Episode 24 The Travel Show

The Breakfast team will be here later. But now the Travel Show.

It was once a hugely popular destination, but today has fallen on

hard times. Can new plans bring prosperity and tourists back to New

York's Catskill Mountains? Coming up this week: We are in

upstate New York looking into one region's dazzling past and hopeful

future. Hard work! Whew! But it's worth it. In Cityzen, we are at one

of London's most colourful and fragrant markets. There is no nicer

place to be on Sunday morning than Columbia Road, in Bethnal Green.

Tommy finds a device to get his one`man party started in Global

Gadgets. Yeah! And we are in Finland to celebrate the 100th anniversary

of the lady behind these creatures. Us Finns are really proud to be the

homeland of Moomins. Hello. Welcome to The Travel Show, coming this week

from the Catskills, around two hours' drive off New York City.

Running over 6,000 square miles in the southeastern corner of New York

State is the Catskill Mountains. It is an area of spectacular natural

beauty, with rolling hills, and river valleys, and sleepy rural

towns. It's pretty quiet today, but back in the '50s and '60s, this

region was crammed with visitors and was, believe it or not, the top

tourist destination in all of the United States. Back then, the

Catskills was the holiday spot for New Yorkers to escape the city heat

each summer, particularly the Jewish community. TRADITIONAL MUSIC. Over

500 grand hotels amused their guests with a full roster of Jewish

comedians, from Jerry Lewis and Mel Brooks to Joan Rivers and Woody

Allen. The southern counties of the Catskills became fondly known as the

Borscht Belt. It was about coming up and being entertained from the

minute you woke up in the morning to the minute you went to bed. There

would be hundreds of thousands of guests on any given weekend,

millions throughout the summer. As one old`timer told me, if you didn't

live through it, no`one could describe it for you, because you

wouldn't believe it. For the local businesses, this meant a gold mine

of holiday trade. The streets of the communities for the most part were

busy until the wee hours of the morning, so businesses stayed open

until midnight or beyond. It was not unusual for eating places to be open

24 hours a day. Gas stations would be open 24 hours a day. When the

golden age came to an end, it happened abruptly. HARMONICA MUSIC.

In a few short years beginning in the late 1960s, the Catskills fell

out of fashion, and New Yorkers began to holiday elsewhere. In the

decades following, hotels and businesses closed in their hundreds.

And the place has become a kind of graveyard for the formerly grand

resorts like this one, forgotten for decades and abandoned to the

elements, now being slowly reclaimed by nature. This change in fortunes

has had a disastrous effect on the local economies, with places like

Sullivan and Ulster counties now struggling with below`average

incomes, and high unemployment. But help could be at hand in the shape

of a new plan to bring gaming to the region. Casino operators are

currently applying for a limited number of licences in upstate New

York, including in the Catskills and Hudson Valley region. One of the

applications is for the Nevele, a classic Borscht Belt hotel. If

approved, the redevelopment would see the derelict site completely

revived, bringing a proposed 2,000 permanent jobs to the region. This

area in its heyday was the place. There would be a line of cars ten

miles long waiting to come to the Nevele for the summer vacation. So

our hope is to put those cars back on the road, get people to come up

here, and put jobs back on the map here. For some, however, these

casinos are not a panacea for the region's economic problems, and

could have a negative effect on local communities. Traditionally,

casinos bring in elements of vice. You have increasing prostitution,

drugs, crime. All those things need to be mitigated when you are

bringing them into a rural community, especially like our

communities here in the Catskills. Instead of multiple casinos, Ramsay

believes a better way to bring prosperity back to the region is

with low`impact sustainable tourism. He is currently putting the

finishing touches on the Catskill Brewery, a craft beer outfit in the

town of Livingston Manor. Let's make some beer. # Watching the bubbles in

my beer. # Hard work! Whew! But it's worth it! BOTH: Cheers! So is this

kind of operation enough to revive tourism in the Catskills, do you

think? No, not one enterprise, not one craft brewery, but it is a whole

movement. With New York City so close, we have a craft brewery,

organic farms, grass`fed beef, tourism with fishing. Together, it's

a solution. This small`scale tourism industry might provide a sustainable

future, but for now, all eyes are on the casino tender process, bringing

what many hope will be a return to some semblance of the glory days of

the Catskills all those years ago. If you are thinking of taking a trip

to the Catskills, here is some information you might find useful.

With festivals in summer, clear autumn air and skiing in winter,

this region has activities on offer at all times of the year. Just watch

out for mud season from mid`March to mid`May, when the melting snow and

rainfall can make hiking difficult. Driving is definitely the best way

to get around the Catskills, but distances between the towns are

deceptively long, so make sure you allow enough time. The Catskills are

remote and cellphone reception is, in many areas, non`existent, so make

sure to make any important calls before you leave your hotel, and be

prepared to take a holiday from the digital world.

prepared to take a holiday from the Next up, a horticulturalist's

delight. The latest in our series where we meet some of the people who

make as cities tick finds us behind the scenes at the Columbia Road

Flower Market in London's east end. There is no nicer place to be on a

Sunday morning than Columbia Road in Bethnal Green. I got here an hour

ago to start setting up. Hopefully people will go home with a few quid

in the old tank. Columbia Road Market is a very unique market in

London. Basically, it is a garden centre in a street in the heart of

London. Looking at all of these different plants, they all have

their own niche. This one here is all instant gardens. He maintains

you don't sunbathe. Stuart is one of the new breed, one of the young

boys. The likes of him will keep it running when people like me are

gone, the next generation. The guys that sell these plants are real

experts. You can ask them anything, and they know all the answers. I

have seen the changes over the years. I have seen it go from

primarily local people that we serve to transforming to people from all

over London and beyond. People come by who are Spanish, French. I met a

guy from Italy a few years ago. He heard my accent, knew I was a

Londoner. I told him what I did, and he started talking about Columbia

Road. ?10, please. Sorry. She's rubbing up against me now. # Like a

flower bending in the breeze, sway with me... # I'm happily married,

I've got to tell you. Banter with customers is not something you plan,

it happens. Is that your husband? That's your partner. Sorry, mate.

You've got the red devil violet. Gorgeous. The work is getting up in

the morning, going home in the evening. The bit in between is a

pleasure, serving people. I wish I was 20 years younger ` more time to

enjoy it. Excuse me. Sorry, darling. Morning! How are you, darling? You

all right? I couldn't really imagine not coming here. Even if I was able

to ever afford to retire, I would still come here on a Sunday. How can

I explain it? It's under my skin. It's part of me. I would like to

think until the day I die, I will still have a licence as a Columbia

flower trader. Cheers, guys. Thank you. Bye, Mary. Bye, young man.

Now, it's time for the Travel update. In the US, access to

California's Yosemite National Park was restricted this week as

wildfires swept across the forest. Residents were evacuated as

firefighters battled to contain the blaze, cutting down trees in an

attempt to stop the fire spreading. The French capital, Paris, has long

been popular with tourists, but one area has now been overwhelmed by a

new kind of visitor. The garden next to the world`famous Louvre museum

has been taken over by an influx of rats who are attracted to the area

because of its proximity to the river and the opportunity to munch

on leftovers from tourists' picnics. They are not really clean animals, I

think, so there is a lot of dirt if they are here. The museum has called

in pest control to deal with the problem.

Silence is set to come to the Spanish city of Seville after the

council passed regulations to limit noise levels. The city is known for

its festivals, flamenco and bull`fighting but some locals have

long complained that noisy activities disrupt their daily

lives. The banned activities include outdoor domino games and singing in

the street, although it is not clear how strictly the measures will be

enforced. And the World Cup has left a

permanent mark in Rio on this wall, where football fan and painter

Marcos Alexandre Jambeiro has created a giant painting showing the

greatest moments of the 2014 tournament. Visitors to Copacabana

Beach will be able to see the mural, which tells the story of the

competition through portraits of players and pictures of key moments.

Coming up on The Travel Show: One`man music machine. Yeah! Tom

puts the latest travel devices to the test in Global Gadgets. And we

enter the enchanting world of the Moomins, as centenary celebrations

take place in Finland. First up, one for all of you party

people out there. Check this out. It is a portable speaker, and no, I

have not just broken a pair of headphones. This is how it comes. It

is called the Monocle. You connect the speaker to your phone or MP3

player and there is an in`line microphone so you can make calls.

You hold it to your ear to listen privately or twist the back and it

will blast out your music. The button on the side will start and

stop your tracks. That is the same button used to accept a phone call.

RINGTONE. Hello. No way. Tell them all that. WOMAN: We're all coming to

yours for a party! Whoo`hoo! For a small speaker, the sound is good,

but when you turn it up really loud, they do tend to distort. I need that

big sound. I've got people coming over. So I've linked up a few of

these, which you can do really easily. Before you know it, you can

create your very own... ROCK MUSIC. ..one`man music machine. Yeah! Yeah!

This is what is going down. Right here. Oh, yeah! Oh, man. How

annoying is that? You have a great book with you when you are on your

travels, but your reader runs out of battery. Now what am I going to do?

I know some people will say, "Hey, Tommy, what you should have done is

carry around a big old battery pack. That would have saved you." Who does

that, unless you are in the middle of a jungle? This, however, is a bit

more practical. The Fuel microcharger is the world's

smallest, and it connects to your device via mini USB. It is

rechargeable and designed to attach to your key ring. It will connect to

Android phones but you will need an adaptor to use it with an iPhone. So

this is designed just to give you an extra boost of energy. It is not

meant to fully recharge your devices. You could get 20`30 minutes

of talk time, enough power to access your maps again if you are lost, or

charge up your reader and find out what happens at the end of your

book. I can't believe it. Here we go. Ah, they all live happily ever

after. Do you ever spend all of your time

on your holidays taking pictures, making videos on your phone, on your

cameras, and camcorders, and never really taking a moment just to soak

it all up? Well, perhaps this is the solution. The Autographer has an

in`built sensor that monitors changes in your surroundings to work

out when to take a photo. It is automatic, so you just select the

frequency of the shots. You can review the images by connecting it

to your computer or syncing up with the app via Bluetooth. No. No. I'm

just going through all these pictures that I've taken throughout

today. Most of them are out of focus. A lot of them are rubbish.

But let's face it, some of the best pictures are spontaneous. This will

capture those. I think I'd better go back to my room, lie down and start

to delete some of these. What do you think this is? A big old pair of

socks? No. A wash bag? No, it's not. This is my travel pillow. Although

it doesn't look very comfortable right now, that's because I haven't

brought it to life. Check this out. The uPillow has a layer of memory

foam and a side valve that allows it to automatically inflate. So it

takes up less space than the pillows that you get that are already

stuffed, but it won't flatten down quite as much as the fully

inflatable ones. However, this saves you all that huffing and puffing. If

you don't mind, I will put this to the test.

SNORES. You guys still there?

Now, don't get too comfy or you will miss these little creatures. They're

the Moomins and this year marks 100 years since the birth of their

creator, Tove Jansson. The Travel Show went to her home country of

Finland to find out what inspired their magical world. Moomins are

characters of this famous Finnish author called Tove Jansson. She

created this lovely Moomin family. It is a family of three. It is

Moominpappa, Moominmamma, and their son, Moomintroll, who is kind of the

main character. Of course they have a lot of friends. They have Little

My, Snork Maiden and her brother, Snork. I think

proud to be the homeland of Moomins. Tove Jansson was many things. She

was a painter, a cartoonist, she was a writer, set designer, playwright,

and of course, she created Moomins, or she started to write about

Moomins during the war. She said that the war was such a desperate

time that she needed something else to think about, and then she started

to create the stories with Moomins. She was born here in Helsinki. Her

family lived in this house behind us when she was born in 1914. I think

many of the Moomin characters are based on her own family. I think

this area inspired her in many ways. The houses that you see here are

so`called art nouveau houses. They were built at the beginning of the

20th century. When you look at the windows and the doors and the roofs,

you can see many similarities to Moomin houses. And then of course

there is the sea. Not far away from here, and that was an important

element in her life. That is it for the Travel Show this

week. Next week: Panama is finally being

recognised as a travel destination in its own right. Rajan travels

across the country from the Atlantic coast to the big city, the only

city, the capital, where Miami meets Havana and the world's most famous

short cut, the canal, celebrates its centenary.

Isn't this amazing? The iconic Panama Canal, and I am cycling along

it. Fantastic! So do join us then, if you can, and

in the meantime, don't forget you can keep up with us while we are out

on the road in real`time by signing up to our social media feeds,

details for which are appearing on the screen now. From me and the rest

of the Travel Show team here in the Catskills, it is goodbye.

Hello. It is going to be a soggy Saturday for many of us.