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.

I’m of two minds about this week’s travel sections: There were more original stories in more papers than there have been for awhile, which made me happy, but there were also more hackneyed phrases than I’ve read in awhile, which was sort of a downer. Not that I’ve only ever written perfect prose. It’s just that with so little space allotted to travel coverage these days, it pains me to see precious inches wasted on clichés. But like I said, it wasn’t all bad news this week –there were plenty of stories to read, and many of them were quite good.

For me, this week’s New York Times travel section was my ideal, a perfect mix of domestic and international travel, youthful adventures and history. Henry Shukman’s homage to Santa Fe was the perfect celebration of the town’s 400^th anniversary. “The desert slowly emerged out of a velvet blackness, became a watery blue, almost the blue of a swimming pool,” he writes, in poetic prose that manages to communicate his love of the location without feeling overwrought. “Then just as we got to the top of the long climb of La Bajada Hill and the Sangre de Cristo mountains sprang into view, the wing of darkness over the earth withdrew, and the true daytime colors began to show, rusty-brown as a cougar’s hide. Ahead, the gaunt lump of the mountains, receiving the first red blush on their faces. At their feet, the mingling of the lights of town with stars of sunlight winking from distant windows.”

Damn, Shukman! The man can turn a phrase. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Tara Mulholland takes us on a trek through Guyana, a country that is trying to establish itself as a destination for eco-tourists. It’s a short, entertaining piece, but in easy to read, streamlined paragraphs, Mulholland manages to lay out some of the history of the place while explaining both why people should go there and why some people shouldn’t. “As we bumped back to Dadanawa ranch from our excursion on the savannah, I turned to one of our guides to ask if she finds it frustrating that so few people visit her country,” Mulholland writes. “She paused. ‘Well, Guyana’s not for everyone,’ she finally said. ‘You can’t go and spot anteaters at dawn if you are in a group of 20.’ The jeep jerked over a particularly tough piece of terrain, and our heads knocked against the roof. ‘And,’ she added, ‘Guyana’s special. It’s not a place to come if you just want a vacation — you have to really want to come here. If you don’t, maybe we don’t really want you.’”

The two domestic-focused pieces in the section covered the emergent food scene in Houston and small, neighborhood ski resorts in New England. Having been forced to Houston on business a few times, my image of the city is composed mainly of humidity, smog, and barbecue. But the Houston Salma Abdelnour describes is full of cutting-edge restaurants in random locations like old car lots — this is a city I’d like to see.

“…in the years since I left Houston, where I grew up, it’s gone from a city where the high-end restaurants were as gilded as they were mostly mediocre to a place with a world-class food scene and a rising generation of culinary stars,” she writes. “Instead of playing catch-up to restaurant trends elsewhere, Houston’s most talented chefs are finding their own voice: uncovering the food traditions of the area’s ethnic populations, experimenting with little-known seafood varieties from the nearby gulf, and embracing Texas’s strange agricultural rhythms. And given the city’s notorious lack of zoning laws, it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that restaurateurs are setting up shop in refreshingly unusual spaces.”

In her piece on small ski resorts in New England, Katie Zezima sets up her stories with one of the best-crafted paragraphs I’ve read in awhile. It’s simple, informative, and sets the story up in two sentences:

“It was also what skiing was like before the days of heated gondolas, ski valets and $97 lift tickets — luxuries out of reach to many people, even before the recession. With many skiers staying closer to home for a second winter, neighborhood ski resorts are enjoying a resurgence, especially in New England.”

SCORE: 10/10 carry-ons

As someone who has spent a fair amount of time in Detroit, I loved the irony of the Detroit Free Press running a travel feature entitled “Once-beautiful Property Is Allowed to Rot and Die.” And travel columnist Ellen Creager’s indignant tone made me chuckle even more. “The senseless death of the Grand Beach Resort on St. Thomas is sick and sad,” she writes. “It has spent more than five years rotting away on one of the most beautiful bays in the U.S. Virgin Islands.”

I’m thinking this DFP staffer must live in Bloomfield Hills if the one dilapidated resort in St. Thomas is killing her; otherwise it would just make her feel like she was at home in the D. But wait, it gets better. “The movie Weekend at Bernie’s II was filmed here in 1993,” she writes, still outraged that a high-end resort would be left to rot. “Model photo shoots for magazines were held here. It was elegant.”

Just like this story.

SCORE: 2/10 carry-ons

The L.A. Times went from all-domestic last week to all-exotic this week, with stories on hanging out with elephants in Thailand, joining a Carnival parade in Rio, taking a day-cruise from Greece to Albania, and experiencing notoriously expensive Moscow on the cheap. I’m gonna tentatively say that the LAT is back this week. Maybe not all the way back, as the section was still dotted with purple prose, but at least 80% back, and I am relieved. It was a rough couple weeks there, LA Times, and I’m glad that whomever was on vacation in the newsroom has returned to their desk.

That said, the paper still sadly managed to print this week’s worst sentence — in fact, it even separated it out as a small paragraph, which leads me to believe that someone thought this sentence was so awesome it deserved to stand on its own: “For an animal lover like me, it was a pachyderm paradise for the price of peanuts,” writes Christopher Smith in his otherwise totally fine article about an elephant reserve in Thailand. C’mon, LA Times: Lines like that one are what editors are for; get out the red pen.

The Rio story starts off with promise. “She dreamed of being a bejeweled samba dancer at the annual party,” the subhed reads. “So how did she end up in a frumpy white suit and tricorn hat?”

And the story itself delivers on the entertainment promised by that little teaser: The writer, we find out, has volunteered in Rio in exchange for a hook-up with a samba school that will let her participate in one of the Carnival parades. Sure, she has to wear a frumpy suit, but it’s worth it to get a birds-eye view of the action. It’s a solid story, but, as with the Thailand tale, could have used the help of a line editor. Amid great lines like this one — “Among the eight of us, the Dutchman was tipsy and the Danish girls complained about the suffocating heat, but I didn’t care.”  – there are some real duds: “Though I was born in Brazil, it wasn’t until I took samba dance classes in my 20s and later performed with an amateur troupe that I became smitten with my birth country and its sensuous samba, and I have been ever since.”

The Moscow story, though, is brilliant. I loved every bit of it, from the insider feel of a former resident letting us in on the secrets of enjoying the city without tons of cash to the perfectly crafted descriptions that show off both the millionaire and middle-class sides of the Russian capital.

“Just take a walk through the rows of tinted Range Rovers and Bentleys parked behind the Bolshoi Theatre and you’ll understand why this is the city that hosts the conspicuously named Millionaire Fair,” writes Sasha Vasilyuk. “Yet behind this facade live most of Moscow’s 10.5 million inhabitants — the IKEA-shopping, subway-traveling middle-class residents who like indie theaters and smoky, underground cafes.”

Rounding out the section, an Albanian cruise story was better than I expected: Not the best-written story ever (a lot of “We did this, and then we did that, and then after that we did this other thing” sorts of sentences), but packed with enough details to make me think Albania might be worth a trip before too many people discover that it’s as beautiful as Greece at a quarter of the price.

SCORE: 7/10 carry-ons

The Washington Post’s section was an odd mix — one of its (two) main travel features covered body scans in airports, and the other discussed soup in Pittsburgh.

The soup story surprised me: I read the whole thing without zoning out once, and by the end I was really hungry. I was also tempted to actually plan a trip to Pittsburg for its annual South Side Soup Contest February 20^th.

“Butternut bourbon bisque, bacon blue cheese, and apple and chipotle chicken chorizo were among last February’s winners, with Paul Krawiec’s creation winning runner-up honors,” writes Christine H. O’Toole. “Krawiec, a ‘Star Wars’ fan, blended allusions to the film, Guinness stout and pirogis in a soup he dubbed Sir Alec Guinness’s Obi Wan Pierogi. The blend of sharp cheddar and stout with potatoes and sauerkraut was topped with ‘Chew-bacon’ and served by costumed waiters with lightsabers and a robotic R2D2.”

That’s it, I’m going.

The body scan story, for its part, was pretty much exactly like the dozen other body scan stories I’ve read in the last couple of months, and frankly the stuff Jaunted.com ran was better. The WaPo writer also used one of my top five least favorite adjectives, describing the body scanner as “au courant technology.” Blech.

SCORE: 5/10 carry-ons

Email