Travel Adventures From Your iPad

TRVL, an interactive app for the iPad and iPhone, is not your traditional magazine. More than a digital alternative to glossy travel magazines, each issue is a self-contained feature story.

A look at online and mobile travel tools and apps.

Think of it as an iTunes for travel articles, said Michel Elings, co-founder of TRVL, an Amsterdam-based company. From the app, users can download issues to their device for free, each dedicated to a single destination.

To read a TRVL article on the iPad is to be transported to that destination, with excellent photography and evocative storytelling. Readers can dive in further by exploring the app’s interactive features: embedded videos, integrated locator maps and links to attractions mentioned in the piece. At the end of each issue is a photographer’s journal, offering insight into how the story and its subjects were approached.

The philosophy behind TRVL is to offer readers a “real travel experience, and to bring travel to the them,” said Jochem Wijnands, a founding editor and photographer whose works have appeared in National Geographic Magazine and National Geographic Traveler.

There’s more on the horizon. The company plans to expand its library in the coming months to include photobooks — akin to coffee-table books — for your iPad. The first will cover the war in Afghanistan. Mr. Wijnands said it had yet to be decided if TRVL would charge for premium offerings, but the first book is expected to be available in August or September.

TRVL also hopes to attract a younger audience with TRVL for Kids. Issues will cover topics like living with Eskimos or living in a rainforest.

Currently, there are 26 TRVL issues available for download, including the most recent story on Bolivia.

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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Source of legend and lyric, reference and conjecture, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is for most children pure pleasure in prose. While adults try to decipher Lewis Carroll's putative use of complex mathematical codes in the text, or debate his alleged use of opium, young readers simply dive with Alice through the rabbit hole, pursuing "The dream-child moving through a land / Of wonders wild and new." There they encounter the White Rabbit, the Queen of Hearts, the Mock Turtle, and the Mad Hatter, among a multitude of other characters--extinct, fantastical, and commonplace creatures. Alice journeys through this Wonderland, trying to fathom the meaning of her strange experiences. But they turn out to be "curiouser and curiouser," seemingly without moral or sense.

For more than 130 years, children have reveled in the delightfully non-moralistic, non-educational virtues of this classic. In fact, at every turn, Alice's new companions scoff at her traditional education. The Mock Turtle, for example, remarks that he took the "regular course" in school: Reeling, Writhing, and branches of Arithmetic-Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision. Carroll believed John Tenniel's illustrations were as important as his text. Naturally, Carroll's instincts were good; the masterful drawings are inextricably tied to the well-loved story. (All ages) --Emilie Coulter

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