501 Places

Torres del Paine, Chile: broken down with sunset approaching

Listen to someone talking about their adventures in deepest Africa or in the Australian outback, and it’s easy to buy into the dream that their trip was perfect. Great people, exotic food, unforgettable sights and exciting adventures. But we all know that during any trip there are those moments that do not make us feel great. The best we can do is think “this will make a great story when I get home”. But at that moment in time we might just choose to be anywhere else. Here’s a few areas where my memory has played tricks on me and tried to retain only the good bits:

Getting cold and/or wet

Sometimes even with the most diligent planning you just don’t take the right clothes. Last year we packed summer clothes on a trip to Syria and Jordan. Driving out of Damascus one morning in glorious warm sunshine, I was comfortable in my T-shirt and shorts. A couple of hours later we parked up at Krak des Chevaliers, a stunning hilltop Crusader castle, and as soon as we stepped out of the car we knew we needed to change. Thankfully we had our bags in the boot and quickly put on all the clothes we had worn to reach the airport in London, and then another layer for good luck.

Nowgrodek, Belarus: nowhere would look good in this weather

Yet this was only a mild shock compared to what came later. On leaving the castle the low hanging clouds suddenly dropped and visibility reduced to a few metres. The cold rain then started and by the time we reached the car, parked around 10 minutes walk away, we were miserable and drenched to the bone. It’s funny to think of it now, but at the time…

Waiting

As an Inter-Railer in the 1980s I used to wait in train stations for crazy lengths of time. I remember once sitting in Belgrade station for around 8 hours waiting for my train. I’d seen enough of the city and just sat on the floor in the corner, chatting with other backpackers as they came and went.

My days of sitting on the station floor may be over, but I still don’t enjoy the lengthy hanging around at airports or the long queues waiting to buy tickets. Our long term memories thankfully seem to blur out these wasted times.

Feeling rough: Phnom Penh

Getting sick

An episode of D+V is not unusual for any long haul trip, and when we are struck down with a bug it can be horrendously unpleasant. It is doubly hellish if we have to travel while sick, or if we have no access to a decent loo. It’s a miracle of the human mind that these ordeals become the stuff of dinner table legends on our return home.

Not knowing the way things work

Turning up at the wrong bus station (I didn’t know there were two in this tiny city!), standing in the wrong line for over an hour before being told to join an even longer one, or learning the hard way about the favourite scams of Delhi’s tuk-tuk drivers. These are just a few examples where a little bit of local knowledge would have made life easier, and my ignorance created frustration and a lot of wasted time. Often the best adventures can arise from our misunderstandings of unwritten local rules, and these might make for great stories later; at the time however they create annoyance and tension.

So next time you hear about someone’s amazing holiday and they tell you how brilliantly it went, stop for a moment before your jealousy boils over. The chances are that at some point they were having a lousy time and wished they were back home.

It’s a little over 8 months since I wrote my first post on 501 places, and it has been an experience I’ve enjoyed and learned from in so many ways. I have made friends along the way and even met some of them face to face. I hope I have developed my own writing as a result of my blog and brought benefits into my other writing work. But why do I keep going with it, and more importantly why do so many other people spend so much time on their travel blogs? Here are just three motives; there are undoubtedly many others.

As a business?

As I started 501 Places I probably didn’t give this too much thought. As the number of readers grew I wondered whether I could create some revenue from this site. Surely advertisers will be interested if I’m getting 10,000 hits a day?

The reality is that there are many sites out there that are getting high volumes of traffic. I don’t know what proportion of this is from fellow bloggers, but given that I read a lot of other bloggers’ posts and in turn they are responsible for the vast majority of comments on my blog, it would stand to reason that there is much cross-pollenation. Does that represent an interesting proposition to advertisers? Only if some of these readers are able to scatter our posts beyond the inner circle and out to interested editors, tour operators and ultimately to the potential travellers.

As an increasing number of bloggers enter the fray, SEO knowledge (getting your site to the top of Google regardless of quality) may become as powerful as good writing in attracting advertisers. If I’m an advertiser looking to place my banner on a site, do I pin my hopes on an eloquent, intelligent blog with 5,000 readers or a mediocre one which ranks highly and has 50,000 visitors? That’s not to denigrate good writing in any way. It’s just that advertisers are not in the business of judging for Booker prizes.

Then there’s the issue of market share. As the number of travel blogs continues to rise (a reliable estimate of yearly growth is hard to find and could be anywhere from 20% to upwards of 50%) the share of voice for each blog is harder to maintain. So advertisers will need to spread their efforts across more sites, and/or reduce their spend on any one site.

A couple of bloggers have started ventures recently to find a new business model in the world of travel blogs. Keith Jenkins (Velvet Escape) and Janice Waugh (Solotraveler) created the Global Bloggers Network, while Dave Lee started Travel Blog Success only a few weeks later. From what I see both models aim to raise revenue through subscriptions from bloggers looking for advice and a supportive peer network, with ad revenue clearly a large part of the business model. It will be interesting to see how they develop, and hope they find the secret to tapping a market that is not well known for its open pockets. I wish them both well.

For the love of it

So it’s not for the money that I write. When I do consider why I keep up a daily blog, I always come back to one basic reason: simple enjoyment.

I make a modest income from writing in other areas: copywriting, creating web content for businesses and article writing for corporate clients. In each case my work is subjected to strict editorial control, albeit in very contrasting ways. My corporate work is commissioned by one of a number of editors and I write according to a given brief. The final output is only signed off after clearing not only the usual editorial scrutiny, but also internal political checks.

Website work and copywriting on the other hand passes through even tighter controls. While an editor might be more concerned about getting an article back by the deadline, the business owner will typically pick apart every aspect of my words. After all, my output will be expected to bring in a tangible return when it is printed or uploaded. And suggesting changes to the status quo of an existing business is never easy.

These commissions and projects are varied and usually a welcome mental stimulant. So when I sit in front of my PC with a blank Wordpress screen and no rules or brief to follow, it is a great feeling of freedom to be able to write what I want, how I want, and publish it without others’ approval. Often a post will change its message and purpose halfway through (it’s already happened twice with this one) but that’s ok. It’s my post and my blog.

Do I have a responsibility to others to entertain or represent a particular viewpoint? Not at all. I only try to be true to my own beliefs and thoughts. If people like what they read, they’ll be back. It’s getting a bit like having satellite TV with 400+ channels where people channel flick and you have a fleeting moment in which to capture their attention. That lack of inhibition is what I enjoy most about blogging.

Our name in lights

The world of blogging is made for the narcissist. Our post goes on the web, Google picks it up, we see it linked to by others, it gets retweeted, it attracts comments. All our needs for affirmation and self-validation are met without leaving our desks or speaking to anyone. And when we see our daily site stats, rankings or analytics we can again bask in the glory of our online success. It is a lazy man’s fame, but who out of us bloggers has not felt even a slight glow of content when we write a post that is well read, commented or linked?

Akha women, northern Thailand - notice the Coca-Cola T-shirt?

In SE Asia, and no doubt elsewhere in the world, there is a growing trend for tourists to visit ‘tribal villages’. These are marketed as communities of people living in accordance with their ancient traditions. By inference, we are encouraged to believe that the state provides protection for these minority groups and that we, as tourists, can come face to face with a different culture while helping them financially by our visit.

We visited a number of ethnic villages during our time in Thailand and Laos. Most were normal working villages, but the most uncomfortable by far was a hilltribe village tourist centre just outside Chiang Rai. We hadn’t been so keen to go, but our driver had already taken us to the brilliant Wat Rong Khun and we had hiked up to a waterfall in the nearby hills. With a couple of hours to kill before our bus to the Lao border, we agreed to her plan of going to see the tribal village centre.

Our reaction was purely personal, but for us it was a place we didn’t want to hang around. Made up of four tribal communities, each one separated by no more than 100 metres along a footpath, this complex housed people from these ethnic groups who would normally have a large swathe of land on which to subsist. Here, penned in like animals in a zoo, they waited for passing tourists to wander up to their station. They would then perform a dance or offer scarves and trinkets for sale, in the hope of raising a few baht. Others may have found the same experience to be a positive one, but I couldn’t wait to get out and just felt wrong for even being part of something that made me feel instinctively uncomfortable.

Lao village

I have since read numerous articles, including this excellent piece by Tony at Contemporary Nomad about the compulsory resettlement of tribal communities in Thailand, and the overall policy in neighbouring countries of forceably integrating these communities into mainstream society. This is clearly a hugely complex subject and not one which I would pretend to understand. In our particular visit, did these people benefit from being in their enclosure and capturing a few crumbs from the passing farang? Financially they probably do benefit (although I wonder how much of the 300 baht entrance fee reaches them, and how much makes its way into ‘other places’). Is this the life they would lead if given the choice? I somehow doubt it.

We did visit other villages along the Mekong in Laos that left us with a more positive feeling. Sure, I learned that financial arrangements were made between the river boat company and the village elders – call it a landing fee. That’s perfectly ok. When we wandered into the villages we were mobbed by curious children and greeted with reserved smiles by the adults. Those encounters were far more pleasant, although even here there is evidence to suggest a dark side to the recent history of resettlement of ethnic groups along the river by the Lao government.

What do we do as tourists in these situations? Do we visit the tribal cultures in these environments hoping that a little or our money does make it into their hands, or we keep away, stopping the demand for such circuses, but subjecting these people to the alternative, whatever that is? Who benefits in the long run? Not the questions that the tourism chiefs would want visitors to leave with, but if ecotourism is to evolve maybe we will gain easier access to the answers.