Exotic Spa of the Day- Coconut Spa

Recommendation- Chocolat Body Scrub or Papaya Body Wrap

Cool Minimalist Hotels

The Business Model;

“In the old days, the bigger the space in a hotel, the more luxury you had,” said Simon Woodroffe, the chain’s founder. “But very, very rich people stay in reasonably small spaces on luxury yachts, and very, very rich people travel in extremely small spaces on Learjets.”...

But these new hotels are even smaller, almost like chic youth hostels, said Lalia Rach, dean of the Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism and Sports Management at New York University. The emphasis on style over space — one way to make the economics work for a budget hotel in an expensive urban center, Dr. Rach said — appeals to out-of-towners who want to feel like New Yorkers, right down to fleeing a shoebox to experience the city’s culture and nightlife.

“This is attractive to a very large market,” she said, referring to travelers ages 16 to 30. “They want to live the destination, not live the hotel.”

At the same time, the theory goes, these hotels need to be destinations for the locals — or at least to feel as if they could be — for guests to sense that they are tapping into the real New York. So Yotel, whose futuristic rooms feature purple mood lighting and private monsoon showers, plans to turn part of its fourth floor over to a restaurant, bar and 20,000-square-foot outdoor patio.

Pod Hotel;

The Pod Hotel offers hip, convenient, and personalized accommodations for the stylish and spendthrifty traveler

Yotel;

"I was lucky enough to get an upgrade to the sleeper bed in British Airways first class. I went to sleep with the conundrum of how to make a Japanese capsule hotel acceptable in the west and woke up realising the solution was around me: all I needed to do was find the designer of the BA first class cabin and ask them to help me design a hotel."

Room Mate Grace
The Ace
The Jane
Morgans

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GLAM

Photo of the Day

Source: 36 Hours in New York City

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Photo of the Day - Caddo Lake

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Japanese clean Paris

Japan syndrome” hits about 10 Japanese tourists to Paris a year. The victims are so disappointed at the dirty streets and rude waiters that they succumb to a nervous breakdown at the idea of having wasted a week of leave and savings on a trip to the City of Lights.

There is said to be a psychologist, Japanese of course, who treats these despondent compatriots at the embassy

-Japan expats clean up Paris

From Crotch Crescent to Penistone

In the scale of embarrassing place names, Crapstone ranks pretty high. But Britain is full of them. Some are mostly amusing, like Ugley, Essex; East Breast, in western Scotland; North Piddle, in Worcestershire; and Spanker Lane, in Derbyshire.

Others evoke images that may conflict with residents’ efforts to appear dignified when, for example, applying for jobs.

These include Crotch Crescent, Oxford; Titty Ho, Northamptonshire; Wetwang, East Yorkshire; Slutshole Lane, Norfolk; and Thong, Kent. And, in a country that delights in lavatory humor, particularly if the word “bottom” is involved, there is Pratts Bottom, in Kent, doubly cursed because “prat” is slang for buffoon.

As for Penistone, a thriving South Yorkshire town, just stop that sophomoric snickering.

“It’s pronounced ‘PENNIS-tun,’ ” Fiona Moran, manager of the Old Vicarage Hotel in Penistone, said over the telephone, rather sharply. When forced to spell her address for outsiders, she uses misdirection, separating the tricky section into two blameless parts: “p-e-n” — pause — “i-s-t-o-n-e.”

-No Snickering: That Road Sign Means Something Else

Your Next Vacation Destination

Make it Bolivia

Well Souled- New Age Tourism?

Mitah Shah and Mark Leibowitz at Google;

At the heart of Well Souled is the belief that lasting impressions are those that come naturally through the people you meet on your travels and how they connect you to the context, sharing their perspectives on the attitudes, sounds, colors, and textures that surround you. This is how travel becomes emotional -- soulful. Well Souled translates this kind of cultural immersion into lifestyle products that celebrate the sensory experience of travel.

U.S.-Cuba Tourism will be bad for Caribbean tourism?

Recently from the Fund;Vacation Over: Implications for the Caribbean of Opening U.S.-Cuba Tourism ;

An opening of Cuba to U.S. tourism would represent a seismic shift in the Caribbean’s tourism industry. This study models the impact of such a potential opening by estimating a counterfactual that captures the current bilateral restriction on tourism between the two countries. After controlling for natural disasters, trade agreements, and other factors, the results show that a hypothetical liberalization of Cuba-U.S. tourism would increase long-term regional arrivals. Neighboring destinations would lose the implicit protection the current restriction affords them, and Cuba would gain market share, but this would be partially offset in the short-run by the redistribution of non-U.S. tourists currently in Cuba. The results also suggest that Caribbean countries have in general not lowered their dependency on U.S. tourists, leaving them vulnerable to this potential change.

Photos of the Day- Istanbul

See more from the photographer- Neeka

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Inspired by Arthur C. Clarke

Jeff Greenwald

Book recommendation- The Size of the World

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Photo of the Day- Peleş Castle, Romania

A New 'Guided Democracy' made by the King

It will be interesting to hear Bryan Caplan's views on this new experiment in a tiny country.

For Discussion: Who's a genuine Bhutanese Citizen?

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Voting on the king's orders;

Yet the king's decrees—formulated into an overarching policy of “Gross National Happiness”, as opposed to economic growth at any cost—have not always helped alleviate poverty. Stringent checks on the exploitation of Bhutan's timber, for example, have helped ensure that rapid economic growth has created relatively few jobs. Though furnished with free medicine and education, some 20% of Bhutanese live below the poverty line.

A big minority—Nepali-speakers from the country's south—have deeper grievances. Under pressure in the late 1980s to adopt the culture of the majority, some arose violently. In response, the government drove around 60,000 (including, it says, many illegal immigrants) into Nepal. More than 100,000 still languish there in UN-run camps; America has offered sanctuary to 60,000.

This will not end the worries of the 100,000-odd Nepali-speakers who remain in Bhutan. Thousands have allegedly been denied citizenship because of their association with those in exile. For the southerners, at least, democracy promises something better. Nine of the DPT's winning candidates were Nepali-speakers. Officials in both parties said that resolving the southerners' grievances was a priority.

In general, candidates promised voters more of the benefits the king gave, including roads and electricity. Some villagers quietly complained about the former regime. By tradition, the king gives land to the landless and timber for house-building. Yet in the remote village of Miseytang, a poor landless trader said that after a month spent presenting her petition in Thimpu, a nine-hour drive away, she had received half an acre of protected forestry land. “It's useless to me,” she lamented, standing outside her fine house, facing a school where her three children were educated free, next to a health clinic, also free.

Most Bhutanese applaud the king's rule. But his decision to impose democracy on them looks canny. There is enough social change evident in Bhutan to suggest a political change was in store. In Thimpu, a city of 100,000, unemployment, and disgruntlement, is rising among educated youths. “Bad Boyz!” exclaims graffiti on a Thimpu building-site. The former regime's success in education, and failure to boost Bhutan's tiny private sector, is partly to blame for their frustrations. So is a fresh limit on civil-service hiring; last year around a third of the country's new 1,200 university graduates found no state job.

The new government will have to find jobs for the boyz. In the short term, tourism is the best hope. A plan to double the number of tourists (20,000 last year) aims to create a total of 100,000 jobs in the sector. This will require a new international airport; the current one, at Paro, is shunned by every national carrier except Bhutan's because of its terrifying hilly approach.

More important, to improve the lot of poor peasants, the government will have to lead them out of subsistence farming. To bring their goods to market, alas, many more roads must no doubt be bulldozed through pristine forests. And the last of the hidden kingdom will come into view.

The Places in Between

The Places in Between

Cuba and our biases

Adrian Lopez Denis finds it laughable that even the best of the Anglo-American media, The Economist and The New Yorker, made iconic covers of cigar smoke (and crushed cigar butts) when Fidel Castro bowed out of office — a man who quit smoking 40 years ago, in a country that has produced a generation of creative young survivors since the heyday of the 1959 Revolution.

Listen to the podcast.

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Notes From The Margin

Poverty Voyeurism

Slum Visits: Tourism or Voyeurism?;

Slum tourism, or “poorism,” as some call it, is catching on. From the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the townships of Johannesburg to the garbage dumps of Mexico, tourists are forsaking, at least for a while, beaches and museums for crowded, dirty — and in many ways surprising — slums. When a British man named Chris Way founded Reality Tours and Travel in Mumbai two years ago, he could barely muster enough customers for one tour a day. Now, he’s running two or three a day and recently expanded to rural areas.

Slum tourism isn’t for everyone. Critics charge that ogling the poorest of the poor isn’t tourism at all. It’s voyeurism. The tours are exploitative, these critics say, and have no place on an ethical traveler’s itinerary.

“Would you want people stopping outside of your front door every day, or maybe twice a day, snapping a few pictures of you and making some observations about your lifestyle?” asked David Fennell, a professor of tourism and environment at Brock University in Ontario. Slum tourism, he says, is just another example of tourism’s finding a new niche to exploit. The real purpose, he believes, is to make Westerners feel better about their station in life. “It affirms in my mind how lucky I am — or how unlucky they are,” he said.

Not so fast, proponents of slum tourism say. Ignoring poverty won’t make it go away. “Tourism is one of the few ways that you or I are ever going to understand what poverty means,” said Harold Goodwin, director of the International Center for Responsible Tourism in Leeds, England. “To just kind of turn a blind eye and pretend the poverty doesn’t exist seems to me a very denial of our humanity.”

The crucial question, Mr. Goodwin and other experts say, is not whether slum tours should exist but how they are conducted. Do they limit the excursions to small groups, interacting respectfully with residents? Or do they travel in buses, snapping photos from the windows as if on safari? ...

By most accounts, slum tourism began in Brazil 16 years ago, when a young man named Marcelo Armstrong took a few tourists into Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro’s largest favela, or shantytown. His company, Favela Tour, grew and spawned half a dozen imitators. Today, on any given day in Rio, dozens of tourists hop in minivans, then motorcycles and venture into places even Brazil’s police dare not tread. Organizers insist the tours are safe, though they routinely check security conditions. Luiz Fantozzi, founder of the Rio-based Be a Local Tours, says that about once a year he cancels a tour for security reasons.

The tours may be safe, but they can be tense. Rajika Bhasin, a lawyer from New York, recalls how, at one point during a favela tour, the guide told everyone to stop taking pictures. A young man approached the group, smiling and holding a cocked gun. Ms. Bhasin said she didn’t exactly feel threatened, “just very aware of my surroundings, and aware of the fact that I was on this guy’s turf.”

Still, she said, the experience, which included visiting galleries featuring the work of local artists, was positive. “Honestly, I would say it was a life-changing experience,” Ms. Bhasin said. Saying she understood the objections, she parried, “It has everything to do with who you are and why you’re going.”

Environment Fact of the Day

The tiny island nation of Kiribati, the former Gilbert Islands, declared the world’s largest marine protected area, a 164,200-square-mile ocean wilderness that includes pristine reefs and eight coral atolls teeming with fish and birds. The zone, about halfway between Hawaii and Fiji, will conserve one of Earth’s last intact oceanic coral archipelago ecosystems.

-Kiribati: Vast Marine Reserve Created

Economic Cost of Rabies

Olivia Judson writes in NYT blog- The Wild Side;

Each year, the disease kills about 55,000 people — that’s 150 a day — almost all of them in the poorest parts of Africa and Asia, and more than 7 million people receive post-exposure treatment after being bitten by a rabid animal. Treatment is not just expensive, but time-consuming: a full course of vaccination requires five visits to a hospital or health clinic during one month. Which, if you live in rural Africa, can mean many hours of travel and time not working. Indeed, the global economic cost of rabies is estimated to be more than $583 million. And that doesn’t count the trauma that deaths from rabies inflict on families and communities. For though rabies kills many fewer people than malaria, it causes far, far more fear....

And vaccinating dogs is cheap. The vaccine costs about $1.50 per animal, and that includes the cost of delivering it. A country like Tanzania has around 5 million domestic dogs. To vaccinate 70 percent of them for one year would cost less than $6 million.

And how you'd die if you get rabies;

Often the first symptom is itching around the site of the bite. Sometimes, it’s an itching so intense that people will tear open their own skin as they scratch. The victim becomes afraid of water, to the point where drinking becomes impossible, no matter how great the thirst: the sight of a glass of water will induce spasms of terror so severe that the victim will hurl the glass away and may retch so violently as to tear the lining of the throat. The vocal cords become paralyzed, distorting the voice. Saliva may become thick and heavy. And then comes the madness.

“At the peak of excitement, the patient’s whole nervous system seems to be aroused. He is in a state of extreme agitation and has frightening hallucinations. His face is a mask of terror. He shouts incomprehensibly at the top of his distorted voice. His body is racked with tremors or spasms. He may struggle frantically and powerfully to free himself from constraints and try to escape from the room.”

Episodes of madness continue until the victim falls into a coma; this is followed by paralysis and death. Sometimes the madness includes ferocious, biting, attacks on anyone nearby. Sometimes it includes a sexual frenzy and attempted rape.

If you arrived in a Western hospital with symptoms of rabies, you’d be sedated until you died. In poor countries, where hospitals are scarce and sedatives scarcer, often nothing can be done, and the victim may be locked into a room, alone, to die. Usually, the victims are children.

Money is Money?

"Euros Accepted" signs pop up in New York City