* Motoring with Mohammed: Living La Vida Yemeni
Motoring with Mohammed: Journeys to Yemen and the Red Sea
by Eric Hansen (Vantage)
Reviewed by Susan Cunningham.
Eric Hansen, the intrepid, foolhardy author of Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo, is back with adventures from a beguiling corner of the Middle East. Back in 1978, after a yacht-wreck in the Red Sea, he was stranded for two weeks on an uninhabited island off the coast of North Yemen. Rescued after two weeks by a boatload of amiable Eritrean arms smugglers, he left buried on the island a pile of notebooks that he had compiled during seven years of bumming around Greater Asia.
Most of Motoring with Mohammed: Journeys to Yemen and the Red Sea takes place a decade later when Hansen returns with the hope of recovering his notebooks. His plans to revisit the island are stymied by bureaucracy, military security zones, and rumors of the presence of Yasser Arafat. Fortunately, Hansen rapidly loses his sense of mission as he falls into the rhythms of the Yemeni male lifestyle. This demands spending a large part of each day chewing a hallucinogenic leaf called qat.
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* Thailand: Data suggests supply/demand mismatch
By Susan Cunningham
HotelNewsNow.com Correspondent
BANGKOK—Tourism in Thailand has bounced back strongly since the global meltdown of 2009, despite continuing economic doldrums in Western countries and Thailand’s continuing political instability.
New source markets have momentum, tourism revenue was up 8% last year and more than 18,000 hotel rooms will enter the market within the next three years. Yet the mood in Bangkok earlier this month at TravelTrends.biz’s “No Vacancy” conference was cautious—even somber.
“There’s a disconnect between luxury hotels and growth in mass tourism,” said Bill Barnett, managing director of Phuket-based consultancy C9 Hotelworks. “There’s a disconnect when it comes to infrastructure … MORE
* Visiting the Thai market where a train drives through
After I saw this startling video of a Thai market ebbing and flowing over the tracks of a train, I had many questions. Where was the market? Could I visit it? What is the history of this line? I’ve found a few answers but I’d love to know more about the line’s history.
The train line began running some time before World War II as a freight line, hauling coal from the coast to Bangkok. As for the rest of the answer: You can’t reach it from Hualampong, Bangkok’s central train station. Nor from Bangkok Noi, the small station on the west bank of the Chao Phraya River, where the train to Kanchanaburi and the River Kwai departs. Read more »
