Monday morning reading for all you travel junkies. Here are some of the best articles I've come across during last week.
Travel articles from other sites
Condé Nast Traveler published a really iconic trip description in 12 Perfect Days in Classic China. It does outline a package tour, but, as they say, in China it's easy to get your plans messed up. " How do a traveler's best-laid plans get foiled in China? Let me count the ways... Fourth, the Chinese tourism infrastructure inflicts a government-dictated mass-market agenda that is not very appealing to the sophisticated traveler. Get within its clutches—as happens on the average tour, including private ones—and you will waste considerable time at ho-hum places, navigating them in a way that is not optimal, with detours for forced shopping, meals at generic tourist restaurants, and layers of middlemen extracting as much money as possible from you along the way." It's a very thorough article, so enjoy!
Upgrade: Travel Better covers how Westin Hotels has partnered with Phillips to create a sleep lab hotel room to combat jet lag. The experimental room is designed to aid "sleep deprivation and cutting jet-lag recovery time in half." This is now being tried out in a Chicago hotel, and hopefully these hotel rooms will soon be commonplace.
Travel-rants.com flags up that compulsory fingerprinting is soon coming to the UK's airports, with the opening of Heathrow's Terminal 5. As Darren points out, it's worrying that these measures are being introduced more widely. I've previously written about how the US-Visit program is to take further fingerprints from travelers. So, how much more of these barriers to travel are we going to see in the future?
Pico Iyer wrote an article for the New York Times about how traveling during Christmas (and other holidays as well) can be quite a good experience in Across the world in 36 hours. Essentially, if you're not bothered by taking a flight when most everyone else is celebrating with their family, it's both less crowded and you're much more likely to get great service and flight upgrades.
Mike Richard writes about being a kid and trying to smuggle a purple laser-gun made of plastic through TSA security for Vagabondish. Guess how that one ended...
Other interesting articles on the web
If you're looking for tips on taking better travel photos, Ciaran Brewster shares 101 tips for better photos (site gone). Definitely useful for travelers, I recommend following tip #5: "If your shooting outside and your subject's face is in the shade use fill flash to get rid of shadows." And tip #59 is one I should follow myself: "Read your camera's manual."
BBC.co.uk has an article on the future of human evolution, posing the question of what happens if the human race splits into two species. Predicted by H.G. Wells and Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, it's not quite as far-fetched as it seems.
For random photos of London, Curiously Incongrous is a great site (was, as it's now gone). Eric says that "Over the past few years I have walked thousands of kilometres through the streets of every part of London photographing what I thought might make interesting photographs." He now has over 3,500 photographs on the site!
5 most read articles on eyeflare.com last week
- Circuit workout video for travelers
- easyJet launches miles credit card
- Don't fall for vacation booking scams
- Strata with tomatoes, herbs, and goatcheese
- NewYorkology.com - a great New York resource
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