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TRAVELInternational, says business to
Russia has “dropped to zero.” But
at the same time, tours to the rest
of Europe are selling briskly.
“Business to the Czech
Republic, Austria, Germany and
Switzerland is booming with
pent-up demand,” Tepper says.
“Travelers are beginning to be
concerned about a p otential
refu gee crisis in Poland, but we
don’t imagine refugees
interfering in leisure travel —
even to Poland — t his summer.”
Eman Abdur-Rahman is
planning to visit Albania this
summer despite the uncertainty.
“I don’t think the conflict will
reach Albania,” says Abdur-
Rahman, who runs a remote
bookkeeping firm in
Gaithersburg. “The only
hesitation would be if other
military forces decide to join
Ukraine.”
When should you consider
canceling your summer vacation?
If it takes you anywhere near the
invasion, says Michael Embrich,
author of “March On: A Veterans
Travel Guide.” Belarus, Moldova
and eastern Poland could quickly
get dr awn into the conflict, he
says.
But he doesn’t think it will
spread so far that it will affect his
European travel plans. “I’m going
to Rome this summer, and I don’t
plan to make any changes to my
itinerary,” he adds.
Alan Fyall, the associate dean
of academic affairs at the
University of Central Florida’s
Rosen College of Hospitality
Management, predicts a t ourist
migration to western Europe this
summer. “It will benefit the
traditional large-city destinations
such as Barcelona, Paris, London
and Amsterdam,” he says. “The
likes of Prague, Budapest and
cities in Poland will be quieter
than normal.”
How do you ensure your trip
doesn’t get derailed by a m ilitary
conflict? First, get the right travel
insurance. A standard policy with
named perils won’t cover fear of
travel, says Narendra Khatri,
principal of Insubuy, a travel
insurance company. “ ‘ Cancel for
any reason’ travel insurance will
be a smarter idea for tr avel to
Eastern and Central Europe this
year,” he says. It will reimburse
between 50 and 75 percent of your
prepaid nonrefundable expenses
if you decide to cancel.
Another tip: Make sure you can
cancel your European vacation
with as few penalties as possible.
That’s what Suzanne Spadafora, a
dermatologist from Richmond,
did before she booked her
summer vacation in Romania.
She paid for her airline tickets on
Turkish Airlines using frequent-
flier miles and ensured the rest of
her stay had flexible cancellation
terms.
Look for flexible booking
policies that allow you to
reschedule. For example, JayWay
Travel, a boutique tour operator,
has a “forever fl exible” booking
policy that allows you to postpone
a trip or request a different
itinerary.
I’m headed to Europe soon,
too. And, like many travelers, I
feel a little uneasy about it. My
tentative itinerary will take me to
Greece and Turkey next month.
It’s far away from the conflict, but
close enough that a sudden shift
in the geopolitical winds could
carry me into uncharted waters.Elli ott is a c onsumer advocate,
journalist and co-founder of the
advocacy group Travelers United.
Email him at [email protected].Romeo Raabe
won’t be taking a
summer cruise
this year. He was
set to fly from
Chicago to
Amsterdam in
August, then sail
around the
Norwegian fjords.
But in the wake of
the Russian
invasion of Ukraine, he and his
wife became nervous about
traveling to Europe and decided
they “didn’t feel comfortable”
going through with the trip.
“With Europe contributing
weapons to Ukraine, we thought
there might be retribution from
[Russian President Vladimir]
Putin,” says Raabe, a l ong-term
care planner from Green Bay, Wis.
As the invasion continues,
many American travelers are
having similar misgivings.
“Just as things were getting
back to normal after the
relaxation of the covid rules, the
conflict in Ukraine has added a
lot of uncertainty,” says Mahmood
Khan, a p rofessor in Virginia
Tech’s hospitality and tourism
management department.
Russia’s military action
probably won’t affect many
American travelers directly.
Neither Russia nor Ukraine draw
a significant number of tourists
compared with other European
countries. Pre-pandemic, Ukraine
welcomed fewer than 15 million
tourists a year, according to the
World Tourism Organization.
Russia drew about 25 million
foreign visitors annually before
covid. About 1 p ercent of visitors
to Ukraine are from the United
States. By comparison, more than
60 million people a year visited
Italy pre-pandemic, about
10 percent of whom were
American.
Greg Pearson, chief executive
of FocusPoint International, a
risk management company, says
you should reconsider your
summer vacation plans if you’re
visiting Ukraine, Russia or any
country that borders Ukraine.
“If you move forward with your
travel plans, I would advise doing
so with an abundance of caution,”
Pearson says. “Make sure to stay
up to date with any changes in
threat dynamics.”
How? When you are about to
embark on your trip, check the
State Department travel
advisories to see whether there
are warnings about your
destination, sa ys Joe Cronin,
president of International
Citizens Insurance. And if you
have an insurance policy, make
sure you’re aware of the State
Department threat level.
“Many insurance plans will not
provide evacuation assistance
during times of terrorism or
political unrest if your
destination has a Level 3 o r Level
4 warning before your departure,”
Cronin says.
Some tour operators have
already modified their itineraries.
Ride and Seek, a bicycle touring
company, normally offers two
bike tours that feature Eastern
European destinations: the
“Napoleon” from Paris to St.
Petersburg and the “Iron Curtain”
from Berlin to Budapest.
“With the rise in tensions in
Ukraine leading up to Christmas,
we changed the [‘Napoleon’]
endpoint to Tallinn, Estonia,” says
founder Dylan Reynolds.
Travelers are avoiding the
warring countries, at least for
now. Greg Tepper, founder of
luxury tour operator ExeterAfter invasion, travelers
question trips to Europe
The
Navigator
CHRISTOPHER
ELLIOTTThis sign was spotted by Joyce Carrier of Arlington near the Zorgvliet Wine
Estate in Stellenbosch, South Africa. Have you seen an amusing sign in
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or republish them in any form. No purchase necessary.JOYCE CARRIERSIGN LANGUAGEimagination. Perhaps this is my
nostalgia talking.
The truth, after all, is that my
copy of “The Trials” was more
than the sum of its pictures and
words. I distinctly remember that
my mum’s bookshelves stored an
earlier Attenborough book, “Life
on Earth.” This one was a paper-
back, and its spine was cracked
with use, evidence that it had
been a favorite of my dad’s, who
had died when I was an infant.
It is no great revelation to
suggest that boys who grow up
fatherless will seek surrogates in
other male role models, both im-
mediate and remote. And I don’t
doubt that I saw, in Attenbor-
ough, another father figure for
the roster. I realized, upon revisit-
ing the book, that I read the
words in his inimitable voice.
Perhaps, as much as anything,
what I coveted was proximity to
him, the great demigod of curiosi-
ty. By 1990, when “Trials” aired,
Attenborough had already been
knighted and had already seen as
much of the world as any other
person alive. Thirty years on, he is
still on our screens. In his latest
program, “The Green Planet,”
about the world of plants, he is
there in the field, now 95 years
old, his joy undimmed, like some
living embodiment of the rejuve-
nating capacity of intellectual
passion.
But the tenor of these latest
offerings has changed. Seldom
does a segment pass without
some reference to the myriad
ways human civilization has
grown to imperil the environ-
ments on display. One of Atten-
borough’s more recent books, “A
Life on Our Planet,” is both a
memoir — he calls it his “witness
statement” — and a manifesto, an
exhortation for “Homo sapiens,
the wise human being ... [to] live
up to its name.” In place of wild-
life spectacle, it opens in the
abandoned streets of Pripyat,
Ukraine, in the shadow of Cher-
nobyl, an emblem of human self-
destruction.For many years, controversial-
ly, the old don avoided contextu-
alizing his writing and broadcast-
ing about the natural world with
caveats about its ruination. The
rationale was that his job was to
inspire a love of nature in wider
society. Undercutting that exposi-
tion with news of nature’s plight,
however pertinent, would be a
turnoff for readers and viewers,
thereby alienating public support
for conservation efforts.
I’ve always been torn over how
to feel about this shift. Certainly, I
don’t begrudge Attenborough for
abandoning the policy, which was
eventually overwhelmed by the
urgency of our current moment.
To ignore the crisis of global
biodiversity now that its true ex-
tent has crystallized would be a
dereliction. Nevertheless, it’s
hard not to see “The Trials” as a
high water mark, if not of biologi-
cal science and the technology
deployed in its documentation,
then at least in the unalloyed,
childlike delight that people of
any age might derive from bear-
ing witness to it.
It is an irony of sorts that, when
I began to travel in earnest, ani-
mal-watching quickly fell to the
bottom of my agenda. This said
less about its objective pleasures
than my discomfort with the in-
trusive circus of careening safari
vehicles and rapid-fire camera
shutters. The wrong kind of con-
text can dampen even the purest
of enthusiasms.
For those of us who were young
at the time of its release, the book,
then, is a bittersweet artifact.
Thumbing through its pages, all
these years later, it is hard to
avoid the sense that my fondness
for it was to some extent contin-
gent on its purity, its complete
absence of critique. And that it
was our good fortune to grow up
in a time of innocence.Wismayer is a writer based in
London. His website is
henr y-wismayer.com. Find him on
Twitter: @henrywismayer.RICHARD BAKER/IN PICTURES/CORBIS/GETTY IMAGESBY HENRY WISMAYERThe 10th in an occasional series
on the books that spurred our love
of travel.
“It is midnight on the coast of
Christmas Island in the Indian
Ocean, two hundred miles south
of Java.” It is with this scene — of a
million scarlet crabs overrunning
a tropical beach like some night-
marish alien swarm — that the
doyen of natural history, David
Attenborough, begins “The Trials
of Life.”
Published in 1990 and de-
signed to accompany the nature
documentary series of the same
name, it’s a book about animal
behavior, split into chapters —
“Growing Up,” “Home-making,”
“Friends and Rivals” — describing
different stages of the life cycle.
I suspect I am not alone in
supposing that most children’s
earliest curiosity about the wider
world is sparked not by travel
narratives, nor even by adventure
fiction, but by factual and refer-
ence books. As a c hild, I would sit
up late into the night and scour
atlases and encyclopedias, won-
dering at the vast span of the
continents and the seemingly
endless miracles they contained.
I’ve always thought of these fasci-
nations as the building blocks of
wanderlust. As adults, we covet
travel, at least in part, to rekindle
the capacity for wonder we en-
joyed when we were young.
When I laid hands on my copy
of “The Trials of Life,” it quickly
became a favorite repository of
bookish knowledge. I received it
in glossy hardback for Christmas,
and it was my most treasured
present, the one that, for days
afterward, I carried around with
me from room to room like a
talisman.
The premise is straightfor-
ward. “My concern here is to
describe the happenings, rather
than the psychological and evolu-
tionary mechanisms that pro-
duce them,” Attenborough writes.
It makes no pretensions of analy-
sis or theory. Instead, it reads like
a compendium of snapshots, each
illuminating some facet of na-
ture’s invention, brutality and
evolutionary logic.
The overall effect is to empha-
size the impression that every
living creature is joined by uni-
versal quests for food, shelter and
gene perpetuation. The trials, we
discover, compel an opossum and
Amazon river dolphin in kind.
This style, segueing between vi-
gnettes, from jungle to desert to
pole, echoed the structure of the
marquee TV programs I’d adored,
which had run on the BBC on
Sunday evenings that fall.
The front cover depicts the
moment that people remember.
In the foreground, two sea lions
lollop up a beach toward the
frame, while another looks over
its shoulder, apprehending, with
what one imagines would be no
small horror, that a killer whale
has just exploded out of the Atlan-
tic breakers behind them. Years
later, I would visit the Valdes
Peninsula in Argentina, where
these scenes of orcas beaching
themselves to snaffle sea lion
pups off the shingle were filmed.
Alas, the ingenious pod of killers
that has become famous for this
A work that inspires natural curiosity
HENRY WISMAYER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
TOP: British naturalist and broadcaster David Attenborough’s career as the face and voice of natural
history programs has endured for decades. ABOVE: His 1990 book about animal behavior, “The Trials
of Life,” was designed to accompany the nature documentary series of the same name.unique hunting method were
having a day off. (An armadillo
did shuffle past and sniff my shoe,
which offered some consolation.)The other images, of which
there are dozens, almost one for
every page of text, are more illus-
trative than spectacular: a lion
cub gnaws on the nose of a dead
wildebeest; cleaner wrasse attend
to the oral hygiene of a gaping
grouper fish; a male garden spi-
der attempts to seduce a giant
female by plucking at a s trand of
silk. (“Copulation for spiders is a
complicated business,” writes At-
tenborough, with typical British
understatement. Reader, she eats
him.) By modern standards,
many of the photos seem worka-
day, unremarkable, though I
found them endlessly enchanting
at the time.
Similarly, reading the book
now, I’m surprised by how much
of it feels dryly observational.
Attenborough is a lucid writer
and peerless educator. But there
are few writerly flourishes, and
certainly none of the personal
and anthropomorphic musings
that characterize so much nature
writing today. There is a whimsi-
cal kind of comfort to be found in
this simplicity, and the concomi-
tant sense that, in those pre-In-
ternet days, bare facts, plainly
told, were enough to fire up theWhen I laid hands
on my copy of
“The Trials of Life,”
it quickly became
a favorite
repository of
bookish
knowledge.