Tanzania: Wildebeest, Zebras, Mildred and Me... In Tanzania, it was: A woman from Brooklyn named Mildred plopped herself beside me in the Land Rover. (In my mind, I immediately called her Mildew.)  Kilimanjaro rising above the Serengeti Plain, Tanzania. Mildred had never met a man (or woman) she didn't dislike. She sat sideways, looking closely at me and elbowed my ribs. "Look at THAT guy! Makes Porky Pig look skinny!" Or, "She's so wrinkled she has to screw her hat on!" Or, as the driver nearly squashed a senior citizen, "She'd make a nice large grease spot!" The days drifted away. I became obsessed with Mildred. (In my mind, I called her Millstone.) Why was she in Africa, anyway? Did her family send her, hoping she'd be run down by a rhino? I began to resent Mildred. (In my mind, I called her Millipede.) Why did she always plump down beside ME? Did all those attractive people think we were friends? I was embarrassed to sit by her and nobody, spotting her, was about to sit by me. If I killed her, would anybody notice? Mildred wore the same things in Africa she wore in Brooklyn: house dresses. (I hadn't seen a house dress in years.) They were all the same, in different colors, and when she sat down she showed about two inches of pasty flesh between her hose and her dress hem. It was difficult not to stare at that space.     The first day in the Land Rover we saw wildebeest, those ugly, primitive creatures that seem to have been put together by mistake. "Wildebeest! Wildebeest!" Mildred shouted, jabbing me so I couldn't steady my camera's long lens. Fortunately, Mildred's attention span was short. Only 13 minutes after we had beheld our first, vast herd, a veritable tumult of wildebeeste trotted by and I kept my telephoto aimed. "What are you shooting?" she said, bored. "Wildebeest!"  I trumpeted. "Yuh," she said.   High in the clouds and chill above the Serengeti Plain, we tourists enjoyed frigid little rooms in a comfortless inn where the miniscule heaters were not to be used lest they explode. Nevertheless, I had witnessed thousands of wildebeest, zebra, gazelle, and bevies of other beasts in migration, and I was as high as an elephant's eye. One day, we arose at dawn to breakfast in a kind of camp commons and to be transported (in more ways than one) to the floor of the seething Serengeti. As I opened my door, a zebra almost nuzzled my nose. "Zebra, zebra!" They were close; like cats, they studied me, the intruder. Since childhood, I'd wanted one and now here they were, cropping the green carpet. Carefully, quietly, I sneaked toward coffee, snapping off shots of zebra at their grassy meal, zebra and young, zebra gamboling, stiff-legged, in the intense morning light. Mildred trapped me in the commons. "You know whaaat?" she shrieked. "I heard all this huffing and puffing and there were zebra on my doorstep. I never!"  "Just think, Mildred," I replied. "You could write a book about it and sell it in Brooklyn. `Zebra on My Doorstep.' "   "Zebra on YOUR doorstep," she sniffed. "Not MINE!"   The trip ended. I never saw Mildred again, but I looked up her name in the dictionary. It's from Old English words meaning "mild" and "strength." Well, they got it half right.

 

A Sense of Travel...with Georgia Hesse - December 2010

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Italy's Amalfi Coast: From Sorrento to Infinity Once, so long ago that no one was around to watch, the gods of geology went crazy on the limb of land we now call Italy that stretches northwest to southeast along the Tyrrhenian Sea. Earth belched up masses of limestone, which the gods then carved and folded and bent and stacked and twisted and tore and wrenched and yanked into a stony fantasy above a sea as blue as the inside of a sapphire. And they saw it was beautiful. So did the people who finally came along, whether they were primitive cave dwellers or cultured Greeks or Etruscans or Romans or Pliny the Elder or Gore Vidal. Every true traveler comes at last to this wild and dizzying landscape, especially to the 49-mile-long corniche called the Amalfi Coast that soars and plunges from Sorrento to Salerno. Positano on the Amalfi Coast Fishing villages of white cubes or faintly Moorish, pastel cottages rise like children's building blocks out of the sea, stacked untidily on each other and interspersed with cypresses, orange trees, olives, almonds, citrus groves and vineyards. Fishing boats bob in curls of harbors, dozens of Pointillist dots on a canvas of (usually) calmest blue. Occasionally, however, winds wail, thunder rumbles, and storms surge as if inspired by the Furies; especially in the dark depths of the aptly named Furore Valley. (At any time, clinging to the convolutions of the Amalfi Drive can be about as comfortable as tripping along a tightrope. Once, settling into the passenger seat of my rented Renault 5, my mother suddenly screamed, shaking the little car to its stem. I nearly drove off into the view. "Oh-h-h! I'm sorry! I sat on a bee!" Then, calmer, "At least it was an Italian bee.")   Dining terrace of the Hotel San Pietro in Positano. Positano is as prettily perfect as a stage set; Sorrento is a garden sliced by sinuous old streets, and Amalfi itself, captain of the coast, is a rich little resort escaped from Spain with an antique cathedral of positively oriental splendor, speaking of trade with 9th-century Constantinople. (Amalfi was Italy's oldest republic and created the world's oldest maritime code, the Amalfi Navigation Tables, in the 11th-century.) All these towns could be called (if one wanted to spoil the show) touristy, but what else would you expect?  Seeking slightly more solitude on my second call along the coast, I cut off the Drive, SS163, just beyond Atrani, turned left and uphill at SS373, Via Castiglione, and found myself in Ravello in a matter of minutes.    Caruso Belvedere Hotel overlooking the Amalfi Coast in Ravello.  Ravello (pop. 2,500 or so) is less a town than a perch, clinging onto a ledge suspended between sea and sky on the slopes above the Valley of the Dragon (Valle dei Dragone). At one time, I found myself in this enticing escape almost every year, always at the Hotel Caruso Belvedere and, as often as possible, in room 5. The view from it, off toward the ancient Greek colony of Paestum (founded around 600 B.C.E.), sucked one into a blue space warp, almost a wall with nothing to mark earth from heaven. If one spread his arms and jumped, it seemed, he would soar safely into the void. Caruso Belvedere Hotel in Ravello. A hotel is almost never a destination. This one is. It began in 1893 when vineyard owner Pantaleone Caruso and his wife rented a wing of the 11th-century palace belonging to the Marquis D'Affitto and opened their five-room Pensione Caruso.  In 1903, a wandering writer from the New York Times discovered the hideaway, 19 rooms were added in the palazzo, and England's Bloomsburg Group made its way up the hill - Virginia Woolf, economist John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey and Clive Bell, all that crowd - followed later by Graham Greene and Gore Vidal, who wrote his 1968 novel "Myra Breckinridge" in room 9.   Infinity Pool of the Hotel Caruso Belvedere. When I knew her well, a Caruso family member was still in charge. Today, the 48 transformed rooms and suites have joined the 40-plus hotels and six railroads of the long-lived Orient-Express family. The vast fireplace, the 18th-century frescoes, the terrace with its Norman arches and the gardens remain. An infinity pool matching sky and sea in harmonious blue adds a fourth, imaginary, dimension to the three we know.  Oh, yes; off the piazza, Villa Cimbrone with its cloisters and vaulted ceilings seduces the art lover and from July to through September, 2011, will revel in the annual Music Festival centered in the 13th-century Villa Rufolo.   Ruins of Pompeii You may want never to venture away from Ravello or the Caruso but, beyond the curvy Amalfi Drive, Capri, Paestum, Pompeii, Ercolano and Mt. Vesuvius are waiting to allure you.  They're another story.

 

A Sense of Travel...with Georgia Hesse - November 2010

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In Repose: The Great Cemeteries and Final Resting Places of Artists and Poets

On a morning so muggy that my contact lenses floated into the corners of my eyes, I slogged through rain forest along the Road of Loving Hearts that crawls up 1,549-foot Mount Vaea on the island of Upolu in Samoa. Insects with unknown names cackled in the jungly canopy. Soggy muck squished in my sneakers. "What in the name of Caedmon am I doing here?"
 
"Looking for RLS," the patron saint of poets replied.
 
Aye. Just a wee bit ahead, in that primeval tangle, lay the Teller of Tales: Tusitala, a.k.a. Robert Louis Stevenson.

 
Robert Louis Stevenson's tomb on Mt. Vaea, Samoa.

Finally, the mount rounded off, the vegetation gave way to a vast view, the white marble tomb rose above a cerulean sea, and the writer's words read themselves to the pilgrim:

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he long'd to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

An undoubted fascination lures the traveler to the great cemeteries of earth: Westminster Abbey and the Tower in London, Père-Lachaise and Montparnasse in Paris, the American Cemetery and Memorial in Manila, Egypt's peerless Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens.

 
Paul Gauguin monument on Hiva Oa in the Marquesas.

But a deeper wonder attaches to tombs that enshrine those who rest in near-solitude as well as in peace, such as Ėmile Gauguin in French Polynesia, the remote Marquesas, and the even remoter Hiva Oa; William Butler Yeats in Drumcliffe Churchyard, County Sligo, Ireland; Eleanor of Aquitaine at Fontevraud Abbey in France's Valley of the Loire; beautiful Rupert Brooke on the Greek isle of Skyros, or Vincent van Gogh in the hamlet of Auvers: worthy pilgrimage places all.

 
Eleanor of Aquitaine rests in the Abbey of Fontevraud.

Stevenson the vagabond, born in 1850 in Edinburgh, slipped in and out of public fashion all his short and sickly life: children's author, poet, essayist, playwright, Gothic and romantic novelist, historian, anthropologist.
 
The young man studied in desultory style at Edinburgh University, earning a never-used law degree in order to please his father, traipsing off to Europe, and - at the age of 26 - falling in love with Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne at an art colony in France. (Not good, thought his parents. She was 10 years older than he; she was married; worse, she was an American and an off-and-on Californian at that.)  They married, against many odds, and honeymooned at a mining shack on Mount St. Helena near Napa.
 
The writer had suffered all his life from tuberculosis,  which remained undiagnosed until after his death. He died of a brain hemorrhage at age 44 at home, Villa Vailima, outside Samoa's main town of Apia. Stevenson was at the peak of his writerly powers, world-renowned for "Treasure Island," "Kidnapped" and "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" among other classics. (At one time, it was all but illegal to grow up in the U.S. without reading "A Child's Garden of Verses.")
 
Forty local chiefs bore the body up the trail to his final resting place. When Fanny died in Santa Barbara, 21 years later, her ashes were interred by their daughter Isobel next to Robert Louis' tomb. Villa Vailima today is a touching museum.
 
On his honeymoon, RLS had penned "Silverado Squatters."  If you can't call upon the pair in Samoa, you might visit them in Robert Louis Stevenson State Park, a two-mile round trip hike up-mountain from the Highway 29 pull-out seven miles north of Calistoga. The shack is gone but the memorial, an open book, remains, although the inscription is difficult to read:

Doomed to know not winter, only spring, a being

Trod the flowery April for awhile,

Took his fill of music, joy of thought and seeing,

Came and stayed and went, nor ever ceased to smile.

 
Vincent van Gogh's view of Auvers-sur-Oise.

It's a much easier task to do homage to one of the world's most popular painters, Vincent van Gogh. You have only to take an hour-long train trip out of Paris' Gare du Nord or Saint-Lazare to the leafy little riverside village of Auvers-sur-Oise. (If you drive, it takes about 30 minutes.) 
 
Vincent spent the last 70 days of his life in a creative frenzy producing more than a painting a day, some of  them canvases of the countryside that rank among his most cherished works. At his beloved brother Theo's urging, he had left the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence and put himself in the care of Theo's friend Dr. Paul Gachet, a homeopathic physician in the little town. (Although Van Gogh sold only one of his hundreds of paintings during his lifetime - "The Red Vines," now in Moscow's Pushkin Museum - one of his two portraits of Dr. Gachet was sold at auction in 1990 for more than $80 million.)

 
Van Gogh's Bedroom in Auvers.

On the morning of July 27, 1890, Vincent walked from his room at the Auberge Ravoux into a wheat field and shot himself in the chest. He died in the inn's top-floor room two days later, July 29, with Theo by his side, and was buried in the churchyard on July 30.

Auberge where Van Gogh died two days after shooting himself.

Today one strolls in Auvers as if through a gallery of familiar images: There's the church right over there, see; there's the garden of fellow painter Charles-François Daubigny and on that side is the good doctor's house. Yes, that's the wheat field...but where have all the black crows flown?
 
There is much to be seen in Auvers before one pays final respects: Check out the museum and the studio-house of Daubigny, a contemporary of Corot and Daumier; call at the Musée de l'Absinthe, devoted to the milky, cloudy aniseed-flavored liqueur much favored by Vincent and other real as well as would-be artists of his day. (You can't buy a drink but you can buy a bottle.)
 
The palatial 17th-century, Renaissance-style Château d'Auvers presents a stylish technological tour of the world the Impressionists inhabited. Some call it hokey; it's not. It's folkish and humorous, with mock-up cafés, cinema projections, inventive special effects, and a smashing train-ride that seems to bounce through the country when it's really the country that's streaming by.

 
Vincent van Gogh and his beloved brother Theo lie in repose next to each other.

Leave until last the short walk to the cemetery, studded with placards reproducing en route the paintings Vincent so feverishly stroked.  Within the graveyard his simple headstone sits against a wall of ivy. Beside it, an identical one is marked for Theo, who faithfully followed his younger brother six months later, an ally in death as he was always in life.

 

Van Gogh's Starry Night over the Rhone. 

"Starry Night" may make you want to look into space and sing.  

From now through Jan. 18, you may greet Van Gogh at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park at the exciting exhibition "Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Beyond," which displays some of the most compelling canvases from the Impressionist collections at Paris' Musée d'Orsay. 

A Sense of Travel  by Georgia Hesse - October 2010

A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes 

Once in a while, a book appears just when an audience is ready or even pleading for it. Published earlier, it might have languished alone on its shelf, unappreciated and, worse, unread. Entering the lists later, it would have been behind-the-times, old news, even passé.

Zounds! Here is the book we need now: "Destiny Disrupted; a History of the World Through Islamic Eyes" by Tamim Ansary, Public Affairs, member of the Perseus Books Group.

Blue Mosque in Istanbul.

This is not a polemic. It is a story told by a writer with eyes in the back of his head. He looked first at the world through Islamic eyes, born into an Afghani family recognized for "piety and religious learning;" the Ansary name indicates descent from the Ansars ("the Helpers"), Muslim converts of Medina who assisted the Prophet Mohammed in escaping assassination in Mecca. Through another set of eyes, Western ones, he looks out upon an American world he first experienced at Colorado Rocky Mountain School in Carbondale (grades 9-12, near the ski resorts of Snowmass and Aspen); then at Carleton College in Minnesota and Reed College in Oregon.
 
You can't get more Amurrican than that.

Arabic world from Damascus to Cairo.

A native citizen of what he likes to call, historically, the Middle World, Ansary lives today with his family in San Francisco, perhaps the Fourth World.

Fascinating it was to me to learn that as children, Tamim (way out there in the "tiny town" of Lashkargah, Helmand Province, Afghanistan) and I (way in here at a ranch near the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming) read some of the same books: V.M. Hillyer's "A Child's History of the World," for one, and Hendrick Willem Van Loon's "The Story of Mankind." (This classic was presented to the "history-loving little bookworm of an Afghan kid" in the late 1950s by British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, who passed through town and invited the lad to tea.) 
 

Arrival of Mecca-born Prophet Mohammad (as Ansary spells it) in 622 C.E. or Year Zero. 

The book begins with the Prophet Mohammad, born in Mecca, near the Red Sea coast of Arabia in the year 570 or thereabouts. (As Ansary says, nobody was paying much attention at the time.) By the year 622 C.E., he had become so controversial that his murder was planned for one September night, but he escaped (one of many exciting stories) to the town today called Medina, 250 miles to the north. From this trip (the Hegira in English, Hijra in Arabic), Muslims date their calendar. (It's now 2010 C.E. or 1388 A.H.)

From the Hijra, then, or Year Zero (or 622 C.E.) Ansary takes us through the collisions of centuries to and beyond the Six-Day War that ruined Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt, gave birth to the Palestine Liberation Organization (the PLO), and led to such offshoots as the Islamic Jihad, "founded by a man named al-Zawaheri, who in turn mentored the now-infamous Saudi jihadist Osama bin Laden."

 

Dusk at Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, Syria.

As an American born in the 20th century, I have always thought of the world in terms of nation-states: England, Kenya, Indonesia, Pakistan, Iraq, whatever. Even though I knew that I was wrong historically, the notion has persisted. It was stunning to learn from Ansary that "the organization of the world into countries is less than a century old."  Did you realize - even if you may have known - that "Between 1945 and 1975, some one hundred new countries were born, and every inch of earth finally belonged to some nation-state or other"?
 
This book does not fulminate, it explores. From atop a historical hill, it looks upon the volumes of humankind, each one containing pages from all the others. Perhaps one day we will learn to read our common story. 

 

Extremes of Muslim world fashion: (left) fashion show in Tehran 2006; (right) controversial model Yasmeen Ghauri, an Islami from Pakistan, and perhaps the opposite bookend to the Prophet Mohammad.

 * * *

Addendum: In Istanbul this summer, the exhibition called "1001 Inventions: Discover the Muslim Heritage in Our World" has been attracting people by the thousands every day. Intended to be secular and non-political, the show is intended to show the groundwork done in the sciences before the European inventors established the West as the bastion of scientific creation. On October 5th, it is scheduled to move to the New York Hall of Science.

A Sense of Travel  by Georgia Hesse - September 2010

Lebanon:  Land of Milk & Honey 

I first set foot and heart in Lebanon in the late 1960s when that antique land was enjoying a time of relative peace and prosperity, attracting travelers from around the globe who entered via Beirut, which was nicknamed then "the Paris of the Middle East." Like me, they came lured by history, to pay a call on the Phoenicians, to find again the ancient "land of milk and honey."

Truth is, I thought I knew Lebanon. It was very old; older than olive trees; older than recorded history; old enough to have sent sailors from the port of Tyre to found a port in Egypt. They had named it Carthage, which in their language meant simply "new town." Archeological digs witnessed  that the town of Byblos was born before 5,000 B.C. and that, as a port exporting papyrus, it gave its name to Bible. ("Paper," of course, is just papyrus writ small.) Tyre and Sidon exported fabrics dyed purple, made from the shellfish purpura (Latin) or porphyra (Greek). Eventually, as words do, this migrated into the phrase "born to the color purple" used mostly for kings and bishops because only they could afford it.

Who wouldn't love such a place?

Old Byblos Harbor.  As a port exporting papyrus, it gave its name to Bible. 
 
The Beirut of the late '60s and following decades smacked of "la belle vie," showing off its French heritage in food, fashion, and fun. (After all, since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the end of World War I, it had lived under the mandate of France.) One stretched on sunny beaches, water-skied on the sparkling Mediterranean, and indulged the self in the luxurious trappings of the Phoenicia Hotel, where the world that mattered met.

New and elegant Grand Hills Hotel near the coast and Beirut.

One day, at a construction site on one of the major downtown streets, a workman fell underground and found himself in a Roman villa, complete with wall lamps, sculptures, and the sniff of history. Like any Frenchmen worth their garlic, the Lebanese turned it into a restaurant.

 

Modern downtown Beirut street sidewalk cafe.

Ah, Beirut! But it came time for Baalbek and other Roman presences in the Békaa Valley (also home of local gastronomy and wines), for the Cedars (of Lebanon, where else?), and Sidon and Tyre and, and... .

Temple ruins in Sidon.

The Phoenicians were uninterested in conquest; they traveled for trade. Yet across their little land (home to the Canaanites of the Bible, remember) tromped the armies of other, more compulsive civilizations: all the really old ones, followed by Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamelukes, and finally Ottomans. All these left residues of their cultures behind, willingly or not. Quite willingly, we wandered to look at them.

Temple columns in Baalbek.

The Romans, as usual, built the best and the biggest. Baalbek is their largest remaining site: ancient Heliopolis, city of the sun. To stroll in its ruins, to sit on a handy column in the shade, to hear the haunting voice of the flute-like mirwiz is to feel the hair rise on the back of your neck, to wonder what it's all about, anyway.

Here it was certainly about power: The six famous Corinthian columns that soar into the ever-blue sky must have told the hordes who tramped by the Temple of Jupiter that there the Roman gods were in residence. Yet even the columns are dwarfed by the mysterious megaliths that support them; in the world comparable only to the stoneworks of Egypt. The Temple of Bacchus is the best-preserved Roman structure in the Middle East. 

Corinthian columns reach for the sky at the Temple of Jupiter.

Tyre is home to earth's largest antique hippodrome (where chariot races were staged); it also boasts a superb triumphal arch and Roman aqueducts.
 

Roman archway in Port City of Tyre.

A World Heritage Site, Ouadi Qadisha (HolyValley) now celebrates the treasured Cedars of God (Horsh Arz el-Rab). Nearby is one of the earliest Christian monastic settlements - in the world, naturally.
 
On that first visit, having purchased along the road a Byzantine master-work (made last week), I was guilty of asking the merchant whether he thought war would come again. "No," he shook a turbaned head. "Not." I believed him because I wanted to write that.
 
Less than a decade later, in 1975, the Lebanese Civil War shook the land of cypresses. But after 1990, peace broke out again and Beirut undertook a costly reconstruction. Then the month-long war between Israel and the Hezbollah raked the civil structure. However, because of its tightly regulated financial system (once Lebanon was "the Switzerland of the Middle East"), it bounced back and in 2009, the country enjoyed 9% economic growth and smiled while welcoming the largest number of tourists in its history.

Lebanon is older than yesterday. I hope it can be as young as tomorrow.

A Sense of Travel  by Georgia Hesse - August 2010

TOP Airports in North America 2010

In June, this column was devoted to the world's best airports and airlines, according to a Skytrax Research survey of 9.8 million fliers representing more than 100 nationalities. Singapore came in first with 2010's best airport (Changi); Asiana ranked as best airline (based in Seoul, South Korea).  Now it's North America's turn.

The Fairmont Vancouver Airport Hotel is on the airport grounds.

And the airport winner is (ta-TUM): Vancouver International, which took 11th place on the worldwide list. Somewhat to my surprise but also to my delight, San Francisco International won second place and Denver International took third. (Since we are here concerned mainly with foreign travel, no purely domestic gems were considered.)
 
Vancouver's airport sits on SeaIsland in Richmond, British Columbia, about 7.5 miles from downtown, and is the second busiest in Canada after Toronto Pearson International. It offers three terminals: the domestic one; an international terminal that includes the U.S. Preclearance Annexe, newly built in the mid- to late-1990s to simplify the paper trail of U.S.-bound traffic, and South, a portion of the original that serves regional airlines. 

Local art displayed at YVR in Vancouver (photo by Susan Point).

YVR (Vancouver's code) likes to claim it has eYVRthing, and that's almost true. In addition to 160 shops and services, it presents a stunning collection of Pacific Northwest Coast aboriginal art that fits handsomely into the theme of "land, sea, and sky." A huge tank maintained by the Vancouver Aquarium swims with 850 species of B.C. marine life, and a waterfall plunges into a flower-bordered creek that wiggles its way through the main lounge.
 

Spacious terminals at Vancouver's YVR airport invite the outdoors inside.

A Public Observation Area in the pre-security area of the domestic area is a kick despite its institutional name. Aim a telescope at the field and watch as aircraft take off, land, and roll along the runways. Check the panels that supply facts, photos, diagrams; play with an interactive model of SeaIsland. Children gape as the B.C. Explorer virtual flyover soars over the landscape of the province, "touching down" in more than 100 communities.

The lobby of the luxurious Fairmont Vancouver Airport Hotel runs right into the U.S. terminal's concourse, providing a health club, sauna, a lap pool, whirlpool, and the Absolute Spa & Salon that soothes body (and soul) with more than 130 beauty treatments. Passengers with any class of ticket are welcomed at two Plaza Premium Lounges, one in the domestic terminal and the other in international, where they can enjoy a nap or shower, try the food and beverage buffet, watch TV or have access to the Internet.  You're flying high, Vancouver!

San Francisco International Airport (SFO).

Before the daze of severe security at SFO, you could roam freely about the three terminals whether a passenger or not, dining, drinking or admiring museum-quality artworks. Today, wandering is restricted, but seductions abound both land- and airside. It's fitting that San Francisco (aka Cuisine City) caters to our compulsions with no fewer than 58 restaurants, cafés, delis, food stands, coffee shops, bistros and other estaminets.

Several of these are outposts of in-city favorites: from B (for Buena Vista Café, in S.F. since 1916, pouring Irish coffee since 1952) to Y (Yankee Pier; in Larkspur, Lafayette, San José's Santana Row). Ebisu caters to sushi and sashimi fans at landside in the International terminal (you know it in the city at Kearney@Bush and near Golden Gate Park, 1283 9th Avenue). City café families with SFO offshoots also include Emporio Rulli, Il Fornaio, Just Desserts, Lori's Diner, Peat's and Perry's, Starbucks and Subway.  At Gordon Biersch (motto: "Never trust a skinny brewer") in Terminal 3, airside, it's a permanent party from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m.

This aerial map of the Bay Area's daily flight routes from SFO, Oakland and San Jose airports could pass for abstract art.

Emphasis at SFO has always been placed on public art; it was the first airport in the country to have a permanent art curator. Right now exhibits are showing off in 19 locations, for instance: "Shanghai: High-Rise Architecture and the Remaking of China's Gateway to the World," an echo of the great show now at our Museum of Modern Art; "Evolution of a Royal Vision: The Birth of Meissen Porcelain"; "Liberian Helmet Masks of the Sande and Poro Societies" from the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology.

Art exhibitions are on display throughout SFO terminals.

SFO maintains educational programs for children in cooperation with the state's Department of Education Content Standards. Parents, take them now to see "Live From the Tropics: Animals of the Rainforest and Coral Reef."

There's more: the Aviation Library & Louis A. Turpen Aviation Museum contains more than 6,000 boos and periodicals, 3,000 photographs, and more than 5,400 artifacts. Just Google San Francisco International Airport.

 
View of SFO Airport surrounded by the San Francisco Bay.

SFO is rimmed by excellent hotels in all price ranges. In these harried days, I usually choose to spend the night before flying out very near the airport. My inn of choice has been the Inn at Oyster Point, and will be again. Under new ownership of Waterford Hotels, it's been spiffed and polished. Its park-and-fly program offers two weeks of free parking and only $1 a day is charged after that!!!  With only 30 rooms and a fine, quiet restaurant, this seems more like a hideaway than an airport entity.
 
Now there's no room to detail Denver International: Call it spacious and spectacular; also vast. Be prepared to spend time on the train.

A Sense of Travel  by Georgia Hesse - July 2010

TOP 10 Best Airports Worldwide 2010

Which do you think is the world's best airport in 2010? Quite a few people believe it's Singapore's Changi, which took the crowning Skytrax World Airport Award in Hamburg on May 20, following a survey that screened everything from shopping (best, Heathrow in London) to washrooms (cleanest, Hong Kong International) and finest staff service (Copenhagen Airport).
 
Some 9.8 million questionnaires ranking 39 different airports were completed by passengers representing more than 100 nationalities.
 
Here are the top 10 overall: Singapore's Changi, Incheon International (Seoul, Korea), Hong Kong International (Chep Lap Kok), Munich Airport, Kuala Lumpur International (Malaysia), Zurich Airport, Amsterdam Airport (Schiphol), Beijing Capital International, Auckland International, Bangkok Airport (Suvarnabhumi).

Munich's Airbrau is the world's first airport micro-brewery restaurant serving traditional Bavarian cuisine.

In addition to these stars, here are other sparklers by region: Africa, Cape Town International; India, Hyderabad Rajiv Gandhi; Middle East, Bahrain Airport; South America, Lima Airport; Central America, Panama Airport; Northern Europe, Helsinki-Vantaa Airport; Eastern Europe, Moscow  Domodedovo Airport (isn't that fun to say?); Southern Europe, Istanbul Ataturk Airport. 

 
Singapore's Changi Airport has a rooftop pool and Ambassador Transit Hotel rooms within its departure area.

Singapore's high marks don't surprise me at all. Although it's one of my favorite destinations, I once made a short-connection visit there, staying overnight in the terminal at Ambassador Transit Hotel, dining at the Crystal Jade Shanghai Restaurant, and taking a free two-hour bus tour of the city. (To be eligible, you have to have a visa and at least a five-hour stopover. The two trips available are the Colonial Tour and the Cultural Tour.)

The breathtaking approach to old Hong Kong airport at Kai-Tak, 1998.

I am nostalgic in a weird way for the former Hong Kong airport at Kai Tak where, until 1998, your aircraft threaded its sinuous way between sharp skyscrapers, nearly scratching its stomach on their summits, while you waved out the window at gentlemen seated in T-shirts on their apartment balconies. Today's Chep Lap Kok's approach is saner and civilized; there are pay lounges where you can sleep, eat, watch TV, check e-mail; find cushioned benches, take showers.

One might expect perfect performance at Zurich's airport, since it sits in Switzerland, and so it proves. The whole system clicks along as perfectly as an Audemars Piquet Royal Oak Offshore. Once, descending from high ski country at Interlaken, I checked my bag at the railway station, took the train to Zurich Airport, boarded my flight, and did not bother with baggage again until deplaning in San Francisco. That was when flying was fun.

Kuala Lumpur International Airport - tops for architecture.

British writer Douglas Adams, author of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," claims that in no known language does the phrase "as pretty as an airport" appear. He's probably correct. If that phrase did leap to mind, the adjective might be "handsome" and, after Changi, it might apply to Kuala Lumpur's terminal (1998), world's only airport winner of the Green Gable award for environmental responsibility. K.L. is an architectural stunner on several fronts.

Dubai Al Maktoum Airport, perhaps world's largest duty-free shopping arena.

Which are the finest fliers to these distinguished airports in 2010? Rated from one through 10, they are: Asiana Airlines (based in Seoul, South Korea); Singapore Airlines; Qatar Airways (Doha, Qatar); Cathay Pacific; Air New Zealand; Etihad Airways (national airline, United Arab Emirates, based Abu Dhabi); Qantas; Emirates (international airline, United Arab Emirates, based Dubai); Thai Airways, and Malaysia Airlines.

Time to whine: Best anything inevitably invites worst, right? This year, CNN's Business Traveller didn't cringe from making its choices: Baghdad International ("danger...in the middle of a war zone"); Lukia airstrip, for Mt.Everest region, Nepal ("hair-raising plummet onto an uphill airstrip cut into the side of a mountain"); Mineralnya Vody, Russia ("feral cats and daggers on sale in the departure lounge").

 

Within Europe, Paris' 1978 Charles de Gaulle and London's Heathrow appeared on several airport hate lists. Another unfavorite is New Delhi's airport in India; my fondest review came from Peter Popham in the U.K. Independent newspaper: "The marble walls and floors of Indira Gandhi International are the color of dead flesh under the fluorescent lights."

A Sense of Travel with Georgia Hesse - June 2010

Relais du Silence: Sh-h-h-h-h...

The first Relais du Silence where I, exhausted from driving, fell happily into sleep was the Auberge du Cheval Blanc near Charles de Gaulle Airport and about 18 miles from Paris. It offered eight bedrooms then and does still, but was renovated in 2008. Priding itself on its gastronomy and seclusion in a pleasant garden, as well as its proximity to Disneyland Paris, this little inn is especially suited for a stopover on the last night of a driving trip in France, since your rental car can be returned at the airport, not quite 16 miles away.

Years ago when I told a friend of this cozy little find, she said, confused, "But do you have to be silent the entire time?" Not entirely; the "Silence" signifies calm, quiet, freedom from traffic roar.

 

Silence: Le Mas du Soleil.

Of the several medium-priced hotel groups in France (Accor, Logis, etc.), I tend to find the Silence group particularly attractive for comfort and price. (At this writing, the euro equals about $1.32; a double at the Cheval Blanc will hover around $125 nightly, a good price for its location.)

In my trips to France over the years, I've stayed in many of the Relais du Silence-Silenthotel fraternity and elsewhere in Europe and have always been satisfied. (The 262-member group runs from seven to 50 rooms and ranges from two to four stars in its own ranking; don't confuse it with the more familiar Michelin code.)

Among my early favorites is the 41-room Château d'Isenbourg in the medieval town of Rouffach near Strasbourg and the Wine Route in Alsace. Several days can profitably be enjoyed here, consumed in pottering to pretty villages and dining upon regional specialties perfectly prepared. My mouth waters (or, more accurately, wines) just to think about it.
 

Manoir de Moëllien in Brittany.
 
Another region, other rooms: Seek out the Manoir de Moëllien in Brittany at the village of Plonevez Porzay near Locronan and the marvelous, art-rich city of Quimper. The 17th-century manor breathes peace and quiet in its main lobby, elegant restaurant, and 18 handsome rooms.

Hôtel du Petit Palais in Cimiez.

I could scarcely believe the 25-room belle époque Hôtel du Petit Palais in Cimiez, a fine residential area of Nice, when I first checked in. It's priced at about half the euros demanded by famous hostelries in town, with comfy quarters overlooking a flower-filled terrace or the old town and the sea.
 
Not far away, in Salon at the heart of Provence where the 16th-century prophet Nostradamus was born, the 10 rooms masterminded by chef Francis Robin merit a bow from gastronomes around the world. When you can bear to leave at all, it's an easy drive to Aix-en-Provence, Marseille, Avignon, Noves, all those temptations.

Hôtellerie Beau Rivage on the banks of the Rhône.

In mellow light on the banks of the Rhône, the 28-room Hôtellerie Beau Rivage presents a modern welcome to a former fisherman's house with a distinguished dining tradition.

Between the toothsome areas of Brie and Champagne, in the Ile-de-France just 53 miles from Paris, the lovely town of Provins was home to Pierre Abélard, one of history's most unfortunate lovers, as well as the red rose of Lancaster that battled the white rose of York in the 15th-century War of the Roses. It houses today the 32-room Hostellerie Aux Vieux Remparts in the heart of the old, old village.

Hostellerie Aux Vieux Remparts.

Although it's the countryside of France that bestows a certain cachet on Relais du Silence retreats, they now exist in smaller numbers in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland.
 
Sh-h-h-h-h...

A Sense of Travel with Georgia Hesse - May 2010

Conquering Europe One Town At A Time...

One day quite a few years ago, Bruce Hamby, late travel editor of the Denver Post, and I found ourselves in Liechtenstein, sitting in the grass, munching bread and cheese, sipping a ringing Blaugunder red from a southwest-facing Alpine slope. "What a fine country," we thought. "Small; just our size, with snow-crowned mountains and a fabulous art collection. Why don't we adopt it?" So we did, unbeknownst to Prince Franz Joseph II of Liechtenstein (1906-1989), and we installed Jerry Hulse, then travel editor of the L.A. Times, as Keeper of Postal Stamps and Kermit (Bus) Holt of the Chicago Tribune as Plenipotentiary Secretary of the Principality.

Vaduz, Liechtenstein.

Taking over little European lands became a pastime and we seized seven of the eight tiniest: Together they command a combined area only a pear tree larger than the state of Connecticut. The Pope foiled our acquisition of Vatican City; we feared the Swiss Guards in their Michelangelo uniforms.
 
But zounds! We captured the rest in alphabetical order: Andorra, Cyprus, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, and San Marino.
 
Andorra, in the sky-poking Pyrénées, is Europe's highest country. The fitness fad is a succès fou, as everywhere in the winter sports universe, but don't despair. Idleness still reigns in sidewalk cafés in the capital, Andorra la Vella. The country counts 40 Romanesque churches, 51 smart shops, and restaurants serving local specialties. (River trout, curly lettuce, quince alioli and mulled Crémat wine, anyone?)  You go largely to say you've been there.

 
Botticelli's "Birth of Venus."

"Something is mything in Cyprus," my friend said. We mused upon white-capped rocks below, where Aphrodite had risen from her sea-shell birthplace to float ashore in a moment immortalized by Botticelli. 

 
Aphrodite's Rock, Cyprus.

Lawrence Durrell calls Cyprus "the forgotten Greek island." It is so old and sunburned that myth and history have become intertwined. Politics on this partitioned Greek-Turkish island are troublesome, testy and get in the way of a good time. The United Nations patrols a border that divides the labyrinthine capital. Even its name invokes squabble: Is it Lefkosia or Nicosia? Only the shadow knows.
 
At a monastery near Limassol, I bought a bottle of St. John Commandaria, a sweet dessert wine said to be the oldest continually bottled one in the world. I have never opened it; perhaps it was first served to Aphrodite and Adonis.

Luxembourg Castle

Once  part of Charlemagne's empire, Luxembourg became independent in 963 C.E. but has been bothered by Spain, France, Austria, the Netherlands and Belgium ever since. You visit the ruins of the Grand Ducal Palace with its Renaissance and baroque facades; you amble in Old Town; you hear a tangle of languages spoken in beflowered streets. Cafés serve chile con carne and coq au vin, not to mention cima alla Genovese or even lasary voatabia from Madagascar. I'd hold out for a local old regular such as nettle soup or pike in a snappy dry riesling sauce or a haunch of roe deer.

Human history lies thicker upon Maltathan "autumnal leaves ... in Vallombrosa."  The five islands - Malta itself, Gozo, Comino, Comminotto, Filflawith - occupy less space on the globe than does Philadelphia. (Only the first three are occupied.) Malta has no rivals for ancient "civilizations" other than Egypt. 

St. John's Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta.

Cruise ships hesitate for most of a day at the rocky perch where sits the capital of Valletta with its gorgeous St. John's Co-Cathedral, home of the Knights (Grand Masters) of St. John (1573-77). Too many travelers miss the stunning antiquities (7,000 years of them!). The underground halls and chambers cut out of the "living" limestone at the temple complex of Ġgantija, as only one example, contain the burial places of thousands of our Neolithic ancestors and their grave-goods.

 
Hypogeum, Malta

Where to find timelessness? Try the Ta' Cenc Hotel on Gozo.
 
Of Monaco I will say little, since everyone knows all about it. Suffice this from Anthony Burgess in the London Observer:

Here in Monte Carlo, where we have to take amusement seriously, there is not much to laugh at.

San Marino, the oldest republic in the world, was founded in about 301 C.E. Since it has the good taste to be completely surrounded by Italy, it is beautiful. Happily, it has never been battered by the wars and feuds of the peninsula but has survived, a tiny enclave atop the jagged sandstone ridge of Mt. Titano, looking down on Rimini. 
 

San Marino

Named for its founder, a pious (what else?) mason named Marinus, San Marino has taken care of itself for 1709 years, striking its own coinage, issuing its own postage stamps, and maintaining its army and police force.
 
Sit in the sun, sip a glass of the local Moscato, and think small.

 A Sense of Travel with Georgia Hesse - April 2010

The Best Small(ish) Towns in Europe 

Recently, TripAdvisor published a survey of the Best Small(ish) Towns in Europe. Only two handsful of people participated in the vote. I could never have joined in this challenge: My list would be at least 100 villages long. I've visited each of TripAdvisor's top 10 towns and they'd be on my list, too, although possibly not in the same order.

The winners are: 1. Bayeux, France; 2. York, England; 3. Bruges, Belgium; 4. Sitges, Spain; 5. Positano, Italy; 6. Dingle, Ireland; 7. Mittenwald, Germany; 8. Lucca, Italy; 9. Ronda, Spain, and 10. Salisbury, England. Of them, the following are my choice half-dozen.

Bayeuxin Normandy. This handsome town, happily not badly battered by WWII, was the first major one to be liberated by the Allies. A few lovely limestone houses remain from the 14th century along still-cobbled streets. Its Cathedral Notre-Dame is exuberant in ornate Gothic-Normand style. The great treasure is the Bayeux Tapestry, the wonderfully witty work inspired by Queen Matilde, wife of William the Conqueror (a.k.a. William the Bastard). It's unique in the western world. 

Stay and dine in the 17th-century Lion d'Or, part of which dates from the 18th century. Here's a place where you can find the old-fashioned French dishes you've been pining for (médaillon de veau pôelé, perhaps?).

York, England. Much of the Roman wall remains standing after only two thousand years. Seized by the Vikings in 866 C.E., the village bustled as a center of the wool trade in the Middle Ages. York Minster (a minster was originally connected to a monastery) is one of the greatest Gothic cathedrals in northern Europe and boasts the largest stained glass window in the world. A mathematically inclined friend figured that if flat and not made of glass it could serve as a parking lot for 27 stretch Cadillacs.

Because of its name, shop on the medieval street known as The Shambles. Buy cheeses and chutneys at Newgate Market. Lunch at the Lighthorse pub and admire its original Victorian bar. Visit the RailwayMuseum and boat on the River Ouse. Sleep in the Feversham Arms or a less costly Best Western.

Bruges (or Brugge), Belgium. This stunning town looks much as it did 400 years ago. Climb to the top of the BelfortTower; its belfry starred in the startling little film "In Bruges" in 2008. The whole city is a sanctuary of museums, 16 of them in three major groups: the Groeninge Museum(fine arts), the Bruggemuseum (history, archeology), and Hospitaalmuseum (look for Hans Memlings). Select from the Dante menu at elegant De Florentijnen, in a former Florentine trading house if you're feeling flush; try the waterside De Torre if you're not. Float over the city by balloon, watch a Belgian "football" match, take the Staffe Hendrik brewery tour, gorge on frites and chocolate.

 

Positano, Italy. Yes, it's touristy. Yes, it's almost too cute. But what can compare with its blocks of colored houses running uphill and plunging down again? It's like falling inside a kaleidoscope. The Amalfi Coast, some say, is the most stupendous drive in the world. One day I nearly drove off into the view when my mother, in the passenger seat next to me, shrieked. (She had sat on a bee.)

 

If you can eke out the Euros for the San Pietro (a Relais-Châteaux), do so. Life is too short not to experience Eden. Don't forget  you're within short and dramatic driving distance of Sorrento (hear singing in the background?), Amalfi itself, Ravello, and - a little farther - the ruins of Pompei to the north and inland, to those of Paestum south along the coast.

 

Ronda, Spain. In 1485, the Crusaders looked up the cliffs to the castle beetling above, as if carved out of the living rock, and decided they wouldn't go there after all. (Instead, they cut off the water supply from below.) From the Puente Nuevo (NewBridge, 200 years old), Nationalist sympathizers were tossed into the gorge far-r-r-r below (at least, in Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls"). Ronda is near the Costa del Sol but, happily, not of the Costa del Sol. Check out the amazing Arab Baths, creep down the cliff face like a cat along the city wall, order lamb shank at the Carmen la de Ronda.

 

Lucca, Italy. As old, as mysterious, as intriguing as the Etruscans, Lucca (a somewhat surprising sister city to South San Francisco) is today the city that makes the traveler fall in love with Tuscany. (I think Lucca may become the new Florence for those who flee from crowds.) Circles of streets seduce the walker; city walls from the 16^th-17^th centuries charm the historian; the 130 stairs of the Guinigi tower present a smashing view and perhaps the most oddly placed tree in Europe. Finally, to dine at Buca di Sant'Antonio (sample faro soup, said to be the oldest dish in Italy) is to realize that in some sublime spots all's right with this world.

A Sense of Travel by Georgia Hesse - February 2010

A Night in the Renaissance

I always have found a special delight, particularly when traveling alone, in pottering about an old home, a "period" house where someone familiar has lived: Mozart's birthplace (1756) in Salzburg, as an example. Likewise, I develop a fondness for even a rock quarry if Cézanne painted in it or a mere pond-sized lake in which Mad King Ludwig drowned. (I have a friend, an artist, who takes these affections for affectations. "Do you really enjoy the Alps more," he asked as we rocketed the rented Renault  through another pass, "because Hannibal led some elephants across them?" "Assuredly," I answered. He bobbed his head in bewilderment.) 

Aerial view of the walled village of Richelieu.

In France one fine day, prowling the provinces of Poitou-Charentes (their borders formed merely by a hyphen), I fell upon three entire towns named for literary heros: Richelieu and Descartes north of Poitiers, and La Rochefoucauld in the south near Angoulême (home to 3,111 Rupificaldiens).
 

Frans Hals' portrait of van Ren Descartes.

Originally La Haye and later La Haye-Descartes, the village (3,963 logical souls) took the name of its most illustrious son in 1967.  Although the philosopher's natal home is now a museum, there are few personal echoes in it of René the mathematician. He spent  much of his life in Holland, then was summoned as a tutor by Queen Christina of chilly Sweden in 1649 and died in Stockholm of pneumonia the following year. The house at 29, rue Descartes (where else?) makes a pleasant detour en route from Tours to Poitiers as the driver ponders "Je pense, donc je suis; I think; therefore I am."

Jean de La Fontaine, poet and fabulist, described Richelieu as "the most beautiful village in the universe." In 1621 when the duke Armand du Plessis hesitated at the hamlet on the river Mable, he must have thought so, too. The following year, the proud, vain man metamorphosed into Cardinal Richelieu, prime minister to Louis XIII, and erected a château worthy of himself. Because of this haughty cynic, several worthy institutions survive, including the Académie française. Of the château, however, little remains but its vast park shaded by chestnut and plane trees. Some shadows of its former magnificence flicker in the Musée Richelieu within the Hôtel de Ville.
 
Sometime in the 10th century, a man named Foucauld stopped at a stony site on the frontier between Poitou and Aquitaine and found it good. He settled on the spot, soon to become la roche à Foucauld (Foucauld's Rock), foundation of a family tree of which the best-known limb is the 17th-century François VI, duc de la Rochefoucauld and author of a tome of reflections on morality that is required reading by students of French lit, "Les Maximes": "Our virtues are, most often, only disguised vices."

Chateau de la Rochefoucauld is a picture perfect medieval castle.

Today, the Château de la Rochefoucauld, seen from below and across the River Tardoire, is the very image of a medieval castle translated through the Italian Renaissance by the presence of Leonardo da Vinci, living at Amboise along the Loire. Much of the pile is open to the public and can be rented for wedding receptions, etc. Two suites are available for a cost of 180 Euros: not bad for a night in the Renaissance. 

 A Sense of Travel by Georgia Hesse - October 2009

Yalta: "the Pearl of the Crimea"

In Istanbul, one long-ago morning, I boarded a Royal Viking vessel bound for the Black Sea through the Bosporus. This is the sea, I remembered from notes, bordered by Ukraine to the north, Russia to the northeast, Georgia on the east, Turkey to the south and Bulgaria and Romania in the west. This is ancient Pontus Euxinus, once a freshwater lake, now an inland sea. Archeological finds 300 feet below its salty surface reveal evidence of human habitation and suggest the land had been inundated by biblical floods. Maybe Noah's? 

View of Yalta on the Black Sea (Photo: Wikipedia)

I had traveled within the Soviet Union several times, by aircraft (a scare and an Ilushyin) and by rail across Siberia (11 time zones but trains ran perpetually on Moscow time), and by cruise ship from Scandinavia. I had discovered that - with a few startling exceptions -- to find drama and romance within this vastness one had to rely primarily upon history. Contemporary civilization was sterile.       

So it was on this cruise, too. Varna, touted the Bulgarian Riviera, featured square, sturdy ladies squished into skimpy swim suits. Wine in Constanta tasted, I thought, of the industrial and municipal wastes that have long deadened these waters. In Odessa, Ukraine, high drama was climbing the 129 steps of the Potemkin Staircase up from the port, named for the battleship Potemkin that was blown up during a famous 1905 revolt led by sailors off that ship. Sevastopol, where the Cyrillic alphabet was invented, seemed not only asleep but exhausted, fatigued by faded, peeling buildings and economic neglect.

Livadian Palace (Photo: Wikipedia)

Then, finally, we awoke offshore of Yalta, "the pearl of the Crimea," where tzars had vacationed and Soviet Union leaders had kept their dachas. Here the fateful Yalta Conference was staged in February, 1945, at the pseudo-renaissance Livadian Palace where Josef Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt set the course for the future of Europe. 
           

But Yalta, sheltered in a beautiful amphitheater formed by the southern slopes of the Caucasus, protected from the mean winds of the north, seemed positively Mediterranean, as alluring as a Black Sea Villefranche. On a sunny September morn, yachts unfurled their sails, swimmers stretched on pebbly beaches, cypress and plane trees, palms and magnolias, cedar and acacias waved from seaside gardens.

 

Some early-risers stood silent on deck, elbows on the ship's rail, gazing as we approached a Crimean Côte d'Azur. "This," a writer friend mused aloud, is where, as my father said, "We gave half a world away."  

"Ah, yes-s-s," whispered an Englishman, nodding absently. "Yes-s-s: Churchill, Stalin, and Whot's 'is nyme."

Hee-hee. I watched FDR roll in his grave. It was my only giggle in the Black Sea.

A Sense of Travel  by Georgia Hesse - September  2009

First Ladies and Dames of Travel

"Forget the politics," counseled one of my first San Francisco editors. "You're writing travel!" Apparently, I had been guilty of looking beyond my room in the then-luxurious Hotel Phoenicia in Beirut, that once and future battleground.
 
I knew better than to be sassy, but I also knew his vision of travel was not mine. Travel was born when a human being first wondered what was happening on the other side of the hill. Travel writing, it is thought, began with "The Epic of Gilgamesh," about 2750-2500 B.C.E. From the beginning, it concerned all human activity: trade, war, the arts, religions - and politics. 

Comfort was not a major concern and going places for the fun of it was inconceivable.The very word travel descends from Middle English and was originally identical with travail: toil, labor, anguish. Indeed, if you follow its root to vulgar and late Latin, you discover torment and even torture.
           
Isabella Bird, first woman member of the Royal Geographic Society.  

On the distinct other hand, the word tour stems from the Greek tornos, a tool for making a circle, like the compass we used in arithmetic. So look at it this way: Tourists spin over the surface of the globe because it's the thing to do. Travelers journey because they must. 

For most of history, travel and writing about it were masculine pursuits. Then in the 18th-19th century came the Romantic revolution featuring a school of doughty (not to say dotty) British ladies (with a capital L).  Reading their works today is an education and a delight.  

A few of my favorite author-adventurers are Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762), Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), mother of Mary Shelley, Isabella Bird (1831-1904), first woman member of the Royal Geographic Society, Mary Kingsley (1862-1900), and Dame Freya Stark (1893-1993).  

 Photo: Mary Kingsley

Freya Stark, discovered at age 87 jumping three steps at a time down the stairs of her villa in old Asolo, Italy, died there a hundred years after she had first fallen in love with the town that had also housed Eleonora Duse and Roberto (as they say locally) Browning. 

Stark obliges me by speaking for her fellow Ladies: "The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised." 

One Stark quotation that speaks for all passionate explorers in all times is this: "To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world."

Photo: Dame Freya Stark

      
A fine volume with which to begin is "Passionate Nomad," the life of Freya Stark by Jane Fletcher Geniesse, Random House, 1999.

A Sense of Travel  by Georgia Hesse - July 2009

Verona: Music to My Ears

Encountering Europe’s near-endless cultural and historical treasures for the first time, travelers often are struck by indecision and stage fright. “Here I am. What should I do? Where should I go first? What’s important to me?” As we age we should grow smarter, but sometimes we don’t. A friend confessed the other day that although she insists on having music in her life in San Francisco, she rarely includes it in her European travel plans. “Too much trouble,” she complained. “I don’t know how to go about it.  Everything’s always sold out.” Isn’t it irritating to learn that, as ever, the answer is prior planning? Europe in summer is a feast of music festivals. “I know the biggies,” my friend said; “Wagner in Bayreuth, the Salzburg Festival, the Edinburgh...I’d like something smaller and, well, unusual.” For me, that all but defines the 87th Verona Opera Festival, at home in the nearly 2,000-year-old Roman arena of an all-but-perfect city where in 2009 live 264,191 souls, all seemingly lovers of conversation, culture, and cuisine -- in a word, Italians. Verona, Italy Verona Opera  Between June 19th and August 30th this summer, five operas and a gala will enliven the world’s largest opera stage, once home (since 30 A.D.) to beasts and gladiators. The operas will be “Carmen,” “Aida,” “Turandot,” “The Barber of Seville ,” and “Tosca,” while the gala evening on July 24 will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the debut, in this Roman setting, of tenor Placido Domingo. The music, the open-air setting and ancient stones, contribute to a sensual beauty much enhanced by the knowledge that after the performance you can amble “home” in the warm night; so civilized. A clutch of hospitable hotels sits nearby in the curlicue streets. (Mine was the about-50-room Colomba d’Oro near the pleasant Tre Corone café right on Piazza Bra'. )  The best restaurant in town, a Michelin two-star, also is within strolling distance: Il Desco, 7 via Dietro San Sebastiano; venison with pearl onions to live for. For performance details: www.arena.it/en-US/schedule-2009.html.

A Sense of Travel  by Georgia Hesse - June 2009

---

'Way to sail, Regent! 

There's nothing like a small disaster to reveal the character of an individual - or of a company. Consider the recently aborted, around-the-world-in-116-days cruise of Regent Seven Seas' good ship Voyager. (Sailing from Los Angeles on Jan. 12, Voyager was to call at 54 ports on five continents, making its final bow at Fort Lauderdale on May 8.)

Regent Seven Seas' good ship Voyager.

On April 1 my friend and travel agent, Martha Nell Beatty, boarded with her group in Dubai for the 17-day segment to Istanbul. They learned that the ship had suffered propulsion pod problems out of Singapore, apparently as the result of a heavy fishing line's becoming entangled with the propeller. Attempts to repair the pod in Cochin had failed. Port stops between there and Dubai had been cancelled.  

On April 7, Martha Nell e-mailed me more news of the sad saga: "Passengers on board (as well as) those boarding in Dubai were given the option of canceling the cruise and getting a full refund or continuing with fewer ports. The first news was that (our segment of) the cruise would end in Rome rather than in Istanbul and that (the ship) was going into dry dock in Genoa. The world cruise was now ending for everyone in Rome on April 19.

"Even more ports were eliminated...remaining were Fujairah in the UAE; Muscat, Oman; Safaga, Egypt, to allow passengers to visit Luxor overnight, and Aqaba for Petra. Egypt and Petra were the highlights of the original cruise and the company felt it had to include them."           

Business class flights home with full shipboard refunds were offered. A 28-day cruise on the sister ship Mariner became a possibility. Trips within Egypt and other options appeared on the horizon. Martha Nell continued: "When I told Capt. Dag (Dvergasten) that the passengers were amazed at the generosity of Regent...he responded,`So was I.' 

"I am incredibly impressed with the way everyone is handling everything. (We have had to) cancel complimentary tours as we are missing the ports. However, we, like Regent, are being generous and giving everyone a $200 shipboard credit."
 
In this shaky economic climate, Regent has already revealed itself as a stalwart within the travel industry. In addition to inclusive airline fares, complementary beverages, butler service in some fare categories, the line is offering free and unlimited shore excursions on its 2009-2010 sailings.

Although involving neither shipwreck nor piracy nor influenza, the Voyager's plight is not a minor one for either the company or its hundreds of travelers. But how the problem is being handled shows an unusually high standard of pride and principle. It should result in the degree of goodwill and word-of-mouth advertising that can't be bought. 

A Sense of Travel  by Georgia Hesse - May 2009