Looking into it further (it's been a while, never expected to see him back on the front page), it seems he did take the trip but plagiarized most of the images (except the ones of him and his boarding pass) and much of the text/captions.
I .... don't know what to say. It's not as if the text he plagiarized was top-class writing! It's just observations and feelings; it would have been far easier to just write down what he was thinking! What is wrong with these people.