Looking for a Classic Caribbean Vacation? Arthur Frommer Suggests Belize
Posted on 09/20/2018, 12:00 PM
Although nearly a million American cruise passengers enjoy momentary contact with Belize each year, the number of its actual tourists is only 250,000 persons, and the country is therefore uncrowded and somewhat innocent of commercial development (except in Belize City, to which no tourist goes). A stay here is like a trip to Costa Rica many years ago, before tourism enveloped and changed that ...
Would You Fly on Wires High Above Vegas? You Can!
Posted on 09/19/2018, 2:00 PM
Starting in November, you'll be able to ride a zipline high over the Las Vegas Strip—a first for Sin City, where daredevils have previously had to limit themselves to off-Strip zips such as the ones at the downtown Fremont Street Experience and the Rio resort. But the new Fly LINQ attraction launches from the LINQ Hotel & Casino, which has an honest-to-goodness South Las Vegas Boulevard addr...
New Long-Distance Cycling Trail Links the Western Balkans
Posted on 09/18/2018, 8:15 PM
The first regional cycling trail to cross borders in the Western Balkans, the new TransDinarica route (www.transdinarica.com), has opened its first segment. Travelers can now cycle over gravel and mountains from Slovenia through Croatia and on to Bosnia and Herzegovina on challenging, remote track through areas of the Balkans that haven’t seen many tourists. The project, which aims to economica...
Switzerland Just Won the Gondola War (If That Exists) With This Crazy Tramway
Posted on 09/12/2018, 3:00 PM
Temperatures that plummet 20 degrees below zero. A hostile, windy crag 2.5 miles (4,000 m) high, totally devoid of trees. Air so thin that people can only wheeze, creeping around at 60% of their normal abilities. It's not hell. It's Switzerland! Those are the conditions that workers endured to give the Alps a new wonder: luxury gondolas on the Matterhorn Glacier Ride, the world's highest cablewa...
New, Heart-Stopping Bungee Catapult Launches in New Zealand
Posted on 08/29/2018, 4:15 PM
New Zealanders are like Elphaba in Wicked—they're obsessed with defying gravity. The world's first permanent commercial bungee operation was established by AJ Hackett Bungy (that's how Kiwis spell it) in 1988 over a gorge near Queenstown on the country's South Island. In the three decades since, many more places for playing human yo-yo have been set up over New Zealand's lakes, dramatic mountain...
Royal Caribbean's Private Beaches Make Second-Class Citizens of the Rest of Us
Posted on 08/27/2018, 6:00 AM
Most passengers on a Caribbean cruise are by now aware of the “private beaches” and “private islands” that cruise lines operate for the purpose of keeping you from contact with local residents or businesses when your ship alights at a particular port. This deliberate segregation has been tolerated by most of us because the artificial beaches or ports have been operated in such a way as to be r...
Arthur Frommer: Remove Ryan Zinke as Secretary of the Interior
Posted on 08/20/2018, 6:00 AM
The Secretary of the Interior of the United States is supposed to preserve and protect our national parks, national monuments, and public lands from commercial exploitation. He is supposed to endorse the plea of President Theodore Roosevelt some hundred-or-so years ago that these cherished properties are to be preserved for generations to come. By his recent statements and actions, the cur...
In Late Autumn, Fly to Iceland for $99 Each Way
Posted on 08/17/2018, 12:00 PM
The following is in the nature of a “believe-it-or-not” category of travel. A scrappy budget airline of Iceland (the aptly named WOW Air) has just announced that for scattered flights to Reykjavik in August, September, and October, it will charge only $99 each way! Specifically, you’ll be able to fly to Iceland’s capital from 10 U.S. cities at that remarkable price. And these take-off...
Arthur Frommer: Climate Change Is Jeopardizing the Travel Experience
Posted on 08/17/2018, 6:00 AM
Is climate change for real? And is it having an impact on the recreational travels we undertake? If you would put that question to relatives of mine living in England, they would loudly respond, “Yes!” They live near an English province where temperatures recently reached 111 degrees Fahrenheit (44 Celsius). While such heat would only slightly affect residents of, say, Phoenix, Arizona,...
Epic New Zealand Rail Line to Reopen After Quake
Posted on 08/15/2018, 12:00 PM
New Zealand's gorgeous Coastal Pacific rail service, which runs between Picton and Christchurch on the South Island's east coast, announced it will return on December 1. KiwiRail's popular five-hour, 335-km (208-mile) trip was halted in November 2016 after a major earthquake devastated the Christchurch area. For much of the journey, the route hugs the coast, with the sea on one side and the ...
Huge Projections and New Architecture Center Added to Chicago Riverwalk
Posted on 08/15/2018, 7:00 AM
The Chicago River has had about as strange a career as any waterway in North America, starting with its namesake city's decision in the late 19th century (enacted in the early years of the 20th) to reverse the river's course in order to keep sewage out of Lake Michigan. Of course, that just sent the sewage—including the foul runoff from the same meatpacking factories that gave Upton Sinclair the...
The Arctic's Most Remote Cruise Destination Gets Less Remote
Posted on 08/08/2018, 12:45 AM
Polar expedition cruises—the industry term for active voyages in remote, icy waters—are a big trend at sea right now. They appeal to contemporary travelers' taste for unique adventures, while climate change has made routes in the Arctic and Antarctica passable for longer stretches of the year (a development it's impossible not to feel ambivalent about to say the least). Even the famously faraway N...
The 'Mamma Mia!' Sequel is a Lie: That's Not Greece!
Posted on 08/02/2018, 8:30 PM
You may remember—or perhaps you studied it in your Great Achievements of World Cinema class—that the first Mamma Mia! movie was set in Greece. Based on the hit Broadway musical, the film was famously, dazzlingly Greek, so Greek it made Zorba look shy. Meryl Streep's American character has decamped there to run a preposterously picturesque cliffside inn, where old flames hover and neighborhood teens...
Partially Underwater Artwork Welcomes Snorkelers in the Maldives
Posted on 08/02/2018, 3:30 AM
The world's first semi-submerged sculpture park is now open for snorkel-equipped art lovers off the coast of the Maldives in the southern Indian Ocean. Dubbed Coralarium, the over-/underwater project was dreamed up by British artist Jason deCaires Taylor, who, according to Smithsonian magazine, has worked on similar installations off coasts in Grenada, Mexico, and the Canary Islands. Those were ...
Georgia in Hawaii: O'Keeffe's Forgotten Island Travels
Posted on 08/01/2018, 2:15 PM
Georgia O'Keeffe had a strong sense of place, and that place was usually New Mexico. But having a powerful affinity for one locale didn't leave the painter immune to the allure of others, as she discovered, seemingly to her own surprise, during a 1939 stay in Hawaii. "My idea of the world," she wrote in a letter sent from the islands to her husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, " . . . h...
