Weekly Travel Scorecard [03.07.10]

As print newspapers fight to stay alive, travel sections lose pages and steadily increase service journalism while operating under more scrutiny than ever. In support of our paper/e-ink colleagues, here’s the Sunday print travel news that’s fit to post about.

Today marks a milestone for the Scorecard: Two 10/10 carry-on scores in one week. It’s a pretty amazing thing when a travel story manages to cross the line between reportage and fiction to become the best of both. This week I read two stories in two different newspapers that managed to do exactly that; two stories that were so good I had to pause for a minute and whisper to myself, “Wow, that was really f-ing good.” And yes, I even censor f-bombs launched internally.

Moving on: One of the Perfect 10′s was, perhaps expectedly, the New York Times. Joshua Hammer’s piece on hiking through Dogon country in Mali is beautifully written, but so are a lot of stories in the NYT. This piece was elevated by its subject matter: the animistic and isolate Dogon people, and a documentation of their homes and rituals.  In my favorite two passages, Hammer contrasts the Dogon people’s reverence of the forces of life/creation and death.

First, there’s the “life” graph:

Inside the maze, every structure, every scratching on a wall, was replete with symbolism. At the center of the village stood the dwelling of the hogon, who is believed to be able to bring rain and good fortune. A two-story mud palace perforated with a dozen apertures, each the length and width of a person, the structure looked like a giant toaster lying on its side. The openings, David explained, are for the spirits of village ancestors so that they can go in and out with ease; the authentic ostrich eggs mounted atop the turrets represent the life force conferred by the creator god, Amma.

And then comes death:

The force of death, too, is never far from sight in the Dogon world, where health clinics are few and far between and most sick people rely on the monkey paws, beads and other talismans of the village medicine man. We saw the widow’s house, a crude hut built on the village outskirts where a widow must dwell, with her sisters, for three weeks after her husband’s death; and a smoothened boulder, where the departed soul is given offerings for a year after death — the one we saw was sprinkled with millet flakes.

SCORE: 10/10 carry-ons

The second “Wow” story ran in a paper that doesn’t always run the greatest travel stories: The Chicago Sun Times. Frank Bures’ piece on a little-known Frank Lloyd Wright cottage in a state park in the Wisconsin Dells may not be as exotic as the NYT piece on Mali, but it succeeds for the same reasons: a perfect combination of great writing and a fascinating subject. The graph in which Bures explains the backstory of the cottage is a perfect example:

It’s a place with a strange, dark past: The house’s namesake was a young computer programmer at the Wisconsin Department of Motor Vehicles who wanted to study at Wright’s architecture school, Taliesin, but was rejected. So instead, he commissioned the cottage from Wright but committed suicide before it was finished in 1959, the same year Wright died. After that, it was sold to another family, who finished it and sold it to the state in 1966.

But Bures takes it to another level with a rather insightful look at the design of this particular place, Wright’s overall design philosophy, and the generally held beliefs of many naturalists. “If you truly believe nature will never fail you, you must redefine ‘fail,’” he writes. “Nature will kill your children and wipe out your species without a second thought. Nature doesn’t care. Nature is value neutral.”

SCORE: 10/10 carry-ons

Kayleigh Kulp’s story of adventure in Honduras for the Miami Herald may not quite be on par with the 10/10 geniuses of the week, but it’s a solid, well-told story nonetheless. A story that could have been focused entirely on river-rafting and cliff jumping becomes a whole lot more interesting when Kulp ties in her reservations about visiting a country known for pickpockets and its recent military coup.

After I dropped 30 feet into the Rio Cangrejal, I realized I had been scared for no reason. But I’m not talking about the plunge, or of the Class V rapids I rafted, the rocky, untamed jungle I climbed, or of the zipline on which I soared over gushing rapids and rocks.

What got to me were the scary stories of civil unrest, drug trafficking and petty crime from friends and family, and that was before President Manuel Zelaya was overthrown by a military coup last year for his radical efforts to change the Honduran constitution. They swore I would come back from Honduras with picked pockets and emotional scars.

Score: 7/10 carry-ons

Similarly solid, but not quite amazing, was Christopher Reynolds story on Todos Santos for the LA Times. Focused on the artsy expat town as the anti-Cabo spring break destination, Reynolds paints a dreamy picture of desert vistas, delicious Italian meals cooked up by transplanted Romans and charming streets filled with little galleries.

These three short, consecutive paragraphs, however, are emblematic of what keeps the story from being all that enjoyable of a read.  Filled with quotes and directions, they turn it into more of a service-y travel guide than a story:

Pat Cope, who arrived from Los Angeles to open a gallery with her husband, Michael, and infant son, Lane, remembers that “when we first moved here, all I heard was roosters.” Sixteen years later, Lane is contemplating colleges, and the roosters still greet each morning, Cope said, but “I don’t hear them.”

Todos Santos, said Paula Colombo, co-owner of the Café Santa-Fé, “is real. Good and bad, it’s real.” Now that the recession has slowed the pace of coastal vacation-home building outside town, Colombo added, “maybe we can settle down and do what we have to do to keep this place as magnificent as it could be …an oasis in the desert.”

My first stop was at Harper’s Rancho Pescadero hotel (no warning given, full price paid). Billed as a different kind of “dude” ranch, it has been busy since it opened in November 2009 with 12 rooms, a restaurant, a bar and a pool. If things keep going this well, Harper said, the hotel could add 15 units by year’s end.

SCORE: 5/10 carry-ons