Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Travel

Catching lobsters online
With just a few clicks, you can bring the fresh bounty of New England into your kitchen.
By Steven A. Shaw
[12/28/99]

In our bubbly is our beginning
New Year's rituals reveal what different cultures revere.
By Burt Wolf
[12/24/99]

Travel Advisor
Last-minute New Year's tips
Our travel expert reassures the Bali-bound Y2K-minded and offers Seattle celebration suggestions.
By Donald D. Groff
[12/23/99]

Out of the Blue
'Tis the season to be pissed off
Too many bags and too few bins make frequent flyers cry foul.
By Elliott Neal Hester
[12/22/99]

It's a bird, it's a plane -- it's SkyMall!
Where can you order an indoor/outdoor miniature golf course for only $18,999.95? In the mother ship of all catalogs.
By Christine Kenneally
[12/21/99]

Complete archives for Travel

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

We're not paying any particular attention to the millennium or Y2K and we don't want to do anything spectacular. We're having a few friends over for a quiet dinner and then at 10:30 I'll be joining my Zen students in the zendo we have built next door. We'll sit and chant and at midnight we'll gong out the old year and gong in the new in the traditional manner, with 108 tolls, and have a little toast. It's going to be very quiet, just the way we like it.

Peter Matthiessen is the author of more than 20 books, including "At Play in the Fields of the Lord," "Far Tortuga," "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse," "Under the Mountain Wall," "The Cloud Forest" and "Bone by Bone." He won the National Book Award for "The Snow Leopard."

BURT WOLF

I live in a small cottage built by a painter in 1917 on the roof of an old building that overlooks New York's Central Park. I intend to spend New Year's Eve alone in the greenhouse of that cottage looking at the city's skyline, calling my family and friends to wish them good luck in the New Year, reflecting on the experiences of my past and the coming attractions for my future.

At the moment of passage between the old year and the new, the shuttle that weaves the story of our lives pauses and presents a brief opportunity for a change in the pattern. I want to be clear-headed and focused at that turning point and able to consciously direct my fate.

When the fireworks start, I will open, decant and drink a small bottle of port that was put down in the year of my birth. It is an old English tradition for a family to put away a few bottles of port when a child is born and drink them decades later at an important occasion. In the old days, most people knew that they would not live to drink their best bottles. "Unless you are a babe in arms, it will see you out" was the conventional wisdom.

But thanks to our increased knowledge of how and why we age and the techniques that are being used to retard the negative effects of getting older, that may no longer be the case. It is quite possible that I will outlast my port, and like the writer Oliver Goldsmith, see the lords of humankind pass by, while my heart distrusting asks if this be joy. Of course, Goldsmith lived in the 1700s without the prospects of Rogaine or Viagra.

Burt Wolf is an internationally syndicated television journalist with special interests in travel, food and cultural history. His reports are broadcast worldwide via public broadcasting stations, the Discovery Network and CNN.

TIM CAHILL

I'm going to spend New Year's in my cabin on the edge of Montana's Absaroka-Beartooth wildnerness, probably in thigh-deep snow. We'll have wood for heat and we'll chop through the ice for water. It's going to be cozy and peaceful, just my partner Linnea and me.

Tim Cahill is the author of six books, including "Jaguars Ripped My Flesh," "A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg," "Pecked to Death by Ducks" and "Pass the Butterworms."

DAVID DOWNIE

It struck me as almost obscene to stay in Paris and be one of 11 million locals and several million tourists celebrating Y2K on the Champs-Elysées or the Seine. To me, New Year's should be observed in private, alone or à deux. A candlelit dinner, a bottle of bubbly and into bed by midnight plus 10!

As New Year's approaches, my wife (photographer Alison Harris) and I usually retreat to our Ligurian hideout, on the Italian Riviera about 20 miles southeast of Genoa. And this year is no exception. Our Italian friends and neighbors -- all of them at least nominally Roman Catholic -- seem to view this latest millennium with bemused detachment. For instance, they're fully expecting the Jubilee celebrations in Rome to be utter chaos -- something the Romans deserve, by the way, since Rome is the seat of government (another government crisis is on as I write this) and source of nearly 3,000 years of mayhem.

Our village-mates shrug when anyone mentions the Y2K bug. Many have never seen a computer, don't really know what the Internet is and glance skyward when we try to explain about chips and slots.

There's a spring with fresh water down the path from our village, they say. Everyone has plenty of candles for home (and church) use. The power often goes out anyway in the spectacular Mediterranean storms that hit the Ligurian seaboard. Pantries and cellars are always stocked with sea biscuits, pesto, vegetables preserved in olive oil, pasta ... "So why worry? We've lived with a lot longer than two millennia of mess, what could be worse than what we've already seen?"

As for my wife and I, we'll pop our bubbly under the olive trees and watch the fireworks arc over the Gulf of Genoa. If they go off, that is.

David Downie is Salon Travel's Paris correspondent. He is the author of several fiction and non-fiction books, including "Enchanted Liguria: A Celebration of the Culture, Lifestyle and Food of the Italian Riviera" (with photographs by Alison Harris).

Next page | Jan Morris, Paul Theroux, Jeff Greenwald and Morris Dye