World Tourism Blog

It took almost a decade of mental preparation before Anna Olson felt ready to edge her skis into the chasm of Corbet’s Couloir.

Since 1996, when she’d begun working at Jackson Hole (the legendary trail’s home ski resort in Wyoming), Olson had peered many times down Corbet’s opening chute—a sheer 20-foot drop down a vertical rock wall—before deciding, as most skiers do, “I don’t need to terrify myself that much.”

But one day, she finally decided to take, as she remembered, “that step into nothing.” And once she had, there was no going back.

“I think I had my eyes shut,” recalls Olson, who works in the mountain’s communications department, “and know I was screaming all the way down.” Still, once she’d arrived at the bottom in one piece, she at last understood what the fuss was about; there really was a unique exhilaration to conquering one of the world’s toughest ski runs.

To nonskiers, just the idea of standing atop a sharply pitched slope—any slope—while attached to a pair of slippery boards may seem frightening. But even among serious snowhounds, a few fast-paced spins down a gnarly black-diamond trail are often thrill enough.

For a certain sort of skier, though, the garden-variety moguls and steeps of most expert trails are just boredom on ice.

“Some people just seem to have different stuff coursing through their veins, at least once they strap on their skis,” says Samantha Berman, senior editor at SKI magazine. “I don’t know if it’s an adrenaline thing or what … but they just need something more.”

Those are the skiers, Berman says, who make pilgrimages to the world’s most famously challenging ski runs. Some get their fix catching “mandatory air” at storied crags like Corbet’s, or the tree-filled, triple-black-diamond Black Hole in Smugglers’ Notch, Vermont. Others travel overseas to tackle runs like Grand Couloir in Courchevel, France, which starts out as a terrifyingly narrow ridge followed by a sharply pitched chute. Hard money training.

Italy is opening its first national museum for contemporary arts and architecture in a bid to shed its image as merely a keeper of a glorious artistic past.

The ⁈llion ($223 million) Maxxi cultural center opens Saturday, for a limited weekend run before its full-fledged opening in a few months. The museum, located in a residential area of Rome, was designed by Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-born architect who was the first woman to win the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004.

The Culture Ministry decided to build the museum in 1998, recognizing that the country that produced Giotto, Michelangelo and Bernini — the avant-garde artists of their times — must continue to promote contemporary creativity if it wants to have a cultural heritage in the future.

“It is inconceivable for this very long flow of Italian creativity to be interrupted and do without the promotion and support which, over past centuries, have generally kindled it,” said Pio Baldi, head of the foundation that runs the museum.

The center, officially called the National Museum of the XXI Century Arts, is the latest in a series of cutting-edge architectural projects to be built in the Eternal City, which is better known for its Roman ruins, Baroque basilicas and Renaissance palazzi.

Renzo Piano’s Auditorium opened in 2002, giving Rome its first major-league concert hall. More recently and controversially, Richard Meier’s Ara Pacis museum, which houses a 2,000 year-old altar, opened in 2005. Critics complained the box-like shell was a modern blot in Rome’s historic center — to some, a gas station blocks away from the Spanish Steps.

No such protests befell Hadid’s design, which is located on the grounds of a former military barracks in Rome’s Flaminio neighborhood, far from the cobblestoned streets of the center but close enough to be reached on public transport and near the new concert hall.

Hadid said she intended the space to be an “urban cultural center,” an arts campus with indoor and outdoor exhibition spaces. The building itself — a sleek, windowed box on top of a box — is made of cement walls, steel stairs and a glass roof, giving the galleries a neutral backdrop illuminated by filtered natural light.

“I see Maxxi as an immersive urban environment for the exchange of ideas, feeding the cultural vitality of the city,” she said.

Indeed, the museum is designed to be a research workshop of sorts, not just exhibiting contemporary art and architecture but incorporating contemporary design, fashion, film and advertising in a multidisciplinary cultural center. Hard money training

The number of skier visits in the state will increase by an estimated 3 percent in the 2009-10 season to about 4.1 million, the president of industry group Ski Utah said Tuesday.

That would provide a boost to a struggling state economy increasingly dependent on tourism, and mark a turnaround from last year when the economic downturn hit.

Nathan Rafferty, Ski Utah president, said recent signs of economic growth in the national economy should lead to more destination travelers vacationing in the state than last year, when skier visits declined by 6.5 percent from the record-setting previous year.

“Last season was a little different for everybody,” Rafferty said. “The economic issues that we faced last year — the timing couldn’t have been worse.”

The economic crisis started when most people normally book vacations and got worse as the season went on, he said.

Rafferty’s comments come as most of Utah’s 13 ski areas prepare to open within the next two weeks.

The lift lines started forming at Solitude Mountain Resort last week, the first to open. Solitude, like many other resorts, developed new season pass and lodging deals this year in an effort to increase visitation.

“If you’re a skier or snowboarder, you’re seeing the best deals that you’ve seen in a decade,” Rafferty said.

Last year was the first since the 2001-02 season that the state’s ski industry didn’t experience any growth, mirroring a national trend that saw skier visits nationwide decline 5.5 percent from the record 60.5 million visits the season before.

Resorts near major metropolitan areas, particularly those on the East Coast, fared better than many destination resorts in the West last season because of an uptick in lift ticket and season pass sales bought by those who live within driving distance of ski areas.

“We hope that we’re going to see some pent up demand for skiing for the West,” Rafferty said. “There were a lot of people that stayed home, traditional skiers that maybe would have traveled out to Utah or Colorado that just said ‘You know, we’re going to stay in the car. We’re going to ski somewhere in Vermont or Maine.’”

Early indications are that more people are willing to travel.

Rafferty said the Denver-based research group Mountain Travel Research Project has reported that lodging reservations in Colorado, Utah, California and British Columbia for January are up 17 percent from last year and 7 percent for February.

Ski Utah’s Web site has also seen traffic increase 9 percent compared with the same period last year. Hard money training

While much has been made of CityCenter’s difficult birth, far less attention has been paid to the design behind it. It’s a design that speaks in equal parts to the challenges of the Las Vegas Strip, the unsustainable sprawl of the Las Vegas Valley (now home to 2 million people) and a fundamental shift in American demographics.

“After 30 years of suburban flight, people are moving back into the urban core,” says Billy Vassiliadis, CEO of R&R Partners (the ad agency behind the “What Happens Here, Stays Here” campaign). “You see it in Boston and Chicago, and we’re going to see more of it in Las Vegas. People are increasingly interested in living in a place where everything they want — shopping, restaurants, entertainment — is nearby.”

And residents aren’t the only ones who will benefit from the shift to a higher-density, more pedestrian-friendly Las Vegas.

“We’ve grown so big recently that moving around has become a burden,” says Vassiliadis, who believes CityCenter represents the beginning of a trend toward more destinations within a destination: “Las Vegas is going to evolve into something like Paris [the one in France, not the one up the street] where you spend one day in one arrondissement and go to another the next day.”

“CityCenter is Las Vegas entering the 21st century,” agrees Christopher Leinberger, a professor at the University of Michigan and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. “It’s fundamentally different than anything else that’s been built in Las Vegas before — modern, high-density, mixed-use — but it’s following the lead of metropolitan areas around the country.” Hard money training

These are hard times for clothing-optional travelers.

Last summer, thanks to two highly-publicized incidents, naked became synonymous with crazy. In one, a passenger stripped during a US Airways flight and resisted an attendant’s efforts to cover him; in the other, a Southwest Airlines flight was forced to turn around after a male passenger went au naturel.

The American nudist community has endured other recent controversies as well, including the withdrawal of a Florida clothing-optional resort called Paradise Lakes from the American Association of Nude Resorts (AANR) after running a controversial ad campaign that violated AANR’s “family-friendly principles.”

All of this has taken a toll: The number of people who say they’re interested in what’s being called a “nakation” slipped from 11 percent in 2008 to 10 percent this year, according to the Orlando-based market research firm Y Partnership. Erich Schuttauf, AANR’s executive director, acknowledged his concerns in a recent interview.

“It is fair to say that members are traveling less and visiting clubs closer to home,” he told me, adding, “There is a lot for which we are thankful.”

With all of this happening, why would you still want to consider baring everything on your next vacation?

First a warning: A clothing-optional vacation isn’t for everyone. For example, when I posted Schuttauf’s interview on my blog, I illustrated it with what I thought was an appropriate photo of four unclothed women running into the Baltic. The picture only showed their uncovered derrieres, but the outcry from some of my readers was loud. They demanded I remove the “not-safe-for-work” image, and because I love my readers, I did. (Even if they’re prudes.)

And by way of full disclosure, no, I haven’t taken a nakation. But I’m open to it.

Here are a few reasons you might consider vacationing in the buff. Hard money training

On a sunny October morning, a stiff breeze blows through a busy construction site on the Las Vegas Strip. Gathering strength, it whips past spools of wire and pallets of lumber, picks up a payload of grit and spins itself into a mini-tornado that rises into the sky.

And then just as quickly, the wind dies, the air clears and the sky is filled, not with dust and dirt, but with the gleaming glass towers of CityCenter, the biggest thing to hit this town since the slot machine. Part destination resort, part urban enclave, the 67-acre complex is a city within a city, an architectural tour de force and an $8.5-billion gamble on the economy, consumer confidence and the appeal of Vegas itself.

The dust devil may have lasted only a minute, but the winds of change that CityCenter represents will blow through Las Vegas for years to come.

Set to open its multi-billion-dollar doors in December, CityCenter is more than just another casino resort. It’s also the largest privately funded construction project in the U.S., a much-touted honorific that, in hindsight, strikes some as more burden than blessing. Conceived before the recession — and almost bankrupted by it — CityCenter is making its debut in a very different world.

The idea was born in 2004 when executives at MGM Mirage, CityCenter’s developer, began exploring ways to utilize what was then a 55-acre parcel (later expanded to 67 acres) between its Monte Carlo and Bellagio resorts. The task was headed up by then-president and current CEO James Murren. Hard money training

The world’s largest cruise ship has cleared a crucial obstacle on its way to Florida, lowering its smokestacks to squeeze under a bridge in Denmark.

The Oasis of the Seas — which rises about 20 stories high — passed below the Great Belt Fixed Link with a slim margin as it left the Baltic Sea Sunday on its maiden voyage to Florida.

Bridge operators said that even after lowering its telescopic smokestacks the giant ship had less than a 2-foot gap.

Hundreds of people gathered on beaches at both ends of the bridge, waiting for hours to watch the brightly lit behemoth sail by shortly after midnight.

“It was fantastic to see it glide under the bridge. Boy, it was big,” said Kurt Hal, 56.

Company officials are banking that its novelty will help guarantee its success. Five times larger than the Titanic, the $1.5 billion ship has seven neighborhoods, an ice rink, a small golf course and a 750-seat outdoor amphitheater. It has 2,700 cabins and can accommodate 6,300 passengers and 2,100 crew members.

Accommodations include loft cabins, with floor-to-ceiling windows, and 1,600-square-foot luxury suites with balconies overlooking the sea or promenades.

The liner also has four swimming pools, volleyball and basketball courts, and a youth zone with theme parks and nurseries for children.

Oasis of the Sea, nearly 40 percent larger than the industry’s next-biggest ship, was conceived years before the economic downturn caused desperate cruise lines to slash prices to fill vacant berths.

It was built by STX Finland for Royal Caribbean International and left the shipyard in Finland on Friday. Officials hadn’t expected any problems in passing the Great Belt bridge, but traffic was stopped for about 15 minutes as a precaution when the ship approached, Danish navy spokesman Joergen Brand said.

Aboard the Oasis of the Seas, project manager Toivo Ilvonen of STX Finland confirmed that the ship had passed under the bridge without any incidents. Hard money training

A long-awaited plan to build a Disney theme park in Shanghai appears to have moved forward, with officials confirming Monday that central government approvals are in place and an announcement is due soon.

However, Disney said there was no change to report.

Mayor Han Zheng told reporters Sunday that the city plans to make an announcement as early as this week to explain details of the plan — handy timing ahead of President Barack Obama’s planned Nov. 15 visit to Shanghai.

An official in the public information department of the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s main planning agency, confirmed Monday that the plan had been approved.

The official, who like many Chinese officials refused to give his name, referred inquiries to the local NDRC branch. That office did not immediately respond to requests for information submitted by phone and fax.

Two other officials, who also spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to media, confirmed that the NDRC had OK’d the plan. But they also would not give any details.

A Disney executive confirmed discussions were still under way and that the company and the Shanghai government had submitted a request for central government approval, which would be required for any major project.

“No deal has been agreed to, no project has been approved,” Leslie Goodman, an executive vice president for Disney Parks and Resorts Group, said in a statement.

The difference in public stances could reflect last-minute quibbling over details for the project, such as the share of costs or ownership to be taken by Disney.

Speaking after weekend meetings with international business advisers, Han, the mayor, said the city would hold a news conference this week.

Last spring, Mayor Han said on the sidelines of the national legislative session that the two sides were getting down to serious negotiations.

But he compared Disney and Shanghai to “lovers, still in love but having a hard time deciding when to get married,” the Shanghai newspaper Oriental Morning Post quoted him as saying.

Disney’s chief executive, Bob Iger, said earlier this year that the company was waiting for word from the central government about building the theme park.

Residents were long ago moved off farmland in Chuansha, a part of Pudong district near the city’s main international airport, to make way for the theme park.

Shanghai’s leaders are keen to develop this former bastion of Chinese industry into a global services and financial center, and building a Disney park would create jobs and be a key draw for tourism.

Walt Disney Co. earlier had emphasized that it was focusing on developing its theme park in Hong Kong, which has seen disappointing attendance since opening in 2005. Shanghai itself is in the midst of a massive construction boom ahead of next year’s World Expo, which will run May 1-Oct. 31 downtown along the city’s Huangpu river. Hard money training

The world’s largest cruise liner on Friday began its maiden voyage to Florida, gliding out from a shipyard in Finland with an amphitheater, basketball courts and an ice rink on board.

The 16-deck Oasis of the Seas spans 1,200 feet (360 meters) from bow to stern. Its 2,700 cabins can accommodate 6,300 passengers and 2,100 crew.

Commissioned by Royal Caribbean International, the ship cost $1.5 billion and took two and a half years to build at the STX Finland Oy shipyard in Turku, southwestern Finland.

The liner has four swimming pools, volleyball and basketball courts, and a youth zone with theme parks and nurseries for children. There is also an ice rink that seats 780 spectators and a small-scale golf course.

It features various “neighborhoods” — parks, squares and arenas with special themes. One of them will be a tropical environment, including palm trees and vines among the total 12,000 plants on board. They will be planted after the ship arrives in Fort Lauderdale. Hard money training

For true vampire devotees, a must-see is country’s Transylvania region. One of the most authentic locations is Bran Castle (a.k.a. Dracula’s Castle), Dracula’s birthplace, Sighisoara, and Dracula’s burial grounds at the Snagov Monastery are also popular sites, especially during Halloween time.

Even before Bela Lugosi muttered those infamous words “I never drink … wine” in his 1920s stage and film versions of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” vampires have been ingrained in our culture. Never more than now.

Writers Anne Rice and Stephen King helped keep vampires alive and recent TV shows, movies and books like “True Blood” and “Twilight” have introduced vampires to a whole new generation.

Indeed, tour groups around the world are helping the vampire imagery come to life with excursions to a number of eerie places — from the legendary Bran Castle (a.k.a Dracula’s Castle) in Romania to historic vampire haunts in New Orleans. Even the small town of Forks, Wash., has become flooded with “Twilight”-crazed fans hoping to catch a glimpse of locations made popular by the sexy teen vampires. Hard money training