Banging on Adventure Travel

Through the Looking Glass

Travel writers who are writing stories for magazines or websites always need to find an underlying theme to their articles, whether it is following Conrad on his journeys around Southeast Asia or finding Orwell in Burma. You can't just write about nonsense and expect anyone to give a damn.

And so it goes with even the most lauded adventure travel writers on the planet such as Richard Bangs, founder of Sobek and the brave soul who rafted down a river in Central Africa and went on to establish his adventure travel company, now incorporated into Mountain Travel if I've got my facts straight.

Bangs wrote recently about the changes in adventure travel over the past few decades, and he's certainly qualified to write such an article, as he is a bonified expert on the subject. Why, then, so many inaccuracies? Most of the article is spot on, but his wildly imaginative writing style means he should exaggerate every failure in present day adventure travel? Why would he do that?

But I love his new words: faddism, rolling skein, panolpy of adventures. Nice wordsmithing, there.

The original adventure travelers were merchants on expedition, seeking proceeds for their imperial backers,

As an example, he cites Leif Erikson. Hello? Leif as merchant on expedition, seeking proceed for his imperial backer?

Leif Ericson was blown off course sailing from Norway to Greenland about A.D. 1000 and ended up in North America.

I'm sure the Norweigans will be thrilled to learn that their national hero was blown off course and only stumbled across North America. And where did Bangs get his notion about this theory?

The advent of modern international adventure travel traces to some 35 years ago, with the first organized treks to the Nepalese Himalayas, and soon thereafter the first commercial raft trips in Africa.

Guess who led the first commercial raft trips in Africa?

So much has changed. Nepal, which throughout the 1980's was the archetypically adventure travel destination, has been embroiled in a Maoist revolution the last several years and is on few itineraries today. The nearby kingdom of Bhutan has been the beneficiary, and is seeing record tourism. Virtually all the trekkers who go to Bhutan wander among the high peaks and immerse themselves in the Buddhist culture.

Bhutan, to my understanding, has very strict limits on international tourism, and I think the country only admits some 5,000 visitors per year. The tours may be filled up, but I doubt this is any direct response to the problems in Kathmandu.

In the 1970's, there were overland treks in Afghanistan, camel safaris in Algeria and river runs in New Guinea, none of which are viable today.

Richard should check with the tour operators which do organized river journeys up the Sepik, as I did several years ago. All are still in business. If you're nuts enough, you can still buy a canoe and paddle down the Sepik, although I wouldn't really recommend it. New Guinea is the most dangerous country I've ever visited.

In the 80's, popular offerings included felucca trips down the Egyptian Nile, climbing Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey, diving the Red Sea, even surfing in Bali. None of those is offered anymore, for fear of religious-based terrorism.

Surfing is now longer available in Bali? Richard, please tie down your hat and visit Nick at www.baliblog.com

I don't know about diving the Red Sea, but is it true that "none of those are offered anymore"?

Even natural disasters take their toll. Thailand had long been a top adventure destination until the tsunami hit in 2004; more than a year later, visitation numbers remain significantly down.

Tourism in tsunami zones is down about 20-30%, but is expected to rebound next year. Most people understand that a great tsunami is an extremely rare occurrence, and when the infrastructure at Khao Lak (most devastated) is rebuilt, the Swedish tourists will return. This statement is pure sensationalism and will only scare away people who should, should, should go to Thailand to help support the Thai people working in the local tourist industry. Shame on Richard.

Today, the fear of avian flu is keeping many Americans away from Southeast Asia and China.

Wrong. Outdated and sad sensationalism. Why is Richard a fear-mongering type? We expect it from Bush, but not from the guy whose purpose in life is to promote grand adventure travel.....to see the world and spread the wealth.

Conversely, destinations rarely visited by American adventurers in the 70's, 80's and 90's have in recent years become popular, like Libya, Mozambique, Nicaragua and Panama, all of which I've traveled to in the last 18 months, delighting in their incipient adventure offerings.

Note: Slate sent Bangs to Libya last year to report on the opening of that country. His report was colorful and honest, but he really seemed to hate most of the trip. And now he promotes the place. Really, Libya is NOT popular, not matter what Bangs tells you. Journalistic license, I guess.

I recently spent a week in Costa Rica with longtime friends including Michael Kaye, owner of one of the original Latin American adventure companies, which he founded in 1978. We rafted the Class-IV Pacuare River (which he pioneered), surfed the Pacific coast, biked some 80 miles through the rainforest, deep-sea fished the Caribbean, and went wildlife, whale and bird watching.

I have no idea the motivations behind this paragraph, but you've just got to wonder.............

New York Times Link

IHT Travel Lies

Sihanoukville Independence Beach



Sihanoukville Ochheteal Beach



Sihanoukville Otres Beach



Sihanoukville Serendipity Beach



Sihanoukville Victory Beach



Sihanoukville Sokha Beach

Do not believe any travel stories you read in the International Herald Tribune.

See the photos of the beaches of Sihanoukville above? Would you spend even a single nickel to visit any of these crudy, dirty, brown-sand beaches? Of course, you wouldn't, but you'd rather spend your time at Southeast Asian beaches which are truly beautiful, such as Boracay, El Nido, Ko Phi Phi, and Samui. Why would you be sucked into wasting your hard earned dollars on some third-rank beach resort in Cambodia?

I've been to Sihanoukville and was disgusted by the cattle that wandered the beach at sunset, shitting over everything. And the town has little more to offer than rundown guesthouses and low-rent brothels.

But then the IHT journalist was given a free trip to the beach resort, where he stayed at the four-star resort, and had nothing but wonderful things to say about his vacation. Travel writing at its worst.

SIHANOUKVILLE, Cambodia "It's the next Goa, the new Phi Phi. If you love the cusp, or that fabulous moment when a destination morphs from backpackers bolthole into a new compass point for monied bohemians, make tracks for Sihanoukville now," insisted my friend in Bangkok, and the idea of a cheap farniente week at the beach sounded ideal after a lot of temple climbing in Angkor Wat.

The beach was even lovelier by day - basically empty and lapped by the warm, limpid aquamarine waters of the Gulf of Thailand. We quickly abandoned plans to explore Sihanoukville, which is often referred to as the "youngest" city in Cambodia since it was founded in the late '50s, in favor of a recurring triangle of idleness consisting of swimming, reading and napping, in exactly that order.

If this quiet beach town, popular with Cambodia's glamorous beau monde during the '60s before the country was devastated by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, is slated to become the next Phuket, the turning point came with the opening of the Sokha Beach Hotel in May 2004. This 188-room, four-star hotel brought world-class comforts (satellite television, air conditioning, room service) to a place that had only had cheap and decidedly rustic guesthouses (Sokha Beach Resort, Street 2 Thnou Sangkat 4, Mttapheap District, Sihanoukville; tel. 855 34 935 999, fax 855 34 935 008, www.sokhahotels.com).

IHT Sihanoukville Travel Story Link

Rory MacLean and Magic Bus

Burning Man

British travel writer Rory MacLean has just finished his latest travelogue and it sounds like a winner wrapped inside an enigma: Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India. Did Rory actually do this trip and, if so, what could he possibly remember of places like Kabul? He probably had to ask expert advice from surviving hippie travelers who made the journey back in the 1960s such as Dalton and Wheeler to spark his brain cells back into action.

In any event, it sounds like my kind of book, plus he discusses some interesting challenges with rights and old photographs in his latest newsletter. You might as well sign up, as Rory is pretty tight with his newsletters and they come far too infrequently in my opinion. He's at Rory MacLean Dot Com

Magic Bus is finished. Yesterday the proof-read manuscript was sent to the typesetter. The jacket has been designed and the subtitle ('On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India') agreed. I've met Rosie the-forever-young-and-sparkling-publicist and drafted ideas for newspaper features. The book's publication is set for June 29th. But finished? Not quite yet.

For one thing there are the rights clearances. Pop music was among the most important creations of the 1960s. Lyrics inspired, guided ­ or in some cases misguided ­ that generation and their search for a new way of living. I heard this sentiment expressed again and again during my research. In an early issue of the Village Voice I read of a Dylan debut performance, 'His voice is crude, his appearance scruffy and as a performer he lacks all traces of a professional. But one brief listening to the emotional understatement in his voice emphasizes the power of his lyrics and his genuine concern for the state of the world.' As far as I'm concerned, no book can be written about the Sixties without quoting ­ or paraphrasing -- lyrics.

In Magic Bus I quote short extracts from ten different songs ­ Dylan, The Beatles and Pink Floyd among others -- and the usage of each quotation has to be licensed to me by the song's writer or his/her representative. Easy? Well, I've spent at least an hour a day for the past month searching for rights holders, begging for permission and sending off cheques (the cost is borne by a book's author, not its publisher). Dylan, Sony (for Lennon and McCartney), Music Sales, EMI, Warner Chappell and Faber Music have been helpful, enthusiastic ­ and understanding over fees. I'm sorry to report that the people representing Bob Seger ­ whose music I love and I so wanted to quote ­ asked for £750 in advance on a percentage of book sales (I only wanted to use 19 words!). It was with a very heavy heart that I had to cut his lines from the book.

My other preoccupation at the moment is with Sixties and Seventies photographs. I went back to many 'veterans' of the Asia Overland trail to gather together a small collection of their original images. Most of them are incredibly evocative, even those shot on battered Instamatics. I hope there will be an opportunity to publish them later in the year. Stay tuned for details.

A History of Travel Guidebooks (Part Two)

Guidebooks Galore

Here's another story about the history of travel guidebooks as published recently in the Sydney Morning Herald, which takes a more classic approach to the craft, but also points out the changing styles between the original favorites and newer updates from Lonely Planet and other "travellers" guides. At the bottom, an interesting list of the best selling travel guidebooks in Australia.

Published by John Murray, it would be the pioneer title of one the world's first great guidebook empires, Murray's Handbooks, which would eventually publish about 400 titles. Its exhaustive, two-volume 1845 Handbook for Travellers in Spain, written by Richard Ford after four years of research and a decade of writing, is the classic among guidebooks.

Karl Baedeker is said to have written his first guidebook - Holland, Belgium and the Rhine - for Murray's Handbooks, but in 1829, with the publication of Baedeker's German-language guide to the Rhine Valley, he also became its first competition. Guidebooks to Austria, Belgium, Holland and Switzerland followed, and by 1861, two years after Karl's death, Baedeker was publishing English-language guides.

Baedeker created a guidebook template that has barely wavered in almost two centuries. The books were saturated in tourist sights but also offered guidance on pragmatic details such as money, language, visas, best seasons to visit, transport options and recommended hotels and restaurants.

Sydney Morning Herald Link

A History of Travel Guidebooks

Tony and Maureen 1973

PublishersWeekly.com has just posted a long article about the history of travel guidebook publishing, starting with Murray in 1836, Baedeker in 1839, along with the founding of both Moon Publications and Lonely Planet in Australia in 1973. Apparently, Bill Dalton beat Tony Wheeler by about six months, a curious fact I didn't know anything about, and I've known Bill for almost 30 years.

The PublishersWeekly.com links at the bottom also work, so you might want to check the travel guidebook publications schedules for 2006, if only to keep track of what's going on with Avalon and LP.

As Hofer was getting Insight off the ground, other adventurous travelers were making tracks off ever more lightly beaten paths. The year was 1973, and both Bill Dalton, whose Moon Publications was soon to launch, and Tony and Maureen Wheeler, the inspiration behind Lonely Planet, were traipsing through their respective territories in Asia.

There may be some confusion about which made its appearance first, but the record is clear: Dalton's A Traveller's Notes: Indonesia appeared in April 1973 as a six-page typed and mimeographed pamphlet distributed as a "gypsy guide" during a 10-day arts festival in southeastern Australia. Tony Wheeler's Across Asia on the Cheap, the first Lonely Planet guide, appeared in October under somewhat similar circumstances, with a reference to Dalton's book in it ("…A Traveller's Notes should be available in most big bookshops for 50 cents," he writes).

The last edition of the Indonesia book, 1,350 pages, was published in 1995. "Bill Dalton was a writer who became a publisher, Tony Wheeler was an MBA who briefly became a writer," says Bill Newlin, publisher of Avalon Travel, Moon's current owner and himself a onetime travel writer. "Bill did a wonderful job of establishing the template that we've continued to develop over the past 15 years."

It's no accident, Newlin says, that Southeast Asia was the locale Dalton and his colleagues at Lonely Planet focused on. "It was a new frontier, a countercultural phenomenon, an updating of the Grand Tour, as Europe became more common." Dalton sold his majority interest in 1989 and stayed on as publisher until 1990. He lives in Bali and stays in touch with the company on an occasional basis.

Publishers Weekly Link

Travails of a Flight Attendant

Visit North America

Nothing to do with the Travails of Travel Writing, but I found the following post by James Wysong more than just funny.

Recently, an irate reader let me know he was sick of me moaning about my job as a flight attendant. His exact words were, "If you don't like it, the last I heard, the drink-tosser's job was voluntary."

I think he got the wrong opinion of my attitude toward the job, but he got me thinking about signs to look out for in the future. So, I drew up an informal poll and asked more than a hundred flight attendants when they would know it was time to take off their wings. Here are some of the best and most interesting answers.

You know it's time to quit being a flight attendant when:

The copilot and the captain are both younger than you.

You can remember when they cooked eggs to order in first class.

Passengers ask you questions at the airport and you aren't even in uniform.

You see a passenger for the first time and know what he wants to drink even before he asks. (I am correct about 90 percent of the time. Some people just look like a ginger ale.)

You wake up in a strange city, don't remember where you are, and don't really care.

Your "secret knock" at home is the same as the code for the cockpit door.

You have a huge collection of miniature alcohol bottles at home. (At last count, I had 512 miniatures from more than 50 countries.)

You take alcohol off the airplane, and you aren't a drinker.

You use the seat backs as support to walk down the aisles. Bless her heart, I flew with an 82-year-old flight attendant who needed the bar cart to prop her up in the aisle.

A younger crew member asks you what it was like in the "good old days."

Several hotel staffs know you by name.

You're the last one to sit down to your family dinner, and the first one to clear the plates.

You know the safety demonstration announcements by heart, and you prove it by reciting them in the shower.

You have airplane disaster dreams, and you like them.

You carry a non-uniform jacket with you just in case the day is full of cancellations and you will need to hide from angry passengers in the terminal.

A younger crew member asks you if you still go out for drinks with the crew "at your age."

You start to smell like a Boeing aircraft. Eau de Boeing they call it.

You are serving dinner at home -- it's either chicken or beef, and not very good, and you think about charging the family for it.

When an angry passenger explains why he will never fly on your airline again, you agree with him and begin to wonder why anyone flies on your airline.

You lie to perfect strangers about which airline you work for.

You are on a tropical-island layover with beautiful weather and a fun crew, and you think the layover should be shorter so you can get home.

On the way to work, you fantasize about phoning in a bomb threat just so your flight will be canceled.

You see oversize luggage and you instinctively start to growl.

Top management's bonuses increase, your paycheck and pension decrease, and you get curious about the going rate for hit men.

You carry a flask everywhere you go.

You start saying "Buh-bye" in your sleep.

Tripso Link

Blogger Corruption?

World Globe

Gridskipper is a daily blog that covers the urban world of trendy restaurants, flashy hotels, hot nightclubs, and plenty of underground happenings with a snarky appeal. It's a fun site and worth putting in your RSS Reader.

Today, Gridskipper approaches investigative journalism with a story about some 20 bloggers who have been invited on a press trip to Amsterdam, with the only requirement that each blogger place a pair of advertisements on their blog. Tit-for-tat sort of thing.

I don't find this sort of arrangement particularly odious, and god knows I've had plenty of freebies during my many years as a freelance travel writer, though Gridskipper makes some compelling arguments against the travel writer/blogger-freebie situation.

Leaving off that many of the anti-junket bloggers simply object in principle to advertising on blogs, and/or that they equate blogs and citizen journalism as the second coming of Christ, their collective naivete about travel journalism is laughable. The process by which old-media journalists visit destinations and "report" on them for travel editorial is almost without exception supported -- in whole or in part -- by the destinations visited or the vendors described.

Economically it would never work any other way. Newspapers cannot spend thousands of dollars to send reporters and photographers to one city for one story, or even a series of stories, without getting price breaks or comps. Magazines usually have a little more leeway financially, but that's only because they bring in more dollars per story for the ads they already sold around that upcoming story. (Newspapers use the same methodology by selling ads around themed special travel sections.)

Even with the intermediary of the publishing company taking money from a vendor and passing it on to the journalist for expenses, the ad money is what makes the travel possible. Some media outlets insert notices identifying such practicies in the story, but it's all the same game whether they admit it or not.

Of course, there are plenty of freelancers who pay their own way and sell their stories on a mercenary basis, but they are both exceptional and typically doing so for personal reasons besides a pathological fear of compromise. The key is whether you trust the author and/or media outlet to give you an honest opinion. And frankly, it's usually painfully obvious who's been aesthetically bought and who has not.

If anything, the Amsterdam blogger project is going overboard with the transparency thing. Given that the bloggers aren't asked to actually blog about Amsterdam as part of the deal, what the Dutch are doing is trading the trip for publicity, i.e. the adspace. If some of the bloggers have a good time and blog about it, that's great too of course, and who really believes that at least one blogger won't report on a positive experience? And who really believes that at least one blogger won't report a negative experience? Publicity is publicity, and if the Dutch chose bloggers they thought were most likely to say complimentary and relevant things, well duh.

Of course, none of this will convince anyone who is constitutionally allergic to blog advertising in the first place, nor will it allay the suspicions of anyone who views every financial transaction as a political act tainted with potential (or inevitable) corruption. To them, I can only say: You should already be taking travel journalism you read anywhere -- including here -- with anything from a grain to a truckload of salt. And if the citzen journalists of the blogosphere can't collectively tell shit from shinola by now, they aren't much use regardless.

Gridskipper Link

Flickr and Creative Commons

Singapore Ballerina by Carl Parkes

I just received a rather sweet request from a high school student in Utah, who would like to use one of my Flickr photos in her art project. Several times yearly I receive such requests from individuals and non-profits, and I always say Yes with great enthusiasm.

Hi Carl-

You have some fantastic photographs! I understand you have creative commons license that does not allow derivative works unless permission is granted by the author of the work.

I am 16 years old and am taking AP art in high school, I am also a ballet dancer. In addition, my father works in Irian Jaya Indonesia, so am deeply influenced by many of your photos.

There is one in particular that I would like to paint. The title of it on flickr, is "singapore ballerina." I am unsure if this is how I go about asking for permission to do this, so forgive my ignorance.

Thank you in advance for your reply.

Kristina P.

Utah