Spendthrift Shoestring

Nicaragua: Big Corn Island

I spent four nights last week on Big Corn Island, Nicaragua, and I'm currently finishing up an article about the ramshackle island for koucou.

Tomorrow I head to St. John's, Newfoundland on assignment.

For now, some photos of Big Corn.

Room detail at Princesa de la Isla guest house.

Banner celebrating Nicaragua's National Independence Day.

Nicaraguan television.

The Staycation Reconsidered

People in the travel industry don't much like the idea of the staycation, a concept seemingly perfectly tailored to a recession. Much of the opposition within the industry to the idea of the staycation seems to reside in the idea that the more people stay at home the less money they spend on transportation, hotels, restaurants, and other touristy things, with all sorts of pernicious and negative knock-on effects for tourism writ large.

Honestly, it's not completely clear to me why traveling types are so opposed to the staycation. As far as the economic argument goes, people can spend lots of money enjoying themselves at home, on precisely the sorts of things for which tourists shell out cash—including hotels. This past weekend I got into a conversation with two New Yorkers who, like me, have been sorely tempted to book a night at the Standard, the hotel that straddles the High Line. The Standard is merely the most obvious current choice for a local hotel bed hop, but it's not the only one. I'm currently updating hotel listings for EuroCheapo's New York guide and I've already come across three hotels where I'd happily shack up for a night.

Hotels aside, there are plenty of ways that staycations can generate tourist dollars. If everyone in New York City with budgeted travel funds took a week off at home and put, say, half of their vacation budgets toward local restaurants, activities, and other amusements, that would surely amount to an enormous sum.

To be honest, I kind of like the concept of a staycation, if the point of the staycation is to find a way to explore one's hometown or backyard in new or previously undiscovered ways. Last summer, when I had eight weeks to romp around London—well, six, once my jaunts around the UK and beyond were taken into account—I assembled a long list of things to do and see. My list was varied. It included neighborhoods, parks, restaurants, walks, cafés, bars, and various products. This list made my time in London a blur of excitement. It felt as if I was unpeeling a different layer of London almost every day.

I loved this way of experiencing a city, and when I returned I decided to find a way to replicate the process here at home. It's helped that my friend Rob and I have settled over the past few months into a pattern of taking little exploratory adventures around the city. These excursions have cemented my commitment to re-exploring New York, but at a certain point I realized that I needed to write a New York list in the spirit of my London activity list. As it now stands, my New York list is a running tabulation of hometown places and activities I haven't yet experienced: various hotel bars for fancy cocktails; a Bosnian hamburger joint; Wave Hill Park; a ride to the end of the 1 subway line; highly recommended tattoo parlors, and so on.

Does a staycation along these lines trump the sheer joy of engaging with different cultures, languages, and customs? Of course not. But if a hometown's richness and variability can be revealed in countless new ways through a staycation, I say book your trip tonight.

Who Will Benefit from SkyEurope's Demise?

On August 31, SkyEurope went belly-up. After months and months of confidence-stripping events—bridge loans, terminated airplane leases, postponed financial statements, the granting of protection from creditors by a Slovak court, the refusal of several airports to service SkyEurope planes in light of unpaid fees—the airline finally called it quits.

For those of us following the ups and downs of European aviation, the airline's demise was no surprise. Most observers of Europe's low-cost airline scene have been predicting a wave of bankruptcies and mergers for a while now. SkyEurope's weaknesses were well documented, and were only exacerbated in the face of terrible market conditions. What was most remarkable was that the airline stuck around for as long as it did.

The bankruptcy comes at a generally really bad time for European low-cost carriers, and there are plenty of commentaries that interpret SkyEurope's fall as the first paragraph of the next chapter of European LCC history—a chapter that will end with three or four big budget airlines battling for the euros, kronor, lei, and hryvni of budget-minded travelers across Europe, with a handful of much smaller specialist budget carriers accommodating underserved regions. (A side-question here, though one not unrelated to the issue at hand: which are the three or four big LCCs that will be left standing? Norwegian, Ryanair, easyJet, Germanwings, Vueling, Wizz Air, and Air Berlin all have either sheer size, customer loyalty, or underserved destinations going for them. But a changed terrain consisting of three to four big players would mean that several of these airlines would be absorbed.)

If only the biggest will survive, then the question of what will happen to SkyEurope's abandoned routes becomes the most crucial one. Who will benefit most from SkyEurope's demise? The buzz so far seems to be that financial gain is Ryanair's for the taking, but Wizz Air has strong links in Central Europe as well.

The most distinctive dimension of SkyEurope's route map was its inclusion of Bratislava, Kosice, and Poprad-Tatry on its route map. Several of the routes the airline flew before folding remain unduplicated.

The biggest gap has opened up at Bratislava, where over two dozen destinations were previously served by SkyEurope. Ryanair has three new routes scheduled for autumn inauguration: Bratislava-Bologna, Bratislava-Rome Ciampino, and Bratislava-Liverpool, while WizzAir has just one, scheduled to take off later this month, a Bratislava-Rome Fiumicino link. Ryanair already flies many routes in and out of Bratislava, and is doubtlessly best placed to expand.

Kosice, a much lower-volume airport, has truly been left in the lurch by the departure of SkyEurope. The airline flew between Kosice and Istanbul, Rome, Manchester, Paris Orly and London Luton. SkyEurope also flew a London Luton-Poprad-Tatry route.

Thus far, an airline called Danube Wings has announced a number of new routes into both Kosice and Poprad-Tatry, though the ground opened up by the disappearance of SkyEurope is still wide open. The biggest and most likely budget airlines have thus far failed to bite. The next few weeks should be interesting.

On Yelp, Taste Good Malaysian Restaurant, and Group Evaluation

I've always resisted turning to sites like Yelp for restaurant recommendations in favor of the opinions of experts. The best restaurants, cafés, and other venues, I've always been convinced, are best divulged by people I've deemed to be experts—by staff writers at magazines and Web sites I like, or by friends with focused obsessions on the best beignets, street tacos, obscure cocktails, and other essential things. Or, alternately, if the experts in question are too snobby to recognize the ordinary brilliance in front of them, the best things fly below the radar altogether. The more plebeian types of superlative things are either very easy or very hard to find or they're expressly unpublicized or they're so plain and to the point that they escape acclaim. Until recently, my general aversion to review sites has approached the status of personal gospel.

On Sunday night, after a day of great eating with Matt and Nathan and Richard—Prime Meats for brunch and Steve's Authentic Key Lime Pies for a snack—we had a vague idea to look for dinner in Queens. I hopped onto Yelp on Matt's iPhone to do research. Matt* has taken to claiming that we've never been steered to a bad restaurant by Yelp. After thinking about it for a little while in the wake of our Sunday dining experience, I realize that he's right. I can't remember a single highly-recommended place on Yelp with multiple reviews that wasn't good.

On Sunday we settled on Taste Good Malaysian in Elmhurst Queens, a restaurant with very strong reviews, as an appropriate place to eat. And when we finally pulled up, I immediately had a great feeling about the place. It is a hole-in-the-wall with little in the way of signage and even less in the way of décor. The tables are worn and the clientele was almost entirely Malaysian. We ate lots of amazing grub, including popiah, roti with chicken curry sauce, tamu emas (blocks of golden tofu), and beef rendang. After returning home, I did some research and discovered that the restaurant has tons and tons of fans beyond the Yelp universe.

My conversion from skeptic to Yelp devotee is still cautious, but it marks a definite shift in my approach to the group evaluation function of social media. I've also been reading James Surowiecki's very convincing The Wisdom of Crowds and I am convinced that various of Surowiecki's points about the surprising accuracy of collective syntheses of information has had a hand in my evolution.

I won't stop hitting up my friends for tips or peruse the listings sections of magazines and blogs that I like, and I'm not ready to trust the crowds on every subject. (I'll forever be taking my own friends' evaluations of hotels and beach towns over those most popular on user-generated sites.) But I have complete faith that when dozens of random people rave about a restaurant in Elmhurst, they're most likely onto something.

*It was actually Richard who expressed things in these terms, but Matt has communicated this idea on several occasions recently.