I’ve never given much thought to going on a cruise. It’s always been something that I associated with swinging singles (think Love Boat) and older, retired couples.

My parents, who fall in that older, retired couples category, discovered cruising earlier this year, taking a trip from Australia to Japan and China via numerous islands. They loved it, so much so, that even before they disembarked in Sydney, they had booked a berth on next year’s Dawn Princess world cruise. It was going to be highlight of their year. But it’s a highlight that, sadly, my Dad, who passed away last month after a brief illness, won’t be able to participate in. Dad, who would have been the first to say ‘life goes on’, is, I’m sure, smiling somewhere in the knowledge that Mom is still planning on taking the cruise.

But while my Mom is probably one of the most independent women I know, she really doesn’t want to go on this cruise alone. So, after much family discussion, it’s been decided that I am the most logical person to go with her.

Now, being offered the chance to go on a world cruise isn’t something that any sane person would turn down. But I must admit, I’ve been tempted to say thanks but I’d rather not. 

It’s just that I have some reservations about the whole cruise thing, especially about  sleeping in a windowless room the size of a matchbox for a month and a half. And being totally at sea for days on end. And travelling with my Mom (last time we did that I was 12). And being disconnected from the internet (and thus the world).

So, what would you do? Would you go on a world cruise?

And more to the point, would you travel with your mother?

(image source)

Green reports…

A new report from sustainability think tank Forum for the Future is warning that the tourism industry is likely to be hit hard in the coming decade as climate change and shifting demographics increase pressure on many resorts. 

Another report released this month, this time from the Natural Resources Defense Council,  identifies 25 national parks most at risk for impacts of climate change and offers 32 recommendations of specific actions the U.S. National Park Service can take to protect national parks and their resources.

Green flying…

Responsibletravel.com, a travel agent that specialises in responsible holidays, has been a long time champion of flyers offsetting their carbon emissions. But it’s now had a change of heart, stating that the travel industry needs to be focusing on reducing carbon emissions rather than offsetting them. Here’s why…

Meanwhile, All Nippon Airways (ANA), in an effort to go green, is asking all passengers to pee before boarding  . Apparently this simple act of relieving themselves prior to boarding could help the airline reduce it’s carbon footprint by 4.2 tons a month

Green hotels….

Most hotel guest throw away around two pounds of trash every day. And most it is trash that, if they were at home, they would probably recycle. Having in-room recycling bins would reduce this but according to hotels, the issue of trash recycling in hotels is a complicated issue.

Green Travel Gear…

In this day and age, no one travels without a re-charge or two or three. Mostly, it’s the type that you plug into a wall socket. But with more and more solar powered chargers, such as thepowermonkey-eXplorer, becoming available, maybe now is the time to make a change.

Green Food…

Love food. Love Travel. Want to be green? Why not become a culinary eco-tourist,  gathering foods from the wild and then learning how to prepare them in the kitchen.

Green Destinations….

If you are heading to Brisbane, Australia, be sure to check out the city’s brand new solar powered footbridge. Opened earlier this month, the bridge links Brisbane’s Central Business District and the South Bank art precinct. Featuring a complicated sun-powered LED lighting system that can produce a number of different lighting effects. Spanning 470 meters, the footbridge is considered one of the longest in the world.

And finally, this month’s green destinations include the U.S. Virgin Islands, Chicago, and Hawaii

Happy green travels…

(image source)

This is a photo of my favorite sight in St. Petersburg. It’s a map on the wall of the Muskovsky Train Station (where you catch trains that go to Moscow — you disembark at the Leningradsky Train Station in that city, very logical) that shows all the railway lines and major cities you can reach simply by ambling onto a train leaving one of the platforms in Russia’s imperial city.

I can spend hours staring at this map, which baffles my relatives. It brings to life everything I — and probably you — love about travel, especially train travel: the lure of a different place, the flavor of an unpronounceable name, the excitement and expectation, the clickety-clack that could bring us, just by buying a ticket and stepping aboard, somewhere so different we could spend the rest of our lives trying to fathom it. It also brings to life, as almost nothing else can, the dizzying size of Mother Russia.

Look at a map of the world. Now look at it again. Look at how much of this planet Russia takes up. It’s huge. It’s unwieldy, monstrously large. You’ve probably read books about this hugeness, the sprawling red space out beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg and the Ural Mountains. Maybe you’ve been riveted by Jeffrey Taylor’s adventures in Siberian Dawn, or even sunk deep into Colin Thubron’s In Siberia. But admit it: you know nothing about this vast country. You can’t even get a fix on Singapore, or Portugal, or your hometown. I know I can’t.

These train lines, snaking silver from St. Petersburg, reach out across what used to be an empire, across a whole country that has probably never, in reality, existed except by political consensus. What is an empire? Power, money, force, oppression, weapons, knowledge, order, control, superiority. An empire is not a place. It’s a time, or a stretch of history, or the common belief of those who control it.

A few years ago I was researching the Old Believers of the Russian Orthodox Church, out of sheer curiosity. This is the branch that split with the rest of the church in the mid-1600s over obscure dogma that I, being completely non-religious, never fully understood, such as how to pronounce “Jesus.” I see its effects mostly in old paintings of Old Believers being arrested and carted away, their fingers frozen in the two-fingered blessing that was replaced by crossing oneself with three fingers, one of the niggly disagreements the caused the great Schism.

I remember reading that in the 1990s someone stumbled across a village of Old Believers somewhere out in Siberia. They’d secluded themselves away from arrest and persecution, hidden so thoroughly that they had lived the 20th century completely unaware of Lenin, Stalin, communism, the KGB, the Cold War, the Space Race, and the Gulag. The Soviet Union had come and gone, and they hadn’t known.

This planet is still so big, with depth we can’t imagine. Dig into any city or country and there’s always further to go, like a fractal or a Socratic dialogue. This train map — on the wall of one single station in one single city of one single country — is only a speck, even of this country alone. There is so much more out there.

I’m in the middle of my first visit to Seattle, Washington (I don’t count going up in the Space Needle as a six-year-old) and today was an afternoon pilgrimage to Pike Place Market in the company of friend, writer and wonderful photographer Pam Mandel.

What a delightful spot, especially without the summer crowds, which Pam says are fairly insane.

A city on the water, with mountains in the background, has such a running head start on being beautiful that it’s almost unfair. Seattle is like that.

OK, so it rained for about 40 minutes this afternoon. Big whoop. Carry an umbrella (er, don’t leave it in your hotel room like me, the Doofus Tourist, who said, “But, the sun’s out right now! I won’t need this thing.”)

Pike Place had $10-15 fresh flower arrangements that were huge works of art.

It had a pasta place that sold noodles with names like Lemon Chive Angel Hair.

The fresh seafood looked absolutely divine.

The street musicians were well worth a generous tip.

And the photo you see was my lunch inside the Market at Lowell’s (one of Pam’s favorite places) with views of the bay to die for, a nice chilled bottle of local beer and salmon tacos with freshly-made tortillas.

More than once I contemplated how fast I could load up my household goods and move here to the “Emerald City.”

James Boobar admits that this is a tour you will not find in any conventional guidebook, not the way he does it. The Dostoevsky Walk: the descent-via-ascent into the private hell of Dostoevsky’s most famous literary character, the murderous, haunted Raskolnikov of Crime and Punishment.

Boobar leads the walk for the interested writers and readers attending the writing workshops of the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia. It’s a way not to get to know “Dostoevsky’s Petersburg” (after all, this is a city whose histories of literature, war, hardship, and wealth would take centuries to excavate), but to get a feel for what may have helped Dostoevsky narrate the way Raskolnikov felt the world closing in on him.

For those who haven’t read the book, a short synopsis would be in order. Raskolnikov, a poor student who sometimes believes he may be a genius, conceives a theory whereby different classes of men get to live by different rules. He persuades himself that men like him are allowed certain crimes that would not be permissable to the common masses; therefore, he proceeds to murder a greedy elderly woman moneylender. Unfortunately, he gets caught by the woman’s not-so-bright half-sister, and murders her, too.

Long story short, the crime begins to prey on Raskolnikov’s mind. He is racked not by guilt so much as self-doubt. It’s a very psychological book, but not annoyingly so, and one I highly recommend reading.

I admit, I initially found the tour a little too post-modern for my taste. As we stood in a square and saw four dead-end streets whichever way we turned, Boobar talked about the symbolism of the dead ends, how Dostoevsky may have seen and used them, reflected in his character’s desperate life after he kills an old woman pawnbroker. I don’t have much patience for that kind of thing. Get into an argument about “art for art’s sake” and I’m generally going to leave the room.

And yet, as I think back on the tour, it exactly reflects my own belief in how very deeply place affects a writer. The place you’re living, the place you grew up, the place your heart broke, the place you were poor, the place you felt rich. Maybe Dostoevsky could not have written so masterfully about the cage Raskolnikov’s guilt builds around his mind if the author had set it in, say, Buenos Aires. A Russian tragedy needs a Russian setting.

The tour winds through Dostoevsky’s little world, passing by a wallside statue in his honor, depicting the winding, entrapping stair of Raskolnikov’s life. A charcoal statue, brooding and dark, much like many of Dostoevsky’s works — much like his life, in fact, the life of a compulsive gambler.

Our quest climaxes at the top of stairs that give the same sense of confinement and an inability to see choices ahead. This is possibly or possibly not the setting of Raskolnikov’s student life and the scene of his self-torture. A locked iron gate, a yellowing courtyard beyond, and then the set of stairs. The walls are covered in graffiti in many languages, Dostoevsky’s pilgrims pleading to Raskolnikov, or for him, or for themselves as they identify with him.

The tour made me rethink the way I viewed literary criticism, and literary influences. St. Petersburg has lovely, wide avenues, and long views over the river and across the islands. But it is full of brooding buildings. Their graceful windows may be open to the street, but the courtyards and life are all behind locked doors. The closed-in aspect of the buildings could lead a person to think of trapped minds and dead ends, of unique Russian fatalism.

Either way, it certainly made me appreciate Crime & Punishment, and Dostoevsky, all over again.

To read Boobar’s own account of St. Petersburg and the Dostoevsky Walk, originally published in Post Road Magazine, click on the Summer Literary Seminars link above, and find the link on the right-hand side of the page.