Roaming Tales

In my first post for environmental blog EcoSalon, I write about Cornwall - a stylish choice for an eco-holiday.

I have some exciting news to share - I’m joining EcoSalon as a regular contributor. I’ve been asked to write two posts a week, one on green travel and one on green tech and lifestyle.

My first post is on eco-holidays in Cornwall, looking at walking, food, art and destinations such as the Eden Project. Cornwall is one of my favourite parts of Britain and, as I hope my photos show, an extremely beautiful part of the country. The post was published today and I’m delighted that it’s currently featured as the EcoSalon Daily Favourite right at the top of the site. Please take a look and let me know what you think. Leave a comment either here or on EcoSalon and if you like it, please feel free to share the link with your friends.

The theme of EcoSalon is about going green without sacrificing style and this is something that really strikes a chord with me. Readers who are familiar with this blog and my food blog The Gooseberry Fool might know that I am a passionate environmentalist. However, I also believe that people need inspiration and a reason for hope. We shouldn’t hide from the immensity of the challenge – but if we focus on doom and gloom, we risk generating despair rather than the committed and focused action the planet needs. Despair is just as destructive to the environment as denial.

I’m pleased to be blogging for EcoSalon because the blog is committed to the environment but with an aim to empower and inspire people rather than hector or scare them. There’s enough troubling environmental news out there – the question is what we can do about it.

Lest any fans of Roaming Tales be fretting about the future of this site - never fear! I fully intend to keep my own site and my blogging duties at EcoSalon are as well as, not instead of, what I already do. It’s a paid gig so this properly falls into my day job as a freelance writer.

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Congratulations to BeWILDerwood, Africa’s Eden and Ngong Ping 36O and all the award-winning travel writers.

I have been a member of the British Guild of Travel Writers for about a year now. It’s a professional organisation and you are only eligible to join if you can demonstrate that you are making a living substantially from travel writing, whether that be books or articles. Membership entitles you to have your name listed in the Year Book, which goes out to all members and other industry professionals who pay to receive it, and use of the snazzy new website where you can build a mini-website or network virtually with other members. You also get a membership card and various discounts but I think the biggest benefit is the opportunity to network with other writers and travel professionals at the regular Guild events.

The star event on the Guild calendar, apart from the AGM, is the annual awards dinner. It was hosted last night at the Marriott in Grosvenor Square and it was a great night. We started with a champagne reception with Jersey oysters and then moved into the main room for dinner. The food at awards events can often be a bit rubbish but last night’s meal was really good - it was a collaboration between the Marriott’s restaurant Maze (part of the Gordon Ramsay empire) and the island of Jersey (one of the sponsors), so we had Jersey crab for starters and Jersey vegetables with our lamb for main course, and Jersey cream with our dessert.

There were actually two sets of awards - the Tourism Awards where members vote on the best tourism projects around the world and the Members Awards for travel writing published in the past year. The Tourism Awards were announced before dinner, the Members Awards between starter and main course and then the raffle (to raise money for the Back Up Trust, a spinal injury charity) before dessert.

I’d come along to a Guild meeting a few months ago to hear the nominations for the Tourism Awards and vote on the short list. The final winners were then determined by a vote of the entire membership by post and email. So I was familiar with the nominations but I didn’t know who had actually won until the night. I was really thrilled because all the projects I voted for won their categories! So congratulations to BeWILDerwood in Norfolk for best UK project, Africa’s Eden or Loango National Park in Gabon for best non-UK project, and Ngong Ping 360 in Hong Kong for best global project.

BeWILDerwood

I’m almost tempted to borrow children and take them to BeWILDerwood as the description of this place really captured my imagination. It’s a treetop adventure playground - with treehouses, aerial ropewalks and zipwires, boats and boardwalks - built on 50 acres of woodland and marshland. It’s very eco-friendly - it’s all built from sustainable wood, the entire site is pesticide free, and they’ve planted a lot of trees as well. Among the magical creatures who live there are Mildred, the vegetarian Crocklebog who lives in the Scary Lake, and Swampy a March Boggle. There is nothing modern about BeWILDerwood, although the guy who built it has said he was partly inspired by 90s computer game Myst.

Africa’s Eden

If it weren’t so expensive, I would book my ticket to Loango National Park in Gabon tomorrow. The fact that I can’t is partly the point - they are trying to keep tourism numbers low so that it’s sustainable for the park’s ecology and the wellbeing of the people who live there. Rombout Swanborn, the director of Loango National Park, has said: “We will never have 20 Jeeps around a waterhole shining lights into animals’ eyes.”

The president of Gabon set aside 11% of the country as a national park in 2002 - only tiny Costa Rica has preserved a greater proportion of land. Before then tourism was virtually unknown in Gabon but they began developing the industry at this point with the ethos “ecotourism pays for conservation”. Loango National Park opened in 2007, covering grassland, rivers, forest and mangroves and featuring spectacularly varied wildlife, including whales, elephants, hippos, leopards, reptiles and primates. Visitors are accommodated in the eco-friendly lodge and satellite tented camps and wildlife viewing is small-scale with pirogue trips, forest treks or savannah drives. There are 500 Gabonese in the area with nearly 100 employed as eco-guides etc, while local farmers sell produce to the lodge, and their children attend a new school built by the park.

NgongPing 360

Ngong Ping 360 in Hong Kong combines an existing attraction - the Giant Buddha built by the nearby Po Lin monastery on Landau Island - with a new one. Previously there were so many tourists coming to see the Giant Buddha and the strain on the monastery was too much, with monks spending their whole time providing refreshments. Now Ngong Ping 360 is actually bringing more tourists but they’ve actually managed to reduce the impact on the environment and the monastery. The tourists arrive via a 5.7km cable car skyrail - the world’s longest without a car change - so they didn’t have to build a road through the forest. While tourists can still climb up to see the Buddha, Ngong Ping has also built a Chinese cultural village with dining facilities, which has reduced the burden on the monastery. A win-win situation!

Highly commended

• * Runners-up in the UK category were the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool and Thanet Greeters in Kent.

• * Runners-up in the overseas category were Highland Paradise, Cook Islands and Palazzo Falson, Malta.

• * Runners-up in the Globe Award were Musee de Quai Branly in Paris and the Dinosaur Gallery, Museum of Natural Sciences, in Brussels.

Members Awards

All Guild members are eligible to enter their work for the travel writing awards and entries are judged anonymously. The winning pieces are published in a glossy booklet, which made highly entertaining reading on my Tube ride home at the end of the night. I believe they will also be posted up on the BGTW website at some point as well. Congratulations all!

• * Nicki Gardner for Best Destination Feature under 850 words
• * Alan Hart for Best UK Feature over 850 words
• * Nigel Tisdall for Best European (non-UK) Feature over 850 words
• * Mike Unwin for Best Overseas (non-European) Feature over 850 words
• * Matthew Teller for Best Business/Trade Feature
• * Sarah Woods for Best Transport Feature
• * Will Gray for Best Guidebook Award
• * Rosemary Bailey for Best Narrative Travel Book
• * Tim Richards for Best Radio Feature
• * Carmen Roberts for Best Television Travel Feature
• * Jeremy Hoare for Photograph of the Year
• * Brian Jackman - Runner-Up for Travel Writer of the Year
• * Peter Hughes - Travel Writer of the Year
• * Jim Dunn for Lifetime Achievement Award

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There’s a green theme to this week’s round-up of travel links.

• Liz at Perceptive Travel writes about TripAdvisor’s $1m charity give-away. Charities in the running include environmental organisations such as Conservation International, the Nature Conservancy, and the National Geographic Society, as well as development and aid organisations such as Medicins Sans Frontiers and Save the Children.

• Over at Intelligent Travel, Suzanne Roberts writes about the greening of the Burning Man festival, while Meg Weaver writes about a museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park that claims to be the greenest in the world, and also in San Fran, Pat Tanumihardja turns her attention to sustainable sushi.

• A piece by Elizabeth Becker in The Washington Post examines the impact of mass tourism on the planet titled Don’t Go There. It makes sobering reading. (Link via Intelligent Travel).

• Pam at Nerd’s Eye View recently hobnobbed with royalty at the Conde Nast World Savers Congress, covering the event on Twitter [search using the #WSC code], and writing two thoughtful pieces on her own blog. Beata Loyfman and Julia Bainbridge have also blogged about this on the Conde Nast site, and Conde Nast Traveler has published notes from the event online.

• Harry Pearson on the Guardian’s Travel Blog bids farewell to the passenger ferry from Newcastle to Norway - killed off by cheap flights apparently.

• Over on the Emerald Isle (yes, I’m stretching the green theme a bit here), food blog A Forkful of Spaghetti reviews breakfast at Denis Cotter’s Cafe Paradiso.

• Finally, don’t be too alarmed at these green polar bears featured by Jeremy Elton Jacquot at Tree Hugger.

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Jewish Cemetery, Krakow, Poland. August 2008.

As we walked from the train station in Krakow, the old royal capital of Poland, to our rented apartment, a lady handed us a tourist leaflet offering air-conditioned coach tours of various ‘attractions’ around the city. Along with the guided tours of the salt mines, one of the options was a tour of Auschwitz.

I don’t know how I feel about this. I think it’s important that we remember our history and I support the fact that the place of so much suffering has been turned into a museum. But it doesn’t feel right for it to be packaged up as just another commercial product, however sensitively it’s handled.

We didn’t end up going - perhaps another time, but almost certainly under our own steam rather than on a bus tour. However, we did take a walk through the Jewish Cemetery in Krakow. It was free to enter but the boys had to don skull caps, which reminded me of how I wore the hijab for my recent visits to mosques in Syria.

The far side of the cemetery was very overgrown with weeds and vines and many of the gravestones were framed by ferns and moss. On the near side, we saw freshly tended graves with flowers with death dates in the past 10 years - it’s amazing to think of how even a depleted Jewish population of Krakow survived through first the Nazi and then the Soviet occupation. One plaque on the wall had an English inscription, which may have been dedicated by the American descendants of a Polish Jew.

This particular gravestone struck me as interesting. The small coloured lanterns were quite common on many of the graves, but what I found interesting was the fact that the man’s name was given in both Polish and German. He died in 1946. There’s a story there, though I don’t know what it is.

PS There are some interesting clues and possibilities in the comments field.

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• * 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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Tibet has always seemed a magical, mystical place to me. I saw the Dalai Lama speak in Sydney when I was about sixteen, I have seen films like Kundun and read books like Seven Years in Tibet. But I have never been to Tibet, or indeed anywhere in the Himalayas.

It seems that plenty of others have. Tibet has been hammered by high-impact tourism for several years now and in 2007 for the first time, the annual number of visitors has exceeded the total population of Tibet. Even in the best of times it would be hard for Tibetan culture to survive, let alone thrive under these circumstances. Sadly, Tibetans don’t live in the best of times.

Since 1950 when the Chinese seized control of Tibet, there has been a steady exodus of Tibetans and an equally inexorable influx of Han Chinese into this tiny Himalayan kingdom. The population of Tibet is only 2.8 million, while the population of China is close to one billion, so outnumbering the Tibetans is not a difficult task. The rule is oppressive, according to both Tibetans themselves and outside observers, and many Tibetans feel compelled to make the terrible, risky journey across the Himalayas to live in exile in Dharamsala in northern India.

Yet China has been promoting Tibet as a tourist destination. There are new air and rail links bringing in more tourists than ever before. Most of the tourist industry in Tibet is run by Chinese and the Tibetans see little benefit. The earthly paradise of Shangri-La is no longer a myth but a marketing ploy (a few years ago the Chinese authorities renamed an existing Tibetan city as Shangri-La and it’s now full of resorts and shopping malls).

As far as I can see, there’s no real way to visit Tibet as a tourist and be part of the solution, not the problem. It would make me far too sad and I don’t want to be complicit in the Chinese occupation. I would rather go to Nepal or Bhutan for the Himalayan experience, and Dharamsala for the Tibetan cultural experience. My friend Vanessa Walker has spent time in Dharamsala and wrote a rather wonderful book called Mantras and Misdemeanours, which has inspired me to make the trip one day.

If I ever do go to Tibet, I hope it will be in happier times, or to make a genuine difference to people’s lives, whether by reporting on the situation as a journalist, or with immediate, practical assistance.

Speaking of the Himalayas and making a difference to people’s lives, Antonia at Perceptive Travel has posted about the death of Sir Edmund Hillary, reminding us that he should be remembered as much for the work he did to help the people of Nepal as for the fact that he climbed Mount Everest.

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The New York Times has published a list of 53 hot destinations for 2008.

I have been to the following places on the list: Laos, Tunisia, Prague, Tuscany, Oslo, Lombok, San Francisco, Detroit, Kilimanjaro, London, Las Vegas, New York. There is only one Australian destination on the list - the Barossa Valley - and I haven’t been there.

Where have you been on the list? Where do you want to go? Do you agree with their selections? What do you think will be hot in 2008?

In the UK, there is a big trend toward holidaying closer to home - it’s not so much about what’s hot, but what’s green. Do environmental concerns affect your choice of holiday destination?

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Peru has always held an enormous fascination for me and climbing Machu Picchu has long been on my list of things to do. But archaeologists are warning that Peru’s Incan ruins, including Machu Picchu, are straining under a tourist boom.

For a long time, travelling to Peru was complicated by the continuing struggle with the Maoist Shining Path rebels. But now it’s become the hot new destination with everyone from Cameron Diaz to Princess Beatrice visiting in the past year. In 1992, just 9,000 people visited Machu Picchu; last year it was 700,000. A former culture ministry official has said: “If we open up Machu Picchu to more tourism, the place will be destroyed within 10 years.”

The authorities have tried to limit the numbers on the hiking trail but now that means that there is a huge increase in tourists going to other ancient sites, such as Choquequirao, the partially excavated sister city to Machu Picchu, and that’s also a problem.

It makes me so sad to hear about the damage caused to our priceless historical and wilderness treasures by irresponsible tourism. I believe litter is a big problem on the slopes of Mount Everest as well. And in the Arctic, I saw lots of bits of plastic, not from tourists but washed into the Arctic Ocean from the Atlantic coasts off Europe and North America.

This makes me think twice about going to Machu Picchu. If I ever do go, I’ll be sure to book with a reputable operator that ensures benefit for the local people and good environmental practices. A site such as Responsible Travel can help me find the right one. I would also consider a volunteer vacation to ensure I’m part of the solution, not the problem.

What do you think is the solution? Should tourists stop going to Peru’s Incan sites? Should the government heavily restrict it? Already Machu Picchu is closed to hikers in February while they clean up all the garbage discarded by hikers over the previous year. I think there needs to be a wider cultural change, not just a cap on numbers.

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