Travel Newsletter: 1 December 2023
Turkey’s Black Sea coast, visiting traditional tourism villages, the Lijiang-Shangri-La Railway, and more travel reads
Welcome to the Nomadic Notes Travel Newsletter, where I curate the best travel reads of the week.
Travel reads
• Turkey’s Black Sea coast: An epic road trip back through time
This is a great interactive article that makes me want to the Black Sea coast. I’m not even sure if this is sponsored by a tourism body, but there are no links to resorts so I will give full marks to the creative team for making me more interested in this region. I have travelled in Turkey and said I would travel more, but the last two times I got stuck in Istanbul (a hard city to leave).
• Tan Hoa tourism village listed among world’s best in 2023
I kept seeing this article in the Vietnam English news sites, and I assumed it was from another travel website listicle. After seeing this story on other sites I caved in and clicked through, and this list is from the UNWTO:
UNWTO names its best tourism villages 2023
“The World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) has announced its list of Best Tourism Villages 2023. The accolate recogonizes villages that are leading in nurturing rural areas and preserving landscapes, cultural diversity, local values, and culinary traditions.”
I went through the list and I’m not familiar with any of them, so this is not your average list. I’m not sure how many people would use this as a bucket list, and if that is a good thing or not.
I went to a tourist village in Flores, and I realised that visiting such places isn’t my thing.
I got a Facebook reminder this week about when I went to a traditional wedding in a village in Sabah, which felt more traditional than visiting a traditional village. The village itself was an unremarkable village in Borneo surrounded by palm oil plantations. You would never go there as a tourist, but staying with the family made the difference. Attending such events is hard to come by, so I don’t know the answer to finding experiences like this.
The wedding taught me that I should say yes to most invitations, and as a result, I have ended up at weddings and funerals in the hometowns of friends who live in big cities.
[At a wedding in Sabah.]
• Traversing Ha Giang Loop: a photographic journey
Another way to visit traditional villages is to get on a bike and stop for soup in a random village in places like this.
• Time has stood still on this Belize island. How wonderful.
• On Warsaw by
• Gear Post 2024 by Tynan.
• There’s a word for how we’re feeling as travelers—and this is it
• China visa-free entry from December 1, 2023, to November 30, 2024: See country list
🛏️ Accommodation
• The ‘Airbnb Alternative’ Black Market
• Airbnb looks to convert Japan's empty homes into tourist lodgings
💻 Nomad news
• Japan is enticing for digital nomads, but visa hurdles remain
🚆Train travel
• The Lijiang-Shangri-La Railway: A new era in Yunnan's connectivity
If your country is on the new China visa list you could get the train from Laos to Kunming, and then check out this new train. I’ve wanted to do this trip myself, but getting a visa is a hassle.
• Why doesn’t the US have more passenger trains?
✈️ Air travel
• 20 years ago, the supersonic passenger jet Concorde flew for the last time
…
James Clark – Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Thank you for this . This will be my weekend read
What a once in a lifetime experience it must have been to attend that wedding in Borneo!