“Welcome to Kamakura! Where are you from?”

“We’re from New York, but right now we live in Bangkok.”

“Ohhh, New York. Three years ago I visited United States! Boston, Washington DC, and New York. I entered Central Park, I entered Empire State Building, hmm let’s see, I entered Ground Zero, I entered…”

We were on our way to see one of Japan’s most famous Daibutsu, or “Great Buddha”, when this elderly, somewhat eccentric chap dressed in pressed light-blue pants and a button-up white shirt stopped us to indulge his curiosity over who we were and where we were from, and to wish us well during our stay in his country. This was our first visit to the breezy beach town of Kamakura, located about an hour outside of Tokyo via the JR Yokosuka Line, and just before crossing paths with our new friend we’d received our first and perhaps most important lesson for staying safe on its surfer-friendly beaches: beware of hawks.

Along with the omnipresent black ravens found throughout Japan, Kamakura’s menacing hawks filled the sky in abundance that afternoon. Hovering ominously, scanning the sand for scraps of discarded food, and like us apparently harboring a serious taste for salmon. With a small box containing four pieces of sushi resting in my lap, I snapped my wooden chopsticks apart and began to mix a spot of wasabi with soy sauce… and then I looked up. A group of 5 – 7 hawks had picked up the scent and were circling us, descending at an alarmingly fast rate and clearly pondering the merits of divebombing and challenging us for these fresh slices of fish.

I’m happy to say that to this day I’ve never experienced a bird attack, but that was close. So close, in fact, that the circle of hawks followed us as we slammed our sushi boxes shut and scampered off the beach in search of shelter. Our salvation was a covered parking lot at a restaurant across the street. Phew!

Sufficiently sated and casting two cautious pairs of eye to the sky, we walked the length of the beach, watching optimistic surfers ride baby-sized waves to the shore, and after getting pointed in the right direction by The Man Who Entered New York cut back up into the city for the modest uphill trek to the Daibutsu.

Kamakura’s bronze Great Buddha is the main draw at the serene Kōtoku-in Temple. Believed to be erected around 1252 under the direction of a Buddhist priest, this magnificent 93-ton monument has features which differ from many of the buddhas seen throughout Southeast Asia: the shoulders are broader, the face rounder, and the robe more… revealing. There’s another key difference: its pudgy belly is hollow, and for 20 Yen can be accessed via a small door on the base.

We stepped in and reverently brushed our hands over the fading bronze belly. The air was still, musty, metallic. Peaceful. Back outside, daylight dimmed, and our hike back to Kini Kamakura Station via the forested Daibutsu Hiking Trail awaited.

It used to be that when you visited a destination, you picked up a couple of brochures at the airport or the train station or the bus station, to go along with your guidebook.

Sometimes, there was even an opportunity to wander into a physical Visitor’s Center and talk to a knowledgeable human from the tourist bureau.

Today, with travelers Googling for information, asking questions on Facebook and tossing out queries on Twitter, many of the places that you’re going to visit are learning to reach out and say hello before you even get there.

Some are using a Twitter hashtag to keep track of your questions:

• #inPDX is monitored by the Portland, Oregon CVB (Convention and Visitor’s Bureau)
• #abilenevisitors is monitored by the Abilene, Texas CVB.

Some are using blogs to give you the inside scoop:

• the Indiana Insider blog
• the ShoreLines blog for Virginia Beach, VA
• the blog for the Boise, Idaho Basque festival Jaialdi (held every five years in Boise, which has a large Basque population)
• the New Bedford (MA) Whaling Museum blog
• the Christchurch and Canterbury blog in New Zealand
• the Fargo, North Dakota/Moorhead, Minnesota CVB blog (they share tourism responsibilities)
• the Cape Town, South Africa blog
• (Update – by popular demand from our Twitter readers) the Columbus (Ohio) Experience blog

Some are using YouTube video to show their destinations:

• the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Visit Philly channel
• the Cedar Point (Sandusky, Ohio) channel (for you roller coaster fans) (Update – I originally had this in Iowa. D’oh!)
• the Travel Nevada channel
• the Loudon County, Virginia channel
• the Western Minnesota Steam Threshers Reunion (every Labor Day in Rollag, Minnesota)
• (Update – by popular demand from our Twitter readers) the Visit Findlay, Ohio channel

They’re on Facebook (Discover South Carolina,) on MySpace (Nashville’s Visit Music City) and sharing photos on Flickr (Visit Idaho.)

Here’s the good news: a CVB or tourism organization is non-commercial. They exist to “sell” you on the merits of their destination and convince you to visit. Nothing else.

Someone whose whole job is simply to make sure you have a nice visit?

That’s worth a follow….

I confess. I never was a grunge music fan. Sure, I know who Kurt Cobain and Nirvana were. I’m aware that Pearl Jam is still jamming. But ask me to name any of their songs and all you’ll get is silence.

I guess you could say that the grunge music movement passed me by. But when I was offered an advanced copy of Grunge Seattle to review, I jumped at the chance. I figured it would offer a glimpse of the rough and tough Seattle of yesteryear; a Seattle that existed before espresso, microbrews, and Microsoft took center stage.

And that’s just what author Justin Henderson provides. The story of Grunge Seattle travels around the basements, bars, and garages of the city’s suburbs, defining the sound and the attitude of the key players.

But it offers more than just a fascinating music history lesson. The book is also a travel guide, mapping out locations of the places, bars, and recording studios that featured prominently during this time.

Sadly, some main grunge locations, such as the Rainbow Tavern,  are no longer standing. But there are still plenty for grunge music fans to see, including the Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame,  Crocodile Cafe (the main grunge venue of the time) on 2nd Avenue and Blanchard Street,  and the park bench opposite Kurt Cobain’s old house in Veretti Park where fans have carved out messages. 

Grunge Seattle is a must read, not only for die hard grunge music fans, but for anyone with an interest in the evolution of American music.

Published by the Roaring Forties Press, Grunge Seattle is the first in The Music Place Series of books that will spotlight the relationship between musicians and the cities they call home.  Forthcoming books in this series include Jimi Hendrix’s London, The Kinks’ London, and Bob Dylan’s New York.

Springtime, Paris, 1956.

A young photographer named Inge Morath had just returned to home, after a five week trip in Iran. She’d traveled for some of that time on her own, something that was neither common, nor a simple matter for a woman at that time.  But as a passionate lover of history and literature, Morath wanted to understand Iran. She later said she was “very interested in the region, in old civilizations which are suddenly overbalanced by modern times.”

That was her personal mission, on the professional side, she went on assignment for a magazine, with instructions to get pictures of carpets and mosques. (She also worked for the Magnum agency, a stock house, and secured a couple of corporate photography gigs to boot.)  She used two cameras: color film for her assignments, for which she exposed 40 rolls, black and white for her own photos, for which she exposed more than 100 rolls. This amounted to more than 5,000 pictures all together.

Unbeknownst to Morath, the camera she’d been using for her black and white film had been damaged – it had a light leak, which created a light stain down the middle of many of her negatives. Her color photography from the trip was published as planned, in the magazine, and in a book, and she’d go on to photograph all over the world and see her work well-published and exhibited. (She’d also go on to marry Arthur Miller, with whom she collaborated until her death in 2002.)  But the majority of the black and white photos that she took in Iran were not published in her lifetime.

With the aid of digital clean-up of the light stain, The Inge Morath Foundation recently released a handsome coffee table sized book containing the photographs she made on this trip. Inge Morath: Iran contains photographs that not only reach far beyond the enduring cliché of turbans and rifles and flying carpets, but also provide context to the images that we see from Iran today.

The book includes excerpts of a conversation between Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran and John P. Jacob, director of the Inge Morath foundation. “She’s very subversive,” says Nafisi of Morath and her photos.  “Having been told to take pictures of Persian carpets and the blue mosques, she goes and shows us the little girls working the carpet factories.” She points out that Morath avoids obvious, easy symbols of a country becoming Westernized (nightclubs and unveiled women), and instead finds this theme in unusual places – like, in the interaction of Western and local workers at an oil refinery.   It’s a subversiveness that I certainly appreciate, as a writer who’s traveled on assignments that lay somewhere off the path of my own personal interests.  And I’d daresay it’s a quality that anyone who’s taken a trip on someone else’s agenda  — a business traveler, a participant in a group trip –  can appreciate as well.

What I love the best about this book is the sense that you get of Morath, as a traveler, trying to figure out what Iran is all about.  The book’s editor, John P. Jacob, points out  that Morath’s photos from the beginning of the trip are more conventional – donkeys, women baking bread – but as the trip goes on, are far less so. “The reason is not that Iran became less mysterious to her; but rather that she allowed the mystery to become a part of the story she was telling,” he says.

To which Nafisi says this: “Most people who go to Iran fall in love with it because people seem so welcoming. There is a welcome, but that doesn’t mean that people are opening to you. It means that they are treating you as a dear guest…There is a shroud over many of the photographs, as if to  say that what is there, is not being wholly revealed.”

Personally, I find the questions that hover over the photographs refreshing.  There’s something so presumptive about a person who travels to a place for a brief time making a definitive statement about it  — although as opinionated human beings mentally wired to generalize, travelers are wont to theorize. (And it’s part of the job description for travel photographers and writers, however uneasily it sits.)  But in her photos, Morath is able to capture both what she thinks is happening, and what she’s still not sure about.

For instance, look at Morath’s photo of the young girls knotting rugs, above.  This is child labor, and those little girls are most likely not able to get down from that high perch on their own. But then look at the little girl at the bottom. She seems to be smiling, certainly doesn’t seem mistreated. What exactly is happening here? It’s a question that this photo raises, indeed, it’s the question that is almost constantly coursing through my mind whenever I travel.

The solution, suggests Nafisi is this: “If we cannot reveal everything, let’s have the idea that this place is defined as much by what it doesn’t reveal as by what it does.”  Rather than saying, “This is how Iranians are,” in the language of authority, with Morath there is just her own narrative: “I was there.”

Related Perceptive Travel story: Dark Side of the Moon in Iran

Mention Sydney, Australia and the first attractions that come to mind are the Opera House , the Harbour Bridge , Taronga Zoo , and The Rocks.

But locals and regular visitors will tell you that there is so much more to this vibrant city than these iconic landmarks. However, finding this other side of Sydney isn’t always easy unless you know where to look.

These 5 secret places will get you started…

1. Open up a Pandora’s box of plague and pestilence at the Museum of Human Diseases at the University of New South Wales. With more than 2,000 cadaver parts on display, this museum isn’t for everyone, especially if you have a weak stomach. But I’d guaranteed even the most bored teenager will find this museum fascinating.

Location: Ground Floor of the Samuels Building, Upper Sydney Campus area, University of New South Wales.

Hours: 3.00 -5.00 weekdays

2. Go nuclear with the Lucas Heights Nuclear Reactor tour on the first Saturday of every month. Ideal for fans of The Simpsons, this tour will teach you all about neutron scattering and neutron beams.  Booking in advance (plus providing ID) is a must at this security sensitive site.

Location:  New Illawarra Rd, Lucas Heights
Hours: tours first Sat of month 10 am and 2pm,

3. Be an urban Robinson Crusoe and get lost on Store Beach .  Sydney has more than it’s share of beautiful beaches but to lose the crowds, head for Manly, rent a kayak and paddle your way to Store Beach. With no roads and no paths, the only way to get there is by sea which all but guarantees a pristine stretch of deserted beach.

Location:  Manly, Sydney

4. Count money at the Museum of Australian Currency Notes. Discover fun facts, trace the history of Australian coins and banknotes, and learn about forgeries at this small museum maintained by the Reserve Bank of Australia.

Location:  Ground Floor, 65 Martin Place, Sydney
Hours: 10.00 am and 4.00 pm Monday to Friday

5. Reflect and relax at the Paddington Reservoir Gardens . This two chambered reservoir was originally built in1866 and played a key element in Sydney’s water supply. But after being decommissioned in 1899, the area fell into disrepair, becoming home to feral cats and graffiti artists. Restored in 2009, the Paddington Reservoir Gardens give the appearance of a Romanesque sunken garden, complete with lake and hanging garden canopy and frescoes and murals lining the walls.

Location:  Cnr Oxford Street and Oatley Road, Paddington

But the best kept secret has to be the recently opened Sydney Harbor YHA . Located right in the heart of The Rocks, this hostel has million dollar views without the million dollar price tag. Prices range from A$37 to A$154 a night depending on the room.

To discover more secret Sydney places, pick up a copy of Frommer’s Sydney Free & Dirt Cheap by Lee Atkinson when it’s released in May.

Related Perceptive Travel story: Acrophobia Down Under