more mindfully our message is also that all us have control over the way we move around the world. We have the power to affect change–for worse, or we hope better–in these places with the choices we make. For example, if you go to the Galápagos, you have the choice whether or not to support an outfitter with a proven record of environmental stewardship and investment in the local community.

What do you suggest that people who are concerned about the issues you raise in your book do?

What needs to be done really varies from one location to the next. In some places, responsible tourism is the “great green hope” as I talk about in the Appalachia chapter. Just going there and contributing to the diversification of the economy makes a difference (this is also the case in the Congo Basin and the Amazon where tourism revenue can sustain a population in the long term, while logging cannot).

Nepal has long been a draw for intrepid travelers, with its Himalayan landscape and religious heritage, but political turmoil put a severe crimp into the country’s tourism industry for much of this decade. The political violence has now largely subsided, though, as evidenced by the democratic election that was held there yesterday. As a result, tourists are again flocking to this mountainous nation. The International Herald Tribune recently looked at the resurgence of tourism in Nepal.

According to the Nepal Tourism Board, December capped a banner year, with air arrivals up 27 percent over the 2006 total. Overall, 2007 welcomed some 360,000 foreign air travelers to the country, making it the most successful year for tourism since 2000.

For a poor but picturesque country that was nearly pulled apart by a decade of bloodshed and political turmoil…the numbers are heartening indeed. They owe much to the calmed political situation. The civilian government has been restored, the Maoists have signed a peace treaty, and democratic elections are scheduled for later this year. As a result, several airlines resumed service or began new routes to Katmandu last year. Hotels report surges in bookings. And the streets of the city where raging protests once flared are again humming with bicycle rickshaws, sacred cows and beat-up taxis ferrying international visitors to the numerous World Heritage Sites in and around the capital city…

For others who have canceled or deferred journeys to Katmandu, the good news is that the troubled decade did nothing to harm the city’s age-old appeals. The snowcapped Himalayas, visible on clear days, soar eternally upward. Impervious to the vicissitudes of politics and trends, Katmandu’s artisans continue to produce rich carpets, yak-wool clothing, wood sculptures and thangka paintings…

And while the city might not be the mythical Shangri-La - crumbling buildings, rusted-out vehicles, emaciated dogs and impoverished families fill the poorly drained streets - the ancient religions of Hinduism and Buddhism do much to infuse meaning and color into the landscape. For more than anything else, Katmandu’s twin faiths make the city one of the planet’s most powerful magnets for spiritual seekers and philosophic souls.

It sounds like an oxymoron, but in fact “slum tours” have become popular in some parts of the world, according to this NY Times article.

Slum tourism, or “poorism,” as some call it, is catching on. From the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the townships of Johannesburg to the garbage dumps of Mexico, tourists are forsaking, at least for a while, beaches and museums for crowded, dirty — and in many ways surprising — slums. When a British man named Chris Way founded Reality Tours and Travel in Mumbai two years ago, he could barely muster enough customers for one tour a day. Now, he’s running two or three a day and recently expanded to rural areas.

Predictably, these tours have their detractors…

Critics charge that ogling the poorest of the poor isn’t tourism at all. It’s voyeurism. The tours are exploitative, these critics say, and have no place on an ethical traveler’s itinerary.

“Would you want people stopping outside of your front door every day, or maybe twice a day, snapping a few pictures of you and making some observations about your lifestyle?” asked David Fennell, a professor of tourism and environment at Brock University in Ontario. Slum tourism, he says, is just another example of tourism’s finding a new niche to exploit. The real purpose, he believes, is to make Westerners feel better about their station in life. “It affirms in my mind how lucky I am — or how unlucky they are,” he said.

And their supporters…

Not so fast, proponents of slum tourism say. Ignoring poverty won’t make it go away. “Tourism is one of the few ways that you or I are ever going to understand what poverty means,” said Harold Goodwin, director of the International Center for Responsible Tourism in Leeds, England. “To just kind of turn a blind eye and pretend the poverty doesn’t exist seems to me a very denial of our humanity.”

The crucial question, Mr. Goodwin and other experts say, is not whether slum tours should exist but how they are conducted. Do they limit the excursions to small groups, interacting respectfully with residents? Or do they travel in buses, snapping photos from the windows as if on safari?

Many tour organizers are sensitive to charges of exploitation. Some encourage — and in at least one case require — participants to play an active role in helping residents.

That’s the argument Fareed Zakaria makes in a recent Newsweek column, and he presents a strong case that government policies designed to deter unwelcome visitors are instead causing millions of legitimate businesspeople and tourists to stay away.

According to the Commerce Department, the United States is the only major country in the world to which travel has declined in the midst of a global tourism boom. And this is not about Arabs or Muslims. The number of Japanese visiting the United States declined from 5 million in 2000 to 3.6 million last year. The numbers have begun to increase, but by 2010 they’re still projected to be 19 percent below 2000 levels. During this same span (2000–2010), global tourism is expected to grow by 44 percent.

The most striking statistic involves tourists from Great Britain. These are people from America’s closest ally, the overwhelming majority of them white Anglos with names like Smith and Jones. For Brits, the United States these days is Filene’s Basement. The pound is worth $2, a 47 percent increase in six years. And yet, between 2000 and 2006, the number of Britons visiting America declined by 11 percent. In that same period British travel to India went up 102 percent, to New Zealand 106 percent, to Turkey 82 percent and to the Caribbean 31 percent. If you’re wondering why, read the polls or any travelogue on a British Web site. They are filled with horror stories about the inconvenience and indignity of traveling to America.

For many, the trials begin even before they arrive. In a world of expedited travel, getting a visa to enter the United States has become a laborious process. It takes, on average, 69 days in Mumbai, 65 days in São Paolo and 44 days in Shanghai  simply to process a request. It’s no wonder that quick business trips to America are a thing of the past. Business travel to the United States declined by 10 percent between 2004 and 2005 (the most recent data available), while similar travel to Europe increased by 8 percent.

It’s rare in the developing world for tourists to find local guides who are female. In fact, when Lisa and I were in Cambodia a few years ago, we had a rare female guide for one of the days that we spent exploring the temple ruins of Angkor. She recounted to us how she’d been the only woman in her class at tourism school and how, by working to the ripe old age of 25, she may have already irreversibly damaged her chances of ever getting married, since local men simply did not want to marry an older woman or a working woman.

So, I was intrigued to discover this article in a recent issue of the Christian Science Monitor about a Nepalese woman who leads hiking treks in the Himalayas and shatters cultural traditions and stereotypes along the way.

Kamala Biswakarma wears the pants in her family. Literally. Saris or kurtas are usually standard wear for Nepali women, but Ms. Biswakarma, at 30, wears pants, a T-shirt, and hiking boots to work. She could almost be mistaken for a foreigner in this tourist hub because no other Nepali women of her age dress as she does.

It would be incredibly difficult to trek in the Himalayas wearing a long polyester sari and Biswakarma is a trekking guide for Empowering Women of Nepal (EWN), a nongovernmental organization that trains and employs women to lead treks in the Himalayas.

A quiet rebel, Biswakarma has not only shed her colorful robes and donned a more comfortable outfit, she also brings home a paycheck. She earns more than her husband and even more than many Nepali men. To work in a male-dominated industry, with a salary equal to “high government officials,” is almost unheard of for women in most parts of Nepal…

She is far from the life her mother raised her to lead. “My mother taught me to work in the field and the kitchen,” she laughs, as if she’s telling a joke. “She told me, ‘Women have to get married. [They] have to work, clean, get up early, and be a good housewife. And if you don’t know how to do your housewife duties, then your husband’s family will complain about you to me.’ “

It’s an issue guaranteed to cause consternation among many travelers. To tip or not to tip? And how much? That’s because tipping customs vary from country to country around the world and while it can obviously be perceived as an insult to not tip enough in some places, it can also be an insult to tip at all in other locales.

This travel story discusses the topic:

Business travelers’ confusion is understandable, says Lynn Staneff who compiled a tipping guide for 70 countries for Magellan’s, which sells travel supplies from two California stores and a Web site.

Tipping is common in some countries, not done in others, or only done in some cities, she says…According to her guide, tipping is not practiced in 11 countries - Brunei, Malaysia, Japan, Oman, New Zealand, Samoa, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, United Arab Emirates and Vietnam.

In most countries, travelers are expected to tip to a waiter or waitress 10 percent, pay the equivalent of $1 per bag to a porter and round the taxi fare to the next unit of the local currency.

Many countries in Asia and Western Europe add a service charge to a restaurant check, exempting diners from tipping, Forni, the author, says. In Japan, Staneff says, tipping is perceived as insulting.

Just last month, I linked to a Boston Globe article about an organization called Couch Surfing that connects people around the world by offering free places to stay in each other’s homes. Apparently, couch surfing is the new hot thing, because now the NY Times has published a long article about the topic, which seems to bring together the worlds of social networking and travel. Check it out.

…the Couch Surfing Project, at couchsurfing.com, a three-year-old global community built on a MySpace/Facebook model of personal profiles connected through a network of “friends.” According to statistics on the site, it has well over 300,000 members from more than 31,000 towns and cities around the world.

The group’s philosophy is also its method, which might be summed up this way: I will offer you my couch free, along with the company of my friends and a tour of my favorite spots in my city. In return, you will give of yourself, and not just slink into my home at 3 a.m. after you’ve done your own tour of my city. In this way, we will be friends, if only for a day or two.

Or, as its mission statement proclaims: “Participate in creating a better world, one couch at a time.”

Couch surfing takes an ancient notion of hospitality and tucks it into a thoroughly modern paradigm, the social networking Web site. But, as its members say sternly, it is not a site for dating, or for freeloaders.

There seems to be a couch surfing subculture that has developed, with its own ethos and, inevitably perhaps, a novel about the experience.

A Kerouac mind-set inspired Ms. Huckabee to write a novel about her couch surfing experiences. Three years ago she was a lawyer in Charlotte, divorced for some years and facing an empty nest, as her children had left home. “It was a huge reconsideration of self,” she said. “Who was I if not wife, mother, etc.? I wanted to find a sense of carrying my home with me, and to do that I needed to let go of the sense that there was a home somewhere waiting for me.”

She gave away most of her belongings and set off on what was to be a three-month tour of Italy. That’s where she discovered couch surfing.

What kept her surfing were the sorts of details that delight a writer’s eye: the Algerian host in Paris who slept with a poster of Monica Bellucci above his bed so he could imagine falling asleep in her arms each night; a Bulgarian family’s grim Soviet-era concrete housing, which, when you opened the door, was like a tropical island, painted in bright greens and blues; the northern European woman who had not worked in three years and had not cleaned her bathroom in that time, either, it seemed, yet who nonetheless borrowed a bottle of wine from a neighbor to welcome Ms. Huckabee…

In an age of cheap airfares and porous borders, where nearly every corner of the earth, from Bulgaria to Bhutan, is open for tourism, the home is the final frontier, the last authentic experience. Instead of being in some sanitized hotel in Hanoi, said Erik Torkells, editor of Budget Travel magazine, “…if I couch surf I could be on some cool ex-pat’s or local’s sofa.” He added: “I’ve already leapfrogged barriers. It would take weeks under ordinary circumstances to get in someone’s home.”

With regard to “the whole MySpace thing,” he added: “This is a generation that’s all about talking to strangers. And why stop there? Why not crash at their place?”

Well, perhaps there is hope for any nation that has been decimated by a civil war. The NY Times a few days ago did a unique story about countries that have recovered from a civil war and gone on to restore their economies with tourism:

Countries once torn by civil war are seeking to revive tourism, hoping to replace images of violence with those of hospitality and adventure travel.

The latest example is Rwanda, most closely identified in the minds of many Americans with the genocide that swept the country in 1994. The country’s main attraction is still the mountain gorillas popularized in “Gorillas in the Mist,” the 1988 movie about the primatologist Dian Fossey.

But now, aided by a newfound stability under Rwanda’s first democratically elected president, the country’s government, business leaders and entrepreneurs are trying to convey that Rwanda has more than primates to offer tourists…

In large part, Rwanda is seeking to copy the success of Vietnam. The country is perceived as a safe, tourist-friendly destination, and services, including tourism, now make up about 40 percent of its gross domestic product. South Korea, Cambodia and Laos — other Asian countries ravaged by war several decades ago —have also become popular among tourists and serious about promoting their offerings. At the end of July, Laos played host to an ecotourism conference for countries in the Mekong region…

Rwanda has taken some bold steps to encourage tourism from neighboring countries and enhance trade and economic opportunity. On July 1, Rwanda joined the East African Community, a bloc that includes Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda; much like the European Union, the group plans to introduce a single currency and relax border controls.

The Arctic climate of Greenland hasn’t traditionally been a big tourist attraction, but interest is growing. Climate change, ironically, is one of the factors behind a rise in tourism to Greenland, as this Associated Press article notes:

Hunting is the central element of the Inuit culture in Greenland, a semiautonomous Danish territory, but that immutable way of life is facing its greatest challenge: climate change. It’s a double-edged sword for the Inuit. It’s transforming their frozen landscape, melting glaciers and disrupting animal life…

Since 1995, Greenland’s vast ice cap has lost 7 percent of its mass and 300 feet in height…But the change also presents new opportunities. Twenty years ago, when visitors were rare, the fjords and bays were clogged with ice through July. Now, those bays are navigable by April or May. That means more tourists _ eager to explore one of the most remote and unexploited corners of the globe. Eight cruise ships will come to the area for the first time this month and next.

“You could say that the Inuit on Greenland are the early adapters to climate change,” said Jacqueline McGlade, EEA executive director. “The people here are determined to embrace a sustainable form of tourism that fosters their traditions and respects their landscape.”

A similar story in the Toronto Globe and Mail makes the same point, in between descriptions of the dramatic iceberg views:

I’m sitting atop a small hill of smooth rock watching centuries of history drift by. In front of me, Disko Bay is filled with icebergs – big ones, smooth ones, small ones. They seem to be waiting, glinting in the midnight sun. It’s approaching 11 p.m. in this village north of the Arctic Circle, but the sun is still two arms’ lengths away from the horizon and won’t set for a couple of weeks.

From my perch, it’s the scale of the scene, not the beauty of each iceberg, that is most impressive. The view is both peaceful and striking. It’s one of those travel-earned vistas that stays in your mind: the red rooftops of Florence from the Campanile, the golden forts of Jaisalmer at sunset, and, here, the shimmering white icebergs of Greenland pausing in the bay…

While Greenland often draws a passing glance on a polar-route flight or conjures up Vikings – or the 10th-century marketing spin by Erik the Red, who came up with the island’s contrary name – today, the country is becoming known as a destination at the forefront of climate change.

Well, not exactly Disneyland perhaps, but a tourism and entertainment center that is larger than the entire city of Orlando, Florida. That is what is being built in Dubai, as the United Arab Emirates tries to look beyond oil and to use tourism as a foundation for its economy. Here is an excerpt from a Yahoo News article:

Widely touted as the Middle East’s very own Orlando, Dubailand, a cluster of mega-billion-dollar projects, is gradually emerging across the desert sands of the booming Gulf emirate.

Faced with a dwindling wealth of oil, Dubai has taken on a new challenge of larger-than-life projects in line with its ambition to become the region’s main business and leisure hub.

Already primed as a holiday destination, it is fast executing plans to build a host of new hotels, golf courses, malls and leisure facilities in order to more than double the number of tourists to 15 million by 2015.

Initially planned to cover an area of two billion square feet (185 square kilometres), Dubailand, billed as the “world’s most ambitious tourism, leisure and entertainment project,” is expected to be a sprawling three billion square feet. This would make it larger than the entire city of Orlando, Florida — home to Walt Disney World, Universal Resort, Sea World and a variety of other attractions and hotels…

Western-oriented Dubai’s bid to position itself on the world tourism map has propelled it way ahead of its oil-rich conservative Gulf neighbours.

Thomas Swick, travel writer for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, just published a column with a humorous but factual collection of international behavior tips. A sampling:

In South America, don’t tell people you’re from America. (They are, too.)

In Italy, don’t order cappuccino after 11 a.m.

In Greece, don’t say, “I didn’t order this,” when your ouzo arrives with a small plate of peanuts or olives or cheese. (It’s complimentary.)

In England, don’t touch the queen.

In Thailand, don’t badmouth the king.

In Vatican City, don’t correct the pope.

In Scotland, don’t call the people English.

In Kazakhstan, don’t mention Borat.

In Ireland, don’t ask, “Are there any good books by local authors?”

In Singapore, don’t do a lot of things.

In Indonesia, don’t say you’re planning to explore the country by car.

And whatever you do, wherever you go, never say you don’t like soccer.

Hope everyone in the U.S. had a nice holiday weekend these past few days.

There was a light-hearted article in the Sunday NY Times about travel, tourism and cultural differences, which is worth a read.

Every summer, people all over the world become acquainted again with a deep truth spoken by the philosopher-tourist Steve Martin. He was speaking for tourists everywhere, not just to France, when he said: “Boy, those French, they have a different word for everything!”

That people from different countries observe different customs — not only of speaking, but of eating, sleeping, gesturing, counting change, observing boundaries of personal space, tipping cab drivers, standing in lines, avoiding certain topics of conversation at dinnertime as unbearably disgusting — is a truism one probably can never be reminded of too often.

…it is bad news only in those isolated cases (which you hear about if you talk to cabbies, tour guides and certain sarcastic individuals in sales) where the awe of Mr. Martin’s revelation is supplanted by the ugly reality of a culture clash — a tip denied, a personal boundary violated, or a long line at a drug store counter jumped by a family of Italian-speaking people, who forever thereafter shall be remembered by the offended party present (an acquaintance of mine) as those “ugly Europeans.”

Let it be said that no group holds a monopoly on the title of “ugly.” Tip-stiffing, line-jumping, excessive price-haggling, sidewalk-blocking-when-stopping-suddenly-to-take-pictures-of-a-person-playing-the-steel-drums — none of these are unique to any national group…

“Ugly” behavior in tourists is almost always in the eye of the people being toured; and Americans are no longer the only, or even the dominant group of tourists out in the world. We are now as often toured as tour-ing.

And New Yorkers, it turns out, are just as likely to be exasperated being toured by tourists unfamiliar with their local mores about tipping or standing in check-out lines, say, as the Achuar tribesmen of Ecuador are to be offended by tourists who sit on certain sacred rocks.

The moral of the story, of course, is that cultural differences matter, even for tourists.

To be an ugly tourist is to miss the fundamental truth in Mr. Martin’s statement. “It is to have an overall lack of understanding that there is such a thing as cultural difference,” wrote Prof. Inga Treitler, the secretary for the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology.

Are those infamous city-a-day package tours fading into oblivion? Not totally, no, but according to Newsweek magazine there is a definite trend among tourists these days toward more leisurely, less hectic vacations.

As work life becomes increasingly hectic, holidays are occupying a more important place in our lives; when we take a break, we want to truly step off the treadmill—even as (or maybe because) we cling to our BlackBerrys. Just as the slow-food movement encouraged diners to savor meals and the way they are produced, the trend toward slow travel promotes a more thoughtful style of vacationing.

It refers not only to leisurely and environmentally friendly modes of transport—train, boat, bike or foot—but also to the nature of the trips: smaller in scope and more off-the-beaten-path—a custom-crafted trek through niche sites rather than a top-10 group tour.

Additionally, more travelers seem to be opting for longer holiday periods. This is a bit surprising, given the short vacation traditions of U.S. society. Of course, perhaps people can take more time off, as the story suggests, because technology enables them to stay connected. Regardless, it’s an encouraging trend.

With time shares and second-home ownership on the rise, many travelers are taking off for longer periods of time, enabled by the technology that allows them to connect to the office even as they paddle around the Arctic.

More and more, people are living for vacation. They are using up every single allotted day off, and bargaining with their employers for more time to savor their travels. Gone are the days when holidays were a discreet, predictable part of the year; today they are more typically considered an essential, non-negotiable part of life.

Have you ever had a desire for a last minute, spontaneous trip? Scott Kraft has, and over a few long weekends he’s managed to travel to Machu Picchu in Peru and Iguazu Falls in Argentina. He had a similar urge to see the Taj Mahal on a quick trip, but India is not so easy to get to. Still, he and some friends managed to put together a journey in which they spent just five days on the ground in India and saw the country’s Golden Triangle, from Delhi to Jaipur to the Taj city of Agra. He then wrote about his experience for the Los Angeles Times.

The sane traveler makes a simple calculation when planning a getaway: The longer it takes to get there, the longer the stay required to make it worthwhile. By that definition, my friends and I are not sane travelers.

We did Peru’s Machu Picchu over a long weekend in 2003. We used another long weekend in 2005 to see Iguazú Falls from the Argentine and Brazilian sides. We trekked to the ancient city of Petra in Jordan last year — and were back home by week’s end.

There was no place in the world, we figured, that couldn’t be conquered in a few days by a group of determined middle-aged suburban fathers with wanderlust, carry-on luggage and the ability to power through jet lag.

Interestingly, National Geographic Traveler also did a recent feature on sudden journeys and published 25 intriguing stories about last-minute travel decisions and the ensuing experiences, from Morocco to Ethiopia and Croatia to St. Bart’s.

We’ve all experienced them—those delightful, slightly irresponsible moments when we toss schedules and obligations to the wind and just take off. Whether it’s a college weekend when you pile in the car and just start driving or a mid-career break when you fly half-way around the world to try your hand at something new, stealing away from your daily routine is a true guilty pleasure.