August 2010 Archives

I'm just back from a couple weeks in LA, hanging with some of my magazine friends. Cruising through Malibu, walks on Santa Monica beach, shopping in Beverly Hills, and lunch on Sunset Blvd. 

Ahh, LA, you've got it all: a warm breeze, a coastline kissed by waves, fast cars and beautiful girls, and vast stretches of desert just over the next hill. That's a place I could spend a lot of time in...

But hey, there's work to do, and I know you folks are itching for more blogs. I'm on it. In the meantime, let's look at another reader question...

Ben from Venice Beach wants to know:

What is the major attraction for you when it comes to travel? 

I think it would have to be that burning curiosity. To see things for myself, to catch a glimpse of how people live in strange places, how they see the world, to discover what that splotch on the map really looks and smells like up close. The more obscure the place, the more I seem to be interested in it. Kira Salak put it well when she said: "[I travel] to see what cannot be imagined, to be taken into my dreams."

Travel is also a sort of compulsion. Whether I like it or not, that urge builds and builds until it's impossible to resist picking up the pack and starting again. It's in the blood, I guess.

Clive J. from the UK asked:

What do you know as a result of travel the rest of us don't?

I think the most important lessons are things we forget in the day to day, not things we don't know. 

When you're cut off out there on the road, the everyday frivolity of life at home - office politics, the rat race, "noble" ambitions, catching every episode of some stupid TV series - it all falls away until you're left with that pure, radiant core. You come to realize very quickly what is truly important to you. Traveling light, with all your necessities boiled down to what fits into your bag, you also realize what little you need to survive and what little you need to be happy. 

The road also teaches you to understand social networks and the way in which images and personas are shaped. You see the larger perspective, or the omniscient view perhaps, because you exist outside of the social structure of the places you're traveling through, and as such you aren't governed by their rules of conduct. You can act in a place without being a part of it. You're treated in a manner that doesn't reflect your past, your background, your accomplishments or your social status, a manner that only reflects the "you" that you present at that moment. It's incredibly revealing.

As for added knowledge, travel does give you a perspective on the wider world. It seems obvious to say it, but you realize that your philosophy and the philosophy and moral code of your culture doesn't apply everywhere else. People live differently and they get along just fine. The harshest culture shock is the one you experience on returning home. It causes you to question everything and to reject some of what you'd always taken for granted, foundational beliefs of your culture and your society. You come to realize what shaky intellectual ground we are all actually standing on.

I received a lot of emails about my previous blog installment on the Pan American Clipper and the golden age of air travel. Many of you would have liked a taste of that bygone age -- so I'm going to give you one. A little bit of history, right here in your glass...

A lot of drinking goes on in the air these days, but it's become nothing more than a way to knock yourself out on long haul fights. Plastic cups stuffed full of ice, little bottles of major brand liquor, and a can of soda, or god forbid some horrible pre-made mix. This dose of oblivion is sloshed together by a bored steward with a plastic food service cart. And more often than not, they have no idea how to mix a proper drink.

It wasn't always like this.

There once was a time when cocktails were a ritual. A toast to end the day. A way to unwind and shift into "home" gear after the hard slog of the office. An ice cold icebreaker for every possible social occasion.

In the early days of aviation, that ritual inevitably took to the skies. And when the height of luxury was represented by Pan Am's fleet of flying boats, this ritual took place with clockwork regularity in a dedicated cocktail lounge.

Clipper flights between Miami and Havana even featured their very own signature drink, mixed with ceremony and respect in a silver shaker.

Here's how you can shake up your own taste of history. For my first Road Wisdom video blog, I present a tutorial on the Clipper Cocktail:

Here are the measurements again, for your convenience:

Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

I invite you to raise a toast with me: To the golden age of air travel!

And please remember to drink it cold...

I read a fascinating book last week called Pan American Clippers: The Golden Age of Flying Boats by James Trautman. It's about a forgotten age of air travel, when men were men, adventure was waiting around every corner, and the world was a much larger place.

It was the decade before World War 2, the early days of aviation. Air travel was still a luxury within reach of a select few. Crowds turned up to watch the big planes land and take off. And routes over both oceans were only just being pioneered.

All of this would change and commercial aviation would take an amazing leap after the war years, but for one brief decade the skies were a truly romantic and adventurous place to be.

Nothing symbolizes this era like the giant flying boats. Passengers were used to traveling by ship -- they liked to get up and walk around, to dine at tables in a special salon, to sleep in fold-down bunks, and to have a stand up cocktail at a proper bar -- and these enormous flying boats were designed with that in mind. Every customer was a first class customer. No one was herded about like a sheep.

Flying boats filled a niche at a time when airstrips were uncommon, and the vast empty stretches of the Atlantic and Pacific could not be crossed in a single bound. Flying from San Francisco's Treasure Island to Manila on the China Clipper was a 5 day journey, with refueling stops in Honolulu, Midway Island, Wake Island, and Guam. From Manila passengers could take connecting flights to Macao and Shanghai. Luxury hotels were built in each of these remote outposts, treating overnighting Clipper passengers to a level of service they were accustomed to back home.

The war years changed all that, of course. Runways had been built all over the place, and larger planes capable of much greater ranges -- including trans-Atlantic flights -- had been developed. Speed took precedence over comfort; the destination trumped the importance of the journey. The world no longer needed these giant flying boats, and they quietly drifted off into the haze of memory and black and white films.

But at their height, the Clippers seemed to be everywhere, appearing on posters and in luxury ads for everything from cigarettes to Goodyear rubber, and touted as "the most romantic planes ever built." You could be forgiven for thinking the skies were full of them. In actual fact, only 28 had ever been built (the best remembered being three Martin 130's and the twelve Boeing 314's that are the most widely depicted face of the Clipper). Despite their cultural importance, not a single Clipper was saved for an aviation museum. Nothing remains of this golden age, save for a few precious memories on newsreels and fading photographs. It's a romantic era of our past that we'll never get back.

My own obsession with flying boats began in 1982. I was 10 years old, and a short-lived television show called Tales of the Gold Monkey had just hit the airwaves. The story was set in 1938, in a South Pacific rife with intrigue between colonial powers gearing up for war. Each episode focused on a little twin engined Grumman Goose flying boat based on the fictional backwater island of Bora Gora. There was an ex-Flying Tigers pilot called Jake Cutter, a drunken mechanic, and a one-eyed dog, backed by supporting characters that included an American spy posing as a lounge singer, a French territorial administrator and bar owner with a checkered past, and a German spy posing as a missionary priest, who spent most of his time "blessing" the island girls. Jake's nemesis was often a Japanese princess and her fierce samurai henchman. It was fun, the characters were stock and one-dimensional, and it brought to mind old-time serials and cliffhangers. It also made me realize, at 10 years old, just how cool it'd be to get a Goose of my own and fly around the South Pacific having adventures.

The series was released last month on DVD after 15 years of lobbying by a core group of obsessive fans. I'm 5 episodes in and, yes, it's as cool as I remember.

By some strange coincidence a company called Antilles Seaplanes has also resurrected the Grumman Goose. They've taken the original design of that amphibian workhorse, installed new turboprop engines, composite materials, and advanced avionics, and are about to start selling this plane again. A new era of flying boats is pretty unlikely. But it does resurrect my old goal...

I think flying around the South Pacific having adventures is a rather worthwhile dream, don't you?