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

Well, I’m happy to report that your optimistic correspondent was wrong: Siberian eco-tourism is incredible, even if it’s not as balmy as Costa Rica.

See, there’s this giant lake in Siberia, Lake Baikal, sometimes called “the Pearl of Siberia.” It holds 20 percent of the planet’s fresh water, and its held sacred by the local indigenous tribes, the largest of which is the Buryat. Lake Baikal has been endangered at various points in the past several decades by the encroachment of development, mainly paper mills that dump waste into the lake. Back in the 1960s a group of local and international environmentalists petitioned UNESCO to add it to its list of World Heritage Sites, thinking that would be a good way to help protect the lake.

And it was. But four years ago there was a proposal to route an oil pipeline along the lake (great idea, obviously), and Putin held out out against outcries from all sorts of groups. Then UNESCO sent him a letter asking him to move the pipeline or they’d put Baikal on the List of World Heritage Sites in Danger. Lush then changed his tune.

Putin directed that the pipeline be moved, saying, “If there is even the smallest, the tiniest chance of polluting Baikal, then we must think of future generations and we must do everything to make sure this danger is not just minimized, but eliminated.”

Problem is that the lake is in danger again. The Baikalsk Pulp and Paper Mill, one of the most notoriously polluting mills in the region, was closed in 2008, much to the excitement of locals, but it has recently re-opened, thanks to a loan and pat on the back from Putin. In addition to helping the plant to re-open, Putin is letting it out of legislation requiring updates on their machinery and a directive to use waste-reducing technologies. When the plant closed the small town of Baikalsk lost most of its jobs, so Putin is framing the mill re-opening as a sort of “stimulus package” for the town. The  thing is, Russia has an economic development policy that helps out towns with only one source of income, so if the mill were allowed to remain shut, the town would likely benefit from government support of education and the creation of new potential industries.

The locals are taking matters into their own hands and aiming for a different development strategy. Namely: eco-tourism. Working in partnership with nonprofits like Center for Safe Energy, Baikal Watch and Baikal Environmental Wave, environmentalists in the area are building a 2,000-mile trail around the lake, called The Great Baikal Trail. So far 500 miles have been built with the help of 4,000 local volunteers and 2,000 international volunteers. The trail goes around the lake and through the forests that run alongside it, some of which include volcanic hot springs and waterfalls.

What makes it sort of an ideal ecotourism spot is that it’s not all just about nature. There are two main cities near Baikal — Irkutsk and the Buryat capital of Ulan-Ude — and back when the Soviet Union was the Soviet Union, Irkutsk was an open city but Ulan-Ude was closed. Consequently, Irkutsk has a European look and is sometimes called “the Paris of Siberia,” while Ulan-Ude remained a traditional Buryat city and thus looks Asian. Point being, the culture of the Buryat was preserved — so a visit to that region introduces a world most people (or Americans, at least) lack knowledge about. A world including unusual architecture (Buddhist temples plus the yurts the Buryat call home); music (their traditional string instrument looks like a mandolin with a giant neck and sounds like Pete Seeger wailing on the banjo); the people (they are friendly and warm, dress in vivid colors, and have a centuries’ old shamanic tradition); and language (the Buryat have their own tongue, and it’s in the same family as Mongolian, so it sounds more Asian than Russian).

To give you an idea of the scene, here’s a shot of local Buryat people:

Above and beyond that here’s a place that fulfills the great dream of eco-tourism: the more people that go there, the better chance there is of protecting all the things that make it wonderful. On that count, Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund are planning to ask UNESCO in July to send another letter to Putin. Hopefully it will work, but it’s not likely to be a permanent solution.

A few thousand visitors per year, though? Pumping money into the local economy and supporting businesses and groups that protect the area?  It’s not that unreasonable of a plan; despite its reputation as a frozen hinterland, Siberia actually has warm summers (temperatures get up to the 90s) during which you can swim in the lake, hike through taiga forests, or take a boat ride to the islands of Lake Baikal to check out the area’s nerpa seals–the only freshwater seals in the world.  That plus all of the attributes listed above could make it a prime ecotourism destination … not to mention a great vacation destination for hipsters to name-drop in coffeeshops.

The NYT, on the other hand, crushed it. Outgoing travel editor Stuart Emmrich (he’s taking over the Style section as of March 1st) served up his last Sunday travel section with flair, running great features on the new Russian contingent in Israel, London’s coffee craze, America’s craft-brew obsession, and a piece on a growing art boom in Murcia, Spain.  I’ve always had the sense that Emmrich loves food-tinged travel stories, and this week’s section included some fantastic examples.

The Israel story has possibly the best title I’ve ever read: Israel with a Russian Accent (and Pork). I literally saw it, and said “Ooooh!” The story delivers on the promise of its lovingly blasphemous title, describing a recent Russian immigration trend and its effect on the Holy Land in beautiful turns of phrase. Israel is described as having several sides, including “pottery-shard old and stiletto-heel new.” Its Russian population, which now make up 15 percent of the country’s residents, “have helped transform the Tel Aviv region into such a fertile high-tech center that some Israelis quip that you have to master Russian to get ahead there.”

At the other end of the spectrum, John Holl’s piece on microbrew tours was way more interesting than it might sound, starting with its fantastic intro paragraph:

“BY 8:30 a.m., Glen Nile was elbow-deep in a bucket of Cascade hops, pulling apart the dry pods and releasing the lupulin, a resinous substance that plays a crucial role in the creation of beer. Meanwhile, Errol Chase, who goes by Butch, was pouring pints of oatmeal stout.”

Holl goes on to describe the tour that he takes, in New Hampshire, and that it’s one of many now available to serve the increasingly obsessed American craft-beer lover. This isn’t your average tour of the local brewery. These are tours that enlist the help of their participants, and teach them a few things about brewing in the process.

One of the few non-food stories in the section, the piece on Murcia’s burgeoning art scene reads in an equally entertaining manner, mixing economic development and art appreciation into the narrative. Rather than trying to tap into the Bilbao effect, writer Andrew Ferren points out, Murcia’s government has opted for a “decentralized approach,” that has led to the emergence of a dozen or so galleries and museums throughout the city. The result: the creation of a sustained creative buzz throughout Murcia that Ferren captures in descriptions of former warehouses and canneries turned into galleries, and progressive exhibits like the Dominó Caníbal (“Cannibal Domino”), during which each artist will base installations on the one prior so that common thematic and material threads become inevitable.

SCORE: 10/10 (Emmrich goes out with a bang!)

With only one major travel feature per week, the San Francisco Chronicle has at least been doing a good job of making that one story a good one. This week it’s about eating like a local on Maui. And while writer John Flinn does commit the cardinal Mainlander sin of appropriating local Hawaiian words like “ono” and “grindz,” he makes up for it with some decent storytelling skills, starting with the intro, in which Flinn introduces the staple of all Hawaiian food staples: Spam.

‘”Don’t ask,’ says Bonnie Friedman. ‘Just taste it,’ he writes. “We’re standing in the parking lot of a mom-and-pop store, far from the sun-kissed beaches and resorts, and she’s unwrapping the dubiously looking and uniquely Hawaiian snack she’s just purchased inside: Spam musubi. It looks like an enormous piece of sushi, but where you’d expect to find a pink sliver of raw tuna or salmon there’s a slab of Monty Python’s favorite mystery meat. With added teriyaki flavor. I really don’t want to, but to humor the food critic and cookbook writer I take a cautious bite. Then a big, enthusiastic bite. And another. It’s really good.”

Flinn carries us through the rest of Maui’s local snacks in this same casual, appealing manner: malasadas (delicious Portuguese donuts filled with custard, cream or chocolate pudding), plate lunch (some kind of meat — usually chicken Katsu, terriyaki short ribs, kalua pig, or some sort of fish — with a big scoop of macaroni salad and another of rice), Loco Moco (usually rice, Spam, eggs and gravy), and shaved ice. None of it is available only on Maui, so this story could easily have just referenced Hawaii in general, and none of it strays from the list of Hawaiian foods usually covered in stories about cheap local Hawaiian fare. Still, the story was handled skillfully — a good read.

SCORE: 6/10 (minus points for generic topic)

The Washington Post strayed a bit from its new formula this week, running two international pieces (one on Kolkata, India, and the other on Salamanca, Spain), and one story focused on a nearby domestic destination: Dan Barber’s Blue Hill Farm in New York. Admittedly, Dan Barber is amazing, and Blue Hill Farm deserves kudos all day long, but I have to admit I’m a little tired of reading about it. Someone needs to get a new angle beyond describing its local, organic goodness. The WaPo story does at least offer a slight twist: Writer Joe Yonan investigate what Blue Hill cooks up during the cold season, given the restaurant’s commitment to cooking seasonally. Nonetheless, it’s tough to tell the Blue Hill story in a new way  – an aside: Yonan mentions staying at the Sheraton and catching the hotel shuttle to Blue Hill, which strikes me as amusingly incongruous.

I’m always suspicious of dual bylines. At one of my very first editorial positions, I worked with a couple who wrote everything together, from the shortest review to the longest feature, and it was always clear that one wrote really well and the other really didn’t. When they split up I gave them each an individual assignment, and it quickly became clear that the female in the duo was the better writer.  Point being, when I saw that the Salamanca story was co-written by a man and a woman, I arched an eyebrow. Fortunately, in this case the two either both write well or the WaPo editor worked some magic to smooth out the differences, because I didn’t notice until I was halfway through and happened to glance at the byline. I love the depiction of Salamanca as a witty city; there’s something really delightful about that idea, and the writers do a great job of backing up their claim with evidence like goofy caricatures carved into the cathedral’s door and the hidden, surrealistic frog carved above the entrance to the city’s famed university.

“Even today, students believe that spotting the frog will bring good luck in their exams, and the amphibian’s fame has leapt beyond the academy,” write Patricia Harris and David Lyon. “Frog kitsch fills the souvenir stalls, and visitors feel compelled to wander the original university warren — just two blocks from the cathedral — to try to discern the elusive amphibian amid the sculptural clutter on the college facade. (It’s about two-thirds of the way up the doorway on the right, and almost impossible to photograph.)”

Unfortunately, if the Salamanca pleasantly suprised me, the Kolkata story did the opposite. I was expecting a great narrative that would match the beauty of its photographs. Instead I found myself wrapped in a blanket of run-on sentences and awkard phrases. Exhibit A:

“A crazy frustration for any traveler in Kolkata is the abiding wariness you have to exercise in the city’s thriving culture of street food. For anyone who even half-relishes gastro-adventure, it’s exceedingly difficult to stroll past so much tasty-looking fare. Certainly the natives aren’t passing it up. On my first day in this wildly vibrant city, I got lost at noontime in a crowd of hundreds, men and women in business suits hovering around food stalls, lunching on delicious-looking dosas, parathas, samosas, stews and other edibles I couldn’t identify. I stopped at every stall and gawked, registering minimal vicarious pleasure and outsized, nearly delirious, envy. The temptation is real. But talk to anyone who has visited India, and you’re likely to hear at least one tale of gut-busting food trauma. More intrepid travelers, though, will be tempted to test their luck anyway. I particularly craved phuchkas, a dish Kolkata is famous for, a one-bite shot of spiced potatoes in a tiny sphere of fried bread, doused with tamarind water.”

SCORE: 5/10 (minus points for the Kolkata disappointment)

Speaking of disappointments: Oh, Los Angeles Times, why must you toy with me? Two or three months ago, the LAT travel section was unassailable, serving up two or three travel narratives worthy of awards, plus a handful of useful service-y stories. Now it’s doing one travel feature focused on a foreign destination, one focused on a domestic weekend destination, and one service-y piece; of the three, usually only one is much good. This week that slot goes to Susan Carpenter’s piece on Panama, which won me over with both its subject matter (I want to go explore cloud forests in Panama!) and its verve.

Carpenter starts her story in the middle, taking us on a speedboat ride with a mustachioed driver. But it’s her description of another ride, at the start of her trip, that made me love her piece:

“Where I was headed was bonito mejor, my driver, Orlando, told me, blowing a kiss to underscore his point,” she writes. “As we drove along the tree-lined highway connecting David to one of its burgeoning eco-tourism districts, I did understand a few things despite the language barrier: that a Toyota Corolla with 208,000 miles doesn’t have enough zip and shouldn’t be passing cargo trucks on one-lane roads, that iguana is the predominant road kill and that it’s pretty pathetic to be an Angeleno who does not speak Spanish.”

SCORE: 7/10 (bonus points for Panama, minus points for the rest)

I’m not really sure how Emmrich’s travel background will translate to the Style section. While governing the Times’ travel coverage, Emmrich has said he focused on finding good writers, not necessarily good travel writers or even people with experience in travel coverage. But the Style section is different; while good writing is important, it almost seems more important to really know your fashion stuff or at least have the good sense to trust reporters who do. It should be interesting to see how the section changes with Emmrich at its helm. It could — and most likely will — change for the better. For his part, Gabriel is moving back into reporting and will be covering education for the paper. According to a letter from Bill Keller about the shift, Gabriel had been yearning to return to reporting for a long time, but he expects to have him back as an editor at some point in the future. Meanwhile, we’re excited — and a little nervous — to see who winds up at the helm of the travel section. Stay tuned for news as it breaks.

Well, now it has. RueLaLa always seems to have at least one getaway deal. Bloomspot launched a couple of months ago with a sort of Groupon-meets-Gilt Group approach that geotargets local restaurant and weekend getaway discounts (the latest for people in San Francisco was about a 50% discount off the swankiest rooms at plush Bernardus Lodge in Carmel, while New York City residents were offered discounts at Great Jones Spa). Kayak launched its private sale section earlier this month. Gilt Group launched its Jetsetter site—which offers deals on everything from sleek New York City hotel rooms to luxury spa packages and African safaris — in late 2009. And Tablet has a private sale program that announces special discounts to members every Tuesday (but, unlike the other sites, members need to pay on Tablet — $195 a year for access to not just discounted room rates but also special perks at myriad resorts around the world).

But now the European king of the invite-only travel world – French site Voyage Privé – is throwing its chapeau into the ring, and it should be interesting to see how it plays out. In the fashion realm, it seems that there are plenty of customers to support multiple competitors, but on the travel front, I’m not so sure. There are only so many luxury resorts out there and then within that group, there are only so many that are interested in putting their rooms on sale, at least in a somewhat public forum.

Given that all of these sites are dealing in the same niche market, there’s got to be a point where enough is enough. I’m not sure when that point will tip, or what the deciding factor will be, but I’m thinking that as more and more of these sites launch, resorts will get choosier about which ones they want to deal with, based on the quality of the site and the terms of the sale agreement.

Having been given a sneak preview of the Voyage Privé site, which launches tomorrow, I can tell you I already spot two Jetsetter repeats — Sé San Diego and The Canyons, in Park City, Utah — and for the most part, the site seems to function in exactly the same way as Jetsetter, even down to the editorial bits that accompany each sale. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve written a few of these types of pieces for Jetsetter, so I know for a fact that they have them written by professional travel writers and they only assign write-ups to people who have physically been to the property. I’m not sure if Voyage Privé has the same set-up, but their previews are done as little mini pop-up Flash travel guides to the area, not just the resort; they’re slickly designed and well-written.

One thing Voyage Privé has on its U.S. competitors is its relative longevity in the new market. The French version of the site gets 2.5 million visitors per month. It has been live in France since 2008, and its revenue grew 130% in 2009, when it sent about 350,000 people on vacation. Jetsetter, which launched in September 2009, saw its sales grow 30% from November 2009 to December 2009, so it’s not exactly growing slowly either. Perhaps smartly, Voyage Privé is inviting only travel press to be members at its launch. “We are initially inviting press only and providing travel press the power and ability to invite in members,” explains a spokesperson for the company.

After that the membership will grow as it does on the other sites, with members inviting other members. If I had to wager a guess, I’d say that the best designed, best conceived sites will win out in the end; those that provide the best extension of a luxury resort’s brand. Kayak.com, for example, probably isn’t the first place that I’d go if I was looking to book a week at a luxury spa or a modern boutique hotel in Soho. Tablet is automatically a different beast because its members pay to be members and they get more than just discounted hotel rates. Bloomspot has differentiated itself by offering only local deals, on everything from restaurants to hotel rooms. That leaves Jetsetter and Voyage Privé to duke it out, and RueLaLa and ideeli needing to figure out whether they want to go whole hog on this travel thing or not.

Get ready for a high-end showdown.

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.

This was a week of hits and misses in newspaper travel sections: There were four stories that I found incredibly worth reading, but no one travel section clearly stood out.

The Washington Post stuck with its new formula: one international story, one “practical side of traveling” story, and one local/domestic story. I applaud the paper’s efforts to put a new spin on Hong Kong, with story about the metropolis told from the perspective of a mother visiting her college-age daughter there, but given that, despite the somewhat unusual vantage point, the story pretty much covers everything that’s already been covered a hundred times in Hong Kong, it’s a bit of a miss. The paper’s “Impulsive Traveler” section, where it tends to focus on easy weekend trips for DC-ers, is fast becoming one of my favorites, however. While, at first glance, the column seems devoted to service journalism, it delivers solid travel narratives about unexpected destinations every week. In this one column, Ocala, Fla. is the focus; specifically the town’s status as the capital of Florida horse country. I don’t know that I’m now more inclined to visit the place than I was before I read the story, but Judy Wells’s descriptive powers made me smile:

Buddy waited patiently, his huge brown eyes glued to the plastic packet in my hand,” she starts off. “The lady with the dog had fed him one cookie, and so had I, but the clever Clydesdale knew that Mrs. Pastures Cookies for Horses are packaged in threes. He had another treat coming.

Later, still talking about Buddy, a Clydesdale that was rescued from an abusive home and now entertains guests at the Hilton Ocala, Wells writes: “Like countless other horses, Buddy has found life in Florida’s horse country to be about as good as it gets. Humans like it, too, especially horse-crazy little girls and boys. Also grown-up ones like me.”

SCORE: 7/10 carry-ons (minus 3 for the Hong Kong miss and practical airline story)

The Boston Globe’s travel section tends to focus primarily on exploring New England (such is our economy), but the paper serves up one story a week focused on a different destination, sometimes far-flung, and often in Florida. This week it ran a piece on the islands off Georgia’s coast. I’m not sure if everyone would find this story as interesting as I did (after hearing about these islands a few years back I’ve been mildly obsessed with them ever since), and truth be told, it’s not at all well-written: This is one of those cases where the subject mattered more for me, but if you’ve got zero interest in Georgia and its islands, you’ll want to move along or else suffer through some pretty awkward sentences. The story has one of the choppiest lead paragraphs I’ve read in awhile:

“If there’s a place where ‘Keep this a secret’’ comes to mind, it’s the Georgia coast, strung with barrier islands as big as Bermuda, and back islands - 1,600 of them - as large as hundreds of acres to the size of a pickup truck. To find so many wildly beautiful islands in one state is remarkable enough, but it’s the fishing that draws anglers here.”

And it carries on the same way throughout, one choppy matter-of-fact sentence after another.

SCORE: 5/10 carry-ons (bonus points for interesting subject matter)

The New York Times section seemed even bigger than usual this week, which was great — bravo, NYT, for continuing to give travel writers something to shoot for. It was a great mix of stories, with a little bit of everything: adventure, luxury, music, and both international and domestic destinations. Strangely, though, I just couldn’t get into any of them but the Vietnam beer story. Otherwise, there’s a story on the underground scene in Utrecht that took me about an hour to read because I kept getting bored and zoning out; there are plenty of interesting things in it, including local bands and artists and a few random facts (it’s hard to find an apartment or an art space in Utrecht), but I just couldn’t bring myself to care. It seemed like that’s how the writer felt, too; there was a flatness in the tone, like he was describing something that he knew other people would think was cool, but that he wasn’t overly interested in himself.

The face-to-face delivery worked in the ACU, a bar staffed by volunteers that caters to the squatter community; it’s also one of the best underground music haunts in this city, about a half-hour train ride south of Amsterdam. On an average night, both band members and the crowd are regulars — a reflection of this modest, sometime insular city,” he writes, after opening with a scene in a bar, where a rowdy band is goading the audience to get closer to the stage.

Ditto on the story about flying to otherwise-unreachable spots in wildly beautiful Alaska. If someone were to describe this story to me, I’d definitely want to read it. But while I actually was reading it, I wanted to be doing something else. I think that part of it was the nut graph, which sets up the point of the story but also mentions why the writer was there (for another article). I’m all for simplicity, but this was so overly straightforward that it broke up the narrative of the piece, and I never really got back into it.

While in Alaska to interview people living in remote areas for an article, I learned how vital air travel is in reaching spots inaccessible by road. I also found it to be the best way to see the state’s many stunning sights — a discovery thousands of visitors are making as the proliferation of pilots in Alaska has led to an array of aerial jaunts.

The Vietnamese beer trail story, on the other hand, was pretty mesmerizing from start to finish. First, I didn’t know there was so much beer being made in Vietnam, and stories like that, which give you a new insight on a culture, are my favorite. Then, the writing is just really good — the tone is light, the transitions are smooth, and the descriptions are evocative without being grandiose. For example, the lead paragraph:

THE setting could have been any typical Central European beer garden. There were long rows of wooden tables stained in dark, rich hues; half- and full-liter beer mugs hanging from metal racks; and two beautifully crafted brass decoction tanks used for mashing traditionally brewed beer. But on this warm afternoon in November, I wasn’t in Plzen, or Munich, or Bruges. I was at the Hoa Vien Bräuhaus in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

SCORE: 7/10 (good, but not great)

The Los Angeles Times had a similarly varied — although nowhere near as large — section, with features on Sicily, skiing in Yosemite, and thrift-store shopping in Vancouver. The Sicily story was the best thing I read this week. Writer Susan Spano paints a beautiful picture of the place, and she manages to weave in dozens of interesting historical facts without making the piece feel like a history lecture.

All along the way are views over the old hill town, with its echoing alleyways and stairs, ruined Baroque churches and roofless palazzos abandoned after the 1968 Belice Valley earthquake, a 6.0-magnitude shaker that killed 300 people and left 70,000 people homeless.

The historic center had been inhabited since Roman times, but the destruction was so massive that many people simply cut their losses and moved away, building an unlovely sprawl of new neighborhoods around the old town. Beyond are the sun-blasted fields and bare hills of western Sicily that bankrupted land owners, turned peasant farmers into slaves and inspired mass emigration.

While telling us of the tragedies of western Sicily and the beautiful but mysterious Elymian temples, covered in the letters of a language modern man has yet to decipher, Spano seamlessly ties the story back to herself and the present:

When the news broke early last year about the sale of earthquake-damaged homes in the historic center of Salemi for 1 euro each, it sounded like the Italian version of a Hawaiian time-share scam. But I had to check it out, so I booked a room at the Hotel Villa Mokarta in Salemi, an easy drive to the sites.

Unfortunately, the Sicily story sets the bar pretty high, and the other two don’t come anywhere near it. The Vancouver piece deserves props for covering Vancouver without mentioning the Olympics, but as someone who has pretty low tolerance for alliteration, the phrase “I was a sartorial simp,” made me want to stop reading, and in general the story is just too self-conscious. If it were a person I would accuse it of trying to hard to be cool. The last story, on Badger Pass, Yosemite’s family-friendly ski area, is good; it’s just not great. I do like the fact that this spot is getting coverage, though. I know dozens of SoCal kids who learned to ski there and have a soft spot for Badger Pass, but I have almost never read anything about it. So on that count, well-done, LAT.

SCORE: 8/10 carry-ons (minus points for the Vancouver story, but overall this week’s winner)

Instead, I say that the Aloha state should combine its fledgling local-farm trend with its widely known penchant for all things mellow. Hawaii should legalize weed. (God, I hope my mother doesn’t read this. Mom, Dad, readers, I say this not because I think pot’s cool, but because I think it is lucrative.) But there it is. A smart financial decision that could actually save America’s favorite vacation island chain.

Still, I’m not the only one with the idea. Plenty of business reporters have already gone into great detail about why it would make good business sense for the state of California to legalize ganja: The state is bankrupt, and if pot were taxed, Cali would climb out of debt, stat. There’s already a network of medical marijuana clinics in California; a regulated industry would make quality and content uniform, and cut down on violence and the destruction of national forest and parkland, where people love to hide pot farms. And Obama already quietly erased a Bush-era regulation that required the federal crack-down on state-approved marijuana businesses. (Although LA’s recent crackdown on new dispensaries by its mayor may prove to be a little obstacle.)

But Hawaii’s looking at legalizing another currently-illegal activity — gambling — instead. For a lot of people this seems like a good compromise. Gambling is more acceptable. It doesn’t cause addiction (oh wait, it does!), or lead people to other harder drugs (oh wait, it can!), or suck up all of people’s time so they don’t do anything productive … you can see where I’m going here: I’m not interested in seriously arguing that pot-smoking is somehow better than gambling; I’m talking dollars and sense, and what’s best for the already-trampled people of Hawaii.

It’s a question of resources, too. On the pot front, let’s be honest, the crops already exist in Hawaii, so there would likely be little increase in the amount of resources needed — in terms of water and energy — to support a legal marijuana industry. Certainly no giant new buildings need to be built and operated.

A new casino industry, on the other hand, would put a major burden on the island state’s already severely stretched resources. Limited resources should be a concept easily grasped on an island.

Then there’s the cultural aspect. There are precious few jobs in Hawaii that don’t rely on tourism, and that creates both a relatively unstable economy (see the billion-dollar deficit) and an unhappy citizenry. Many native Hawaiians already feel like their land was taken from them illegally, and over the past few decades they have slowly been squeezed off the property ladder by snowbirds from Ottawa and Washington who want a piece of paradise.

On the Big Island, it’s not uncommon for people to live on the east side of the island and commute up to an hour or two to get to work at the resorts on the west side, simply because they can’t afford to live closer. And then these people are asked every day to wait on the very tourists and transplants who took their land. It’s easy to see why there’s tension between locals and howlies. If the government were to stimulate growth of a non-tourism-based industry it could help address both problems. Granted, if that industry is weed, it probably won’t stimulate the ambition needed to start other non-tourism-related industries, but that’s another issue.

To be fair, the state has been trying to stimulate other types of economic activity. A couple of big algae-to-fuel projects are underway there, and restaurants on the island are working to stimulate a local farming industry. But in general, the state is focused on tourism dollars, and often goes for the quick fix to the detriment of its long-term sustainability. This time, Hawaii, do us all one better:  Say no to casinos. Don’t make another short-sighted mistake and turn your entire state into an Indian Reservation with a beach.

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.

There seems to be some sort of cosmic rule that prohibits the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times from running good travel sections in the same week. For a couple of months now the grey lady has been beating the blonde bimbo to a pulp (sorry LA), but this week the tables turned, mostly because The New York Times ran its cruise issue this week — probably not a bad idea given that it was V-day plus a long weekend for President’s Day, but still not pleasant to read.

The LA Times, on the other hand, may now officially be back. It was almost there last week and this week, the paper really hit its stride with a great narrative feature on Tasmania; a fun story about the now-artsy enclave of Bisbee, Ariz.; and a story on Vancouver, that I think they probably couldn’t avoid running what with being a West Coast paper and the Winter Olympics starting last Friday.

The Tasmania story has one of the best lead paragraphs that I’ve read in awhile; I loved the way writer Thomas Curwen weaves together the long physical journey from LA to Tasmania with the metaphorically long road he and his wife took, saving and planning for a year, to get there.

“Only toward dawn did the sea begin to calm. I rose from my berth and glanced out the window,” he starts off. “The setting moon cast a broad light on the rolling waters of the Bass Strait, and in the distance, the lights of Tasmania began to dot the darkness. We had been traveling since Sunday. My wife, Margie, and I had left a rainy Los Angeles, exchanged winter for summer, overnighted in Melbourne and were two hours away from a landfall that we had been anticipating for almost a year. It was Thursday morning, and it seemed right that getting here had taken so long.”

I also appreciated his and his wife’s definition of travel, and desire to see the “real” Tasmania or, as he puts it, “to see whether it was possible to make the world large again.” Well put, Curwen. But as much as I really dug this story, it was tough to reconcile all the anti-tourism stuff with the fact that in the end he and his wife had booked a tour, complete with a guide and vans. Not so rugged after all, a great story nonetheless.

I have a feeling that all of my hipster friends will be booking trips to Bisbee, Arizona after reading about it in the LA Times. A former mining town, Bisbee was originally inhabited predominantly by men and thus mostly filled with old saloons and brothels. According to writer Charlie Vascellaro, the town has retained its “lusty” vibe and recently become “an artisan community, with an almost cult-like following among returning tourists,” and “a surprising haven for a lively and eclectic music scene populated with gypsies and vagabond musicians.”

Vascellaro goes on to describe a night out in Bisbee, complete with an Eastern European cabaret/gypsy fest, and continues to paint a Boho picture of the town via quotes from various local musicians and artists, all of whom sound borderline brainwashed by the place. It sounds like a cross between the sets of True Blood and Everything Is Illuminated.

SCORE: 8/10 carry-ons

I’m sorry New York Times, but I’m afraid you’re too late: I just can’t bring myself to read another cruise story. That said, the photo with the story about the Nile cruise does make me really want to take that trip at some point in my life.  One other thing on the cruise section and then I’ll move on to the good stuff: There’s an article in there about Honolulu’s China Town that I swear I’ve read a few times before. That area has supposedly been undergoing a renaissance for five years now.

Thank God the cruise news wasn’t the extent of the section. Sarah Wachter’s story on the forró in Paris is fantastic; a lovely mix of travel and cultural anthropology about Parisians’ current fascination with the sultry Brazilian dance.

“Part of the appeal of forró — which ranges from a slow rhythm called xote to a faster version called arrasta-pé — is its accessibility,” Wachter explains, then quotes instructor Marion: “It’s less competitive than salsa and less pedantic than tango.”

It’s a great description, and while Wachter didn’t write it herself, she had the good sense to use the quote.

SCORE: 6/10 carry-ons

The San Francisco Chronicle seems to be running more lengthy travel features of late — so bravo, SF Chron. In this week’s section, Masada Siegel takes us on safari to Africa, and while I couldn’t tell you  where she was in Africa after reading her piece, I enjoyed reading it as one of those rare experiences where you read thinking, “That’s sort of silly,” but smile and enjoy the words all the same. I have the same feeling when I watch Katherine Heigl act, and I can’t — and may not want to — put my finger on it.

In this case, I think that Siegel sounds like an entertaining person and sometimes that’s enough.

Love it or hate it, the woman’s got a voice (and for the record, I like it).

SCORE: 7/10 carry-ons

The Washington Post put out a solid section this week, including a literary tourism take on Stockholm, a food piece on finding a traditional meal in chronicly trendy London and an informative and entertaining little piece on Macon, Georgia. While I appreciate the effort of tying a Stockholm story into a popular book, I’ve got to say that I don’t really get the whole “tracing the places in the book” take on visiting a city. I once happened upon a church in Scotland that’s apparently mentioned in The Davinci Code and it was full of these people, and it was weird. But I digress. Christine Dell’Amore’s piece for the WaPo is fine, it’s just hard for me to relate to.

“By the time I make it to the island of Sodermalm, where the novel is set, I’m thanking the Norse gods that I bought snow boots earlier in the morning,” she writes. “I wait in front of Bellmansgatan 1, the trendy address of main character Mikael Blomkvist, inhaling snowflakes and starting to worry that the tour has been canceled, when my guide, Elisabeth Daude, materializes from the whiteout like a snow angel, draped in a cream-colored shawl.”

The story on Macon, Ga. was suprisingly enjoyable to read. I still don’t think I’ll ever plan a trip there, but I probably will drop some historical facts about Macon into conversation at some point in the future. Also, this story has the distinction of being the only one this week to make me say “Wow!” out loud, so that’s something.

“Macon is home to so many buildings on the National Register of Historic Places, you’d need 77 hours to visit each for just one minute — driving and gazing time not included,” Andrea Sachs begins. See that? A good first line can keep you reading about all sorts of things you wouldn’t normally be interested in.

The Macon story drew me in, but there’s something about the London story that I just loved. The writer’s tone is both informed and easy; again, I’m not particularly interested in the topic — finding traditional food in London — but I loved reading the writing.

“True, in the hustle of the financial center, they’ve been gone for decades, replaced by the same modern quick-service establishments you’ll find everywhere,” writes Yarvin, explaining the recent disappearance of old-fashioned pie shops in London. But he follows it up with this great little aside that’s nothing particularly special but just lends the piece a nice tone: “(The first place I ate pies and eels — on that street called “The Cut” — is now a sushi bar.)”

Yarvin eventually finds three shops that sell pie and eels, a traditional lunch once eaten by most Londoners. “On Bethnal Green Road, two of the last remaining outposts, both called Kelly and both insisting that they’re unrelated, held their ground,” he writes. Sure, there’s nothing necessarily remarkable about this sentence, but I loved the image that it conjured in my mind: that of the guys working behind the counters at these places, wearing track suits and insisting in rough London accents that they had nothing to do with the shop of the same name just up the street.

Unfortunately, at a certain point nothing can make up for the fact that this is a pretty boring story about one man’s hunt for pies and mash in London. And it doesn’t help that Yarvin loses his jaunty tone part of the way through. It’s hard to believe that the same guy wrote the lines above and then this dud: “I had spent the better part of a day searching for pie and mash shops that it turned out no longer existed. Clark’s was the real deal, though.”

SCORE: 8/10 carry-ons

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

Well, it was bound to happen. After two weeks of pretty superb travel sections all around, this week’s sections were a bit ho-hum.

One big standout was Alice Pfeiffer’s piece on art squats in Paris. It’s a fascinating subject. I, for one, never knew that there was a whole host of technically illegal art galleries in the City of Lights — nor that the city has recently moved to support them. But Pfeiffer does a great job of providing both the necessary practical details and the far more interesting stories surrounding the venues.

“On the Rue de Rivoli, one building stands out amid the busy boutiques and department stores,” she writes. “Inside a colorful interior, the place buzzes with shoppers and tourists — and young people covered in paint. This is 59 Rivoli, the latest of Paris’s legalized art squats.”

Melena Ryzik’s piece on losing Elvis in Memphis’ indie scene is pretty great, too, written in the sort of insider tone necesary to make such stories interesting and not travel guide-ish. “A motley crew of the city’s scenesters — from Burning Man types who brought their own Hula-Hoops to nu-Goths in their Edwardian frippery — danced until they were sweaty, even in the cold,” she writes. You had me at “frippery,” Ms. Ryzik.

Elsewhere in the section: an exploration of Tokyo’s ramen scene that was pretty good, but fell just slightly short of amazing (the writer seemed to hang out only with expats, which undermined the whole “authentic Tokyo” angle of the piece); a story about flyfishing in New Zealand that probably could have been fascinating had it not been quite so straightforward (too many practical details, not enough of the actual experience); and a piece on an Austrian chalet that erred in the opposite direction, including too many overly elaborate descriptions to be interesting (example: “The bray of a donkey brought that point home as we sipped hot coffee on a creaky wooden balcony and watched our visible breath vanish into the thin air.”).

SCORE: 8/10 carry-ons

The Boston Globe became the fifth or sixth paper in the past two months to run a story on the Oasis of the Seas, just in case there’s anyone left in the country who hasn’t read about the largest cruise ship ever made. At least they balanced it out a bit with a story about barging up the Loire. The latter story is neither amazing nor terrible, focusing largely on the pros and cons of barging in general and the writer’s particular experience with his aging parents. It’s well-written; it’s just that it’s sort of hard to get an idea of what such a trip would actually be like if you weren’t this exact writer on this exact trip. It’s also unfortunately paired with a photo that looks more like a white trash couple on a river cruise in Florida than a European barge floating down the Loire.

SCORE: 3/10 carry-ons

The Los Angeles Times continued with its trend of mediocrity, this time focused solely on California destinations, dominated by a San Francisco vs. San Diego package of stories. The lead story in the package rattles off a page-long list of attributes for each city, waffling back and forth over the pros and cons of each. “One gave us The Maltese Falcon, the other gave us Tony Hawk,” Christopher Reynolds writes. “One is the cradle of hippiedom; the other is a major Navy port.” It goes on like that for far too long. The package is evened out by two San Francisco articles — one on hippies the other on the Presidio — and a San Diego story focused on the city’s ties to the Navy, none of which are particularly amazing. Fair enough: Maybe the paper is moving to focus squarely on service, providing its readers the info they need to plan weekend trips throughout California. Selfishly that bums me out because the paper has traditionally had some of the best narrative travel writing around, but I suppose that’s the business these days.

SCORE: 3/10 carry-ons

But maybe there’s hope yet. The Washington Post, after about a month of pretty second-rate travel coverage, came back this week with some great stories. Okay, sure, the section also included about the 10th story I’ve read this year on Las Vegas City Centre and the 100th story I’ve read in my life about the good food in Mexico City, but it also featured a fantastic story on the island of Floreana in the Galapagos, where the mail system relies on helpful visitors.

“Instead of stamps and postmen, the Galapagos isle relies on a barrel and the kindness of travelers to move its mail,” Andrea Sachs writes. “Twice a day including Sunday, boatloads of unofficial mail carriers land in Post Office Bay and walk a few sandy yards to a wooden barrel crammed with postcards and notes left by past visitors. The guests, mainly cruisers eco-touring the Ecuadorian islands, sort through the stacks, looking for addresses within delivery distance of their homes. They also drop their own messages into the receptacle, adding another link to the chain of mail.”

And Becky Krystal manages to make a destination I have zero interest in visiting – Providence, R.I. — seem worth at least a detour next time I’m within a train ride. “My interest settled on an era more than 200 years later, when downtown was the state’s thriving commercial hub,” Krystal writes. “In the mid-20th century, a combination of suburban flight and highway construction forced businesses to close or relocate. The area lost its sheen. Strangely, the low period may have preserved much of what you can see today.”

Welcome back, WaPo.

SCORE: 8/10