Roaming Tales

• * The New York Times focuses this week on summer in Sydney. It’s interesting to see what they make of my hometown - they also have separate features on the ocean lap pools and the beachside cuisine. The rock pools are a fabulous subject - one of the best features of many of Sydney’s ocean suburbs and with a fascinating social history as well. It’s something that is authentic in the sense that it is familiar to Sydneysiders but fresh and new to outsiders. The photographs all show Sydney sparkling in the sun, which it usually is, except that the La Niña effect has been bringing abnormal amounts of rain this summer. For a local perspective, the Sydney Morning Herald has this feature on kayaking in Sydney Harbour.

• * Rachel Friedman at Brave New Traveler asks what will become of the traditional backpacker book swap, if e-book readers such as Amazon’s Kindle take off (link via WorldHum). Both Rachel, an Eva at WorldHum, riff about the experience they had with certain books that passed through the hands of dozens of travellers, each of whom wrote their name on the title page. I wonder if either has heard of BookCrossing, which lets you have that experience any time - except it’s about travelling books rather than books when you’re travelling.

• * The Window Seat has a round-up on tipping around the world - always a contentious issue! Though they don’t include the United States, where it’s possibly most fraught of anywhere.

• * This Just In… notes that the largest Frida Kahlo retrospective in the US in 15 years is opening this month in Philadelphia. I saw a Kahlo exhibition at the Tate Modern in London a couple of years ago and she is well worth the time so if you are going anywhere near Philly between now and May then you should pay a visit. Watch the movie Frida with Salma Hayek to get in the mood.

• * Staten Island is probably the least glamorous of New York’s five boroughs. It one claim to fame - as opposed to the infamy of the garbage dump and the mob stronghold - is the free ferry that gives decent views of the Statue of Liberty. Apparently it gets an undeservedly bad rap and is actually quite green and pleasant. Whatever. But now the so-called ‘forgotten borough’ is getting a vineyard and winery - Gridskipper has the details.

• * Should Lonely Planet - now owned by the BBC’s commercial wing BBC Worldwide - publish a guide to Burma (Myanmar)? Join the debate at Gadling.

• * In most cities monorails are a joke - a boondoggle from the 1980s that goes nowhere and serves no useful purpose. Sydney has one. Detroit has one. Now Dehli is to join the list of cities with a monorail, according to Gadling. Though with a planned 45km of track, maybe this monorail will actually go somewhere and serve a purpose. Here’s hoping! (Do we get to sing the song now? monorail … MONORAIL … MONORAIL).

• * A hot topic in the blogosphere is debating how Cuba will change now that Fidel Castro is retiring and whether the United States might, finally, lift the travel embargo. (The official US line is that it will not do so until Cuba introduces democracy, which seems like a strange policy considering Americans can travel to a whole host of non-democratic countries such as China). Of course, Cuba is no great mystery to the rest of the world, as the LA Times’ Daily Travel & Deal blog points out. Meanwhile, many Americans have sidestepped the travel ban anyway, as The Window Seat writes. The Observer called in its architecture writer to describe Cuba as it is now.

• * The Tokyo restaurant scene is distinctly unimpressed with the Michelin team and it star ratings, telling the New York Times: “How can a bunch of foreigners show up and tell us what is good or bad?” It’s a badge of honour for many Japanese chefs that they turned the Michelin stars down. (Link via WorldHum).

• * The Blarney Stone is meant to give you the gift of the gab but Jaunted reveals that travellers have been kissing the wrong stone.

• * I’m really enjoying Liz (aka KiwiWriter) at Write to Travel’s weekly feature of Travel Blog of the Week. This week she features Primitive Culture, a travel blog with Bangkok as the base. The photographs are especially well done.

• * Poor old Max Gogarty continues to make headlines around the blogosphere. World Hum’s take is here; Perceptive Travel here; Gadling here; and my own post here.

• * Check out this photograph of olives in Jerusalem in Intelligent Travel. Or for really beautiful photos, visit Exposed Planet - the latest picture is of three Uros women on Late Titicaca in Peru.

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Bruges in French or Brugge in Flemish - this charming Belgian town is a treat by any name. It’s perfect for a weekend rambling through the cobbled streets, dabbling in culture and indulging in good food and drink.

1. Accessibility

It’s in the heart of Europe, just one hour on the train from Brussels, the Belgian and European Union capital. It is easily accessible from France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK, making it a viable weekend destination. A Eurostar train ticket to Brussels from London, South-East England or France offers free onward travel to any Belgian city. Make the most of this by spending an afternoon in Brussels on the way back.

2. Architecture

Bruges is a well preserved medieval town, with cobbled streets opening on to a series of town squares lined with grand gothic buildings. Arched stone bridges criss-cross the canals and many of the older houses have canal-front entrances. The town is human scale so you can walk everywhere and see just about everything within the weekend.

You can walk nearly everywhere in Bruges and there are also boat rides along the canals and horse and carriage rides through the streets, a bit ‘touristic’ perhaps, but a nice option.

3. Art and history

Bruges had a population of 45,000 in the Middle Ages, which was enormous for the time. There are several excellent museums, such as the Groeninge Museum, which offers a good collection of art by Flemish masters, including Jan Van Eyck. I recommend the St Johns Hospital complex, the site of a former medieval hospital. Surgery in the Middle Ages was performed by barbers - such as in this painting of a child undergoing eye surgery. The display also includes some rather bizarre looking surgical implements and a lot of religious paraphernalia. Paupers were apparently buried in straw and
there was a charitable foundation to pay the priests to say masses for the poor several times a year.

Also nearby is the lovely Cathedral of Our Lady, which boasted paintings by Caravaggio and a beautiful Michelangelo sculpture of the Madonna and Child, one of the few outside Italy.

4. Belfrys and windmills

Climb the 12th century belfry in the central square. It has over 300 steps but it’s worth it if you can. The bells themselves are quite fascinating with giant clockwork contraptions to ring the bells. The views are superb, giving a grand overview of Bruges architecture, with the vista extending all the way to the outskirts of town, where you can see the giant modern windmills that power the town. Wind power is a long tradition in Belgium, as it is throughout the Lowlands. If you take a walk around the edge of Bruges Old Town, you might stumble across the old style windmills that have now been decommissioned, by removing the slats.

5. Food

If nothing else, I can guarantee that you will eat well in Bruges - or at least, you would have to work hard not to. There are quite a few nice restaurants - take a recommendation from your hotel or guide book or simply take a walk and see what looks good. Seafood is a particular specialty, especially the traditional dish of a pot of mussels (moules in French or mosselen in Flemish) in a broth such as cream and white wine, served with fries. Other traditional dishes on the menu include Flemish Rabbit, which is cooked with prunes. Other cuisines, such as Greek, are available but Belgian food is the real star.

Chocolate (and waffles)

Technically this counts as food but surely, chocolate is worth its own entry? There is a reason that Belgian chocolate is renowned the world over and the inhabitants of Bruges capitalise on this relentlessly - it’s no exaggeration to say that in some areas every third shop is a chocolatier. Waffles are also a Belgian invention and you can get freshly made waffles in the market. This is exactly how waffles should be - hot and dipped in cinnamon and sugar with a crunchy outside and chewy middle. You can even combine the two, with a chocolate waffle.

7. Beer

If Belgium is not the land of chocolate then perhaps it’s the land of beer, though it’s true that Germany gives it a run for its money on both counts. My favourites were Kriek, a cherry-flavoured beer that was subtle and not too sweet, and a creamy house beer in one of the pubs. Pubs in Bruges are cosy and characterful - like the English notion of a pub before the menace of the chain pub. It gets mighty cold in Bruges in winter so a nice warm pub is a great place to while away a few hours in the afternoon or evening, while many of the pubs have terraces and beer gardens so in summer you can sit outside.

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When I first went to Scarborough on the East Yorkshire coast, I couldn’t believe my eyes. There was a Tardis on the footpath! I half expected the Doctor (played by Tom Baker of course) to appear and beckon me with a wink and waggle of his finger to join him on his inter-galactic adventures through time and space.

The new series of Doctor Who has introduced the franchise to a lot of new viewers in the United States but those of us in the Anglophile world - in my case, Australia in the 1970s and 1980s - grew up with it. I remember thrilling to the theme music and cowering behind the couch during the scary bits. The big boys at school (who were an ancient seven to my five years old) would play Daleks in the playground, intoning “I will ex-ter-min-ate you” in a robotic voice, with their arms outstretched to make a Dalek gun. Peter Davison, the blond one, was the doctor by the 1980s but we saw the curly-haired, tweed-scarved Tom Baker often enough on repeats and he was definitely my favourite.

Yet to Britons, particularly those from the older generation, this is a perfectly ordinary police box, a remnant from an earlier age when the police on the beat would have to call back to the station at regular intervals. This page dedicated to police boxes says they were introduced in 1888, widespread by 1937 and ditched in favour of walkie-talkies in 1967. When Doctor Who first started, in the 1960s, the police box was quite common place, making it a good disguise for the Tardis, at least for the Earth-based episodes.

There are very few police boxes left, but they are scattered around the UK in odd places. There’s one on the seafront promenade at Scarborough. There’s another next door to the cathedral in Glasgow. There is one in Brighton that is set to be turned into a tiny student house. Presumably it’s bigger than the average police box … or maybe it’s just bigger on the inside?

If the Doctor ever did invite me to go travelling with him in his Tardis, where would I go? Well, bearing in mind that the Tardis is in a perpetual state of disrepair and the navigation usually goes wrong, my top five destinations would be:

• The Moon, to see the Earth from Space.
• An Earth-like planet to search for intelligent life.
• Sydney in 1787 (before the arrival of Europeans).
• London in 1600 to see a Shakespearean play at the Globe Theatre and possibly meet the playwright.
• Ancient India at the time of the birth of Buddhism.

Actually, it’s really hard to choose just five - I would also love to go to Renaissance Florence, ancient Greece and Egypt, the Aztec Empire, and much more. I’m unsure whether I would want to visit the Earth in 50-100 years from now, to know whether things work out for my (as yet unborn) children and grandchildren.

What would your top five be? Let me know in the comments and also feel free to tell me where else you can find a Tardis police box in the UK.

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Liz (aka KiwiWriter) at Write to Travel runs a weekly feature interviewing travel writers. This week she was kind enough to interview me. The questions were wide ranging, from how I got started in travel writing to my predictions for the future.

“…I wanted to be a writer from an early age, although I also wanted to be an actress, a circus performer, a barrister, a marine biologist, and Australia’s first female prime minister…”

“…The biggest trend for travel writing in general is that we are facing a global environmental crisis and the social pressure needs to be for less travel rather than more…”

You can read the full interview on her site, and there are links to other interviews in the series in the right sidebar of her site. Please feel free to leave comments either here or there.

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The rise of the web and the popularity of blogs and other citizen media is a challenge for traditional media owners. Newspapers and magazines are torn between wanting to compete directly, and wanting to stick to their guns and do what they do best. The rules of the game have changed.

The Guardian has responded better than most. It’s a small newspaper in Britain with a circulation of about 380,000 per day, but it’s a massive player online with about 15 million unique users per month globally. It’s embraced blogging, reader interaction, podcasts and the rest.

Yet The Guardian, like everyone else, is still figuring out how far to go down this road. This was highlighted last week by the sad case of Max Gogarty, a 19-year-old who is about to set off on a backpacking trip to India and Thailand. Max was commissioned to write a series of weekly posts from the road, and the first one, introducing the trip and chronicling his visa application, went up last Thursday. I saw this at the time, since I subscribe to Travelog, but it’s the breathtaking scale of the backlash - including spoof sites, countless blog posts, and even a mention in the Wikipedia entry for “nepotism” - over the past three days that makes this really notable.

The problem was that the idea - middle class kid spends his gap year partying in India and Thailand - is not terribly original and Max’s writing, while not as terrible as some commenters made it out to be, does nothing to rise above the basic dullness of the concept. He writes:

“I’m kinda shitting myself about travelling. Well not so much the travelling part. It’s India that scares me. The heat, the roads, the snakes, Australian travellers.”

The response from Guardian Unlimited readers was scathing, complaining about the clichéd idea and quality of the writing, and suggesting that he must have got the job through nepotism, or as a promotion for Skins, which he occasionally writes for. Someone did a Google search on his name and figured out that he is related to Paul Gogarty, an occasional freelance contributor to The Guardian’s travel section. By the time I looked at the thread most of the most insulting comments had been removed, so I didn’t see the worst of it, though it’s still pretty bad. Rafael Behr has written about it for Comment is Free, likening the “pillorying” of Max both on the Guardian comments threads and in the wider blogosphere to a scene from the Cultural Revolution in China and complaining that there is only mob rule online. However, a good proportion of the comments were directed at Andy Pietrasik, the travel editor.

Pietrasik responded the following day, answering some of the criticisms and inaccuracies but stopping short of admitting he was wrong to commission it. He quite rightly points out that no one deserves the level of abuse that Max has got, “no matter how skinny their jeans”. He also said:

“One thing that came out of yesterday’s posts was that you want to hear a lot more from real people rather than journalists, so I’m going to be putting up a lot more readers’ recommendations and writing. I hope you like it. I’m sure you’ll let me know.”

This is what is puzzling me. I think a lot of the personal abuse was unwarranted and unfortunate. Some of the comments were downright cruel and other comments, while more measured and perhaps justifiable, were still highly critical. I know how thin-skinned I was at 19 and I believe his family when they say that he is feeling pretty crushed right now. As some commenters have pointed out, all of this will be archived on the internet forever for prospective employers to find in five years time when doing a name search on Gogarty.

However, I do think it was misguided to commission it in the first place. In order for newspapers to survive and thrive in the era of the blogosphere, they do need to be more open and allow more of a two-way conversation, which Guardian Unlimited has done to great effect. But they also need to remember that they are not MySpace or Facebook and the best way to compete is to differentiate yourself from your competitors. Readers of The Guardian turn to it, rather than (or as well as) blogs or social networking sites because they are looking for a certain authority and quality.

There is a place for a variety of voices in the blog section, as long as the quality of the general newspaper reporting, comment and writing does not suffer. But even the blogs do need to be offering something new and it pass a yardstick for quality. I didn’t think there was anything hugely wrong with Max’s style, considering his age, though it’s nothing special. The main problem is the gap-year experience is so common in Britain that it’s not really something new and Max’s background is so typical for media types that it hardly qualifies as adding to diversity - most journalists are not 19, to be sure, but age will cure that one.

Contrary to the travel editor’s assertion, I didn’t see anything in the comments thread to suggest that people wanted more writing by “real people” as opposed to journalists (who, presumably, are robots or aliens). Here’s one response:

“No, I want to read more good journalism, not middle class kids on work experience writing about their holidays, or the last series of Neighbours, especially when they’re handed it on a plate like this. There are a lot of really talented people out there who just want a chance to prove themselves.”

Maybe the editor and I read different comment thread (as I said, it had been moderated by the time I got to it)? The one thing that came through quite strongly when I read both threads was that people wanted GOOD writing, wherever it came from. In fact many of the comments expressed a preference for journalists on the basis that the writing was more likely to be good. Could it be that Andy had already decided to put up more reader writing - had, in fact, got the job on the basis of making the site more Web 2.0 - and was therefore using the comments to justify his decision?

I would be interested to know what my readers think about what they expect from travel newspapers and magazines versus blogs? And whether a blog on a newspaper website should have the standards of the newspaper or the standards of blogs in general? How should old media respond to new media?

I think Max Gogarty has had enough abuse so I will be moderating comments. You are welcome to say whether or not you think The Guardian was right to commission and run the piece but please be civilised - there’s been enough flaming.

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• My other great passion is food and I write about this over at The Gooseberry Fool so I particularly enjoy reading articles that combine the two. This week The Guardian has an article on where you can find the best examples of top 10 classic dishes around the world, from sushi in Tokyo to pizza in Naples.
  

  “Ask a New Yorker for the ‘best burger’ and they are liable to laugh derisively. ‘That’s impossible,’ they’ll reply. ‘Do you mean old school or new school, retro or nouveau?’”

  Meanwhile, The Observer has a lovely article about foodie tourism in New Zealand.

• Lara on Cool Travel Guide has written a series of posts on postcards. Does anyone still send them, she wonders. Do people still read them? I certainly do - I love the aesthetic of a good postcard and find it pleasurable to sit in a café with a good cup of coffee and a stack of postcards, choosing the right image for the right person and reliving the highlights of the trip. It’s much nicer than sitting in an internet café and I feel that I am making more of a connection with people - especially the old and very young who may not use the internet.

• This week’s Carnival of Cities is hosted on the Family Travel site. Browse the posts on cities ranging from Seattle to Trieste. You can also enter for next week’s carnival, which will be hosted on the Perceptive Travel blog.

• Gadling writes about tracking pandas in the wild in China. Apparently panda turds smell like fresh bamboo.

• World Hum asks what would Joshua National Park be without Joshua trees? Not a hypothetical question since global warming could render the park too warm for its namesake trees within 50-100 years.

• KiwiWriter identifies the five essential ingredients of a good travel blog.

• Heather on her Travels shares the experience of a walk from Blaise Castle to Kings Weston in Bristol, complete with tea and a lemon drizzle cake at the end.

• Are you travelling solo? (Or even worse, NOT travelling BECAUSE you don’t have a travelling companion). Kim on Wild About Travel + Writing recommends the best holiday destinations for the single traveller. She also has a post with common sense advice for the solo female traveller. If you want to meet someone special, then follow Window Seat’s guide to the top single cities in the US - New York is full of single girls, while San Jose is full of single men.

• Tailoring in Asia is very good and ultra cheap so a visit to the region is a good excuse to get some bespoke clothing. Window Seat has a guide to how to do it.

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Were you one of the hundreds, if not thousands, of British Airways customers stranded in New York over the new year period?

It’s worth contacting the Customer Relations department - you might get some free flights out of it.

My recent trip to New York was extended by three days because BA cancelled our flight from JFK to Heathrow on 3 January. I went online immediately and tried to rebook but it was so busy that the closest available flight was not until 6 January. Their telephone staff later told me it was due to staff illness and that at least one flight had been cancelled every day that week.

We were fortunate enough to be staying with friends and I made the most of the extra time visiting Brooklyn Botanic Garden and Green-Wood Cemetery. But even without hotel bills,  New York is one of the most expensive cities in the world, and both my travelling companion and I had to take an extra two days off work.

The one thing I really wanted BA to do was to upgrade us to business class. We were flying back on a Sunday night, for arrival early Monday morning, and an upgrade would have made the world of difference to whether or not we could work that day. However, BA was unable to do this. Firstly, because the flight was completely full in all classes and secondly, because it is set up to deal with retrospective complaints rather than dealing with problems as they arise. I was advised that there was nothing they could do to help and I should contact BA’s Customer Relations department on my return.

I nearly didn’t do so as our travel insurance entitles us to some compensation, a claim that is still being processed. But when I realised the insurance pay-out for flight delays would result in just £80 each for three days’ delay, I decided I ought to contact BA again after all.

I’m glad I did because the airline has just come through with a £100 travel voucher for BA flights per passenger. I suspect that if I had been in a position to present some hefty hotel bills that it might have been even more, but given our particular circumstances, I’m pleased with the outcome. I still wish they could have sorted out an upgrade though.

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This is a guest post by Natasha Judd, a New Zealand writer, traveller and self-described web geek, currently living in London. Her first novel Lessons to Learn, which deals with the challenges and culture shock faced by a Kiwi English language teacher in Korea, was published by Cape Catley in 2007. Natasha also runs the writing resource website WebStuff4Writers.com. Here she shares the tale of her recent birthday weekend - a surprise trip to Bath with her husband.

Normally, I’m a bit obsessive about our holiday planning. I can agonise for days about where we’re going to go, what we’re going to do, where we’re going to stay: checking the local tourism websites, reading reviews, comparing prices and breakfast menus. So, when my husband said that he was going to take me away for my birthday this year – that all I needed to organise was a day off work on 21 January – I didn’t know what to expect.

On the Saturday morning, I definitely didn’t expect the car, hired from streetcar for three days, but it certainly made a nice change from the crowded buses and trains that are our day-to-day transportation here in London. In a car, you can take alternative routes, you can stop in Reading for lunch in a pub. If you’re my husband, you can drive west in perfect confidence that my total ignorance of UK geography means that I have absolutely no idea where we’re going.

We ended up in High Littleton, a small village on the outskirts of Bath. My husband had hired one of the Greyfield Farm Cottages – a perfect place for a winter weekend retreat, with both a log fire and a jacuzzi to keep us warm. As I flicked through the guest book in the lounge, what I noticed was the number of repeat visitors, people who returned to these self-catering cottages year after year, or came back for special occasions in their life. It hardly surprised me. From the cider and chocolates when we arrived to the complimentary Thermae Spa voucher, the Greyfield Farm Cottages oozed a vibe of relaxation and escape (and if that wasn’t your intention, there was also an on-site gym).

Sunday was our history of Bath day, with museums and historic restaurants and walking tours. You certainly get the feeling that Bath has been a significant area for quite a while when you walk around the Roman Bath Museum. In the second century AD, the conquering Romans were already coming here to bathe, throw their offerings into the Sacred Spring, and to worship at the temple of the goddess Sulis Minerva. Much later, in the early 1800s, Bath was home to one of the UK’s most famous writers, Jane Austen. Two hundred years later, Miss Austen is still making her presence known, courtesy of Jane Austen walking tours (which my husband had downloaded onto our iPods from the Visit Bath website) and the Jane Austen Centre.

When it was the centre of Bath Society, Jane Austen may have been an occasional visitor to the Pump Room. Today, it’s more a gathering place for tourists. We sampled glasses of the Bath spring water – said in the past to cure a whole range of ills – but on the whole, I preferred my hot chocolate. Dinner that night was at Sally Lunn’s House, the oldest residence in Bath and the home of the Sally Lunn Bun. The famous buns were a central part of our meals, acting almost as a second plate.

On Monday, after a breakfast of local bacon and eggs, we checked out of our cottage and drove back into Bath. An exhausting morning of shopping and spending in Bath’s stores and markets was followed by a couple of hours of relaxation in the Thermae Bath Spa. Outside the wind was blowing a gale, but that only mattered when we were trying to get in and out of the roof-top pool.

So we didn’t have great weather. It rained on our walking tour. It was cold. But then again, it was January, it’s the UK, and on that point at least I wasn’t surprised. I’ve been told that in summer Bath is crowded with tourists and that you have to queue for an hour to get into attractions like the Roman Bath Museum. So, for those looking for a romantic winter weekend holiday, I do recommend Bath.

I didn’t know where we were going for my birthday. I’d had a few vague theories, none of them correct. Our long weekend in Bath was better than I could have imagined, and my lovely husband gets lots of points for that.

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Last September I travelled to Singapore on assignment for Anyway. The magazine has a regular feature called MyPlace, which explores a city in the company of an expat showing us their adopted home. Our guide to Singapore was German designer Niko von Saurma who gave us insight into Singapore’s artistic and cultural life. I had been to Singapore previously and my original impression was of a giant air-conditioned shopping mall so I was surprised and pleased to discover a different side to the city.

I have now published the article here on Roaming Tales, and an accompanying city guide. Although I worked with a photographer for the magazine article, these are my own photographs.

Comments are not enabled on the article itself but you are welcome to leave a comment here.

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So far that is over a week’s worth of posts and more than 50 travel blogs. If that is still not enough for you, then frankly you’ve got too much time on your hands and should start your own blog! Or you could check out the following for more leads:

• Blog by Blog, Guardian Unlimited’s guide to destinations via the eyes of local bloggers.
• Travel Rants, a destination in its own right and also home to a weekly travel blog carnival.
• Travel Pod, a platform and community for travel blogs.
• Travel Blog Directory, from Budget Travel’s This Just In.
• The T List, a listing of travel, expat and destination blogs.
• Expat Blog Guide, a directory of expat blogs.
• The blog roll on Cool Travel Guide.

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