The Titanic Awards

Name Vivek Wagle
Who? Editor of Lonely Planet’s website and all things digital.  Born in India, Vivek has lived all over the place and is now (relatively) settled with wife and son in Melbourne, Australia.  Check out his full profile on lonelyplanet.com.
Age 32
Countries Visited 32 (curious coincidence)

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Hotel Room A no-longer-existing budget hotel in Calcutta. Flying cockroaches, “living” mattress, shared toilet covered in diarrhea.
2. Worst Tourist Attraction Petronas Towers, Malaysia. Sure, they’re tall – but you have to wait forever in line and pay admission to get to the top, and then you can’t see anything because of the haze.
3. Worst Museum Gerald Ford Museum, Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA. So tragic it’s awesome.
4. Worst Airport LAX. Some surly, clueless staff; outrageous food prices; no crowd management or direction.
5. Worst Bus Ride Siliguri to Darjeeling, W India – nine hours unable to move with my knees up by my ears.
6. Worst Flight Flying from Managua to Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast in a tiny, bumpy plane with an airline that “sometimes” made it (ie 92% of the time) without crashing.

Famous Travelers lonely planet, lonelyplanet.com, LP, Vivek wagle

Name Thomas Kohnstamm
Who? Has written over a dozen Lonely Planet guidebooks before he went on to write the funny, truthful, behind-the-scenes-of-guidebook-writing bestseller: Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics, and Professional Hedonism. He has also contributed to Travel + Leisure, Time Out New York, Forbes and numerous other publications. He is at work on a new book about the first Amazonian to attend Oxford.
Age 33
Countries Visited 50+

Titanic Nominations
1. Worst Hostel I’ll never forget the smell of the hostel in Costa Rica (back in ’98) with the decomposing rat under the bed.
2. Worst Bus Ride Nighttime Greyhound from Port Authority to DC. Hands down. Another one that wasn’t terrible – but was rather funny – happened on a bus in Venezuela: a Dutch friend (who couldn’t read Spanish) overlooked the “urination only” sign on the bathroom door. After taking care of business, he was accosted by the bus stewardess. She promptly checked the stall, upbraided him in front of the other passengers and fined him the equivalent of $12. He tried to deny it, but she publicly refuted him with all sorts of graphic evidence. I hadn’t laughed that hard in a long time.
3. Worst Street Food Random pig organs reheated atop a sheet of corrugated metal. No idea which organs they were. Protein is hard to come by in some parts of the Andes.
4. Worst TV Travel Personality I have a fair amount of respect for anyone who can pull off a travel show. I will say that if I were truly lost in the middle of nowhere that I’d rather run into Survivorman Les Stroud than the relatively more famous Bear Grylls. Giada de Laurentiis (or her writers) would fail Travel Writing 101 with the incessant commentary on “gorgeous sunsets” and “yummy dinners.” But with a famous family and other obvious assets, viewers probably give you a bit more leeway to suck.
5. Worst Guidebook Series People expect me to say Lonely Planet, but I actually think that LP is one of the best. I really don’t dig Fodor’s or Frommer’s – I am not their intended audience. That said, I’d argue that all guidebooks have weaknesses and they are best used as a simple tool for trip organization rather than a paint-by-the-numbers approach to travel.

Famous Travelers greyhound, lonely planet, LP, pig organs, Thomas Kohnstamm, venezuela, worst

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