Per CNN, the U.S. Senate is introducing a bill into the Senate to lift the 47 year-old ban on travel to Cuba. Given the Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate, many see this latest effort to ban the ban to be the most viable in years. Per Senator Lugar (interestingly enough, a Republican sponsor of the bill), “we must recognize the ineffectiveness of our current policy and deal with the Cuban regime in a way that enhances U.S. interests.” Please, please finally do away with this acinine travel policy.

Almost as anticipated in the art and travel worlds as the Forbes 100 Richest list is in the financial world, the Top Five Most Visited Museums list was released today, with the Louvre topping the list with over 8.5 million visitors who descended beneath the world’s most famous pyramid (okay, most famous outside of Egypt) in 2008. Second was the British Museum, followed by D.C.’s National Gallery, the Tate Modern, and then NYC’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

At the bottom of the list for the third year in a row is Gering, Nebraska’s own North Platte Valley Museum. A regional museum housing artifacts, documents, and other historical materials related to the rich heritage of the North Platte Valley, it failed to attract even one middle-school field trip in the final quarter of ‘08. “We are striving everyday to improve our museum and to create new and exciting ways to generate excitement for our wonderful exhibits,” said curator Walter Jameson. “We expect that with the additions of our new 3,000-seat IMAX theater and 3-D Cyclorama, we will begin to see an upswing in attendance.”

In our latest (and first) installment of Frommer Watch™, Arthur Frommer is throwing the gauntlet down on user-generated travel review sites. Citing his own ill-advised foray into user-generated advice during the pre-internet days of yore, Frommer recounts how his own guides once contained a “Readers’ Selections” section. That was, until he began to realize that his supposedly authentic tips and advice from ordinary travelers turned out to be, more often than not, coming from less than honest moles working on behalf of manipulative restaurants and hotels.

Nowadays, with the proliferation of user-generated travel sites all over the web (the most prolific newcomer being the Kayak.com spinoff, TravelPost.com), Arthur wonders whether theses sites “are being manipulated or, in some cases, operated with less than professional standards.” He finishes by concluding that it’s inevitable that these sites will fall prey to such manipulation and that the problem is basically “insurmountable.”

I am personally shocked — shocked! — that there is manipulation going on at these sites. I just spent the last, oh 20 seconds or so contemplating this very dilemma and I’m ready to share my own opinions on this debate (for a more thought-out and actual debate, check out the lively comment section below the above-linked article, with Pauline Frommer herself weighing in on her father’s side).

I tend to be suspect of anything that seems to capture the adoration and hearts of the general public (see American Idol, the American version of The Office, Titanic, the Snuggle, and 401K Retirement Plans) but at the same time, I’m just as suspect of so-called expert advice (see Gene Shalit, CNBC, and the Catholic Church). That being said, there are a few, trusted individuals who I either know personally, or have followed their advice long enough to know that they can be trusted, whether that advice concerns a certain band, movie, restaurant, travel locale, etc . . .

I guess what I’m saying is this: I think you should follow those guides that you trust based on past experience, whether they be a giant book publisher, or some guy on TripAdvisor from Kalamazoo that really knows his hotels in Playa del Carmen, and avoid those dubious raves from strangers and the herding masses.

Of course, the philosophy that I actually follow in my own life is to not listen to anyone, strike out with abandonment, make both giant mistakes as well as amazing discoveries, but ultimately find out via my own experiences (bad or good). You know, so I can then give advice to everyone else.

The secret’s out: if you really want to enjoy Barbados, skip the pricey resorts and leathery tourists on the west coast of the island and Go East Young Surfer! to the real Barbados.

As Danielle Pergament explains in her piece in this Sunday’s NYT (remember her? we blogged about her appearance — with video — at the NYT Travel Show this year), “sequestered from the posh resorts by acres of sugar cane fields, thick, verdant forests, and trees full of wild monkeys, [the west coast ] is Barbados’s rougher side.”

Home to one of the hemisphere’s premier (yet little known) surf spots, “much of the eastern and southern coasts already have the trappings of a laidback surfer town — makeshift beer bars, street food vendors selling fried fish, and cheap guesthouses with blue painted walls.”

Thanks Danielle, just in time for my trip to rainy Ireland you have to go ahead and write a story about hanging out and surfing on a beach paradise just hours away from my home by plane. I will spite you and find my own beach paradise on the Emerald Isle and do a little surfing myself, perhaps I’ll even make the local news when I’m helivaced to the nearest frostbite treatment center.

A taste of true Brazilian culture is waiting for you just a short trip from Rio in Minas Gerais.

By Lindsey Witthaus

When most people picture Brazil they usually conjure up images of Rio de Janeiro and its many postcard-worthy locations such as Sugar Loaf Mountain and the famous Ipanema and Copacabana beaches. But let’s be honest, these sites are travel-bait, crawling with tourists all year round. In fact, whenever friends or family have visited me in Brazil, we almost always made the trip there. I’m not saying there’s something wrong with wanting to visit Rio — I was personally obsessed with the idea before my first trip to Brazil — however, why stop with Rio when there’s so much more to see just a short trip outside of the city?

When my two best friends came to visit me in Brazil last summer, I insisted we beat the Rio scene and take the short trip north into the state of Minas Gerais for an authentic glimpse of Brazil’s rural — or Caipira — culture. It was one of the best times of the year to go; during the months of June and July, all the little towns come alive for the annual celebrations, Festa Junina and Julinha. These parties are far from your average church function. Held in small communities or in the courtyard of Portuguese Colonial churches, these blowouts boast live music from bands playing well into the night. You can try an array of special drinks, including hot chocolate with cognac, or a favorite mixed drink consisting of tropical fruit blended with sweetened condensed milk and vodka or cachaça (sugar-cane alcohol). Tents are full of locals selling seasonal food such as roasted corn and the traditional canjiqua: a warm, sweet concoction, best described as a maize porridge. (more…)

One person’s authentic Irish pub may be someone else’s Olive Garden. It seems that with the onset of globalization and the increase of culture exportation, the traditional Irish Pub is the latest to be recreated and commoditized around the world. This article at World Hum discusses the new book, A Pint of Pain, one man’s Super Size Me look at the global pub industry, and the effect it’s had on the originals back in their homeland.

This is exactly what I’m worried about for my trip to Ireland on April 8th. I loathe the idea of finding myself in a pub that I stumbled upon and then to realize that I’m in some sort of mock-up created during the country’s recent boom, filled with German and Australian tourists sipping Guinneses. My solution to this problem is to look for the pub with the most old-timers inside, because you know that place has probably been around for ages if they’re there. So I pledge to go to only pubs where the median age is around 67. That should do it.

Nestled against the eastern coastline of South Africa is Phinda Resource Reserve, a 57,000-acre reserve boasting the Big Five, 380 bird species and a coastline teeming with marine life.

The Independent Online has a great story of one woman’s trek into the bush to track down and catch a peek of one of the 50 rhinos that roam these grasslands. Apparently, to track rhino means you must be comfortable with both touching and smelling their feces, which is why I would probably never make it as a safari guide.

I feel like I used to get e-cards all the time back when the internet was a young lad, now the only e-cards I get are from Putumayo — not that there’s anything wrong with that. Especially since their e-cards play good music (I feel like I remember a large proportion of e-cards I used to get were of animated cats telling me “Happy Birthday”).

Putumayo’s newest online greeting is announcing the release of their new album, “¡Salsa!”, not to be confused with their other salsa album, Salsa Around The World.

The above video is of New York’s own Eddie Palmieri with his new band, Perfecta II, performing Sujétate la Lengua, a track featured on “¡Salsa!”. it’s over 9 minutes long, but come on, it’s Eddie Palmieri, you can listen to this all day long and never get bored. Check out the maraca player at 5:32. A) Would this not be the coolest (and easiest) job in the world? What was that audition like, and who exactly did he beat out? And B) I swear to god I’ve seen this guy hanging out in the store on my corner, chatting it up with the clerk behind the counter and drinking coffee out of a Styrofoam cup.

“Free” and “cheap” seem to be the theme of the site this week, which is probably a reflection of the pitiful state of my bank account (do airlines really need to charge for their tickets?). There are plenty of options for cheap travel, from hostels, street food and just plain mooching, but there are also plenty of better alternatives.

Budget Travel, staying true to their name, has 9 tips for traveling free, including such far-flung proposals such as: #7 — helping out at a farm (depends on what type of farm don’t you think? Is this a quaint, cheese-producing, quirky neighbor-type farm in the South of France or is this a manure farm in Missouri? Big difference), # 2 — volunteering at a hiking trail, or #1, 3, and 6 — crash at someone else’s pad (couchsurfing.com, “Home Swapping,” and sister-city exchanges). The last couchsurfers that stayed at my house gave me a bottle of ice wine, some homemade jam, and an invitation to stay at their — probably much nicer — place any time. What better way to travel?

One doesn’t normally think of Hawaii in late-spring/summer, but one thinks about it a little more when one sees flights there for under $300 (San Fran), $449 (New York/Boson/D.C.) and $533 (Chicago).

Chicagoans rejoice, Costa Rica’s a mere $290 away, way better than nearby Minnesota.

I like this deal. Iceland’s been all over the news lately, and for $437 you can see the country first hand. Living in New York City, it’s hard to say anything bad about anyone else’s financial meltdown, and I’m sure Icelanders probably want nothing to do with any New Yorkers in their country, so just be sure you stray the topic (if possible) from economic policy and currency arbitration and you’ll probably have a great time.

My recent travels have been exclusively cell-phone free, which has had both its advantages and drawbacks. It’s a strangely comforting feeling to revert back to those pre-mobile days where you truly can become detached from the rest of the world (minus your daily blog postings of course), and where meetings take on that old-fashioned feeling (I’ll meet you at 3 in the square, if we don’t see each other, then it was good to meet you). Of course, this can also mean planned encounters often go astray (crowded squares, delays, etc . . . ) and calls via public phones can eat up precious travel time (what exactly was that country code again and when do I enter it?).

To help you out, the Frugal Traveler’s dishing on how to make and receive calls internationally for nearly nothing, all it takes is an unlocked phone (time to strike up a conversation with that shady bodega owner on the corner), a local SIM card, and a Skype account. Unlock the phone, buy a local SIM card, set up a Skype account (thanks Estonia!) and that’s it. Calls to your cellphone will go to Skype, then back out again and to your traveling number. Now to figure out how to block calls from work on Skype . . .

The newest video from John and Cara — who’ve been traveling the world on an epic two-year honeymoon (see all their vids from the trip so far here) — finds them in Kho Pi Pi, one of Thailand’s most famous islands (see The Beach and The Man with the Golden Gun). Parts of the island still bear the scars of the devastating tsunami (2:33) but with views like these (1:31), it’s hard to imagine people won’t be coming here for the rest of time.

For those single folk who aren’t very happy being alone and who are reluctant to watch any sort of video from someone else’s honeymoon, I’d highly advise you to fast forward through the gratuitous Andaman Sea-frolicking that begins at 1:02. For those happily married folk who spent their honeymoon somewhere that involved snow and/or winter jackets, I’d advise the same.

Probably not, but you can make a valiant effort and try, so long as that nasty sunburn doesn’t totally incapacitate you, you survive that skull-crushing fall from the Class IV rapids, and you don’t react too badly from that orange-kneed tarantula bite (actually the venom is unlikely to kill you — more like getting stung by a bee, a bee that injects their victim with liquefying venom).

As the NYT points out, “twenty-seven percent of Costa Rica’s land area is devoted to national parks and reserves, one of the highest percentages for any country.” So it’s unlikely you’ll ever be far from someplace where you can enjoy a different aspect of the outdoors, be it via beach, river, or eco-park. It’s no surprise that Rica is Central America’s most popular destination, with an estimated 1.9  million visitors in 2007 alone.

“The larán Mountains northwest of San José, Costa Rica’s capital, Monteverde is a Disneyland for eco-tourists,” containing such far-flung enterprises as nature tours, private zoos, and a fair-trade coffee plantation. There are also thousands of plant, bird, and animal species to see that call the mountains home. Doesn’t this make you feel bad for those people who wasted their vacation-time in Cancun this Spring ?

CNN’s reporting how travel blogging is changing the world of travel. Such examples include JetBlue’s reluctant policy change to allow folded bikes on their planes (at no charge!), hotel management’s eagerness to quash bad publicity by bribing bloggers with free hotel rooms, and the clarification of WestJet’s breastfeeding policy (allowed!).

In all seriousness, I think what this article’s getting at is how the internet’s filling a void for real, honest, interesting travel coverage untainted by the heavily subsidized, press-junket infiltrated mainstream travel media. (Wow, that last sentence makes me sound like the Sean Hannity of travel blogging. I’ll try to tone it down a bit.)

The travel industry isn’t just hip to blogging. In many cases, it takes blogs more seriously than the mainstream media.

“Blogging has a sense of authority and authenticity that other media doesn’t have,” says Rebecca Goldberg, a hotel design expert and editor-in-chief of Boutique Design magazine.

Here’s where the piece strays a bit. The article goes on to describe how you, the opinionated traveler, can contribute to the travel blogosphere: “All it takes is a computer and an Internet connection.” (Uh-oh, my secret’s out.)

But remember, don’t start some lame, general-focus site that highlights plain old destination travel around the world (yawn). Try focusing on a single topic “like renting cars or visiting a particular destination, and you’re off to the races, say experts.” A car rental blog? They are so striking gold here. What about a comfortable walking shoe blog? A hidden money belt blog? The possibilities are endless!

Also, remember to dumb it down a bit. “Write in a more informal, conversational style” they advise. In other words, don’t respect your reader. What an erudite, sapient specimen of exhortation for us all to excogitate. I really mean that.

Still recovering from that bender known as Katrina, a road trip to the Big Easy reveals how New Orleans isn’t letting a little hangover prevent it from enjoying life, just like it always has.

By Ted Hesson

We decided to take a road trip for several reasons: moving, freelance work, sightseeing, hell-raising, escapism, rock and roll — the usual motives. Since it was freezing cold in New York, the three of us thought it would be smarter to move southerly before hanging a right towards the West Coast. While my two friends ventured on to California, though, my final stop on the trip would actually be New Orleans, a city that I had always wanted to visit. I expected to find, among other things: heaps of spicy seafood, Bayou-tinged blues, unparalleled architecture, non-stop debauchery and the remnants of one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the United States. For better or for worse, it was all there.

From Atlanta, we took the slow road to the Big Easy, making a few stops along the way. We spent an hour in Montgomery, where we discovered a Disney-esque downtown devoid of inhabitants, save some chatty pharmacy workers, with whom we talked about New York, Alabama’s quiet capital and, eventually, New Orleans. “Y’all goin’ to New Orleans?” one worker said. “Na, I wouldn’t go if I were you. Y’all gonna get boogled.” Our Yankee ears must have translated it poorly, because I’m sure what she meant to say was that we would get “voodooed,” but either way, I got the point. She thought New Orleans seemed pretty freaky, and as a childhood fan of Anne Rice, I didn’t disagree. But, to put things in perspective, it was rush hour in Montgomery, and I hadn’t heard a honking horn or shouting pedestrian yet. Seemed to be just as good of a chance of getting boogled here as anywhere else. We hopped back in the van and decided to take our chances with whatever witchcraft might lay in wait. (more…)