I can't remember why I consented to ride in a hot air balloon during an African safari in Kenya some years ago, but I do recall that the moment we went aloft, I became painfully aware of how foolish I had been to do so. Our pilot was a somewhat deranged middle-aged man of British extraction, reacting ecstatically to the joy of being aloft. Instead of simply skimming along the tree line, as he had initially done, he suddenly manipulated the balloon to soar to altitudes of several thousand feet. And suddenly, standing in a small wicker basket hanging from the balloon, I looked down from an unimaginable height at the earth far below, and realized how vulnerable we all were.
It was not only that we were hanging from a flimsy balloon, kept aloft by a sheet of flame, but we were also flying above a games park filled with prides of lions, thousands of wildebeest, cheetahs by the dozens, and other wild animals, in a balloon whose exact place of landing we could not control. What if it set down among those lions, I asked myself? It was only after I emerged with knees shaking from the completed ride, and climbed out of that slightly-worn wicker basket hanging at an angle over the ground, that I realized how dangerous it is for tourists to subject themselves to such risk. And I reacted with sharp, sensitive awareness to the news, this week, of those 19 foreign tourists to Egypt who were incinerated while hanging from a hot air balloon that caught fire.
Imagine the near insanity of consenting to ride in a hot air balloon in a country where the entire activity is unregulated and the pilot unlicensed and the entire activity is undertaken by local entrepreneurs out to make a fast buck.
But hot air ballooning is only one of the "extreme sports" or "extreme adventures" that tourists sign up for in numerous foreign countries. Each year, people are severely injured, somewhere in tropical waters, by plunging down from a parasailing device drawn by a motorboat whose engine has suddenly stopped. This happens with surprising frequency. Each year, a tourist consenting to ride hanging from a zip line over a deep ravine in Costa Rica is suddenly found stuck on that line high in the air. This happened to a relative of mine. Each year, tourists to Belize take unimaginable risks by swimming into a cave and then being directed to dive underwater to a passage that supposedly leads them to an open-air room in the rock.
All over the world, untrained entrepreneurs in an unregulated activity, taking no safety precautions whatsoever, offer thrills to the visitor for a modest payment. Even in the United States, the regulation of hot air ballooning is apparently confined to the requirement that pilots be licensed as supposedly aware of the need for precaution. How many unreported accidents take place in hot air balloons carried aloft by air heated by jets of flame that can easily be misdirected at the balloon itself?
Persons in the travel industry should direct warnings to their clients against succumbing to those offers of extreme adventures. The risks are greater than assumed, and the possibility of grave injury or death is tangible.
While most other foreign currencies fluctuate up and down, the Chinese yuan stays solid as a rock. That's because the Chinese government is obviously engaged in unabashed currency manipulation, keeping the yuan at a virtually-motionless level of 6.23 to the dollar. All this is in support of the Chinese export industry, and the other major consequence of it is the cheap cost of a China vacation. If you'd like an example of that, you need only go to the air-and-land packages operated by China Spree in the month of April, 2013.
Provided you depart at least a month from now, and choose any listed date in April, you'll pay only $1,499 for a nine-day tour to Beijing and Shanghai, consisting of seven actual overnights in China. You'll receive, included in that figure, round-trip airfare from San Francisco (or, for only $100 more, from New York), round-trip transfers to and from the airports of Beijing and Shanghai, seven nights at a good, first class hotel with breakfast daily, and considerable escorted sightseeing, as well as transportation between Beijing and Shanghai. When you consider the normal cost simply of a 13-hour round-trip flight completely across the Pacific to China, which alone is worth $1,499, you realize what a staggering value is this week in two fascinating cities. No other destination anywhere else in the world is as comparably cheap.
If you'd prefer a more extensive introduction to both Beijing, Xian, Suzhou, Tongli, and Shanghai, you can buy a 10-day tour of China's so-called "Golden Triangle" (flying you, among other features, not simply across the Pacific round-trip to China, but also transporting you by air from Beijing to Xian, to see the terra cotta warriors enshrined in Xian), for an April 2013 departure, for only $1,859 from San Francisco, and $1,959 from New York. You'll again receive first class lodgings, several meals, and considerable escorted sightseeing, for 4 nights in Beijing, 2 nights in Xian, and 3 nights in Shanghai (on one day, you'll be driven by motorcoach from Shanghai to Suzhou and Tongli). This air-and-land package called "The Golden Triangle" is available to be booked for numerous departure dates this coming April.
The tour operator is China Spree (www.chinaspree.com), which is obviously making a concerted effort to be the leading source of ultra-low-cost tours to China. At virtually every newspaper-sponsored travel shows I've been to this year, I've been accosted by people telling me how much they enjoyed their ChinaSpree-operated tour. The two low-cost air-and-land packages to Beijing and Shanghai, or to Beijing, Xian and Shanghai, are almost always cited as the tour they took.
The weird outcome of last weekend's Italian election -- major vote totals for the outrageous Silvio Berlusconi and the equally-nutty Beppe Grillo -- has at least created positive news for American travelers. It has so unnerved the business interests of Europe that the value of the euro has now fallen to $1.30, with the British pound selling for $1.51. Those rates -- which might even go lower -- have markedly cheapened the cost of a European vacation for us dollar-possessing travelers.
And the Japanese yen remains at a remarkable 90 to the dollar, lowering the cost of a stay in Japan. Provided only that you can find an inexpensive airfare for an overseas vacation (try hipmunk.com, do-hop.com, or momondo.com), the prospects look good for ambitious summer vacationers.
But you'll need to make wise decisions in the choice of destinations. There's an awful lot of misleading information out there, as I discovered in responding to callers on this weekend's Travel Show (Sunday, noon to two E.S.T., at wor710.com).
One listener phoned the show to point out that she was flying in June with her fiancee to Rome, where they hoped to get married in a Presbyterian church (are there any in Rome?) on days one or two, and then to embark on a train trip to Florence and Venice. Her specific question: How can she arrange to ship her sumptuous wedding gown back home, as she did not want to cart it along for the remainder of her Italian trip?
I had the unenviable task of pointing out that as far as marriages are concerned, Rome is not Las Vegas. Unlike Las Vegas, where you can obtain a marriage license and get hitched within a half hour after your arrival, all European countries have severe residency requirements for permitting people to have weddings on their soil. I told her that she had to contact the nearest Italian consulate to learn how many months she would first have to reside in Italy before she could be married there. I could almost hear a groan of dismay from the caller.
Another caller explained that she was planning to go on a Baltic cruise this summer, ending up in St. Petersburg, Russia, where she hoped to make her own hotel reservations for two days of sightseeing in that fabled city. For such a short stay, she reasoned, she would not have to go through the difficult and expensive process of obtaining a Russian visa. I had to disappoint her by pointing out that her plan for bypassing a visa was just not do-able, that Russian requires a visa of any tourist, and that the only exception to that rule was for cruise passengers engaging in a group sightseeing tour arranged by the cruise ship, involving a day-long stay that returned at night to the cruise ship. Even a one-day overnight stay in Russia requires a visa.
Another listener, who had submitted his question by e-mail to the program, announced that he was anxious to cruise the coast of Alaska, but would do so only on a ship catering to young passengers. I had to respond that there was no such thing; that the audience for Alaskan cruises was heavily weighted to mature and elderly people. Was I wrong to be so pessimistic?
Is South Africa safe to visit, asked another caller? I responded that the general consensus is that Cape Town is acceptably safe (provided only that you take the precautions you would follow in any large city), while Johannesburg is iffy -- iffy because of the considerable poverty in that city, that is usually a generator of crime. Nevertheless, a great many tourists stay over in Johannesburg on their onward trip to Krueger National Park, and by taking reasonable precautions, they enjoy a stay without mishap.
Generally speaking, the questions posed to us on The Travel Show are so wide-ranging, reflecting an intention by many listeners to visit the most remote corners of the world, that they prove the continued vitality of travel. In the course of a slow economic recovery, at a time when unemployment is still high, people are still traveling in huge numbers and not simply on weekend trips but to international destinations. One caller this past weekend extolled the pleasures of a trip to Ghana in Africa, which he portrayed as a stable country that recently achieved a peaceful transfer of power from one president to another. It is reached, he said, by non-stop flights, and your visit is among friendly people well disposed to America, in cities with modern hotels.
As someone who obviously doesn't have expertise in ship design or maritime safety, I felt somewhat hesitant in passing comment on the recent tragedy of the Carnival Triumph, whose electrical system -- knocked out by an engine room fire -- caused it to drift without power for five days in the Gulf of Mexico.
And yet it seemed obvious to me. A cruise ship is like a city at sea. Shouldn't it possess back-up generators if the main source of electricity is knocked out? Of course it should, as I proceeded to write in this blog. And if such an event happens during a time of stormy seas, or when the ship is hundreds of miles from land (as on a trans-Atlantic sailing), grave tragedies including loss of life could occur.
Would you believe that The New York Times has this morning published a well-researched article reaching the same conclusion? And it points out, amazingly enough, that the event on the Triumph is the third such instance to occur during the past three years. One such loss of power occurred, amazingly enough, on another ship of Carnival Cruise Lines, the Splendor, in 2012.
Because of an ambiguous situation of government regulation (all ships carry the flags of tiny countries like Liberia and therefore claim to be immune to supervision by the United States), no government has rushed to enforce comprehensive or effective rules for the installation of safety equipment aboard ships. Though various admonitions to create redundancies in the production of electric power have been issued, only 10-or-so modern cruise ships contain back-up generators located far from the main engine room. The other 100-plus cruise ships contain one such system, and if it is knocked out, then the boat and its passengers are out of luck.
Two years ago, the Splendor experienced an engine room fire that eliminated its electrical power, amid resulted in harrowing circumstances almost identical to what befell the Triumph. Yet Carnival did nothing. And passengers of the Splendor rubbed their eyes when they read about the identical later occurrence on the Triumph.
What is needed is strong action by Congress. Asserting its authority over any ship that docks at a U.S. port, or that is marketed primarily to a U.S. audience, Congress could demand that ships be re-fitted with back-up generators. Though this will require the ships to give up a fair number of passenger cabins in order to create the space for those second generators, it is a requirement that cries out to be enacted. Otherwise, we will soon see an even greater tragedy than the one that so affected the passengers aboard the Triumph.
A revealing set of statistics was published last week, revealing that the single largest hotel chain in Europe is Ibis, the rock-bottom-priced group of fairly-basic lodgings owned by the Accor Group. Ibis now consists of 1,277 hotels with 121,882 rooms.
Ibis replaced America's Best Western Hotels, that now have only 90,738 rooms, apparently making it the runner-up. In third place is Accor's Mercure brand of moderately-priced, distinctly-middle-level hotels, most of them of the three-star level and therefore still reasonably priced.
Those rankings make an important point, in my view: that the public remains extremely cost-conscious in its choice of travel facilities, that the people concentrating in their writings and their interests on deluxe or first class approaches to travel are limiting themselves to a tiny portion of the travel market. They are like defeated candidates who have confined their political message to the 1%. They are inconsequential players, participants in an industry that increasingly has nothing to do with them.
In our publications and in this website, we at Frommers.com have nearly always been sensitive to the make-up and interests of the traveling public, who are cost-conscious to an extent of which the haughty publications are woefully unaware. In travel, Budget and Cheap are the names of the game.
And by the way, England's Premier hotel chain -- another low-priced grouping with limited amenities -- has 50,744 rooms and is now fourth in European rankings. A similar low-priced chain, England's Travelodges, is close in size.
The dreaded sequester -- a drastic cut in federal appropriations for the Defense Department, on the one hand, and discretionary civilian operations on the other -- is scheduled to go into effect at the end of February, unless Congress takes action to enact a more gentle and balanced approach to government spending.
The politics of that development are not for this travel blog to discuss.
But one aspect of the sequester does call for comment by persons concerned with both the travel industry and the quality of life in our nation, and that is the effect of those cuts on the National Parks Service. An official of the National Parks Retirees Association appeared with my daughter and myself on The Travel Show last Sunday [listen to that podcast] to point out that the sequester, taking place near the end of the Parks Department's fiscal year, would require an immediate cut of $110,000,000. A slash that great would require the firing or reduced hours of thousands of Parks rangers and other service and maintenance personnel. And the result of that downturn in employment would require the closing of numerous National Parks facilities, or shorter hours or days of operation of the parks, or a cut-back in vital maintenance of Parks buildings and roads.
It would, in effect, decimate our superb Parks system, ruining or eliminating many attractions and services, and drastically reducing the ability of citizens to vacation in these magnificent and pristine areas of America.
Write to your representative in Congress, demanding that they take action to prevent such a wholesale destruction of great national assets.
As best I know, there are five outstanding opportunities in Britain and the U.S. to enjoy a weeklong learning vacation this summer at a great college or university. I've already written at length about the programs at Oxford ("The Oxford Experience"), Cambridge ("International Summer School"), and Cornell ("Cornell's Adult University"), that operate in July and early August, and are open to people of all ages, without entrance requirements and without examinations to take or papers to write. You can't possibly enjoy a better holiday interlude in a hallowed academic institution whose challenges to your mind will remain vivid in memory for years to come.
Each program offers housing and all meals, in addition to tuition and such other extras as evening entertainment and lectures, and late afternoon tours. Simply insert the above names into a major internet search engine, and you'll learn all about what's offered.
I'm writing now to disclose that the two St. John's Colleges at campuses in both Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Annapolis, Maryland, have just announced their programs ("Summer Classics") for the coming summer, and these, too, are among the top learning opportunities available to you. For the second summer in a row, St. John's in Annapolis will conduct its program in June, while the Santa Fe campus operates in July. Each school bases its presentations on great books of the Western tradition, as you would expect from an institution whose four-year undergraduate curriculum consists entirely of the study of the 100 most important works of that tradition (from Homer to Freud), read chronologically and in full. Summer courses are taught by the distinguished faculty of each school.
If you have questions about the Santa Fe program, you can phone 505/984-6105 or e-mail summerclassics@sjcsf.edu. To learn more about the Annapolis program, either phone 410/626-2530 or e-mail kathy.dulisse@sjca.edu. In either case, you'd do well, in my opinion, to simply request the recently-issued 40-page catalogue, as the programs are so comprehensive and varied that they deserve better study than you could obtain over the phone -- or from this blog. But don't pass these up. They provide the single most important vacation that any intellectually-alert adult could have, as I can confirm from personal experience with them.
Last Thursday, the day before we finally flew home to New York from San Juan, my wife and I decided we would no longer stay indolent and aimless on a beachfront chaise lounge, but would deliberately plunge into the contemporary life of Puerto Rico. We headed, first, for the Plaza del Mercator (the big, covered, marketplace of San Juan) to gaze at the unfamiliar tropical fruits that are harvested on the island itself and made the mainstay of the residents' daily diet, and then we crossed the street to have a quick and early seafood lunch at El Pescador ("the fisherman"), one of the many local restaurants for residents that surround that marketplace square.
From there, a short walk brought us to the Museum of Puerto Rican Art in a stunning new building that displays the oil paintings done by leading local artists over the past two hundred years (a "must see", reflecting the strong emotions about their culture felt by these highly-innovative men and women); after which we headed into Old San Juan ("Viejo San Juan"), where a modern protest demonstration was the highlight of our stay.
All throughout the afternoon, a group of more than 100 young Puerto Rican women, in festive but modern dress, marched through the streets of that original city beating drums and brandishing placards, banners and flags advocating approval of the Violence Against Women Act that is now bogged down in the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C. At various plazas, they would stop to perform graceful dances and to respond to the cheers of the various onlookers who applauded and shouted their approval.
I am mentioning this not to make a political point (heaven forbid!), but to cite it as an instance of the growing modernity of life in Puerto Rico; in previous generations, women held back by the traditional views of Hispanic culture would never have dared to present such a strong feminist message, no different from what you would have heard on the streets of San Francisco or Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was one of many instances in which we glimpsed a sort of life in Puerto Rico that is centuries ahead of what you see in virtually every other island of the Caribbean.
We mainlanders visit Puerto Rico for the beaches and the surf, for swimming pools warmed by the constant sun, for the sounds of rhythmic music, and for temperatures that make you feel lucky and privileged. But we now enjoy these pleasures in or near a city, San Juan, that is comparable to any big metropolis at home. You arrive in a totally modern airport, take a broad highway into town, and pass not simply the resort areas but the business district of Santurce with big office buildings and graceful parks. You could be in Dallas or Cleveland. And the outward appearance of most of the areas you visit is thriving and prosperous. There are numerous impressive museums and other cultural attractions, a vibrant restaurant scene of many different ethnic cuisines, and a population that is gracious to a fault -- and often English-speaking.
I am of course aware that Puerto Rico has its problems. It has been in recession since 2006 and the unemployment rate is 14%. But it is clearly recovering, and considerably aided by the tourism we Yankees bring to it. It is one of the least expensive destinations to reach in the Caribbean -- if you are flexible in your dates you can often find round-trip airfares of $250 to $350 from most U.S. cities -- and its price structure for accommodations is moderate by Caribbean standards. I thoroughly enjoyed my own recent Puerto Rican vacation.
To install such a facility on existing ships will cost a lot of money. To make space for another massive generator will probably mean eliminating as many as 200 passenger cabins. No longer will such ships carry 3,000 passengers, but rather 2,500 passengers.
But isn’t that a small price to pay for avoiding such tragic events as recently endangered the Carnival Triumph and its passengers? Imagine if that loss of power had occurred on a transatlantic or transpacific crossing while the ship was several hundred -- even a thousand -- miles from land!
A cruise ship is like a city at sea. And like any city, it should have an alternate source of energy and power, located at the other end of the ship from where the basic source of power is found. To rely on a single producer of energy located in or near the engine room entails a giant risk, as Carnival discovered.
Most cities have back-up plans, back-up connections to other electric grids that can be used if the main source of power fails. And such a back-up source should also exist on cruise ships carrying a thousand and more passengers. New ships should be re-designed to enjoy such alternate remedies; old ships should be altered -- sent back to the shipyard -- to install such alternate remedies.
And that way, we won’t encounter an even greater disaster than the one that was partially avoided on the Carnival Triumph. Since the large cruise lines -- Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Norwegian -- now enjoy earnings measured in the billions per year, they have the obvious wherewithal to institute this improvement in the reliability of their systems of energy.
Today is the last full day of my Puerto Rican idyll (where the winter temperature is usually 86 degrees), from which I fly back to New York on Friday. Two days later, on Sunday, I’ll be recounting the experience, and adding still more comments, at the opening of The Travel Show shared with my daughter, Pauline, from 12-2pm ET. You can hear that program on any of the 130 radio talk stations that now carry it around the country. or by going to www.wor710.com where it is streamed live. If you miss that time, recording of that broadcast is carried on the site for several weeks and is presented without commercials! Just click "podcast" from the mainpage.
(With today’s merger of American Airlines and U.S. Air and the tragedy of the Carnival Triumph drifting through the Gulf of Mexico, we’ll have more to discuss than simply Puerto Rico.)
Then, a week later, I’ll be appearing at the Los Angeles Times Travel Show at the Los Angeles Convention Center, where I’ll be speaking from 11 a.m. to noon on Saturday, February 23 (and then signing books at the bookstore booth near the speaker’s stage). I’d very much appreciate meeting with California readers of this blog at that time.
Two weeks later, on Saturday March 9, I will again be speaking at 11 a.m. at the Washington, D.C. Travel and Adventure Show in the Washington, D.C. Convention Center, and hoping to meet readers afterwards, again at a bookstore booth near the convention stage.
If you can’t attend either of these events, you should know that you can always phone in questions or comments to The Travel Show, toll-free, at the 800 number that we announce on the show. And if you can’t do that, you can always e-mail us with questions or comments to Frommertravelshow@yahoo.com. Many of your e-mails will be discussed on the show, but if they aren’t, they are always answered in writing, by Pauline or myself, within two or three days after we receive them.
We hope to enjoy these contacts with you, and especially look forward to meeting you either at the LA or DC shows.
