Travel Maven blog

Cruise passengers bob in the Atlantic

News from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean: Passengers on a trans-Atlantic cruise aboard the SeaDream II jumped overboard for a dip last week.

The 56-passenger cruise ship, one of two luxury vessels owned by SeaDream Yacht Club, was on a route from Spain to Puerto Rico.

Passengers said they wanted to swim, said SeaDream II’s Captain Terje Willasen.

 "At dawn on Thursday October 15, I knew that this was the day. The seas were as still as a pond,” said Willsen.

At latitude 26 degrees, 28 minutes, longitude 39 degrees 40 minutes, 958 nautical miles from the Azores and 1541 nautical miles from San Juan, a group of passengers slipped into the ocean from the ship’s special stern Marina and bobbed about in the sea, before continuing their journey to San Juan.

SeaDream calls its two small ships mega yachts. Information from SeaDream.com

National Geographic Traveler tops in travel

Newspapers, magazines, Web sites, blogs, writers and photographers win awards in annual Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition

National Geographic Traveler wins two gold awards -- for its magazine and its Web site -- in the 2009 Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition.

Among other winners announced today in Guadalajara, Mexico, sister magazine, National Geographic Adventure, takes top honors in photography and adventure writing. For the third year in a row, the Los Angeles Times earned the gold for the best Newspaper Travel Section among those with circulation above 350,000. The Boston Globe led all publications with the highest total of five awards, three silver and two bronze.

Travel Journalist of the Year is Joe Ray, a globetrotting freelance writer-photographer who is a regular correspondent for the Boston Globe. Judges cited his skill and efficiency in portraying the adventure of travel.

Bob Howells, a freelance writer cited for his focus on nature-oriented travel, wins the silver award as runner up. 

The bronze goes to Dave G. Houser, a freelance writer-photographer lauded for exceptional storytelling and reporting. Houser's work appears on TheTravelMavens.com web site.  

The annual awards ceremony is one of my favorite moments of the year, as I love to give away money -- this year more than $20,000 to North America's best travel journalists.

Judges comments and all the winners

Germany, the revolution of candles and prayers

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and end to Germany's Iron Curtain, David Molyneaux returns for the celebrations. This is his seventh blog.

Eastern Germans remember 1989 as the year of the big surprise.

Decades had rolled by without much reason for hope of democracy. Then, in a matter of months, the old East German regime fell apart, and freedom arrived overnight.

Most of the world did not know in 1989 that the Cold War of more than four decades was crawling toward an end. The Soviet Union -- a collection of countries tied forcibly to communist Moscow after World War II -- was collapsing economically, though that, too, was kept under wraps.

Meanwhile, the people of Soviet-dominated countries such as East Germany, kept taking baby steps toward freedom.

Germany, secrets of the dreaded police in Leipzig

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and end to Germany's Iron Curtain, David Molyneaux returns for the celebrations. This is his sixth blog.

Folks who live in Leipzig, Germany, are proud of the museum dedicated to the horrors of the old  East German secret police, the Stasi. Truth gains value after you live in a world of lies for four decades.

The Stasi Museum in Leipzig is operated by a community group that continues to work at   saving old records and keeping the past alive -- making certain, they say, that nothing from the secret days remains hidden from the public.

During the past 20 years -- since the end of the Iron Curtain across Germany and the decrepit East German government -- wives and husbands have found out about spouses who were spying on them for the Stasi.

Parents discovered their children kept tabs on their anti-government feelings. Neighbors learned of sneaked peeks when window shades were not drawn, when, perhaps, families were breaking the law by watching television shows from the west.

Germany, lies and dreams east of the Iron Curtain

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and end to Germany's Iron Curtain, David Molyneaux returns for the celebrations. This is his fifth blog.

Behind old enemy lines, Germans have stories to tell. 

Delightful cities of music and religious history, such as Eisenach and Leipzig, offer also a journey through the old East German world of hidden bunkers, secret police and a life so fearful that  citizens didn't dare let their children talk at school about family time at home. They feared any talk might lead the police to arrest them for social violations or government taboos, such as watching television shows beamed from the west.

"We lived a lie," said Ralf Paesler, an environmentalist in Eisenach, about 170 miles southwest of Berlin. 

Paesler said that in East Germany, when you walked out your door, talked on the telephone, wrote a letter or discussed anything in public, you presented yourself as a good, enthusiastic citizen in the repressive society of the German Democratic Republic (the GDR). 

Wartburg Castle, above, has dominated Eisenach for nearly 1,000 years.

Paesler must have been persuasive, as he tested government authorities when he claimed he was a conscientious objector to war -- this in a country that didn't recognize objections of any kind. 

Somehow, said Paesler, he managed to get through more than a year in the army without touching a weapon. He said he learned the concept from what he heard about America during the Vietnam war.

Germany, when East met West on peaceful soil

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and end to Germany's Iron Curtain, David Molyneaux returns for the celebrations. This is his fourth blog.

In late October 1989, when there were two Germanies, The Plain Dealer of Cleveland, Ohio, sent me to West Germany to write articles for the Travel Section. Dour East Germany, behind the  Soviet Iron Curtain, was not much of a vacation destination.

During the first week of November 1989, I wrote that some residents along the Iron Curtain believed that the border fences, in place for more than than 40 years, would fall by Christmas.

Molyneaux in Berlin, November 1989

Folks I interviewed said citizens on both sides were ready to cross the border, and they believed that security personnel would not stop them. Before my story was published in Cleveland, German wishes came true.

On Nov. 9, Berliners scaled the hated wall. On Nov. 10, Germans on both sides of the Iron Curtain demanded that highway gates be opened and began tearing down border fences where country roads once met. Not a single border guard fired a shot. 

On Saturday, Nov. 11, I joined thousands of Germans who streamed through new holes in the fences to find neighbors and villages they had not visited in decades.