How Long Does It Take To Paddleboard From Cuba To Florida?

by Elizabeth Seward on

Ben Friberg is a 35 year old musician from Chattanooga, Tennessee who recently became the first person to paddleboard from Cuba to Florida. According to a Reuters interview, Friberg’s almost entirely stand-up feat last week was an endeavor to “promote peace and understanding between Cuba and the United States and to promote a healthy lifestyle.” The journey between Cuba and Key West, Florida is 110 miles. Friberg completed the trip in 28 hours, sitting only for snacks. He was followed by a support boat that included a navigator as well as a medic.

What Are The Rules For Breastfeeding On A Plane?

by Elizabeth Seward on

It has happened yet again: a mother breastfeeding on a plane was allegedly treated poorly by an airline staff member. The mother was breastfeeding on an American Airlines flight last month while sitting in a window seat next to her husband. Since American Airlines has publicly stated that breastfeeding is allowed on their flights during all stages of flight and that flight attendants should not place restrictions or requirements on breastfeeding mothers, the mother felt free to breastfeed. However, a disgruntled flight attendant requested that she cover up, citing that there were kids present on the plane at the time.

The couple refused and the flight attendant later returned to their aisle, telling a girl seated in the aisle next to the husband that her seat was going to be changed, projecting that the girl was uncomfortable despite the fact that the girl hadn’t complained about the breastfeeding. According to the couple, the flight attendant did not offer service to the couple for the remainder of the flight.

American Airlines responded to the complaint filed by the mother in a letter that was posted to Facebook by a friend of the mother. American Airlines stated in the letter that they believe it is reasonable to request that a mother cover up and that breastfeeding be conducted with modesty and discretion, despite the fact that the manual states that mothers should be able to breastfeed without restriction or requirement and the fact that 45 states allow mothers to breastfeed in any public or private location.

United Airlines, American Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines and others have stated that breastfeeding is not prohibited while on the plane. Whether a breastfeeding mother should be required to cover up, however, seems more ambiguous. What are your thoughts on requiring or requesting that breastfeeding mothers cover up?

#lpmemories: Some Personal Reminiscences And Reflections

by Don George on

When news emanated from the Melbourne headquarters of Lonely Planet two weeks ago that the iconic publisher of guidebooks and related travel titles was laying off up to 80 editors and other staffers, shock waves reverberated throughout the travelsphere. LP is the world’s largest guidebook publisher, with 500 titles covering 195 countries, produced by hundreds of writers and editors, and speculation surged in social media and old school journalism circles alike that this move portended the end of print guidebooks, or at least the demise of LP as a guidebook power.

Shortly after the announcement and its aftermath, LP’s new owners, NC2, which had purchased the publisher from BBC Worldwide in March, released a statement saying “At the end of last week, Lonely Planet began engaging with its global workforce regarding its plan for the future, which includes a restructure of the business. Since that process began, reports have emerged in the media that Lonely Planet has plans to exit the content business. These reports are untrue and stand in stark contrast to the company’s renewed commitment to great content for both print and digital offerings. … Lonely Planet remains committed to delivering quality content to our travellers, as we have over the last 40 years. There are currently no plans to reduce our breadth of destination content, or our product offering in digital or print. Large scale cuts to our guidebook publishing list are unfounded and categorically untrue and Lonely Planet is committed to continuing to publish guidebooks.”

Despite this assertion, debate about the fate of print guides in general and LP’s in particular has spread, and some other publishers have been moved to reaffirm their commitment to keep their guidebooks in print. Pauline Frommer, who with her father recently reacquired the Frommer trademark from Google, wrote to me in an email: “Starting this October, we’re going to be putting out 30 new editions: 10 will be updates from the very popular Day by Day series, and 20 new guides in a series we’re calling The Easy Guides. … We hope to be up to 80 titles by next fall. (We do recognize that digital media is a huge tool for travelers and so concurrent with the print publication of the guides will be the publication of e-books and apps, and the upkeep and expansion of Frommers.com.)” And Rick Steves, head of his own eponymous empire, wrote me: “I am very much committed to print. … Our guidebooks are literally selling better than ever. I have 30 or 40 in print and, as I have every year for the last 25, I’m in Europe right now for 4 months researching with my team.”

No clear conclusions about the future of publishing can be drawn at this point from the LP news, but one truth has emerged very clearly from the reaction to that news, and that is how deeply important guidebooks are to many people, how they become intimately interwoven into the narrative of our lives. This truth has found poignantly rippling expression in a Twitter thread – hashtagged #lpmemories — started by longtime LP author Celeste Brash.

“I started #lpmemories in reaction to all the layoffs because I was sad and sharing the good times with people was a therapy,” Celeste wrote me.

“The first post was on July 19th: ‘Once, in Sulawesi I had the honking King of taxi drivers. He honked at sticks in the road when he had nothing else to honk at #lpmemories.’ I followed this with two more #lpmemories, then Zora O’Neil, another LP author, chimed in. I did a few more, then LP authors Sally O’Brien and Sara Benson got in on it. Elizabeth Eaves got in on it somewhere in between as the first non-LPer, so I tweeted: ‘Thanks @ElisabethEaves! Hoping #lpmemories are for everyone, @lonelyplanet users, authors, whoever.’

“The first reporter to pick up the story was Bronwen Clune from the Guardian. Then everyone started writing about it, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Time, the Telegraph and then the New Yorker. It’s just taken on a life of its own. But the story was always the same (and based on Bronwen’s information — she was the only one who reached out), that #lpmemories was a sort of eulogy for LP and guidebooks in general. I’m not sure either of those are dead. My original intention was just to think about the good times in honor of my colleagues who had just lost their jobs and LP which had just fired a big part of the heart of the company, the many people who made it what it is.”

A week after it launched, the #lpmemories thread had lengthened to many hundreds if not thousands of tweets, with posters ranging from battle-scarred LP author-veterans to everyday on-the-road enthusiasts. Reading the thread feels like attending a joyous-sad, wanderlust-full wake-cum-celebration, filled with nostalgia-drenched 140-character recollections of misadventure and magic.

Tracking this journey has been profoundly poignant for me. I was the Global Travel Editor at LP from 2001-2007, and I have my own treasure chest of indelible memories from that period, but much more deeply, the company has been an integral part of my traveling life since the summer of 1978, when I set off from Tokyo for a two-month meander through Southeast Asia with a compact yellow book titled South-East Asia on a Shoestring in hand.

Already dubbed the Yellow Bible by fellow backpackers, this guide — increasingly tattered, beer-stained, curry-spattered, starred, underlined, and scribbled-in-the-margins as the trip progressed — became my invaluable travel counsel and companion; it told me where to eat and stay and what to do, but even more importantly, it gave me essential bits of history and culture that taught me how to act respectfully in a place and how to peer under its surface and get a sense of its heart and soul. Years before Lonely Planet co-founders and Shoestring authors Maureen and Tony Wheeler became actual friends of mine, they felt like friends because of their ground-level approach to foreign cultures and their personal voice that seemed to speak directly to me -– and to all my fellow tribe members who traipsed around Asia clutching their tome like a talisman.

I used the Yellow Bible to navigate Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. It took me to Lake Toba and Yogyakarta and Bali, Kuala Lumpur and Malacca. When I was marooned by a missed bus connection in what seemed a middle-of-nowhere place called Kuala Kangsar, it comforted me with news of a historic temple I should visit. And when I arrived exhausted and famished in Penang, it led me to a soul-reviving guesthouse and a street-stall feast that was one of the best meals of my trip. The Wheelers’ advice was straightforward and simple, and delivered with we’ve-done-this authority and god-we-love-travel passion.

Recalling this period now, 35 years later, it feels to me like the beginning of a travel revolution. Coinciding with larger economic and technological changes that suddenly enabled more and more travelers to venture more and more widely around the world, the LP guidebooks inspired and empowered people to explore on their own. And crucially, by example and edification, they encouraged travelers to take seriously the history and culture of the places they were visiting, to take time to learn about the beliefs and practices prevalent there. Do so and you’ll have a deeper, richer, happier experience, they preached. And they were right. But the usually unspoken and even more important message was that this kind of attitude/approach was fundamentally important on a human level.

In this sense, I believe that the Wheelers, and other early, enterprising guidebook creators who promulgated similar principles, played an immeasurably important role in encouraging travelers to become better world citizens, to be both knowledgeable and empathetic about other peoples and places, and to appreciate the everyday from the local person’s perspective. Like the best travel writing of all kinds, their work — and the works of the hundreds of similarly impassioned and empathetic writers and editors they hired over the years — brought the world closer together.

Consider the ever-expanding ripples of this effect over the company’s 40-year history, and you could argue that on a popular, person-to-person level, LP has contributed as much towards world understanding and peace as any other institution on the planet.

Of course, I’m biased. From 2001 to 2007, I wrote a weekly column for lonelyplanet.com and was the global spokesperson for LP. I’ve edited seven LP literary anthologies, with an eighth scheduled for publication next year. I’m the author of LP’s Guide to Travel Writing, which has been the signature creation of my professional career. So I owe a great, great deal to Lonely Planet. In addition, Tony and Maureen Wheeler are personal friends, and though I left the LP staff six years ago, I’ve maintained friendships with dozens of colleagues in its Melbourne, London and Oakland offices.

But for two decades before I joined the LP staff, I was just a far-flung fan like any other, relying on its guides to find my way around and into more than 80 countries, from the haute cafes of Paris to the hinterlands of Pakistan. Perusing the guidebook on the plane became a rite of passage for me, the blessing of each new adventure. It opened the portals of possibility, posing the head- and heart-quickening question: What wonders await?

Many of those wonders were pointed out in the books, but equally important, the books gave me the grounding confidence to venture out and find other wonders on my own. This is just as much a legacy of LP for me as the hostels, festivals, and off-the-beaten-path attractions it spotlighted. LP gave me the courage to leave the guide in the guesthouse and explore beyond its pages. Ironically enough, it made the planet less lonely, more friendly. It paved the path to a truth I found time and time again: that people around the world generally care for each other, whatever their background, ethnicity, and political and religious beliefs, that kindness is the glue of human connection.

I began this rambling word-journey thinking I would recall some of my own most poignant #lpmemories. But I realize now that the path has led in a different direction, that the hashtagged signpost has pointed me to a very personal celebration of the past and a heartfelt hope about the future of LP. From the Yellow Bible to the Blue-Spined Book, LP has immeasurably enriched my life’s journey and, as that ever-lengthening Twitter thread testifies, the life journeys of innumerable people around the world. In an age when intractable divisiveness, superficial advice, and anonymous expertise threaten to become the norm, its legacy and calling seem more important than ever before.

Developing The Island Of Sal: Cape Verde

by Elizabeth Seward on


Nearly three hours past the scheduled landing time, my flight from Lisbon to the island of Sal, Cape Verde (Ilha Do Sal), is now taxiing to the gate. The local time is almost 3 in the morning and I’ve just spent the last 18 hours in Lisbon, where it’s 5 in the morning. My internal clock says it’s midnight, the beginning of a Thursday, and by that clock, I haven’t slept since Monday night, which can also be communicated as: it’s been 42 hours since I’ve slept. The friend I’m traveling with has brought three significantly heavy bags with her and needs me to carry one of them. I have my own bag, of course, on top of a backpack and a bad case of tendonitis. The bag I’m carrying for my friend is one that doesn’t have wheels. It just drags along the concrete resilient as a military tank. I feel as though I’m dragging along the concrete untouched too, but my outer shell is fictional, comprised entirely of my nonplussed delirium.

%Gallery-194271%I locate a man standing at the arrivals gate holding a sign for the hotel where we’re staying, Hotel Morabeza. My online research informed me that the hotel holds a decent ranking among travelers and locals alike. It’s rated as one of the island’s best hotels and the fact that a driver is here at this late hour despite my inability to inform the hotel of the flight’s delay is reassuring to me. The man leads us in the direction of the hotel shuttle and one of my arms is dragging this clunking vinyl bag down a rugged outdoor ramp while the other is guiding my rolling suitcase when a boy appears out of what seems like nowhere to assist with the luggage-loading. I’m wondering whether or not he works with the hotel or if maybe he’s the driver’s son. I then realize he’s just a local kid seizing an opportunity to earn some money, but when I open my mouth to speak, to tell him that I don’t even have Cape Verdean escudos yet to give him, I notice that he only has one arm and yet he’s already hoisted this cumbersome bag up and into the van. He looks about 11 or 12 years old. The man who led us to the vehicle says nothing, his lips seem pursed but his face is sympathetic. When the boy asks the question I knew he’d ask, my heart sinks.

“Coins? Can you spare some coins?” he’s wide awake and, if I might conjecture, exuding a bit of pride over the impressive physical feat he just performed, in a matter of seconds to boot.

“I don’t have any,” I say, confident that it’s true, but rummaging through my purse all the same, because, well, maybe I’m wrong.

It’s probably just because I’m tired, but I want to cry. Poverty and distress can be found everywhere, but most of my travel has been to developing countries wherein the pleas for help are especially plentiful. I know to expect it, I know to prepare for it and I know to not let every request that’s met with my sincerely empty pockets eat me up inside. But I feel my insides being eaten. I have tendonitis. He has one arm.

My friend finally uncovers some coins in her wallet, although it’s too dark for her to tell if they are euros, Belize dollars, or US dollars. She hands them to the boy and he exits the scene as instantly as he had entered.

***

The country of Cape Verde has been held up against other African nations as a beacon of hope; an example of how a young country can best execute democracy. But the islands of this archipelago nation each face their own specific struggles and successes, and Sal’s trajectory seems to have always looked the way it does now: equal parts bleak and promising. Discovered (officially) by the Portuguese in 1460 and originally called “Llana,” the island’s name was changed to “Sal,” which is the word for salt in Portuguese, once the ancient salt of Pedra de Lume was uncovered. The first commercial use of the island was that of a transatlantic slave trade center. The Portuguese brought slaves over to the island from West Africa to the Cape Verdean islands. With exclusive rights to trade slaves from the West African coast, the islands’ slave markets were popular until the exclusivity of West African coast slaves ended in 1560.

Droughts and famines followed on the island of Sal, which is the oldest island of the Cape Verde islands. Hardly any vegetation grows thanks to the low annual rainfall, which nearly categorizes the island as a desert island. The landscape is harsh and unforgiving. The salt from Pedra de Lume was lucratively mined and sold during the 18th century, but the mines are effectively defunct these days. The population of 35,000 is sustained largely on tourism alone now, but the tourism industry can be a double-edged sword on an island like Sal. On one hand, travelers find the white and sandy beaches to be a sunny paradise and perfect for water sports, like surfing, and they bring money to the island when they choose it as their vacation spot. This is arguably very good for the island. On the other hand, these travelers are wealthier than the locals by a large margin and can not only drive up the price of local goods but even worse: stay inside an all-inclusive hotel without circulating any of their money into the local economy.

From the vantage point of Sal’s beaches, the local economy doesn’t necessarily enter conversation. But when traveling inland, the dusty shantytowns are expansive and what might have been the suburbs in some areas are instead a tribe of half-finished skeletons of buildings whose construction was halted mid-way due to a recession. With the influx in tourism to the island, the government is now spending millions developing a sustainable infrastructure for Sal and its economy. Plans for renovations to the airport, fishing port (Palmeira) and local roads have been underway for over a year. With an emphasis on tourism and a collective effort that will support tourism, it seems as though the little island of Sal might continue to persevere against all odds. While Sal has experienced the highest rate of growth among the Cape Verde islands, the unemployment-related poverty is still staggering. The island’s future is in the hands of tourism and the dichotomy of positive and negative effects it brings to the island. Should the tourism decline, should the little boy with one arm have no one to ask for money, should local merchants have no customers, should fewer passengers disembark the planes that land at the island’s international airport – should these circumstances transpire, it’s difficult to envision the inhabitants of the island maintaining their resilience.

[Photo Credit: Elizabeth Seward]

Travel’s Three Gifts: Notes from an Indonesian Island

by Candace Rose Rardon on

The first time I meet Rai is at the morning market in Sampalan, the largest town on the Indonesian island of Nusa Penida.

She says hello to me from behind mounds of mangos and bright green chilies at the stall she runs with her mother. Despite the heat, she wears a purple hoodie zipped to the neck. We chat for a while, her brown eyes glowing, her dark hair pulled back from her face.

I see her again the next night, at a dance lesson in her village. After the lesson finishes, she asks, “You come to my home?”
And because I have no other plans on this Saturday night, I say, “Why not?”

Rai sits behind me on my motorbike and directs me down an unlit gravel lane. The farther we go, the more the road disintegrates beneath my wheels. I apologize each time we hit a bump.

“Candace,” she chides, “every day I am taking these roads.”

When we reach her house, her family is seated on their concrete front porch. I’m told to call her fisherman father Bapa, and her mother Meme. Her brother Putu and sister-in-law Kadek are also there. Putu is 21, his wife 20; already, Rai tells me, they have lost two children. One died “in belly,” another at 13 days old.

When I try to find the words to say I’m sorry, Kadek smiles an impossible smile and says, “No problem. It’s okay.”

“Tomorrow you can help me selling in the market?” Rai asks.

Again I say, “Why not?”

“And tonight, you sleep at my home?”

For a moment, I mumble something about my homestay at a modified hostel in Sampalan. And then it hits me – I’ve just been offered an actual homestay.

Rai goes to take a shower, and afterwards asks if I’d like to take one, too. Bapa warns me — it’s only a “manual shower,” and the bathroom is outdoors, open for all to see, its walls barely reaching up to my chest.

Still, it’s far enough from the house – and lit only by the glow of Rai’s flashlight – that I soon let go of modesty and strip down, dipping a plastic tumbler into a bucket and feeling the water cool my sticky skin. I tilt my head back, take in the incandescent sky above me, and thank the universe for this moment.

Because that’s the first gift travel gives me – the gift of discovery, and the thrill of encountering a world so completely different from my own.

We set our alarms for 4 a.m., and I lie beside Rai on a foam mat on the floor. Her parents will sleep in the living room. After they turn off the TV, the only sounds are the occasional calls of a gecko and the ticking of a heart-shaped clock on the cinderblock wall – and Rai’s quiet breathing next to me.

I glance to my side and see that the frangipani blossom she’d picked earlier is still tucked behind her ear. I am slow to fall asleep, kept awake by gratitude and wonder at finding myself so at home here.

Because that’s the second gift that travel gives me – the gift of belonging, and the thrill of journeying so far from home only to find a home in such a new place.

The following morning, we arrive at the market when the chickens are still asleep in the trees. Yet we’re far from the first ones here. Women are setting up their stalls with flashlights held between their ears and shoulders like telephones. They roll back the sheets of blue plastic that covered their tables overnight. Rai complains of moths eating her tomatoes.

Like a pot coming to boil, the market slowly heats up. Sandals begin to slap against the dusty paths, plastic bags rustling as they’re filled with corn and cassava and grapes the size of golf balls. While Rai sells produce – carrots and chilies, garlic and red pearl onions – I stand next to her, helping where and when I can.

For the next three days, I return each morning, until the day comes for me to say goodbye and depart from Nusa Penida.

I’m still in touch with Rai – through Facebook, of course – and every now and then I’ll get a message from her, asking how I am. I smile each time, remembering the market and the manual shower and how it felt to fall asleep in the damp darkness of her home.

Because that’s the third gift that travel gives me, and it’s the reason I’ll never stop traveling – the gift of connection, and the thrill of weaving an invisible web around us as we move through the world, and the world moves through us.

The connections that keep each journey alive forever.