Everyone seeks something different in travel. For some it begins and ends with foreign food. Others prefer art and museums. Some take their pleasure in exotic nightlife. For many, the quest involves a beach. I have my own special thing. I always go looking for the local sport. I enjoy sports for their own sake, but I also find that they often offer revealing insights into national culture.

On Malaysia’s east coast that meant standing in a village square watching a top-spinning contest. The Malaysians call this peculiar sport main gasing. The participants use long ropes to violently snap their discus-sized tops onto a mound of packed clay. Then a teammate scoops up the six-kilogram top on a wooden paddle and transfers it to a metal-tipped bamboo stand. Soon there are several gasing “asleep” (as the Malaysians describe a fast-spinning top) on their stands. They sleep for more than an hour. Main gasing may not be Wide World of Sports material, but it’s definitely different. In North America, you don’t often see the athletes squatting on their haunches smoking cheroots in midgame.

Sumo was high on my itinerary when I flew to Japan. Ancient and mysterious, sumo is half sport and half religion. The ring, the sand that is used, the referee’s robe, his ceremonial dagger, the salt-tossing and the wrestlers’ thunderous foot-stomping are all drenched in Shinto tradition. Unlike most sports, sumo is as much about anticipation as it is action. The rikishi spend up to four minutes simply preparing to do battle. When they finally get to grappling, the bouts rarely last more than 20 seconds. The violence is a release of tension, not just for the wrestlers, but for the crowd as well. When the flesh collides, the usually reserved Japanese cut loose.

When I visited Holland, I went to a bar to watch a World Cup soccer match. The Dutch were playing Brazil and the room was ablaze with Dutch orange. Calling the place noisy would have been an understatement—to order a beer you needed a bullhorn. Once more sport provided a socially acceptable excuse for a normally stoic race to raise hell. The Dutch lost the game, and they rioted that night in Rotterdam.

In Bangkok, I spent a night with the eight-armed warriors. That’s how the Thais describe kickboxers. Almost anything goes in this savage sport: punches, kicks, elbows, knees, leg trips and wrestling throws. Tough as it is, it was tougher in the old days when boxers would put ground glass into their leather hand wrappings to better maim their opponents. Rituals play a major part in Muay Thai. Before commencing hostilities, the fighters perform a slow-motion dance that is part prayer and part psych. A band composed of pipe, cymbal and drums plays throughout the bout. It’s eerie snake-charmer stuff. Stranger still, the music mirrors the pace of the combat. Adding to the unholy din is the crowd. The spectators bet furiously with one another, shouting wildly and flashing hand signals as the odds shift from round to round. How they sort it out at the end is a complete mystery to me.

Many years ago in Barcelona, I set aside a day for bullfighting, if only to hail a taxi and say, “Plaza de toros, por favor.” People kept telling me that the best stuff was on display in Madrid, but they seemed to take it pretty seriously in Barcelona too. The highlights from the arena played on the TVs in most of the city’s bars. In North America, they show goals and home runs. In Spain, they show deaths. Six bulls died three times a week. Still, squeamishness didn’t keep all the tourists at bay. The day I attended, a young American girl stood up at one point and cheered, “Yay, bull! Go bull!” She was making a statement, but I’m not sure she had thought it through. When the bull wins, the matador gets eviscerated.

Bullfighting may be Spain’s most famous sport, but it isn’t the most authentic item in Catalonia. I found the genuine article one afternoon in an old stone building just off La Rambla, a 1.2-kilometre, tree-lined pedestrian mall. The game was jai alai, or pelota, as it is often referred to in Spain. Jai alai (pronounced “high lie”) is also played in Miami, Tijuana, Macao and a few other places, but it began in the Pyrenees with the Basques. Some claim it’s the oldest ball game in the world. Most everyone agrees it is the fastest. The ball reaches speeds of up to 300 kilometres per hour.

The ball is slightly smaller than a baseball but harder than a golf ball. The players catch and fling it against a wall with a cesta, a slim, hook-shaped wicker basket that is attached to their wrists. The three-walled court, or fronton, is long, high and narrow. The front wall is 15 metres tall. A screen prevents the spectators from getting creamed by the speeding orb. Even without knowing the rules, I could recognize the high level of skill involved, but that’s not what impressed me the most. It was the atmosphere; the fronton was such a relaxing place. Shafts of sunlight filtered down through the clerestory windows. The walls of the arena were made of nut-brown wood. Some spectators smoked cigars; some wore suits. All of them were men.

Jai alai is a big gambling game. It was once described as “a lottery with seats.” But the betting in Barcelona wasn’t conducted at pari-mutuel windows. Instead an attendant walked back and forth in front of the stands with a couple of split tennis balls in his hands. When someone indicated that he wanted to make a bet, the attendant tossed the ball up to him with a piece of paper tucked inside. The gambler wrote his wager on the paper and tossed the ball back.

Intimate was the word that came to mind. This cathedral of leisure wouldn’t have seated more than 200 people. A small standup bar served beer and spirits. There were no cheerleaders, no video replays and no commercial breaks; just the crack of the ball on the wall, the hiss of the cestas, and the occasional burst of appreciative applause.

Ninety minutes in the fronton put me in an entirely different place. I left convinced that I had touched the rhythm of Spain.

Photo Credits:

#1: telegraph.co.uk

#2: thaiphotoblogs.com

#3: nytimes-institute.com

Salavado Dali was a master of surrealism, so it’s only fitting that the world’s most comprehensive collection of this eccentric Spanish artist’s work should be found in a surreal setting–beside a power station in an industrial section of “God’s waiting room”–geriatric St. Petersburg, Florida. Just as surprising as the location is the museum’s popularity. On a midweek afternoon in March, the Salvador Dali Museum (www.salvadordalimuseum.org/) is packed, not just with curious Europeans, but with white-bread Middle America types, undeterred by the $10 admission charge or the challenging subject matter. There is no shortage of visual delights. The museum boasts an inventory of 96 oils, more than 100 watercolours and drawings, some 1,300 graphics, plus sculptures, photographs and documents.

The price of admission includes an optional tour with a guide. It’s highly advisable, as Dali’s work is complicated. Our guide, Tom, is an enthusiastic fellow who produces an alarming amount of saliva when he talks. Originally from Virginia, he has a thick southern accent, and it takes some time to adjust to the sound of his honeysuckle drawl as he discusses Dali’s fascination with Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious. But the effort is worth it. A far more complex impression of Dali emerges during our tour than I remember from the 1960s, when the wild-eyed Spaniard was regarded as another wigged-out pop star, roaming the globe in a purple cape with a black ivory cane and his twitching Count of Monte Cristo moustache.

Out tour begins with a painting entitled Daddy Longlegs of the Evening–Hope! In addition to the obligatory spider, there is a limp airplane oozing out of a cannon and a desiccated body draped over a tree, its head flattened into a fish-eye silhouette. The figure is holding a violin while ants dine on its skull. According to Tom, this 1940 piece predicts the key role that air power would play in the Second World War. The work is also significant because its history explains the museum’s creation. The painting was purchased at an auction in 1943 by a Cleveland plastics engineeer named Reynolds Morse, and his wife Eleanor, for $600. The Morses met Dali to complete the transaction over cocktails at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City. Dali, demonstrating his business acumen, regretfully informed them he could not sell the painting without its original frame. The cost of the frame was $700.

Rather than being soured by the experience, the Morses continued to buy Dali’s work. The conservative couple’s infatuation with the flamboyant artist puzzled their friends, but they persevered, braving the insults tossed at them by Dali’s domineering wife, Gala, and paying for expensive dinners that Dali presided over in chic Manhattan restaurants. Eventually, the two couples developed a friendship that included taking vacations together and collaborating on lectures and exhibitions.

In 1971, Morse began to exhibit his Dali pieces in a wing of his company’s headquarters in suburban Cleveland. The collection soon outgrew its surroundings and in 1980 he began to search for a permanent home. St. Petersburg won the bid for collection under the condition that it be kept intact and accessible to the public. The Florida legislature raised $2 million to convert a vacant warehouse into a museum and establish foundations to maintain and display the collection, which is now valued at more than $350 million.

Those who only associate Dali with his surrealist canvasses will be surprised by the museum’s examples of the more conventional paintings that he did in his youth. One, in particular, the 1926 still life Basket of Bread, glows with the translucent warmth of the great Dutch masters. Eighty-three years after its creation, the bread still looks like it just emerged fresh from the oven. There are also a number of rarely exhibited items, including a drawing for a movie entitled Giraffes on Horseback Salad that Dali intended to make with the Marx Brothers. Sadly, Dali’s script was rejected by MGM as too weird.

Thankfully, the museum has plenty of examples of Dali’s stunning hallucinatory visions, the ones populated with melting watches, bleeding eggs, lobster telephones, insect-legged elephants and tilting crutches that caused many to conclude that the artist was either insane or on drugs. Dali denied the latter charge. As he once declared, “I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.”

These powerful and macabre 1930s paintings, pulsing with sex and paranoia, established Dali as the most famous of the surrealists, an art movement from which he was expelled in 1934 because of his right-wing political views. But the Catalonian’s photographic realism clearly stamped him as a modernist. As writer J.G. Ballard observed: “Fitted with a disquieting light that is more electric than solar, his paintings are like stills from some elegant but unsentimental newsreel filmed inside our heads.” 

Dali had a mischievous wit, evident in some of his titles: The Pharmacist of Ampurdan Seeking Absolutely Nothing, Eggs on a Plate without the Plate, and Aphrodisiac Dinner Jacket. The latter is a sculpture composed of dozens of shot glasses filled with creme de menthe that are attached like monstrous sequins to a jacket from under which a white brassiere peeps out. As the Spaniard noted, “It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.”

Out tour culminates in a long, tall gallery devoted to six of what Dali immodestly called his “masterworks”: massive, religiously inspired paintings, crowded with mind-boggling detail and double images, all produced between 1948 and 1970. In order to paint these behemoths, he had part of his studio floor removed so that a canvas could be raised and lowered by ropes, keeping the part he was working on at eye level. The most famous of these epics, The Hallucinogenic Toreador, took almost four years to complete.

Head buzzing, I exit the gallery wondering what Dali would have thought of all this. He planned to attend the museum’s opening in 1982, but cancelled when Gala fell ill. After her death that year, his own health went into decline and he made no more trans-Atlantic trips before his own death in 1989. One suspects that Dali would have been pleased by the museum, especially its fabulous gift shop, whose assorted temptations artfully empty the pockets of visitors.

The shop’s array of books, T-shirts, posters, calendars and fridge magnets is supplemented by baseball caps, umbrellas, jewellery and silk ties imprinted with Daliesque grasshoppers, ants and rippling birds. There are Dali-designed tarot cards, functional melting clocks, martini glasses, jigsaw puzzles, finger puppets, and bumper stickers and coffee mugs emblazoned wth one of Dali’s most enduring and revealing statements: “The only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad.”

Photo Credits:

#1: iatwm.com

#2: gravitando.wordpress.com

#3: worldgallery.co.uk

#4: artknowledgenews.com

#5: fotos.org  

A friend of mine used to fly south each winter to Montserrat. The lush, green tropical island was one of the least known of the many Caribbean getaways. There were a few hotels and some nightlife, but the place was pretty much off the radar for most tourists. My friend knew virtually nothing about Montserrat before he went, other than the fact that George Martin, the Beatles’ producer, had built a recording studio there, at which Dire Straits laid down the tracks for their “Brothers in Arms” album and the Police recorded “Synchronicity.” But he was instantly charmed by the atmosphere. Unfortunately, Montserrat fell victim to two natural disasters, Hurricane Hugo in 1989, and the eruption of the Soufriere volcano in 1995, which buried the capital city, Plymouth, under 15 metres of mud. My friend died of a heart attack before he could find another idyllic retreat to replace Montserrat, but there are other unspoiled islands out there waiting to be discovered. Here are seven to dream about.

Fakarava: Overshadowed in popularity by neighbours Tahiti, Bora Bora, and Moorea, Fakarava, a gorgeous Polynesian atoll enveloped by a coral reef and blue lagoon waters, is so remote it’s not even found on most maps. So pure is the environment here that Fakarava has been designated as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve for the preservation of rare species. Rich in natural fauna, it offers pink-sand beaches and is rife with rare aquatic life that includes loach, meru, and barracuda–not to mention hammerheads and tiger sharks. Not surprisingly, scuba diving is the island’s top draw, but other attractions include the ancient village of Tetamanu, where there is a Catholic church made of coral that dates back to 1874, and pearl farms, where rare black pearls are shelled.

Boa Vista: One of the lesser-developed isles in the volcanic Cape Verde chain, Boa Vista is mainly suited to those whose interests lie in water sports and sun worship. With pristine sand dunes, magnificent, bone-white beaches, emerald-green seas and relaxed atmosphere, you can lounge all day in complete peace, absorbing the sunshine and spectacular panoramas. Or choose from a readily available range of activities, such as snorkelling, scuba diving, windsurfing, kayaking, game fishing, horse-riding, quad bikes and jeep treks. Boa Vista is the third most important loggerhead turtle nesting site in the world. See them nesting from June to September. At night, you can sample the traditional seafood restaurants and lively music bars in the capital of Sal Rei and its unique blend of African, Portuguese and Brazilian cultures.

Yap: Part of a remote tropical archipelago in the midst of the Pacific, Yap is the most intriguing destination in the island nation of Micronesia. Having managed to escape most outside influences, such as colonization and mass tourism, the island’s traditional way of life remains both authentic and distinct. Legends are portrayed in colourful dances, village women dress in grass skirts and go topless, while the men wear loincloths, and ancient stone money discs are still used as local tender. You can spend your days hiking among the island’s rolling green hills, mangrove forests and antiquated stone paths or go off and explore the ocean’s coral reefs and swim with dolphins and manta rays.

Terre-de-Haut: Les Saintes, a spectacular cluster of eight islands situated just off the coast of Guadeloupe and accessible only by ferry or private yacht, is the very essence of French West Indies life-–without the crowds. Terre-de-Haut is the most appealing of all, with its attractive beaches, delicious Creole cuisine and laid-back French-speaking locals. It’s also the only Les Saintes island with overnight accommodations. Beachcombers will love the powdery white sands of the palm-lined Plage de Pompierre, while the spectacular underwater world of colourful reefs and exotic fish makes scuba diving and snorkelling another huge draw. Rent a golf cart to get around and visit a different beach at dawn, midday and dusk. Outside the village centre, a steep trail leads to 18th century Fort Napoleon, a fortress with barracks and prison cells, model ships and a botanical garden. There is also a nearby beach that attracts divers and nude sunbathers.

Lamu: The oldest living town in Kenya, Lamu was one of the original Swahili settlements along coastal East Africa. The port has existed for at least a thousand years. Lamu was on the main Arabian trading routes, and as a result, the population is largely Muslim. Due to the narrowness of the streets, automobiles are not allowed–the city is easily explored by foot, bicycle, or, as many locals favour, donkey. The island boasts golden sands fronting the Indian Ocean, tiny villages and a breezy, slow-moving pace of life. The rich atmosphere and history alone makes Lamu worth the trek, but so do its beaches and waters: Shela Beach offers the best swimming, while excursions to ruins and coral reefs could have you snorkelling alongside frolicking dolphins.

Cat Ba Island: The largest islet in Vietnam’s Cat Ba Archipelago, a series of 350 craggy limestone outcrops adjacent to scenic Halong Bay, Cat Ba Island is an undiscovered oasis. Starting from the Halong Bay Wharf, it takes four hours to reach the island by boat, with stopovers for swimming and eating fresh seafood. With an area of 356 square kilometres, Cat Ba encompasses forested zones, coastal mangroves, freshwater swamps, beaches, caves and cascading waterfalls. In 1986, the northeast side of the island was designated a National Park and includes a protected marine zone. The best way to see it is by motorbike. Cat Ba Island supports a population of over 20,000 inhabitants most of whom live off fishing or farming in and around Cat Ba Town. The town is small and ancient, with clusters of fishing boats. It’s a short hike from the through a tunnel to Cat Co Beach where mountains form a throne-like frame around a stunning sandy coast.

Vis: Aside from intrepid travellers, wealthy yachties and Croatians in the know, Vis remains relatively undiscovered by tourists. While the Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Slavs, Venetians, Austrians, French and British have all taken turns occupying the strategically-positioned island, Vis has now reverted back to something of a Mediterranean hidden gem. With its secluded beaches, crystal-blue waters strewn with sunken shipwrecks, vineyard-covered mountains, historic ruins and some of the best fish restaurants in the Adriatic, it’s no wonder Conde Nast Traveller has billed Vis as “Capri before the tourists.” Vis also offers some great hiking opportunities and from the top of Mount Hum (587 metres) it is possible to see Italy. While on the island, be sure to take a boat trip to the islet of Biševo with its luminescent Blue Grotto.

Photo Credits:

#1: fabuloussavers.com

#2: forbestraveler.com

#3: drewmeyerinsights.com

It’s a development that my family regards with some bemusement. My wife has begun calling me “Nature Boy” and my teenage daughter is less than impressed. At dinner the other night as I was describing some of the birds I’ve seen at Jericho, she said, “You seem to know a lot about them. Have you given them human names yet?” Her final retort, as she left the table, was “Birds are boring.” I can’t agree. They sing, screech, swim, waddle, fly, fight and hunt. And when you actually stop to examine their plumage it is hard to deny their beauty. Most things, with the possible exception of Brittany Spears, become more interesting the more you know about them, and I find this to be true of birds.

I’m not alone in this opinion. About 70 million North Americans currently participate in birdwatching, a hobby that employs more than 60,000 people in the retail and nature tour trades, and generates more than $25 billion dollars annually. Spending on bird watching is on the rise around the globe. For example, the birders who flock to Kuşcenneti National Park at Lake Manyas in Turkey are estimated to spend as much as $103 million annually. Guided bird tours have become a major business with at least 127 companies offering tours worldwide. There are now several websites that cater specifically to bird watching enthusiasts who are keen to travel, such as www.travellingbirder.com and Where Do You Want to Go Birding Today? www.camacdonald.com/birding/birding.htm.

Some of these birdwatching trips venture to remote and inhospitable regions. One of the popular destinations for Birdseekers, an English company that offers bird-watching tours at some 30 locations around the globe, are barren, windswept islands in Alaska’s Bering Sea. The company’s founder and director, Steve Bird (yes, that’s his real name) says that his clients are willing to pay $16,000 or more for a 25-day trip to Alaska for the chance to spot a Bristle-thighed Curlew, McKay’s Bunting, Smith’s Longspur or Red-legged Kittiwake.

The term “twitcher,” is reserved for those who travel long distances to see a rare bird that is then “ticked” off on a “list.” According to Wikipedia, the usage of the term twitcher began in the 1950s, originating from a phrase used to describe the nervous behaviour of Howard Medhurst, a British birdwatcher. Prior to that the term used for those who chased avian rarities was “pot-hunter,” “tally-hunter,” or “tick-hunter.”

My budding interest in birds pales in comparison to the extreme behaviour of hard-core birders. A couple of years ago, the appearance of a rare type of turtle dove drew a flood of twitchers to a remote island in the Orkney Islands. On the first day of the dove’s sighting there were 27 car-loads of birders on the ferry, charter flights from England and dozens on scheduled flights. In the space of 10 days around 1,000 twitchers came and went. Among the onlookers was Lee Evans, who earned himself a Guinness Book record entry for the number of bird species seen in Britain in a year (359 in 1990). When a reporter asked him why he does it, Evans said: ”We’re sad gits, really. We’re misfits, anti-social obsessives, and I know I’m one of the worst because even the other birders say I’m mad. I’m quite prepared to admit it, but don’t ask me to stop because I can’t, even though I know I’m too old now to ever be number one.”

There are about 10,000 species of bird and only a small number of people have seen more than 7,000. Many birdwatchers have spent their entire lives trying to spot all the bird species of the world and some have lost their lives in the process. One of the most famous is Phoebe Snetsinger, a globetrotting American woman who set off on an almost non-stop series of journeys to exotic locations after being diagnosed with malignant cancer. When her cancer went into remission, she continued travelling, surviving an attack and rape in New Guinea, before finally dying in a road accident in Madagascar in 1999. She observed as many as 8,400 species, a feat that no fellow twitcher is near to challenging.

Predictably, Great Britain produces some of the planet’s most fanatical twitchers. In 2008, Alan Davies and Ruth Miller, from North Wales, set a new world record by observing an amazing 4,327 different species during a year-long tour, easily exceeding the previous record of 3,662, set by an American spotter in 1995. In an interview, Davies, 47, said: “Birds are my passion, always have been. From a very early age, birds have been the focus of my life. They have been reason to suffer altitude sickness in the Andes to see an Ecuadorian Hillstar, trek across the Karoo desert in 45 degrees Celsius to glimpse a small grey Eremomela, empty my stomach over the side of a small boat with engine failure just to see an Isabelline Wheatear. To see birds in wonderful places is what I live for.”

The two eccentrics sold their houses to fund the trip, which began January 1 in Arizona, and spanned British back gardens, Asian rainforests and Arctic ice floes, among other terrains. The adventure was not free from setbacks. While in Vancouver, in April, they had possessions stolen from their car, including a camera, mobile phone and video camera featuring footage of many of rare birds they had ticked off their list. After a brief return to their rented flat in Wales, the couple spent Christmas in the Ecuadorian jungle, where they proudly spotted such species as the Vermilion Tanager, Green Jay and Saffron-Crowned Tanager. On their blog, they wrote: “Highlights along this track included Bearded Guan, Black-and-Chestnut Eagle. A female Masked Trogon added a splash of colour. Leaving the park behind we headed for our lodgings at Madre Tierra at Vilcabamba (the Valley of Longevity) and had our Christmas supper of roast turkey.”

However, (and this must be quite a blow), while the pair carefully documented their expedition through the blog, photographs and film, their achievement will not enter the record books, as they were not accompanied by an independent adjudicator.

Photo Credits:

#1, 2, 3, 4: Kerry Banks

Bagan, Myanmar: Once considered among the most precious collections of relics in Southeast Asia, second only to Cambodia’s Angkor Wat, Bagan (formerly Pagan) is in danger of becoming an unmitigated disaster, say archaeologists. An eleventh-century king is credited with building many of the original shrines, ornamenting what was then Myanmar’s royal capital with symbols of his religious fervour. After a 1975 earthquake damaged several of the most important temples, government officials invited a team of UNESCO archaeologists to help restore and reinforce the monuments, and Bagan seemed well on its way to becoming a World Heritage Site. But by the early 1990s, Myanmar’s notoriously ruthless military regime was no longer interested in adhering to the exacting UNESCO standards for historic preservation, choosing instead to fast-track the restorations and erect replicas of monasteries, stupas, and temples—many from scratch and with inferior materials—in an effort to lure more visitors to the country’s most popular tourist attraction. The original stupas took months or years to construct, but the modern facsimiles are completed in a mere two weeks.

Galapagos Islands, Ecuador: Too much of a good thing can have negative consequences. More than 120,000 visitors a year come to the Galapagos to gaze at giant tortoises, iguanas, Darwin’s finches and other endemic species. That’s a spike of 80,000 people since the early 1980s. Adding to this is a steep rise in immigration from the mainland, 965 kilometres away, which has contributed to overfishing and pollution. The biggest threat to the islands’ ecosystem, however, is a steady influx of invasive species stowed away on boats and flights. Conservation organizations spent $18 million over the last six years to wipe out 140,000 feral goats. But the islands remain plagued by cats, rats, fire ants, and hundreds of other non-native plants and animals, as well as germ-laden insects to which the native animals are not immune.

Banaue Rice Terraces, The Philippines: Built and maintained by the Ifugao people for the last 3,000 years, these amazing rice terraces achieved UNESCO World Heritage Status in 1995, but that has provided few economic benefits from tourism for the farming population. Two clusters of the five terraces are now considered to be threatened because of increasing pressures due to urbanization, land use conversion and shifting cultivation, and other demographic pressures. Other causes of the terraces’ degradation are a lack of interest on the part of younger Ifugaos in learning the relevant techniques and the fact that the terraces’ low yields are in many cases sufficient for only four months per year. 

Everglades National Park, Florida, USA: This 1.5 million-acre area, which is full of rare and endangered species like the Florida panther and the West Indian manatee, is the largest subtropical wilderness in the U.S.. However, today it a mere shadow of its twentieth-century self, shrunk by half under suburbs and sugar farms, its natural course dammed or diverted by roads, canals, locks, and levees—changes that have left no fewer than 14 animal species here threatened with extinction. Urban development, including condominiums and shopping malls, agricultural fertilizer, mercury contamination of fish and wildlife and lower water levels due to flood controls continue to threaten the Everglades. Already, half the ecosystem is gone. On the World Heritage Centre’s Danger List since 1993, the park is also at serious risk from climate change and sea-level rise.

Virunga National Park, Democratic Republic of Congo: Civil unrest and armed conflict extending back to the mid-1990s has devastated the DRC, claiming an estimated four million human lives since 1998. This war—considered the deadliest since World War II—has also had a drastic implications for wildlife in the DRC. Perhaps the most horrifying example of the impact of conflict is occurring in Virunga National Park, the oldest national park in Africa. Virunga is one of the most biologically diverse regions of Africa, with over 700 species of birds and 200 species of mammals. It was named a World Heritage Site in 1979 for its natural habitats—essential to the preservation of biological diversity and endangered species, including the mountain gorilla. There are only around 700 mountain gorillas left in the world, and more than half of them live in Virunga. Today, ongoing conflict continues to threaten this dwindling population. In 2007 alone, 10 mountain gorillas were slaughtered.

Walled City of Baku, Azerbaijan: Since it was built in the 12th century by Iranians, the walled city of Baku has survived invasions and bombardment by Russian warships, civil war and revolution. But now the citadel–designated a UNESCO World Heritage site–is under threat of extinction from a construction boom fed by Western oil companies pouring billions of dollars into the capital. Flouting a ban on all new development in Baku’s walled city, known to locals as Icheri Sheher, buildings which have stood for centuries are being torn down to make way for new office complexes and plush villas. They are built to meet demand from Western oil companies drilling in the nearby Caspian Sea, foreign embassies and wealthy locals, all ready to pay high rents to base themselves in Baku’s choicest piece of real estate.
In 2003, UNESCO placed the Inner City on the List of World Heritage in Danger, citing damage from a November 2000 earthquake, poor conservation as well as “dubious” restoration efforts.

Luxor, Egypt: As the site of the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes, Luxor has frequently been characterized as the “world’s greatest open air museum.” The city is home to some of the greatest wonders of ancient Egypt, including the Temple Complex of Karnak and the Valley of the Kings, which houses the tombs of the pharaohs. William C.S. Remsen, a preservation architect, says as more people move into the area (which was once farmland) extra water is pumped in, causing water levels to rise. Since the temples are made out of porous stone, the water gets absorbed and leaves behind salt. When this salt crystallizes behind the stone, it causes the decorated surfaces of the temples to evaporate. The ancient monuments are also threatened by tourism, theft and floods that have damaged wall paintings and caused structural damage to many of the tombs.

Ice Fields of Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania: These massive pure white fields captured by Ernest Hemingway in his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” are literally disappearing. In 2002, Lonnie Thompson, a professor of geological sciences at Ohio State University, released a study that predicted global warming would wipe these fields out completely between 2015 and 2020. Data from the study show that 82% of the ice fields melted between 1912 and 2000. However, while global warming is cited as one culprit, most scientists claim that it alone cannot have caused such a dramatic change. The other factors behind the transformation remain a mystery.

Angkor Wat, Cambodia: According to heritage experts carrying out restoration work at the temple, which ranks as one of the largest religious ruins in the world, a plethora of new hotels, cashing in on the country’s rapid rise in tourist numbers, is sapping gallons of water from beneath nearby urban areas. They say this could upset the delicate foundations on which Angkor Wat sits and could lead to parts of it crumbling into sinkholes. The structures at Angkor Wat are built primarily out of sandstone, which the huge amount of foot traffic around the site is steadily eroding. In 1993, when Angkor was first added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List, the savage Khmer Rouge was still active in the area. Only 7,600 brave souls ventured to the temple complex that year. Since then, however, Cambodia has become “safe” in the eyes of the international community, and package tours have landed in fleets. In 2007, some two million tourists visited Cambodia, with half stopping at Angkor Wat. With tourist traffic continuing to increase by about 20 per cent a year, three million people are expected to visit the country in 2010.

 Photo Credits:

#1: poisonwen.wordpress.com

#2: goway.com

#3: gorilla-haven.org

#4: swiftravel.com

The bizarre dance craze originated completely by accident. In 2003, Harding had just quit his job as a video game designer and was backpacking around Southeast Asia with some friends. One day in Vietnam they were videotaping each other when one of his companions suggested he do his “geeky dance.” Harding continued to do the jig in various Southeast Asian countries that he visited on the trip. The videos were uploaded to his website for friends and family to enjoy. Later, Harding edited together 15 dance scenes, all with him in centre frame, and added some background music–a world music song entitled Sweet Lullaby by Deep Forest. Harding first posted himself online in January 2005. The video was passed around by e-mail and by various bloggers and eventually became viral, with his server getting 20,000 or more hits a day as it was discovered. “It got picked up by somethingawful.com and sites like that,” Harding recalled. “Usually, what they showed was people getting hurt or doing something really stupid, so I was bracing myself for abuse, but everyone seemed to like it.”

Bemused by his antics and impressed by the following he was amassing, the makers of Stride Gum contacted Harding and asked him if he would be interested in making another video for them for the debut of their chewing gum, which was slated for June 2006. With Stride’s sponsorship money, Harding journeyed to 39 countries on seven continents, including Antarctica, Egypt, Italy, Turkey and Easter Island, stopping to film himself busting a move at each destination. From these wanderings, he created a second video called “Dancing 2006.”

In an interview with the Washington Post, Harding admitted that the most difficult dance he did took place on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. “I spent nine hours climbing up to the peak, I vomited eight times on the way up and I just had nothing left by the time I got up there.” The most complicated video was shot underwater in Micronesia in front of the propeller of a Japanese shipwreck that was sunk in World War II. The most terrifying two-step was on the Kjeragbolten rock in Norway. “It’s just a tiny rock wedged between two faces of a chasm 3,000 feet up and only a few feet across. Dancing on that rock, yeah, I came very close to killing myself.”

Although there is no discernable connection between chewing gum and bad dancing, Stride offered to sponsor Harding strutting his stuff around the world again in 2007 and 2008. Amazingly, in this era of shameless commercial tie-ins, he was not obliged to wear a Stride T-shirt or deliver a little pitch for the product. Harding released his third dancing video on June 20, 2008, the product of 14 months of travelling in 42 countries. In his early videos, Harding dances alone, but in his third video he is usually in the company of others: South African street children in Soweto, painted tribesman in New Guinea, Bollywood dancers in India, waitresses clad in French maid costumes in Tokyo, all copying, or trying to, his spastic gyrations. Harding’s girlfriend, Melissa Nixon, helped to produce the video. Nixon organized the 40 or so dancing events, culled from a list of more than 20,000 invitations from fans around the world to come boogie with them in their hometowns. The esoteric background music, a piece called ”Praan,” was composed by Gary Schyman specifically for the video. The vocals were supplied by a 17-year-old Bengali singer named Palbasha Siddique, with lyrics adapted from the poem “Stream of Life,” by Rabindranath Tagore.

Today, Harding estimates that his online dance videos, which appear on YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo and on his own website: www.wherethehellismatt.com, have been viewed more than 20 million times. The miracle of Internet fame has transformed his life. Harding was recently recruited by Visa to star in its “Travel Happy” advertising campaign, and has hired a publicist to help him field interview requests. He is also in demand as a public speaker, an amazing development considering he never utters a word in any of his videos. As for the message he hopes to convey through his globe-stomping antics, Harding says: “A wildly exaggerated view of the natural joyfulness and goodwill of our species. I make humanist propaganda. I try to trick people into thinking the world is wonderful so they will act accordingly.”

Photo Credits:

#1: smh.com.au

#2: gamespot.com

#3: brandrepublic.asia

2. After John Lennon’s death in 1980, the graffiti-covered “John Lennon Peace Wall” became a shrine for the youth of which city?
A. Amsterdam
B. Prague
C. New York
D. Liverpool

3. You are having a meal in Honduras and the waiter brings you a dish of “bamboo chicken.” What are you eating?
A. Skunk
B. Ocelot
C. Parrot
D. Iguana

4. In which Asian country will you find the myterious “Plain of Jars”?
A. Laos
B. Iran
C. Turkey
D. South Korea

5. Which American city dyes its river a bright shade of green every year for St. Patrick’s Day?
A. Boston
B. Chicago
C. Pittsburgh
D. Charleston

6. The icon of the Black Madonna is the most important shrine in which country?
A. Brazil
B. El Salvador
C. Poland
D. Portugal

7. Maxwell House Coffee was named after a hotel in which American city?
A. Detroit
B. Atlanta
C. St. Louis
D. Nashville

8. Ian Fleming, the British novelist who created James Bond, spent his winters writing the Bond novels at Goldeneye, a home that he designed and built on what island?
A. Jamaica
B. Sicily
C. Majorca
D. Bermuda

9. In which Muslim country can you observe a spectacular festival called Fantasia, where armed men on horseback perform acrobatic tricks and fire their muskets at a full gallop?
A. Egypt
B. Morocco
C. Yemen
D. Afghanistan

10. What famous American bridge has appeared in such movies as X-Men: The Last Stand, Vertigo, A View to a Kill and Interview with a Vampire?
A. The Brooklyn Bridge
B. The Golden Gate Bridge
C. The Verranzo Narrows Bridge
D. The Royal Gorge Bridge

11. Which Caribbean island group is the fifth-largest banking centre in the world and home to more registered businesses than people?
A. British Virgin Islands
B. Barbados
C. Cayman Islands
D. Bahamas

12. The 1982 movie The Year of Living Dangerously, starring Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver, was set in which Asian nation?
A. The Philippines
B. Burma
C. Indonesia
D. Singapore

Answers

1. C. Kenya
Quite possibly the only place in the world where you can feed and photograph the giraffe over your breakfast table, and at the front door, and even from a bedroom window. The Giraffe Manor is an elegant, personally hosted, small and exclusive hotel, famous for its resident herd of giraffe. Built in 1932 by Sir David Duncan, the lodge is situated on 140 acres of land just a few kilometres from Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city. In 1974, Jock Leslie-Melville, grandson of a Scottish earl, and his wife Betty, who also founded the African Fund for Endangered Wildlife (AFEW), bought the Manor. They then moved five babies of the highly endangered Rothschild giraffe to their property where they were successfully reared and now have their own babies. When Jock passed away, Betty decided to open her house, now called the Giraffe Manor, to visitors. As well as the giraffe, the property is also home to many species of birds, large families of warthogs and the elusive Bush Buck.

2. B. Prague
John Lennon was a pacifist hero to young Czechs. After his death in 1980, the “John Lennon Peace Wall,” at the backside of a fourteenth century churchyard in Prague, became a place for the youth of Czechoslovakia to write their views. In 1988, the wall was a source of irritation for the then communist regime of Gustav Husak. Young Czechs would write grievances on the wall and this led to a clash between hundreds of students and security police on the nearby Charles Bridge. The movement these students followed was described ironically as “Lennonism,” while Czech authorities described these people variously as alcoholics, mentally deranged, sociopathic, and agents of Western capitalism. A running battle developed between the police whitewashers and dissident graffiti writers until November 1989, when Communism collapsed in the former Czechoslovakia’s non-violent “Velvet Revolution.” The Lennon Wall has since become a tourist attraction.

3. D. Iguana
Iguana meat is popular throughout much of Latin America, where consumers willingly pay more for it than for fish, poultry, pork, or beef. To fill the demand, several iguana species are hunted by rifle, slingshot, trap and noose; they are even run down by trained dogs. Villagers catch them for food for the family; professional hunters snare and sell them to vendors. The meat tastes somewhat like chicken, and iguanas are often referred to as gallina de palo, “bamboo chicken” or “chicken of the tree.” The lizard meat is typically cooked in a spicy stew.

4. A. Laos
The hundreds of huge carved rock jars that litter Laos’ mysterious Plain of Jars, date from the Neolithic period. They stand up to 3.25 metres high and can weigh up to 13 tonnes. Historians still debate their origins and purpose. When French archaeologist Madelaine Colani excavated the jars in the 1930s, she discovered some contained bronze and iron tools and bracelets, along with glass beads, while the rest appeared to have been looted. These items led Colani to theorize that the jars were funerary urns, holding cremated remains. This theory has been strengthened by the more recent discovery of underground burial chambers.

5. B. Chicago
For over 40 years, the Chicago Journeymen Plumbers turn the Chicago River a bright emerald green for the annual St. Patricks Day Parade celebration. Bill King, the administrator of Chicago’s St. Patrick’s Day committee, says that “the idea of dyeing the Chicago River green originally came about by accident when a group of plumbers were using fluorescein dye to trace illegal substances that were polluting the river.” According to the event organizer’s official site, it takes 40 pounds of vegetable dye to create a carpet of green that lasts four to five hours. Of course, they don’t dye the entire river with that–just one section a couple of blocks long. Interestingly, the vegetable-based dye replaced an oil-based dye. Environmentalists lobbied for the change, arguing that oil-based dye was hardly an eco-friendly substance to be shovelling into a river.

6. C. Poland
The Black Madonna in the Paulite Monastery of Jasna Gora (Czestochowa) is visited by millions of pilgrims annually. The painting came to Poland in 1384, probably from the east, perhaps even Jerusalem. Legend traces the icon’s origin back to St. Luke who, it is said, painted it on a cypress table top from the house of the Holy Family. Nobody knows when people began venerating the painting as an icon, but it was already thought miraculous when it was brought to Poland. When the sick or ill prayed to it for health, they often were healed. When Polish kings or monks prayed to it for military victories, they won. In 1655, 3,000 Swedish troops besieged the Jasna Gora monastery. Defending it were just 170 soldiers, 70 monks and 20 noblemen. The monks and their troops won. This inspired the rest of the nation to rebel and the Swedes were routed. This “Miracle at Jasna Gora” was attributed to the intervention of the Mother of God, and her painting. When the Russians were at Warsaw’s gates in 1920, thousands of people walked from Warsaw to Czestochowa to ask the Madonna for help. The Poles defeated the Russians at a battle along the Wisla (or Vistula) River. During World War II under German occupation, the faithful made pilgrimages as a show of defiance. That spirit deepened during the years of Soviet-enforced communism, when all government attempts to stop the pilgrimages failed.

7. D. Nashville
In the early 1900s, Nashville entrepreneur Joel Cheek perfected a special coffee blend, which became the house blend of the Maxwell House, a city hotel. When he began selling it to the general public, he adopted the hotel’s name as the brand. In 1917, Cheek began using a “Good to the Last Drop” slogan to advertise Maxwell House Coffee. In 1920, the Cheek family sold the brand to General Foods, which made wide use of the slogan. For several years, the ads made no mention of Theodore Roosevelt as the phrase’s originator. By the 1930s, however, the company was running ads that claimed that the former president had taken a sip of Maxwell House Coffee on a visit to Andrew Jackson’s estate, The Hermitage, near Nashville on October 21, 1907, and that when served coffee he had proclaimed it to be “Good to the Last Drop.” Today, Maxwell House claims that the slogan was actually written by Clifford Spiller, former president of General Foods Corporation and did not come from a Roosevelt remark. The phrase remains a registered trademark for the product and appears on its logo.

8. A. Jamaica
Ian Fleming, the British intelligence officer turned turned spy novelist, spent winters on Jamaica’s north shore at his Caribbean getaway for almost two decades and wrote 10 of his James Bond novels there. Fleming borrowed the name of his famous spy from James Bond, the author of A Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies. As for the name of his home, Fleming said in an 1964 interview: “I had happened to be reading Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers, and I’d been involved in an operation called Goldeneye during the war: the defense of Gibraltar, supposing that the Spaniards had decided to attack it; and I was deeply involved in the planning of countermeasures which would have been taken in that event. Anyway, I called my place Goldeneye.” The estate is now the centrepiece of an exclusive resort by the same name.

9. B. Morocco
Also referred to as the Aiin Aouda (Mock Horse-Back Battle), Fantasia is an annual equestrian performance and celebration of traditional folklore that takes place in Meknes each July. This horse-riding spectacle includes hundreds of charging horsemen (and women) wearing traditional clothing. The performance consists of a group of horse riders, wearing traditional clothes and charging along a straight path at the same speed so as to form a line, at the end of the ride (about 200 hundred metres) all riders fire in the sky using old gunpowder guns. The difficulty of the performance is synchronization during the acceleration especially during firing so that one single shot is heard. Each region in Morocco has one or several fantasia groups, called serba, totaling thousands of horse riders nationwide. Performances are usually during local seasonal, cultural or religious festivals.

10. B. The Golden Gate Bridge
This fabled, orange-hued San Francisco bridge has appeared in many movies since it opened on May 28, 1937, with the world’s longest suspension span. Why you may ask isn’t this city landmark painted gold? Because the term “Golden Gate” actually refers to the Golden Gate Strait which is the entrance to the San Francisco Bay from the Pacific Ocean. The orange colour, called International Orange, was chosen in part because of its visibility factor. Advection fog, a low, ground-hugging fog, is prevalent in San Francisco Bay. The bright colour helps drivers as well as ships see their way. The colour was also chosen because of its natural blend to the warm landscape of the area.

11. C. Cayman Islands
Not only do these remote British-run islands comprise the fifth largest banking centre in the world, they also tout the highest standard of living in the Caribbean with the average annual income of approximately $42,000. The Caymans have more registered businesses than its 65,000 inhabitants, and are home to 279 banks with $1.5 trillion in banking liabilities. The Cayman Islands has become a successful offshore financial centre because of the high quality service providers, reputable law firms, as well as the Big Four accounting auditors that operate from the islands. Today, 45 of the world’s top 50 banks have subsidiary or branch operations in the Caymans.

12. C. Indonesia 
The Year of Living Dangerously is about a love affair set in Indonesia during the overthrow of President Sukarno. The plot follows a group of foreign correspondents in Jakarta on the eve of an attempted coup by the so-called 30 September Movement on September 30, 1965, and during the beginning of the violent reprisals by military-led vigilante groups that killed hundreds of thousands. The film was banned from being shown in Indonesia until 1999. The title The Year of Living Dangerously refers to a famous Italian phrase used by Sukarno for the title of his National Day speech of August 17, 1964. The movie also starred Linda Hunt as the male dwarf Billy Kwan, Gibson’s local photographer contact, a role for which she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Photo Credits:

#1: travellingboard.net

#2: flickr.com

#3: flickr.com

#4: newsday.com

#5: flickr.com

Icelandic Phallological Museum: Husavik, Iceland
This museum’s bizarre goal is to collect penis specimens from every mammal in Iceland, including several species that are endangered or currently extinct in Icelandic waters. The museum houses 245 specimens displayed like hunting trophies, embalmed in formaldehyde, or dried in display cases. The collection includes specimens of sperm, humpback and even the giant blue whale, polar bears, various kinds of seals and walruses and even tiny mice and other rodents. The strangest item is the penis of the “Icelandic Christmas Lad”, donated by a former mayor of Reykjavik. It is believed that “Icelandic Christmas Lad” refers to one of Santa’s toy-making helpers. Sigurour Hjartarson, a former teacher, is the founder and director of the museum. Hjartarson says he founded the museum so people from all over the world could “undertake serious study into the field of phallology in an organized, scientific fashion.”

Dog-Collar Museum: Kent, England
Although it is hard to believe that there’s a demand for this sort of thing, this museum, located inside of Leeds Castle, attracts more than 500,000 visitors every year. The dog collar collection counts over 100 unique items that present the history of canine-wear starting from early medieval times to the Victorian Age. The dog collars were originally gathered by Irish medieval collector John Hurt and his wife Gertrude, and were donated to Leeds Castle in 1979, as a tribute to the castle’s last private owner, Lady Baillie, a major dog lover. The antique dog collars tell 500 years of canine history, from early, 15th century dog collars, filled with spikes to protect the neck of hunting hounds against wolves, boars and bears, to glamorous leather and velvet baroque collars of the 18th century. Engraved silver collars from the last century, some fashioned by leading silversmiths of the day, form an interesting section. Many come in pairs joined by short chains, such as those presented to Top and Tabinet engraved “The Property of Earl Talbot. The Winner of the Great Champion all aged (Puppy) stakes for all England 32 Dogs at 20 guin’s each at Ashdown Park. Dec 14th 1838.” Other inscriptions are less formal. An 18th century English brass collar simply states; “I am Mr Pratt’s Dog, King St, Nr Wokingham, Berks. Whose Dog are You?”

Mutter Museum: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The Mütter Museum was founded to educate future doctors about anatomy and human medical anomalies. Today, it serves as a valuable resource for educating and enlightening the public about our medical past and telling important stories about what it means to be human. On display are some 20,000 objects showcasing gruesome human health anomalies including a wax model of a woman with a human horn growing out of her forehead, a five-foot-long human colon that contained over 40 pounds of fecal matter, and the petrified body of the mysterious Soap Lady, whose corpse was turned into a soapy substance called adipocere. The museum also houses a collection of 2,000 objects extracted from people’s throats, a malignant tumour removed from President Grover Cleveland’s hard palate, the conjoined liver from Siamese twins Chang and Eng Bunker and a growth removed from the thorax of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth.

Museum of Medieval Instruments of Torture: Prague, Czech Republic
This educational exhibit with historical explanations in six languages showcases an extensive collection of torture devices, many of which originated during those wonderful years known as The Inquisition. These replicas of the originals will send a shiver down the spines of all who contemplate the horrors unleashed upon mankind in the name of religion, war or just plain old sadism. Aside from knuckle-crackers and cat-o-nine tails, torture devices utilizing fire and plenty of needles await you, iron maidens, and saws meant to separate bodies in half–lengthwise. And if your head’s not screwed on right, the Spanish garrotta chair will fix that for you, literally driving a screw right through you skull.

The Burlesque Hall of Fame: Las Vegas, Nevada
Formerly known as Exotic World, the museum historically was located on the site of an abandoned goat farm in Helendale, California. It documents the history of burlesque from its 19th century origins through its golden age in the mid 20th century, and displays artifacts commemorating historic burlesque performers such as Blaze Starr, Lili St. Cyr, Chesty Morgan and Tempest Storm. Exotic World originated as the private collection of retired exotic dancer Jennie Lee founder of the League of Exotic Dancers and former “Bazoom Girl” (a moniker she earned for effortlessly twirling tassels on both her bosom and behind). It’s currently curated by retired burlesque performer Dixie Evans, who often personally leads tours through the exhibits. Unique individual items include ivory fans used by Sally Rand, gloves and a black velvet shoulder cape worn by Gypsy Rose Lee, a heart-shaped couch owned by Jayne Mansfield and the cremation ashes of Miss Sherri Champagne.

Sulabh International Museum of Toilets: New Delhi, India
“Unlike body functions like dance, drama and songs, defecation is considered very lowly.” So begins a 1995 paper written by Dr. Bindeswar Pathak, the founder of this New Delhi museum as well as the Sulabh International Social Service Organization. Ostensibly part of a sanitation crusade, the Sulabh International Museum of Toilets follows the toilet’s historical pipeline from 3,000 B.C. to the present. What began as a hole in the ground—and remains a hole in the ground in some parts of the world has come a long way in terms of design, comfort and plumbing. The museum offers fun facts (Louis XIV purportedly used to relieve himself while holding court), examinations of toilet customs from around the world, and arts and literature (from poems to painstakingly crafted chamber pots).

Serial Killer Museum: Florence, Italy
Who needs to visit galleries crammed with the world’s greatest art when you can listen to a man with a creepy robotic voice describe the crimes of John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy in infinitely gory detail? As well as offering the chance to buddy up with waxworks of Charles Manson and notorious cannibals, Florence’s most bloodthirsty attraction also investigates methods used to track down the killers–from blood sample analysis to psychological profiling–and the methods of dispatching them. That means mock-ups of gas chambers and electric chairs. The displays include waxwork models of notorious serial killers, often in an environment associated with their case. Gacy is dressed as a clown in a mock-up of his living room, with the bones of his victims buried beneath. Ed Gein, the inspiration for both Buffalo Bill in Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon and Norman Bates in Psycho, is in his shack, creating his perfect woman out of the skin of his victims.

Cockroach Hall of Fame and Museum: Plano, Texas
Back in the 1980’s Michael Bohdan paid $1,000 for the largest cockroach in Texas, which got him an invitation on The Tonight Show. That started the roach craziness and before he knew it, the bug exterminator found himself on a tour judging a cockroach dress-up contest. After the tour ended, all the funny-dressed bugs were to be thrown away, but Bodhan decided to keep them and put them on display in Plano. And that’s how the Cockroach Hall of Fame and Museum was born. Ever since, the bug-control master has been killing roaches and adding them to his collection. Now the collection features more than 25 dressed-up bugs, including Marilyn Monroach, David Letteroach and Ross Peroach and Liberoachi, a dead cockroach dressed up in a suit and wearing a mink cape, playing a tiny piano. There are also some live Madagascar Hissing Roaches. More than a little intimidating, they are four inches long, over one inch thick and make a hissing noise when they’re disturbed. The Cockroach Hall of Fame and Museum also offers its guest some very special snacks–barbecue-flavoured Worm Snacks (dried roach larvae).

Photo Credits:

#1: news.com.au

#2: scienceroll.com

#3: cpa.psu.edu

#4: msnbc.msn.com

I rode a bus to the University of B.C. campus and then descended down Trail 6. There are several routes that will get you to the beach, but Trail 6 is the most spectacular. I remember taking Trail 6 back in the late 1970s when I first came out to Vancouver from Toronto and being blown away by the massive trees and the first breathtaking view of the vast expanse of sand and the crashing waves. It was like stumbling into a secret world. Of course in those days, Wreck Beach was something of a secret world, and one that aroused considerable suspicion, and perhaps a little envy. Some Vancouver politicians wanted to shut Wreck down. The most vocal anti-nude campaigner was a deep-voiced Pentecostal preacher and alderwoman named Bernice Gerard, who claimed that the naked sun-bathers would have a detrimental moral effect on students at the nearby University of B.C. I guess she wasn’t familiar with the school’s Engineering Department.   

In those days there were no apartment complexes encircling the crest of the hill and no picturesque wooden stairway to guide you to the bottom. You had to clamber down an overgrown dirt trail and, if I recall correctly, you also had to swing on a rope to traverse one section. It’s much more civilized today. There is a large coloured map at the top of Trail 6 that tells you “You Are Here,” and other signs telling you what you can’t do, such as walking your dog on the beach between March and September. There’s even a sign posted at the halfway mark that tells the people coming up when they have to put on their clothes.

I was introduced to Wreck Beach by my friend Mike, another transplanted Torontonian, who went there virtually every day during the summer. It was like a religious act with him. He would take a journal and scribble his thoughts. He called the beach “his office.” I didn’t go down to Wreck to write. I just loved the atmosphere. This was the best beach in the city: big waves, big sand, big sky and big blue herons. In fact, when you were down there you never felt like you were close to an urban centre. Wreck Beach was a place that simply couldn’t exist anywhere else in Canada and most definitely not in uptight Presbyterian Toronto. It was part of the frontier feeling that still existed in Vancouver back then. The beach epitomized a sense of freedom that I found completely captivating.

Then again, Wreck Beach boasted other visual delights beyond the local flora and fauna. (Actually, there were probably more visual horrors, but I have erased those from my mind.) One sight that still occupies a prominent place in my memory was the mirage-like appearance of a beautiful tanned and topless brunette strolling up the beach with a tray of aquamarine-coloured drinks in her hand. The blue drinks were catchy, but even more intriguing was the fact that she wore a leopard-skin bikini bottom. Somehow, that lone scrap of clothing made her appear a lot sexier than if she had been totally nude.

The jiggling vision of leopard lady selling alcoholic drinks from atop a tray was certainly a novelty. I’m not sure that would be the case today. In mid-summer, the beach is a buzzing outdoor emporium. There is an entire area known as Vendor’s Row, where people sell postcards, massage oils and suntan lotions, clothing, gourmet snacks and various intoxicants. If you are so inclined there are also tarot card readings, henna tattoos, body painting, wood carving, energy healing, portrait sketches, casino games and umbrella rentals.

Vendors Row was empty when I arrived this time. But to my surprise there were a couple of dozen nude (or nearly nude) people bivouacked in the sheltered section of the bay. Some of the men were playing Frisbee and an impromptu jam session was underway. A hardy tribe, this lot. No one seemed to mind that I had a camera, but then I didn’t linger in the nude section. Instead, I got blissfully lost in space taking photos of glittering shells, seaweed-draped rocks and the graffiti-covered searchlight towers that were installed during World War II to keep a lookout for invading Japanese. Thankfully, the old hippy haunt had not yet succumbed to gentrification. The afternoon sun was glorious and the salt air was invigorating and the hours just melted away. Seduced by the beach’s wild beauty, I stayed to watch the sun burn into the sea.

When I finally made my way up the 436 wooden steps and back to the real world, I felt just as I had 30 years before–grateful that Wreck Beach exists and glad to be living in Vancouver.

Photo Credits:

#1, 2, 3, 4: Kerry Banks

Slumdog Millionaire

In the case of Slumdog Millionaire, however, some of the travel spin-offs have sparked controversy. Part of the movie was set in the Dharavi district, Asia’s largest slum, where one million people live in squalor in an area smaller than New York’s Central Park. Mumbai-based Reality Tours and Travel is now offering guided tours of the hellhole. The excursion’s “highlights” include a stop at a stall of six toilets that serves 16,000 people and a stroll alongside a river so black and septic that it oozes rather than flows.

“In India, a lot of people think the movie is poverty porn,” said Reality Tours co-founder Chris Way in a recent interview. But he insists that criticism of his tours, whose sales are up by about 25 percent since Slumdog Millionaire’s release, “comes from misunderstanding what we are trying to do, which is break down the negative image of slums, and highlight the industry and sense of community.” Reality Tours charges $10 or $20 a person, depending on length of the tour, and pledges to donate 80 percent of after-tax profits to local charities.
 
Other tourism operators have begun leading curious, rich Westerners into famous slums, from the townships of Soweto to the favelas of Brazil. “The jury’s still out on whether the tours are perverse invasions of privacy or eye-opening experiences that will prompt action on the poverty agenda,” Christine Bowers, a consultant for the World Bank, said on her blog.

There is no doubt though that popular movies can provide financial bonanzas for savvy marketers. The most striking recent example occurred in New Zealand, the backdrop for The Lord of the Rings, where an intensive tourism campaign spanned the three years of the trilogy’s film releases. The island nation has christened itself “New Zealand: Home of Middle-earth” (the world in which the Rings’ fantasy plays out). Air New Zealand has emblazoned four aircraft with giant images from the films and there is even a government-appointed Minister of the Rings. The payoff? The annual tourist influx to New Zealand has jumped from 1.7 million in 2000 to 2.4 million today–a 40 percent surge–attributed to a large degree to The Lord of the Rings phenomenon, and a big upgrade for New Zealand’s international profile.

Similarily, the Harry Potter movies have inspired tourists with children to visit a variety of locales in Britain where tour companies have organized itineraries that include, if not the actual Diagon Alley or Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, then some of the sites that served as those imaginary settings on the big screen. Locations included Gloucester Cathedral (Hogwarts), North Yorkshire Moors Railway (Hogsmeade station) and Alnwick Castle (Hogwarts again). VisitBritain, the tourism body responsible for selling England to the Brits and Britain to the non-Brits, invested heavily in movie tie-ins: 340,000 Harry Potter location maps were printed.

Several British locales featured in The Da Vinci Code, such as Temple Church in London, Burghley House in Lincolnshire, and Rosslyn Chapel, a 15th-century Scottish church (pictured here), found themselves invaded by a wave of fanatical amateur sleuths after the film’s release in May 2006. In fact, the hullabaloo surrounding The Da Vinci Code led to an unprecedented partnership among national tourism agencies in Britain, France and Scotland, who teamed together to showcase locations, destinations and attractions linked with the film. The three agencies developed a tour program called “Seek the Truth” with Sony Pictures, and high-speed rail service Eurostar to offer tourists a chance to “follow in the footsteps of the film’s main characters.

Japan’s tourism industry has gotten a lift from several recent films, including Lost in Translation, The Last Samurai and Memoirs of a Geisha, even though much of the latter was actually shot in California. Meanwhile, several Caribbean islands have capitalized on the box-office success of the Pirates of the Caribbean movie trilogy. Tourists in the Bahamas can take a 25-minute boat ride to Blackbeard’s Cay, visit the Pirates of Nassau Museum and see Fort Charlotte’s underground passages and dungeons. St. Lucia has the Brig Unicorn, an authentic 140-foot replica of an 18th century ship which was featured in The Curse of the Black Pearl, while Dominica has Shipwreck Cove and a cruise up Pantano River where the Black Pearl anchored.

Visits to scenic Phi Phi Leh island, near Phuket, Thailand, soared after Alex Garland’s novel, The Beach, was turned into a 2000 film there starring Leonardo DiCaprio, but not everyone was pleased that the film makers had chosen to shine Hollywood’s lights on the uninhabited island. Despite strict conservation laws, the Thai government let the film crew dig up more than half the beach at Maya Bay to plant coconut trees–destroying roots holding the dunes together.

An unexpected monetary windfall was created by Sideways, a modest comedy about two middle-aged men embarking on a wine-tasting tour in California. The 2004 film generated more than 600 media stories highlighting Santa Barbara as a travel destination–the equivalent of $4-million worth of advertising, a major cash injection for what had previously been an overlooked and often ignored part of the California wine business. Businesses in the Santa Barbara area have reported an increase in trade of up to 30 per cent since the film’s release, with wineries on the Sideways’ map receiving a rise of up to 42 per cent.

Although the power of celluloid to spur tourism is now widely recognized, the movie credited with opening people’s eyes to the phenomenon is the 1986 comedy Crocodile Dundee, which became Australia’s highest grossing film ever and made an international star out of unknown actor Paul Hogan. One survey credited the movie with doubling visitor numbers to Queensland in three years. Interestingly, many Australians initially objected to the film, claiming that it confirmed the general image of Australian backwardness and “outback”-ness rather than affirming the image of a modern urban society. Hogan’s response to the criticism was nothing if not direct: “People are so dumb sometimes in Australia. What are we going to do, put a nice sensible hard-working accountant in a film and say: ‘Here’s a typical Australian, hard-working, industrious. Everyone would yawn and say, Never go to Australia.’”

In terms of long-term tourist impact, however, the piece of cinema that can stake a strong claim to being the most successful of all is the all-singing, all-dancing, all-yodelling Hollywood classic The Sound of Music, which was set in Salzburg, Austria. One out of three Japanese have seen it, and it’s what draws 75 per cent of all American tourists to Salzburg. More than 40 years after the film’s release, some 300,000 fans por into the city every 12 months on the strength of the musical, with 40,000 taking the official Sound of Music Tour. Evidently, the hills are alive with the sound of cash registers.

Photo Credits:

#1: boston.com

#2: teako170.com

#3: templars.wordpress.com

#4: thgholidays.com

#5: blog.goethe.de