Salon.com > tourism

New Yorkers’ newest opportunity to step all over you

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 21:39:00 +0000

In an attempt to show the faces of the New Yorkers and tourists who swiftly move through Times Square at an unrelenting 24-hour pace, French street artist JR has set up a photo booth right in its center. Inside Out New York City, which started last night as part of the Times Square Arts public arts program, is a continuation of JR’s Inside Out Project, where the faces of the people who live in a place are made visible on its structure.

Pasting new posters

JR’s photo booth truck

Mexican vigilantes take over town

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:07:00 +0000

Hundreds of armed vigilantes have taken control of a town on a major highway in the Pacific coast state of Guerrero, arresting local police officers and searching homes after one of their leaders was killed. Several opened fire on a car of Mexican tourists headed to the beach for Easter week.

Members of the area's self-described "community police" say more than 1,500 members of the force were stopping traffic on Wednesday at improvised checkpoints in the town of Tierra Colorado, which sits on the highway connecting Mexico City to Acapulco. They arrested 12 police and the former director of public security in the town after a leader of the state's vigilante movement was slain on Monday.

A tourist heading to the beach with relatives was slightly wounded on Tuesday after they refused to stop at a roadblock and vigilantes fired shots at their car, officials said.

The vigilantes accuse the ex-security director of participating in the killing of their leader Guadalupe Quinones Carbajal, 28, on behalf of local organised crime groups and dumping his body in a nearby town on Monday.

Porn shoots in Parisian catacombs? Mais oui!

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 17:38:00 +0000

When you think of settings for porn shoots, you usually think of a dingy soundstage with a lice-ridden mattress in the corner, or a fluorescent-lit, all-white living room in some sketchy producer's San Fernando Valley home. You usually don't think of eighteenth-century Parisian burial grounds.

Yet if reports from the Local, an English-language French newspaper, are to be trusted, that's exactly where scores of enterprising smut peddlars are headed. Recently, the historic Catacombs of Paris has become a popular destination for adult filmmakers, models, and photographers, who are heading sixty feet underground to shoot against the backdrop of millions of human skulls and skeletons.

A spokesman for the Musee Carnavelet, the company that manages the catacombs, says that they receive at least one request for permission to film or take photos there every week. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they are not at all pleased with this trend.

“Obviously, we say no. This is a sacred place, which houses the remains of six million Parisians. We only allow serious or scientific documentaries,” the spokesman said.

China’s new tourist attraction: “Shangri-La”

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 16:38:00 +0000

Editor's note: "Manufacturing: Shangri-La" is a three-part series on a Tibetan hamlet turned tourist trap. Read Part 2:Profit quest imperils one of world’s most stunning landscapes; Part 3: China’s Shangri-La for minorities.

SHANGRI-LA, China — The fabled land of Shangri-La is a “delightfully favored place,” where monks live for hundreds of years, in the shadow of a “dazzling pyramid,” the mountain Karakal. The air has a “dream-like texture.” Every breath yields a “deep anesthetizing tranquility.”

That, at least, is how Shangri-La is described in "Lost Horizon," British author James Hilton’s classic 1933 novel.

Disneyland for gang enthusiasts

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 23:30:00 +0000

HERE'S HOW TO TAKE A GANG TOUR: start at a bus parked outside a Silverlake building called The Dream Center, where grown adults cluster like kids on a field trip. Pay $65, and take your complimentary bottled water. Notice the church group from Missouri, 20-strong and blonde, and eye their grocery bag full of snacks. Notice the surprising number of Australians. They pace restlessly. One of them is named Tiny, but he isn’t. He appears to be here with his son, a teenager in baggy shorts and braces.

Alfred is the guide. He’s a marine turned gangbanger turned entrepreneur. He’s cracking Inner City Jokes. His phrase. We don’t need the windows open cuz we don’t do drive-bys. Also, we can’t have them open because the bus is air-conditioned. He’s hired three other guys to help lead the tour — ex-gang-members who had trouble finding other jobs with felonies on their records. They’ve turned their experiences into stories for travelers. They are curators and exhibits at once. When they’re not giving tours, they’re doing conflict mediation in the communities these tours put on display. The $65 will fund this work.

Playboy coming to India as “aspirational lifestyle brand”

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 17:41:00 +0000

Playboy, a brand that's built an entire industry on sex appeal, is coming to India, a nation that remains very shy of sex appeal. Although the magazine is still banned in India, a Mumbai-based company has licenses to promote the Playboy brand with hotels, bars and clubs, the first of which will open in mid-December at Goa's Candolim Beach--albeit with an Indian twist.

According to the Daily Mail, the head of the Indian club, Sanjay Gupta, wants to "separate the powerful Playboy brand from its adult associations" and turn it into "an aspirational lifestyle brand for the growing Indian middle class." "We will dissociate from nudity completely," said Gupta. "We are positioning it around lifestyle, aspiration and glamor." (Even the iconic Playboy bunny costume will be toned down, "keeping in mind Indian sensibilities").

But Nikhil Desai, Goa's director of tourism, remains unconvinced that Gupta can make the Playboy club a wife-friendly place, as he claims it will be: "Assuming there is going to be vulgarity and activities that are not in tune with the Goan culture, their proposal will not be granted permission." He added, "However, they could be setting up a perfectly decent club."

PB Lifestyle has plans to open another Playboy club in Hyderabad, India in 2013.

Octogenarian restorer: I want royalties!

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 12:30:00 +0000

In what can only be described as the most unbelievable turn of events around the Beast Jesus debacle, Techdirt says the woman at the center of the global sensation is claiming copyright and wants a cut of the tourist money bonanza that has hit the small Spanish church.

Yes, octogenarian Cecilia Gimenez, who destroyed transformed García Martínez’s 19th-century fresco of Jesus into the now infamous Beast Jesus, isn’t pleased that she’s been left out of the spoils of her work. Spanish newspaper El Correo explains that since last Saturday the church has started charging visitors to the site and Gimenez wants some of the €2,000 they’ve raised in four days.