Another week draws to a close and, as we do every Friday, we pause here at Vagabondish to consider some of the brighter jewels in this glittering diamond mine we call Earth. This week’s candidates: the Belgium one-legged man who stole a single shoe, the central Pennsylvania pothead with weed stuck to his head, the masked Iowa duo with permanent marker disguises, and the South Dakota bank thief who listed “robbery” as his official occupation. Composed of international heist masterminds, this group is not.

These gentlemen are exemplary for the bevy of singular and subtle virtues they display, each in his own quiet way. So while you might point out that the Belgium man should have stolen two shoes to avoid narrowing the suspect list to a single person, have you considered that maybe he was just conserving resources? Waste not want not! And sure the South Dakota guy made a de facto admission that landed him in prison for four years. But are we so far gone as a culture that we no longer admire honesty? And the Pennsylvania pothead who kept his weed in his hat – and then lost it because it got stuck to his forehead, at which point it was spotted by a cop – well he was… actually he’s just an idiot. But nonethless we’re awarding this week’s trophy to the two Iowa morons, if for no other reason than because they’re morons:

Police received a call Friday night that two men with hooded sweatshirts and painted faces had tried to break into a man’s home in Carroll, Iowa. When police stopped a vehicle matching the caller’s description blocks away, they were stunned by the men’s disguises. There were no ski masks or stockings pulled over their heads; instead, Matthew Allan McNelly, 23, and Joey Lee Miller, 20, streaked their faces with permanent black marker. Carroll Police Chief Cayler told CNN the strange disguises made it easier for his officers. “We’re very skilled investigators and the black faces gave them right away,” Cayler said jokingly.

If you’ve ever seen a cartoon burglar, the reason he uses coal to darken his face is so he can wipe it off afterward. Cartoon burglars aren’t even real. They don’t even exist in our reality. And yet they know enough not to use permanent markers for masks. But the salient “what if we get pulled over” consideration apparently escaped these two citizens. We emphasize “citizens,” by the by, to remind you that each of their votes counts as much as yours. See you next week.

Vagabondish Citizen of the Week, Dead Giveaway Edition © Vagabondish.

We’re not exactly fans of so-called poverty tourism (”poorism”). Rich tourists go to a village in India or a township in South Africa. They walk amidst the desperate poverty, maybe pick up some kids, and then leave having experienced a refreshing catharsis of guilt over their privilege. If they’re really obnoxious they spend the next half-decade subjecting their friends to mawkish descriptions of “how they felt” throughout their pointedly temporary and intentionally abject half-day outing. It’s all so teeth-gratingly unseemly.

So our first reaction to the new plan of the Nepal Toursim Board – to highlight 10 rural villages as tourism destinations and build infrastructure so travelers can get to them – was wary skepticism. But it turns out that this isn’t your normal voyeuristic rural/village/poverty tourism project:

Selection of potential destinations, houses or resorts, providing training, making tour packages, fam trips and market promotion for the selected destination were underway. “There are challenges as we need to launch new activities and products including the basic infrastructure that will determine the length of stay in the villages,” he said… the Tara Gaon Development Board (TGDB) including other organizations was also studying on sustainable village tourism development across the country. According to the NTB, villages like Sirubari, Ghalegaon, Nar Phu, Lumbini, Chepang, Pasgaon, Dhading, Sailung, Siklish, Siurung, Balanthali, Sivapuri, Bhujung, Gorkha, Ganga Jamuna and Nagarkot have already gained popularity for village tourism.

The catch here is that Nepal’s not calling for straightforward poverty tourism, where the point is to see a destitute village because it’s ostensibly “authentic” (the much creepier equivalent of San Francisco or Boston yuppies who frequent dive bars). Instead this is a very concentrated and deliberate effort to build basic infrastructure and get to the root of why these villages are poor in the first place. There might be criticisms of that move – debates over the ethics and sustainability of development are hardly new – but vulgar poorism this is not.

Under normal situations poor villages stay poor because no one can afford anything businesses are interested in supplying, which in turn prevents businesses from creating the local jobs that would create wealth. It’s the very definition of a cycle of poverty.

The Nepal Tourism Board was actually pretty clever about this project, announcing now that they’ll be pushing the villages as destinations in 2011. The early heads up telegraphs to the private sector where customers will be two years from now, giving entrepreneurs an incentive to get on the ground in those villages. Promising tourist dollars later for investments now neatly sidesteps the problem of jump-starting a local economy, hopefully creating a sustainable economic engine that’s able to run on its own.

Nepal Launches Massive Rural Tourism Program To Build Up Villages © Vagabondish.

The folks at Wired have collected thirteen pictures of various glaciers from around the globe, all shot from space and all of them amazing. The conceit of the article is that glaciers are a veritable blur of geological activity, moving, flowing, and breaking apart fast enough for us to actually observe changes. Much more exciting than mountains! Each page has specific information on the individual glaciers, and there are general insights sprinkled throughout.

File this wherever you keep the rest of the things you have to see while they still exist. Which, in the case of glaciers, won’t be for much longer:

Glaciers also provide an environmental record by trapping air bubbles in ice that reveal atmospheric conditions in the past. And because they are very sensitive to climate, growing and advancing when it’s cold and shrinking and retreating when its warm, they can be used as proxies for regional temperatures. Over geologic time, they have ebbed and flowed with natural climate cycles. Today, the world’s glaciers are in retreat, sped up by relatively rapid warming of the globe. In our own Glacier National Park in Montana, only 26 named glaciers remain out of the 150 known in 1850. They are predicted to be completely gone by 2030 if current warming continues at the same rate.

The picture we’re giving you is a 2005 shot of Bear Glacier, a gigantic chunk of ice that used to hold together this glacial lake. Three years after the picture was taken the ice melted and the lake broke through, draining out into Kenai Fjords National Park’s Resurrection Bay. All over the planet there are other lakes held in place by other melting glaciers, and not all of them will flow gently into large harbors and bays. The next few years are going to be interesting that way.

In any case, make sure you click through to Wired’s gallery. The pictures are just straightforwardly stunning.

Spectacular Glacier Photos Document Earth’s Disappearing Landscape © Vagabondish.

Photo of the Moment: Pondering Dog Things, Oaxaca © Vagabondish.

On a recent trip, I decided to get creative in my search for accommodations. Enter
A Bed and Breakfast Afloat – a (wait for it …) floating bed and breakfast in the heart of the Vineyard’s Oak Bluffs Marina.

The Skinny

A Bed & Breakfast Afloat’s MS Resolute is a classic 40-foot island cutter sailboat featuring:

• The Galley (kitchen) has a refrigerator, microwave, toaster oven and coffee maker. Continental Breakfast is provided daily.
• The Salon (living room) has a TV/VHS player; a couch on the port side (left) which pulls out to be a double bed and a single bed on the starboard side (right).
• There is a private head (bathroom) with shower capabilities.
• The cockpit (outer area in the back of the boat) is spacious for outdoor dining, relaxing, socializing or simply enjoying the water views.
• The V-berth (bedroom) has is a queen size bed and plenty of room to store your belongings.

In Detail

Location

Centrally located in the Oak Bluffs Harbor in Martha’s Vineyard. Bars, restaurants, shops, charter boats, mainland ferries to New Bedford and Quonset – they’re all within a ½ mile walk. Quite simply, there is no better location.

What’s more, the marina is within a protected harbor, meaning the weather on the open sea has little bearing on the MS Resolute’s environment. The soft lapping of the waves at the hull (plus a Corona or six) helped us sleep astonishingly well both nights.

Amenities

We verified all of the amenities listed above and then some. In total, it’s nicer than some apartments I’ve lived in. College size fridge, comfortable seating for 6 up front, queen sized bed (V-berth), plenty of extra bedding and towels.

A substantial continental breakfast is provided as well. Susan will supply just about anything you ask for – juice, coffee, muffins, snack bars, you name it. It was all waiting for us when we arrived.

Size / Space

Keep in mind, this is a modestly sized sailboat. It’s not a cruise liner, so expect fairly tight quarters. That said, for two people, we found the Resolute perfectly livable for a weekend.

(To be honest, I enjoyed it so much, I spent the better part of the following day researching live aboard vessels. But that’s another topic for another day …)

The bathroom (“head” in marine speak) was tight. If you’ve spent anytime in an RV, you’ll understand. There’s something very intriguing about such minimalism; it’s only as big as it needs to be and more. I had no real issue with it. The Mrs found it fine for the weekend, but guessed it to be a bit trying for longer stays.

Proprietors

Proprietors John and Susan Stephenson are a laid back, take-it-as-it-comes couple who’ve clearly spent (and continue to spend) their lives on the water. They were warm, inviting, and extremely accommodating. Our initial ferry was cancelled, making us almost four hours late for our meetup with them. They stuck around until almost 11 o’clock at night, patiently waiting for us.

Incidentally, they live on a larger sailboat (which they also charter) within the same harbor – just a hundred yards away. So they’re readily available to help out with any questions or issues you may have.

Pricing

From $295 per night (2 people), low season. From $325 per night (2 people), high season.

Bottom Line

The location can’t be beat; laid-back, friendly and knowledgeable proprietors; and pricing that’s inline with every mid-range hotel on the island all make A Bed & Breakfast Afloat an absolute winner. Recommended.

A Bed & Breakfast Afloat Offers Unique Accommodations in the Heart of Martha’s Vineyard © Vagabondish.

One year ago today, Nora Dunn explored voluntourism and found, “with some research, due diligence, and attention to a community’s actual needs, you can put your humanitarian efforts to many good uses around the world.”

As with everything however, there’s two sides to the coin:

… the more I researched volunteer service organizations and tour companies, the more I found myself sliding down the rabbit hole of a newly coined form of tourism in and of itself: voluntourism.

Although my spell checker still doesn’t recognize it, “voluntourism” is indeed a legitimate term and vehicle for those who wish to volunteer for a worthy cause whilst on vacation. It sounds wonderful in concept, but as with so many things that become popularized and “touristy”, it now has a more gritty edge, some negative cultural and personal side-effects, and there are people who now can’t even say the word without lots of lip curling and eye rolling.

Check out the full post – Voluntourism: Hip or Hype? – and share your thoughts in the comments!

Voluntourism: Hip or Hype? [Flashback] © Vagabondish.

Competing directly with Richard Branson’s nascent space tourism ambitions, a Barcelona-based firm says they’re within a couple years of launching a full-fledged space resort. The Galactic Suite Space Resort will take mega-rich tourists into orbit for three nights at a time, with round trips based out of a spaceport on an as-yet-undisclosed island. The whole thing actually sounds a little shaky, and the 2012 time line has some people raising their eyebrows, but we want to believe!

The Galactic Suite Space Resort say it will cost $4.4 million for a three-night stay at the hotel, with this price including an eight-week training course on a tropical island.. During their stay, guests would see the sun rise 15 times a day and travel around the world every 80 minutes. They would wear Velcro suits so they can crawl around their pod rooms by sticking themselves to the walls like Spiderman.

Now for some concerns. We have some quibbles with the way they’re branding their space tourist venture, which is something we’re inclined to take seriously on account of the whole “we care about tourism and think space is awesome” thing. The intro on their official site is New Age-y to the point of obnoxiousness. It’s got a montage of slow-pan globe images, a woman hovering in a lotus position, and the kind of music we thought was exclusively reserved for B-rate cop movies. The phrase “the birth of homo spaciens” makes an unironic appearance, which was startling because we’ve never heard it unaccompanied by a rim shot. We’re 95% sure they took their fetus picture – yes, there’s a fetus picture – from the cover of a circa Reagan administration VHS of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even the typeface is grating.

All of which is a shame because they’re a hotel that floats in mothereffing space. Space tourism will gain mainstream currency not because it’s a transcendental soul-changing experience that aligns your chi with the rest of the universe – though it might – but because it’s mothereffing space. There are rockets, there are jets, there’s some fire the propels you out of the earth’s gravity well – and at the end you get to spend time in orbit. Deeper Meanings are unnecessary. Eyes on the ball folks.

Space Resorts For The Mega-Rich Set To Debut By 2012? © Vagabondish.

As I’m wont to do, I spent the last few days listening to an endless barrage of house and electronic music loud enough to jar several fillings loose. Thus I quickly blew out the stock iPhone earbuds and decided it was a good time to put the Scosche IDR400M noise cancelling headphones through their paces.

For a variety of reasons, Scosche has joined a handful of manufacturers (Timbuk2 and Mophie come to mind) we’ve recently come to love. Their entire line is well designed with great build quality and construction. We found the IDR400Ms to be no exception.

The Skinny

According to Scosche, the IDR400M noise cancelling headphones feature:

• Oversized 10mm drivers for Increased Dynamic Range and a balanced soundstage
• Integrated microphone for handsfree conversation and audio control
• Single and dual flanged silicone inserts provide unparalleled noise isolation and comfort
• Machined aluminum construction

In Detail

These ear plug style phones are only a tad larger than the stock iPhone earbuds. But the sound quality is in a completely different league. Rich bass and crisper high end (read: vocals and horns) provide a thoroughly better aural experience.

Noise Cancelling

As I type this, I’m seated thirty feet from the engine of a 757 over the Atlantic Ocean (I’m inside the plane though, don’t worry) with the IDR400Ms tucked snugly in each ear. Save for a dull, almost inaudible hum from the otherwise deafening turbine outside, the only thing I hear are the sweet sounds of Morphine’s Mark Sandman softly discussing his prescribed Cure for Pain. Just to remind myself of how damn quiet these things make the outside world, I remove them. Suddenly, it’s like every passenger is simultaneously running a commercial hair dryer at full blast. Headphones back in, Morphine back on. And all is peaceful and right the world.

That “deadening of the world” effect is the good and the bad – something that’s noticeable in most ear plug style buds. They’re so damn quiet, I have to remove them every time the Aer Lingus flight attendant stops to ask if I want yet another beer. (“Yes. For the love of God, Toots, yes! Keep bringing ‘em every 10 minutes until I pass out. Then make it every 20.” She scolded me for the “Toots” bit, but somehow her Irish lilt still made it sound intoxicatingly sexy.).

I even contemplated leaving my hunting-quality earplugs at home and substituting the 400Ms instead. Unfortunately the choking hazard that the cord would inevitably present while I unknowingly toss and turn in the middle of the night was a little too frightening for me.

Audio Quality

The only downside I’ve yet to uncover is the distinct lack of mid-range. This is an issue I’ve noticed in many earplug style headphones though and, to be honest, something to which I quickly grew accustomed. My guess is it’s something to do with how the sound is conducted into the ear canal under such an air-tight seal. Perhaps the bass is so heavy that it essentially overrides much of the middle range? I’m sure audiophiles can school me on the finer technical points in the comments below.

Availability

Available now for $59.99 retail; $29.99 via Amazon and other online retailers.

Bottom Line

In short, I’m in love with the Scosche IDR400Mheadphones. They’re the best ear plug style headphones we’ve ever tested and the price, size and quality are all right in the flashpacker sweet spot. Highly recommended.

Scosche IDR400M Noise Cancelling Headphones © Vagabondish.

Icelanders this week are waking up to a bleak McDonald’s-less dystopia. The ubiquitous global chain no longer exists in the increasingly impoverished nation, where a near-total economic collapse has made it too expensive to import McDonald’s products. The island’s three Reykjavik branches, the oldest of which opened 16 years ago, closed for the last time at the end of October. The picture above shows the Sudurlandsbraut neighborhood branch during more economically prosperous times. Even then it seemed a little… austere.

Before you rush to congratulate our Nordic brothers and sisters on having liberated themselves from the shackles of corporate fast food slavery – which, we admit, was our initial reaction as well – consider that they themselves don’t feel particularly liberated:

Noisy crowds, long queues, and traffic jams plunged McDonald’s restaurants in Iceland into a state of siege Saturday, as the chain served its final burgers on the island… Extra staff were deployed to reinforce the outlets, whose disappearance after 16 years means Iceland will be one of the few Western countries without a presence of the ubiquitous eatery. Customers in one branch faced a 20-minute wait to be served and snaking lines of cars caused traffic jams at the drive-in. “I have worked here for six years, and I have never worked as hard as in these final days,” one staff member told AFP.

On our side of the pond, of course, we face the opposite problem. If you want to avoid any sign of McDonald’s – if you really, really can’t stand the sight of Golden Arches – the best you can do is to plant yourself between the towns of Meadow and Glad Valley in South Dakota. There you will have gotten as far away from a McDonald’s as you can in the Continental US. A whole 107 miles:

© Stephen Von Worley

Icelanders Now Totally Bereft Of McDonalds, Americans Still Not So Much © Vagabondish.

Photo of the Moment: Take Me Out of Here, San Jose © Vagabondish.