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IT—Inside Traveler
By Jessie Johnston and Emily King

November 21, 2006:

Wired Wanderlust: Video Passages to India

Far be it from IT to say anything against doorbells, sleigh bells, or schnitzel with noodles, but our list of favorite things veers more than a little from the one proposed by a certain former novice as a comfort to her sweet-voiced young charges. Though still susceptible to brown paper packages tied up with strings, we currently incline toward the following: videos, blogs, and (thanks to Traveler's recent special section) India. Put those favorite things together, and you know what you get? Our new favoritest thing: vlogs about India.

Ryanne Hodson recently returned from a monthlong visit to the subcontinent, during which she posted a number of videos on her blog. Check out her footage of Mumbai traffic, mehndi, Pune, and a party featuring entertainment by puppets, a snake charmer, a conjurer, and a monkey.

Want more? We did. And were amply satisfied with our discovery of Deirdré Straughan's Indian vlog from a trip with her daughter a year and a half ago. Straughan, who lives in Italy but went to school in India, posted about 20 clips, including an elephant ride to Jaipur's Amber Fort, a demonstration of Rajasthani hand-block printing, a turban-tying lesson, and an exuberant parade that had us tapping our feet and checking Orbitz for fares to BOM.

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Lightning Field of Dreams

IT loves both nature and art, so when Bryan Lavietes, the senior Washington producer for Court TV (and onetime Harvard English major), suggested a piece combining the two, we lent him our ears…then, gave him a pen:

"I don't remember the first time I heard of The Lightning Field (near a one-street town called Quemado, New Mexico), but it's been on my 'things to see before I die' list ever since. A fall wedding in Tucson last week finally gave me the opportunity. The Lightning Field is a work of land art by Walter De Maria, commissioned and maintained by the Dia Art Foundation. DeMaria spent five years trying to find a suitably isolated spot with high lightning activity before settling on a sparsely populated patch of high desert in western New Mexico—and then he set about planning, building, and installing 400 lightning rods perfectly spaced in a one-mile-by-one-kilometer stretch of land. He finished it in 1977 and The Lightning Field has been hosting visitors since 1980. It's open May through October, but you should call ahead for reservations since only six people can visit at any one time. You have to stay overnight, in a cabin you share with the other five people.

"The hope, of course, is to see lightning strike the poles. However, that occurs rarely. The surer bet is that you'll be treated to a dazzling sunset and sunrise and an unnervingly quiet star-filled night. Walking amidst the rods is a moving and humbling experience. The poles and their pointed tips gleam and shimmer with the movement of the sun. And when the sun gets too high in the sky, the poles all but disappear. Nothing moves, but everything changes."

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Emily King, Traveler's assistant to the editor, wants to visit the pyramids of Giza before they're just a suburb of Cairo. Researcher Jessie Johnston hopes to see Machu Picchu before it becomes an Angkor-style jungle gym.

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