Valentine’s Day: Romantic Spots or Single Travel?
– “World’s most romantic hotels” (MSNBC)
– “Romance, food and wine in Sonoma” (SF Chronicle)
– “The look of love just might be the view out the window” (SF Chronicle)
– “Valentines? Paah, travel alone” (Times of London)
– “Solo diving in the Red Sea” (Times of London)
– “Find love in the great outdoors” (Times of London)

Black History Month
– “Five Cities, Five Takes” (Washington Post)

Backwoods Lodges
– “Some Getaways Are More Away Than Others” (NYT)

California’s Surf History
– “The birth of surf” (Guardian)

Cambodia
– “In Phnom Penh, Hopefulness Replaces Despair” (NYT)

China’s Wild West
– “Viewing Two Chinas From a Stop on the Silk Road” (NYT)

Lake Tahoe in Winter
– “Snowed by Tahoe” (NYT)

Mali
– “Welcome to Mali” (Times of London)

Miami Matures
– “Is South Beach Growing Up?” (NYT)

Natchez, MS’s New South
– “A Magnolia state of mind” (LA Times)

San Francisco’s Chinatown
– “Young insiders reveal tales of a hidden Chinatown” (Houston Chronicle)

Sedona, AZ
– “36 Hours: Sedona, Ariz.” (NYT)

Tibet
– “Solving Shangri-La’s Mysteries” (SF Chronicle)

From May to August of this year Kate Harris, Mel Yule, and Ben Rawluk loaded up their bikes and set out across Western China, following the trail of Marco Polo through Xinjiang Province and Tibet. Along the way they sweated through 4,000 k of remote and challenging terrain and raised thousands in support of Kham Aid, a non-profit working on cultural preservation the Tibetan regions of China. Kate recently uploaded a preview of their videos to Travelistic:



About the origin of the trip, she says: “We were deeply inspired by Marco Polo [and] decided to loosely retrace [his] travels through the Chinese autonomous regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, only traveling by bike rather than camel or caravan. We believed that the truth and reality of those places would be best revealed on dusty, winding trails, in remote communities, inside yurts shadowed by unnamed mountains.” You can read more about Kate, Mel and Ben’s adventures in the Cycling Silk blog, or on their website. For more of the unadulterated visual thrill of all that amazing landscape, check out Kate’s Flickr photostream.

Condé Nast Traveler is currently holding a poll to pick the films released since July, 2005 that most inspired viewers to travel. The results will be published in their December issue, and one poll-taker will win a five-night trip to Cancún. There are some likely candidates on the list – Brokeback Mountain, The Constant Gardener, Pride and Prejudice. I’m rallying for a little-seen Chinese film, Mountain Patrol: Kekexili, that’s set in the remote Tibetan plateau and has some gorgeously bleak cinematography (see left). Alas, Snakes on a Plane was released in August, too late to qualify; it’ll just have to wait for next year.

Now that summer is hitting its stride in the Northern Hemisphere, which in NYC today means heat and humidity in the high 80’s (mmm-mmm!), cue lots and lots of stories about frosty, faraway and sometimes inaccessible places where you can leave both the human crush and summer temperatures behind:

- “A national park to yourself…Canada’s Arctic Preserve awash in silent beauty” (SF Chronicle)

- “Iceland’s Ring Road: The Ultimate Road Trip” (NYT)

- “Going native up north (Canada’s Charlevoix region)” (LA Times)

- “Where Sweden meets Denmark” (Chicago Tribune)

- “A pilgrim’s trail (Tibet’s Mount Kailash)” (SMH)