The Titanic Awards

Name Jason Cochran
Who? He was awarded Guide Book of the Year by the North American Travel Journalists Association for Pauline Frommer’s London. He is a regular writer for the New York Post, AOL’s WalletPop.com, and Travel + Leisure.com.  He has also written for Budget Travel (as senior editor), New York Daily News, New York Times, Travel + Leisure, Newsweek, Frommers.com,  Arena (U.K.), Who (Australia), and Scanorama (Sweden).   As a commentator, he has appeared on CNN, Australia.com, WOR, Outdoor Life Network, MSNBC.com, and many radio programs.  He spent nearly two years backpacking solo around the world and now lives in NYC.
Age 37
Countries Visited 55

Titanic Nominations
Worst Metro Glasgow Underground. Tiny as a dollhouse, loud as a jet, and it only goes around in a circle.
Worst Airline Policy Charging for water. You can’t take your own through security, yet SAS, Ryanair, and countless others charge €3 for it. Pure trap-and-gouge.
Worlst Flies Australia’s Northern Territory. They’ll literally drink the water off your eyeballs.
Worst Maps Tokyo. You need an engineer’s degree to find the washroom in some malls. Out on the street, addresses are nonexistent.
Worst Street Crime Johannesburg. At the hostels, they don’t gather at night to talk about what they saw that day. They discuss who got mugged.

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Famous Travelers australia, flies, glasgow, jason cochran, johannesburg, maps, metro, mugged, underground

Name Charles Veley
Who? This former software executive has become known as the World’s Most Traveled Person.  It’s a definition and title he himself has helped create, but there’s no denying that he has likely been to more corners of the globe than anyone else.  If one were to chop up the world into finer geographical slices than just countries, as the MTP group does, you’d have 757 pieces: countries, territories, autonomous regions, enclaves, geographically separated island groups, major states and provinces.  Charles has been to a whopping 709 of them, including the extremely remote Bouvet Island, Chechnya, and Rockall. More at  MostTraveledPeople.com and charlesveley.com
Age 43
Countries Visited All of them

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Hotel Welcome Drink At check-in for an eco-lodge in Tortuguero, Costa Rica, a tree frog hopped onto my forehead, and promptly urinated down my face.
2. Worst Atmosphere Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, China.  Most Chinese cities are already too polluted to see or breathe.  As the capital of China’s largest coal-mining region, however, Taiyuan raises the stakes.  The entire landscape here is coated in coal-dust, creating a colorless, post-apocalyptic feel.
3. Worst Island to Inhabit Clipperton Island.  Surrounded by sharks, and covered with eerily squawking boobies and beady-eyed red crabs which swarm at night, devouring anything organic in their path, Clipperton has a long history of repelling human life.  Nearly all who have tried to inhabit this Pacific Island (and many have tried) have either died, gone insane, or both.  The US Navy planned to establish an airstrip here during WWII, but lost several ships trying to establish a beachhead and gave up.
4. Worst Place to be Stranded Peter I Island.  While removing expedition gear from this solitary and otherwise inaccessible island 400 miles off the coast of Antarctica, our inexperienced helicopter pilot decided to abandon his four-man crew (including me) due to visibility issues with only five loads remaining.  The weather closed in, and we realized the nearest possible assistance was at least five days sailing away.  Long story short: 24 hours later, our pilot overcame his fear of landing in less-than-perfect conditions and returned to retrieve us.
5. Worst Toilet Amur Highway, Siberia.  Most of hinterland Russia is a de facto toilet for car travelers; with vast wilderness available, why place effort into concentrating such unpleasantries?  However, the very few petrol stations along the only East-West road in Russia (thousands of mostly unpaved, ungraded, and treacherous miles) have wooden outhouses which have never in history been cleaned.  In the Siberian summer, when the mosquitoes and flies grow to be as big as birds, anyone who enters one of these dilapidated shacks exits quickly, often screaming, with arms waving about the head.

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Famous Travelers aiyuan, and Rockall, Chechnya, china, Clipperton, Most traveled, ouvet Island, Shanxi Province, Siberia

Name Tim Moore
Who? In 1998 Tim accidentally embarked on the therapeutic Arctic voyage that was to spawn Frost on My Moustache, a critically-acclaimed comic travelogue that regrettably took its name from the punchline to an offensive joke. This was followed by Continental Drifter, a retracing of the foolhardy round-trip to Venice made by Britain’s first Grand Tourist; French Revolutions, the best-selling and prize-winning account of his farcical yet strangely inspiring attempt to cycle all 3,630km of the 2000 Tour de France; and Do Not Pass Go, a history of his native London seen through the 22 streets on the Monopoly board. Spanish Steps patiently detailed how not to tackle the Camino de Santiago by donkey, and Nul Points was an account of Tim’s ill-advised attempt to meet those performers who have failed to trouble the scorers at the Eurovision Song Contest. Tim’s most recent book, I Believe in Yesterday, relates his globetrotting, time-traveling adventures in historical reenactment.  This would at least partially explain his photo.
Age 44
Countries Visited I gave up keeping tabs when Europe fragmented into 12 billion sovereign territories. Anyway, a trawl through the Wikipedia list suggests I’m currently on 62.

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Aspect of Being an Unfit Englishman Cycling Long Distances in France The number of signs that yell ‘PAIN’ down every high street.
2. Worst Thing About Traveling through Spain with a Donkey The stupid and useless holiday vocabulary you pick up – ‘My animal requires barley’ hasn’t established itself as the phrasebook gift that keeps on giving. Though I still hope to get some use out of ‘I will clear up his night-mess in the morning.’
3. Worst Words to Hear when You’re in a Camp full of Kindly, Earnest Widows at a Civil War Reenactment ‘Sir, would you do us the honor of reading a little William Shakespeare?’
4. Worst Long-Term Car Park The cheapest one in Mestre, on the mainland outside Venice. It’s run by children: the sort of children who will put 47 miles on the clock during your absence, then summon large dogs when you point this out.
5. Worst Place in the Entire World Dubai is a gigantic expo of wrongness: everything that’s bad about modern life brought together in one place. The only way to cross the street that goes right through the central business district is to take a taxi. I spent five days feeling like Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes. ‘We finally really did it! God damn you! God damn you all to hell!’

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Famous Travelers Civil War, donkey, Dubai, Santiago, Shakespeare, tour de france, Venice

Famous Travelers bangladesh, honduras, java, travelers tales, worst airline, worst meal, worst place, worst toilet, zambia

Name Jim Benning
Who? Co-founder, co-editor WorldHum.com. World Hum stories appear often in The Best American Travel Writing and other anthologies, and the site has won Lowell Thomas awards from the Society of American Travel Writers, including, in 2006, the gold award for best Internet site. Jim’s own travel writing has appeared in National Geographic Adventure, The Washington Post and other publications.
Age 38
Countries Visited Dozens.

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Bus Ride The harrowing drive through the mountains from Jiuzhai Gou to Chengdu in Sichuan, China. Extra points for the big bag of fresh yak meat the driver bought at a stop along the road and tossed in the bus aisle. The lower we descended in the mountains, the warmer it got, the greater the stench became, and the more yak blood streamed over the bus floor.
2. Worst Visit to a Tropical Paradise During a military coup. I happened to go to Fiji. The capital was under martial law. It was, um, a little tense.
3. Worst Tourist Trap Kuta Beach, Bali. I love Bali, but you’ve got to get out of Kuta and away from the cheesy T-shirt shops, thumping bars and tuk-tuk touts.
4. Worst Photo-Op for Tourists The real-life donkey painted to look like a zebra on Revolution Avenue in Tijuana. Photos of sombrero-topped, tequila-filled tourists posing with this poor donkey or one of his brothers are collecting dust all over the United States and the world. Why? There’s nothing Mexican about this. Free the donkeys! Burn the photos!
5. Worst Overrun Sacred Spot The tiny cemetery on the island of Janitzio in Lake Patzcuaro during Mexico’s Day of the Dead. Tourism officials were promoting the place to death – no pun intended — and it seemed that all of Mexico had descended upon the cemetery, trampling graves, pushing one another, ruining what is otherwise a beautiful, sacred tradition.

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Famous Travelers Bali, chengdu, china, fiji, hum, kuta beach, mexico, tourist, World, Worldhum, worst bus, yak

Name Catherine Watson
Who? Former travel editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and winner of the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalist of the Year and the Society of American Travel Writers’ Photographer of the Year. Her writing has been anthologized in many books, including “Best American Travel Writing 2008.’’ Her solo collections are Roads Less Traveled — Dispatches from the Ends of the Earth and Home on the Road: Further Dispatches from the Ends of the Earth. More at catherinewatsontravel.com.
Age 65
Countries visited 112.  (Most recent is the Faroe Islands)

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Taxi Ride My all-day-long attempt to find the Tree of Life in the desert of southern Bahrain. The taxi driver, who’d been working on this 10-by-30-mile-wide island for 25 years, admitted he’d never been south of the Manama suburbs. By the time we’d found the damned tree, we’d been lost more times than I could count, and then arrested for trespassing.
2. Worst Toilet The dank, filthy, unlighted ruin of a public ladies’ room in central Bucharest, before Ceaucescu’s horrid government fell. No toilet paper, no soap, no “feminine hygiene products” in the whole country, no nothing.
3. Worst Meal The famous raw shrimp cocktail of Kathmandu. I ordered it to celebrate an overland trip into Tibet, got violent food poisoning, was sick for the next 3 weeks and lost 16 pounds. Only then did it occur to me how far Kathmandu was from any ocean shrimp might live in.
4. Worst Foreign Policy Idea The U.S. government’s ban on ordinary American travelers going to Cuba. It would be funny if it weren’t so stupid: Technically, we CAN go to Cuba, we just can’t spend any MONEY in Cuba.
5. Worst Airport Security Nepal’s domestic terminal. As elsewhere in South Asia, “Ladies’’ are searched separately, behind a curtain. The young female officer didn’t look up from filing her nails. “Do you have big knife?’’ she asked. No. “Do you have bomb?’’ No. “You may go.’’ Well, okay, then, if you say so…

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Famous Travelers airport, Bahrain, Bucharest, Cuba, Kathmandu, Nepal, security, taxi, worst meal, worst toilet

Name Jeff Greenwald
Who? Contributor to such publications as National Geographic Adventure, Outside, Salon.com, The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. Jeff is also a performer, whose solo stage show, “Strange Travel Suggestions,” has been running since 2003. Two of his five books include Shopping for Buddhas and The Size of the World. Jeff also serves as Executive Director of Ethical Traveler, a worldwide alliance of politically engaged travelers. More at jeffgreenwald.com and ethicaltraveler.org
Age: 55
Countries visited:  68, because I’m counting Tasmania as a country all its own. And Tibet, of course.

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Place to be Salman Rushdie I love the billboard over one of Tehran’s big intersections: “On the Day the US Praises Us We Should Mourn.” (Does loving the billboard count as praise?)
2. Worst Place to be Caught without a Seat Protector The toilet on the China Railways train from Golmud to Xining looked like a holding pen for baboons with spastic sphincters.
3. Worst Place to Fall Asleep in a Car One crosses Sri Lanka on twisting two-lane highways with buses passing on blind turns at 120 kph. I’m not 100% sure that I’m not actually dead.
4. Worst Country on the Planet Mauritania is the world’s largest cat litter box. And some people still own slaves. Chengueti, shmengueti; give it a miss.
5. Worst Place to Blow Your Nose and Look at the Handkerchief Afterward Kathmandu, Nepal, has long been one of my favorite places on Earth. I’m still giddily happy there, but you can hardly tell through the particle filter mask.

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Famous Travelers Buddhas, china, eithical, golmud, Kathmandu, mauritania, Nepal, sri lanka, tehran, tibet, toilet, traveler, xining

Name Keith Bellows
Who? Legendary Editor-in-Chief of National Geographic Traveler Magazine (the magazine has won 50 Lowell Thomas awards for excellence in travel journalism and twice been nominated for a National Magazine Award during Keith’s tenure). He has also contributed to such publications as Sports Illustrated and Reader’s Digest and penned The Canuck Book (yes, he’s Canadian, though born in the Questionably Democratic Republic of Congo). He teaches travel writing and photography workshops around the country (like this one in SF at the end of May).  More at Nat Geo Traveler Magazine online.
Age 57
Countries visited 98

Famous Travelers, Favorites

Name Robert Young Pelton
Who? Filmmaker, speaker, and author of The World’s Most Dangerous Places, Come Back Alive and Licensed to Kill. He has traveled alongside the Taliban, CIA, Blackwater and too many rebel groups to list.  And he’s  the only travel writer with his own signature survival knife! (ratcutlery.com)  More at comebackalive.com
Age 53
Countries Visited 120+

Titanic Nominations
1. Least Civilized Militants The Small Boys Unit I was with in Liberia was run by a 15-year-old who had three or four girlfriends and always smoked a huge spliff. These guys (mostly 10 – 12 year olds) like to cut the enemy to pieces after they were dead. Not very sporting chaps.
2. Worst Jungle Darian Gap. Very dry, hot and thorny. At the time I was kidnapped, getting marched at night (at gun point), so you fall a lot  and the spikes on the trees you grab to catch yourself would go right into you. I was literally unhooking these tines from my hand.
3. Worst Military Food French MREs. You’d think they’d have this gourmet stuff, but they had  two dozen flavors of greasy southern French crap that even the peasants wouldn’t touch.
4. Worst Spot for Getting Mugged Jo’burg, South Africa. It was worst in that no one would mug me. I put a camera on my neck and timed it because this was supposed to be some great spot for getting mugged. But I was just approached by really friendly locals telling me I probably shouldn’t stand there with a camera on my neck.
5. Worst Toilet In Mali I asked where the toilet was… they pointed outside. There is a lot of outside in Mali. Huts and then sand as far as you could see.  And they didn’t go inside the huts.  So everywhere was the toilet. I was just supposed to wander out into the sand and find a spot inbetween everyone else’s shit and go. With everyone watching. And you know everyone wants to see how the white guy goes to the toilet.

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Famous Travelers Darian Gap, johannesburg, kidnapped, LIberia, Mali, militants, most dangerous, mugged, worst toilet

Name Tim Cahill
Who? Winner of a National Magazine Award and two Lowell Thomas Gold Award from the Society of American Travel Writers, Tim is one of America’s best known adventure travel writers and humorists. He’s a founding editor of Outside Magazine, where he penned the Out There column for years.  He is the author of nine books including Hold the Enlightenment, Pass the Butterworms, A Wolverine is Eating My Leg, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh, Pecked to Death By Ducks, Road Fever and Lost in My Own Backyard. His work also appears in National Geographic, National Geographic Adventure, The New York Times Book Review and other national publications. He lives in Montana.
Age 65
Countries visited About 100.

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Name for a Night Club The Disco of the Giant Ground Sloth, Puerto Natales, Chile
2. Worst Wire Ever Tapped International call at a “Tourist” Hotel in Beijing.   Heard during a fifteen minute conversation with my wife: *Click, buzz, click*  *a heavy sigh*  *sounds of someone eating* followed by *a long satisfied belch.*
3. Worst Menu Item in an Actual Restaurant Boiled Fermented Cow’s Nose, Denpasar, Bali (there is a note on this item, in English “the flavor may not agree with some Westerners.”  True, that.)
4. Worst Outhouse The Throne of Terror, built at an archeological dig near Lake Paytexbatun, Guatemala.  Archeologists are not biologists and constructed the two holer over an existing vertical cave populated by bats. Visitors are obliged to deal the common travelers’ ailment while angry bats swoop and dive about in a maelstrom of rage.
5. Worst Traveling Companion A guy named Lazslo. No one in particular, just any guy named Lazslo.

Agree or Disagree with Tim? Take the 2010 survey >>

Famous Travelers, Favorites Bali, Beijing, Chile, Denpasar, Guatemala, National Geographic, New York Times, outhouse, Outside magazine, toilet

Name Peter Greenberg
Who? Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter and producer, served a correspondent for ABC’s Good Morning America and Travel Editor for NBC’s Today show, named one of the most influential people in the travel industry by Travel Weekly. Peter is also host of the nationally syndicated Peter Greenberg Worldwide Radio show, heard live each week on more than 150 stations around the globe.  Travel Editor at Large for AARP, contributing Editor for Men’s Health, and a contributor Forbes and the New Yorker, he can often be found on the lecture circuit.  He published two books in the span of nine months:  “Don’t Go There. The Travel Detective’s Essential Guide to the Must-Miss Places of the World“ and “Tough Times, Great Travels.” More at www.petergreenberg.com
Age 59
Countries Visited 151 and counting

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Airline A tie. Between Easy Jet and Ryan Air. Forget the come-on internet fares. The real sticker shock comes if you try to check in a bag, even if you pay the extra five pounds to do it. It’s a total scam, and neither airline excels in essential full disclosure. So…if you’re homeless, a fugitive from justice or just entered the witness protection program, these are the airlines for you, because I presume you will board with nothing more than what you’re wearing.
2. Worst First-World Airport This is an easy one. Miami. To me, it’s the last flight out of Saigon every time I go through the place. The only redeeming thing in the entire airport is the great Cuban food at La Carretta, which you’ll be eating since you stand an excellent chance of not going anywhere fast.
3. Worst Tourist Attraction Pisa. There’s a building there. It leans. End of conversation.
4. Worst Drinking Water in U.S. Los Angeles wins hands down. Do you like the taste of heavy metals and minerals in the morning?
5. Worst Rules a Country Never Tells You About South Africa.  If you don’t have at least two blank pages in your passport, you will be denied entry. Just stupid.

Agree or Disagree with Peter? Take the 2010 survey >>

Famous Travelers peter greenberg, travel detective

Name Tony Wheeler
Age 62
Countries Visited I’m at 141 (just in transit at an airport does not count)
Who? Founder of Lonely Planet publications, writer, unreformed traveler

Titanic Nominations

1. Worst Pizza Many contenders but the pub in Nimbin, northern New South Wales, Australia wins. How could the Australian centre for dope smoking, hippy free living produce something so bloody awful?
2. Worst Toilet Darchen in Tibet, Australians talk of ‘long drop’ outhouses. This was the opposite, a vertical mountain of shit, a long climb to the top.
3. Worst First World Airport Terrible third world airports are no great achievement, LAX and Charles de Gaulle compete for the titles of worst in the first world.
4. Worst Visa Queue India gives you the longest line but for sheer tedious slowness followed by absurd, Kafkaesque, mind bogglingly stupid bureaucracy when you get to the front, the Russians are the clear winners.
5. Worst Drivers The Saudis. Missing guardrails or paint scrapes on the rockface at every corner prove, yet again, that warp speed is fine for the straights but you still have to slow down for the corners.
6. Worst Traffic Jams Bangkok passed the baton on to Manila, but despite competition from Dubai the place that is way out in front – i.e. completely stationary – is Shanghai.
7. Worst Connectivity Why is high tech Japan the only place in the first world where my mobile phone doesn’t roam and my ATM card can’t pull money out of the machine?

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UPDATE: The pub that made Tony’s list for worst pizza is now a bistro under new management and would like everyone to know that they no longer have pizza on the menu.

Famous Travelers, Favorites lonely planet, LP, pizza, toilet, tony, trafic, wheeler

Name Pauline Frommer
Who? Creator of the Pauline Frommer Guidebooks and Co-Host The Travel Show, a nationally syndicated radio show. Pauline appears weekly on CNN.com to discuss the latest travel trends and pens a column for MSN.com. Her guidebook Pauline Frommer’s New York City was just named Best Guidebook of the Year by the North American Travel Journalists Association.
Countries Visited I don’t know. I visited too many before the age of 10 to be able to know how to count ‘em up.

Titanic Nominations

Famous Travelers, Favorites airline, food, toilet

Name John Flinn
Who? Former executive travel editor, San Francisco Chronicle
Age 52
Countries Visited 37

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Wine Chateau Gue, a Zimbabwean Chenin Blanc
2. Worst Toilet Deep-freeze outhouse at old Pruitt Hut, Russia’s Mount Elbrus
3. Worst Local Delicacy Hakarl, Iceland’s putrid shark taste treat
4. Worst Pizza Canned spaghetti on toast, New Zealand, 1982
5. Worst Timeshare Hustlers Cabo San Lucas

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Famous Travelers accomodation, food, local delicacy, pizza, toilet, wine

Famous Travelers airport, australia, australian, flight attendants, hotel, inflight, peter moore, toilet, tourist attraction, travel writer