"The airplane and the airport are equal, in the way that the bottom of one septic tank is equal, all in all, to the bottom of the next septic tank..." Ursula le Guin, Changing Planes
"They say travel broadens the mind. I find it broadens the arse." Anon
"At last, 100 things to not do before you're dead. Stay in - it's the new going out." John Morgan
Welcome to the web's least exciting guide to completely missable bits of the globe
The Tourist Bored is your personal antidote to all those fawning, cliche-sodden travel pages, in magazines, newsprint and online. It's where professional travel writers, often under the liberating guise of anonymity, get the chance to dish the dirt on the world's most hyped and least overwhelming travel "must-sees". Fasten your seatbelt and prepare to go nowhere - and feel all the better for it...
Who is the Tourist Bored?
As yet not sponsored by the EU, the Tourist Bored is written and edited by overseasoned travel and car journalist Simon Hacker, a man who's spent far too many years of his life staring blankly at baggage carousels for the sake of magazine and newspaper travel commissions.
He's written for the travel sections of the Sunday Times, the Independent on Sunday, the Mail on Sunday and a bulging rack of travel and car titles, including BMW Magazine, Peugeot Rapport, The Renault Magazine and the US issue of Lexus. After four years as motoring critic for the Guardian's G2 section, he's now the motoring bloke for the Bulletin in Brussels, contributes an off-beat humour column for What Diesel? magazine and is a regular writer for Tiscali's UK portal. And he was a founding ranter to that most esteemed of anti-travel masterpieces, Crap Towns.
Picture by Jim Forrest
If you really must fly...
Click on the links below to transport yourself from your comfortable chair to somewhere probably less inspiring. Don't say I didn't warn you...
Travelling for love
Travelling for snakes
Staring at holes (actually a place worth visiting)
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Gloom with a view June 23 2008
This just in from North Sumatra: Hotel Polonia in Medan. Is this the worst hotel room view known to travelling man?
Breaking news: coach company comes clean about bus travel...
With thanks to car and travel photographer Tom Salt
Macedonian slapped meat, anyone?
Sun photographer Marc Giddings asks whether anyone else has tried the slapped meat or choked lamb in Skopje, Macedonia. "It's the only restaurant I've ever visited where the prices were marked down on the menu," he tells the Tourist Bored. In the end, he settled on a domestic sausage. Allegedly.
...or perhaps a little bullfrog?
Freelance photographer Simon Childs pondered a Chinese take-away on a recent assignment in Shanghai. Carrefour supermarket's fresh options include amphibians, turtles and generally unrecognisable objects. Tasty.
In defence of the Hotel Slunce... June 17 2008
Unusual circumstances spewed me haplessly to the doors of this less-than-handsome hostel last week. Regular readers will have been regailed (or kept awake perhaps) by the travails of my Czech-Slovakia-Poland migration. What I failed to mention was that, for reasons of personal disagreement with my travelling companion, I booked two separate hotels on my final day. The original was the Hotel Amphone in Brno, which by interesting coincidence is currently being showcased by Tripadvisor as an example of a hotel to avoid. The Plan B hotel was, as above, the spectacularly monikered Hotel Slunce, in Havlickuv Brod, a small town strategically placed between someone you might be driving emphatically away from and Prague airport. But before you brace yourself for some sort of travel-addled tirade on both establishments, neither, I believe is THAT bad. The Amphone is slated for being dowdy, unfriendly and too eager to serve cold meat for breakfast. I found the reception frosty in a typically Czech way, but the owner came over while we waited for the lift to creak into place and took a minute to explain all the facilities. He was very friendly and didn't seem at all drunk. And yes, you could probably furnish the rooms better with what gets fly-tipped from a failed car boot sale, but the Amhone is set next to some divine greenery, in a quiet boulevard, and the rooms are huge - around £40 buying B&B for two. All in all then, it's just not bad enough to be really worth commenting on. And the Slunce? Sadly, this one too is a tad too ok for me to get excited about, despite the truly terrifying edifice. A splendidly bemulleted duo armed with a synthesiser cranked into action on the patio, so I stayed in the restaurant and ordered "head cheese". This I thought might be just a bad translation and it did say it was pickled, which sounded interesting. Being a neovegetarian, I thought I'd be fine. Turns out head cheese is a literal translation of jellied pig's brain in a pastry crust. But we all saw the funny side, as I fell eagerly onto a plate of mozzarella.
If you have any nominations for the Tourist Bored's Truly Most Terrible Hotel of the Year 2008, stick them on the rants page. And thanks to erstwhile colleague Mike Collier for his typically dry observations on Yalta. So far, it seems to be our front runner as the most vile place ever to visit. Or perhaps you disagree...
Stop press: anti-travel ed tries fly-drive holiday to eastern Europe June 12 2008
The driver coming the other way had no intention of reversing. Obstinate Slovakian git, I muttered, before I remembered that horse-driven carts don’t tend to have a reverse gear…
Welcome to a dark, forgotten corner of the EU. These remote hairpins of the Carpathian mountains were last blogged by Jonathan Harker in that bible of bloodsucking delight, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It’s not the kind of place most of us head for a fly-drive. Forever the optimist though, I wasn’t to realise that until the sun began to sink into the brooding, pine-clad slopes and the umpteenth innkeeper had sign-languaged that he had no room for the night.
The trees seemed to reach out as the road became progressively unroadlike. It’s only then that you realise there might be just about enough room in the capacious new Skoda Roomster Scout to sleep the night. Amid the bustle of Brno, back in the Czech Republic, this model’s five-star NCAP rating had been some comfort, but 24 hours on I was more interested in evidence of vampire-repellent security. And then a black shape loomed in the road ahead. Oh no, I screamed. It can’t be. But it was…
Yes, it was the biggest pothole this side of Kabul. A black hole of neglect stretching from one side of the gravel track to the other. There was only one way to go: through it. I paused, got out and checked the bodywork. Hopefully Skoda’s engineers might forgive my timidity. After all, the Scout, a dressed-up version of the standard Roomster MPV, has all the stance of a 4x4 while in reality is a straightforward 4x2 with attitude bolted on, said bolt-ons amounting to extra plastic body mouldings, chunky 16-inch alloy wheels and vampire-repellant fog-lights and roof rails (ideal for strapping on coffins and stakes). Inside, you’re treated to special ‘Scout’ upholstery (not green canvas), sunset glass, tyre-pressure monitoring, ESP, a leather three-spoke steering wheel and gearknob and upmarket aluminium pedals… all very nice, but they say the Titanic was beautifully crafted, too.
Thankfully my confidence was rewarded by a pothole-pulverising performance as we weaved north into the forest, hoping to reach the Polish border and the sanctuary of a lockable hotel door before those garlic-dodging demons caught our scent. And to be fair, they’d have a good chance: the model tested here, at £13,610, comes fitted with the smaller 1.4-litre TDI option. It’s a bit noisy if you work it hard, but it does pull with ease and, if you’re hoping to make it to the next fuel station, is capable of an official average of 53.3mpg. In fact, on my average, this valiant little hero turned in a proud 62.5mpg.
And that included this late-evening scramble. If there were any nasties in these hills, my Scout had convincingly evaded them, offering a cocky two-fingered flourish at 4x4 diehards. All I had to do now was deal with any other obstacles to my foolish plan for a holiday, not least what can be best described as a patchy tourism infrastructure east of Brno. Czech and Slovakia might have had a velvet revolution, but the spontaneous tourist can wake up to a Hessian reality.
Telc (pronounced like 'squelch'), an hour or so west of Brno towards Prague, is the perfect first stop for a fly- drive. A quaint town surrounded by tailored parkland and huge fish ponds, it boasts some of the finest Renaissance architecture known to 70s jigsaw puzzle lids. Room rates here are competitive (though you’ll just need to accept that kipping costs around ten times more than a decent dinner in Czech or Slovakia). Wander east, however, towards (and beyond) Slovakia’s border and things get tricky. I’ll spare you the full directional misery, but the advice is clear: book your rooms ahead and don’t rely on luck. I write with the grizzled rancour of a man who’s tried to buy a pizza in Trencin at 9.59pm. And beware the optimism of many guide books, not least the currency calculations of even the most recent ones: typically, £1 netted some 42Kc in the Czech Republic last year. Now? You’re down to around 30Kc…
That said, my Scout-assisted scamper east of Brno brought a bingefest of architectural, social and gastronomic delights: villages where Trabants still grace driveways and electricity retains a novel edge; small towns shackled with Stalinesque housing developments and locals who (pizzeria waiters aside) are all too happy to forgive your linguistic ignorance. Many of us nonchalantly tick the Czech box with an Easyjet-powered, Pilsner-binged weekend in Prague. But furnished with the kind of reliable, comfy and well-heeled wheels driven here, Czech and Slovakia is far more than that. And up country, the Pilsner’s even better.
# With special thanks to Michelle Henniker at Skoda UK. And copious emnity to Ryanair who charged my visa £10.50 for travel insurance when specifically not requested.
Give Iceland the cold shoulder May 23 2008
The watching ships line up in Reykjavik harbour, waiting for tourist dollars. And so they might: Iceland has an incredible resource to exploit in the form of visiting whale populations. Its whale-watching industry has grown apace in the last decade. And what does its government do? It shows an incredible skill as shooting itself in the foot: this week, this nation's Department of Intellectual Trolls, aka Iceland's Ministery of Fisheries, announces an immediate return to whale killing, in total defiance of the internationally agreed moratorium on the activity.
The initial plan is to harpoon and butcher 40 Minke whales. Last year, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's announcement of an intention to sail in and prevent the slaughter, by deliberately triggering an international incident, was in itself enough to keep the harpoons covered; this year, sadly, Iceland seems to have decided to get down in the gutter of immorality, joining Japan and Norway as powers that put corruption, greed and lies before humanity and true environmental concern. If Iceland's stupid killing spree leaves you feeling powerless, there are many measures you can take: firstly, don't go there. Iceland has far more to lose in touristic revenue than it can gain by staining its waters red. Secondly, you can read the packet before you buy: if it comes from Iceland, leave it in the freezer. And lastly, support a campaigning organisation that puts its money into direct, non-violent, action - a group supported by the Dalai Lama - and one that is currently readying to visit Iceland, very much NOT as a tourist.
Plane stupidity questioned - but airport cancer continues 21st May 2008
How awkward: the UK government commissions its own watchdog, the Sustainable Development Commission, to look into the impact of airport expansion. Today, the SDC issues its findings, the gist being that the implications of airport growth are so murky a further three-year study should be instigated - and expansion at Heathrow and Stansted accordingly shelved. Why the SDC's mutinous caution?
Its top concern is that while everyone bangs on about more flights spelling economic boom, the small issue of UK tourists flying abroad with greater frequency, when they could be spending their cash in Cornwall and Blackpool, hasn't been calculated. And then there's the fog of scientific debate surrounding "contrails" - those high-altitude exhaust streaks that blight our skies with ever-increasing regularity. No one really knows how much damage these cause, but their proximity to the planet's fragile outer skin is hardly a cause for optimism. Thirdly, aviation engineers say cleaner technology will surely save our skins, yet the pace of improvement is undetermined. And in the meanwhile we all fly to Torremolinos on shagged-out wings that should have been retired when Mrs Thatcher scuttled off.
The SDC wants a new aviation policy to be published by 2011. But in the meanwhile the government is expected to allow a third runway at Heathrow this summer. And a planning inquiry verdict into lifting a passenger cap at Stansted is expected any day now... The Tourist Bored will keep you posted.
Why we're all going to hell - via JFK 20th May 2008
So here it is: Trip Advisor's top-ten places to visit, as voted for by droves of cash-rich, idea-starved travel zombies. It was exciting to note that the inescapably arse-numbing predictability of Disney World has been usurped... by the achingly vapid NY branch of Madame Tussauds. In fact, only one opportunity for cultural edification exists here, languishing down at number 10. The clear implication is that 9 out of 10 long-haul flights are being taken not to engage in cultural experience but to queue at burger stands. And that's despite the strenuous efforts being made by US immigration staff to make entry to the US a deeply unpleasant experience...
Top 10: Most Popular Attractions
Check out the top attractions TripAdvisor members are planning to visit this month: 1. Madame Tussauds Wax Museum, N.Y. 2. Walt Disney World, Fla. 3. Saona Island (Isla Saona), Punta Cana, D.R. 4. Top of the Rock Observation Deck, N.Y. 5. Xcaret Eco Theme Park, Mexico 6. Disneyland Park Paris, France 7. South Beach, Miami, Fla. 8. Eiffel Tower, France 9. Universal Studios Hollywood, Calif. 10. Anne Frank House, Holland
