501 Places

Loadsamoney! (Just under $100 worth of Uzbek Som)

According to the GfK Ascent Survey of 15,000 UK holidaymakers in 2009, as presented at the CIMTIG organised Travel Vision 2010 evening, UK tourist numbers for last year to Egypt are up 20% and Turkey up 9%. On the downside the Canary Islands have seen a drop of a massive 22%, while numbers are also heavily down in Italy (19%), Cyprus (15%), Greece (13%) and Spain (13%).

These are quite dramatic numbers, and spell a serious issue for the traditional Mediterranean destinations who have built much of their success on the back of the British holidaymaker. What do all these countries suffering a slump have in common? The most obvious explanation is the Euro, against which the pound has weakened heavily in the last three years (although it has been fairly stable for almost 18 months now). We heard how American tourism patterns changed when the dollar tanked in the last decade, with less Americans coming to Europe and to Japan. As Europeans we also noticed how those places that tied their currencies to the US dollar suddenly became more attractive to the rest of us.

But on closer examination something doesn’t make sense here. If we look at the big winner in this survey it is Egypt, enjoying a 20% boost in UK visitors in 2009 alone. The explanation presented for this was that the strength of the Euro is driving Brits to look for better value elsewhere. Yet the British currency has fallen by almost exactly the same amount against the Egyptian currency as it has against the Euro (11 Egyptian pounds to the GBP in 2008 and a little over 8 today).

So why the major change in tourist hot-spot from Spanish and Greek resorts to Egyptian ones? I must admit until I heard these figures I had no reason to check the state of the Egyptian currency, but I had heard much of the PR that had told us all that people were looking to take their holidays away from the Eurozone and that Egypt and Turkey seemed to be the obvious alternatives.

I suspect most people have no inclination to study currency markets (I find them fascinating but I am aware that this is not a very cool admission to make). So if the message is that the Euro countries are expensive and it’s best to go outside of the Eurozone to make your money go further, then perhaps a lot of people have taken this at face value and headed off to Thomas Cook and asked for a holiday to Egypt or Turkey.

Which really leads me to commend the Egyptian tourism authorities on an excellent job well done. They have managed to jump on the bandwagon of anti-Eurozone publicity and reap rich rewards, without anyone holding up their hands and pointing out that their currency has gained in strength at the same pace as the now expensive Euro. It looks to me like a marketing strategy of keeping your head down while making money; and it is being executed with much success.

Brewing storm?

Last night’s excellent Travel Vision 2010 seminar at the Travel Club in London threw up a flurry of statistics about UK travellers. Hosted by CIMTIG and the British Travel Awards, the main part of the evening was the presentation of the findings of a survey of over 15,000 UK holidaymakers, exploring their decision making behaviour and travel plans. I will dwell on these results in future posts and some of these findings are directly relevant to those of us who scatter our words freely through cyberspace.

I felt one comment however was worthy of instant analysis. Simon Calder, the well known UK travel journalist and host of the Travel Clinic on LBC, a London radio station, spoke about the thousands of enquiries he gets each week from listeners looking for advice and information on all things travel; everything from where to go on honeymoon to how to pack a carry-on bag. In two years of hosting the show, the subject of carbon footprints, responsible travel or any environmental aspect of holidays has never once been raised. Not once.

My immediate reaction was one of surprise. Not that I expected it to be no.1 most popular item on the public radar, especially in these difficult times. But given the number of calls the show receives, to draw a complete blank in two years is telling. So what’s going on?

There is no shortage of green propaganda going out to the public. A favourite topic of the broadcasting media, the climate change message has been derailed to some extent recently by allegations of selective release of data. But we still see regular news items on the subject, and in the UK Channel 4 in particular offers a regular diet of documentaries focussing on social responsibility violations from around the world. The travel blogging world is full of those who focus on a green theme, be it reducing our carbon use or the social impact of our travels. A robust market in pushing the green message is there for all to see.

Many specialist tour operators are actively marketing their responsible travel credentials. Some feature the awards received for their social responsibility, others highlight the local communities who benefit from their activities. Hotels are keen to jump on the bandwagon, telling us how they will save the money they used to waste in changing our towels daily or having decent lights in the room, all in the name of saving the planet.

So the lavish Save the World party is meticulously planned, and everyone has been invited. But guess what? When the guests turn up, their only focus is the free booze. All the messages that have been carefully designed to capture the imagination of the guests are wasted as they concentrate on getting the most value from the free bar.

That’s the reality. While there are exceptions, when it comes to the crunch people decide on their travel plans based on cost, value, convenience and comfort, and the green issues are of no more than marginal importance. The messages relating to the long-term health of the planet or the welfare of those who are impacted by our travels are largely disregarded in favour of our immediate needs from our well-deserved holiday.

Many businesses have woken up to this, and market being green as a ‘nice to have’ extra rather than a customer winning benefit. Maybe the BBC and other broadcasters will also tire of sending out the same message to an audience that’s increasingly immune to its significance. Is that a damning indictment of the ineffectiveness of the messengers, or of the selective ignorance of the population. How have we got to the point where the potential destruction of our planet as we know it has become a boring story?

If, as it seems, there is little commercial gain to be had from the reputational boost of adopting a green strategy, the only organisations that will continue to drive responsible behaviour are those who do so because they believe it’s the right thing to do. Let’s hope there’s enough of those to make the difference required.

We Brits are renowned for our lack of culinary flair. Most visitors to the UK do not find evidence to the contrary (excellent British food exists in many places,  but these are rarely found near the main tourist centres). Most of our European neighbours would probably make excuses about washing their hair or grooming the dog to get out of a British dinner invitation. So the opportunity to cook pasta for a group made up of French and Italians, in Florence of all places, was too good to miss.

It was back in my Inter-Rail days, and I had arrived in Florence towards the end of my trip. I was running out of money, and the hostel blew a hole in my ever-shrinking budget. So I suggested to a group of fellow backpackers that I would make dinner in the hostel kitchen, and they willingly agreed. Clearly their minds were on the money they would save, and being young and innocent had yet to be exposed to the infamous cooking ability of a typical Brit. I only asked that we split the costs of the food.

Now at 17 I knew only one dish: macaroni cheese with bacon. Being in Italy it seemed appropriate to produce my own rendition of this classic, a dish that would later sustain me through much of my student years. We soon found bacon, cheese, pasta, milk, butter and a few tomatoes, and I had my main ingredients. It was frustratingly hard to find these things considering I was in Italy. I remember thinking how much easier Italian food is to make when you have Tesco’s down the road. Borrowing a little flour and salt from the left-overs in the hostel cupboards, the meal was prepared and eagerly polished off, and our little group left the table satisfied for little more than a 1,000 Lira each (remember those?)

Almost 25 years later, if I was in the same position I am sure I would choose pasta again. My version of the dish has evolved (pancetta instead of bacon, generous additions of garlic and chilli, and a healthy portion of fresh cream at the end). But the beauty of this meal is that it doesn’t require any fancy ingredients, and whether you’re staying in a hostel, an apartment or a self-catering facility, the few pieces you’ll leave behind will not be expensive and most will last for a long time for others to enjoy.

Cooking while travelling is a lot of fun, and having inflicted my culinary skills on my European friends, I hope that one day I hear of an Italian backpacker who fries up fish and chips for some Brits in a UK hostel. Now that would be impressive!

Appealing? A pretty good restaurant, Luang Prabang, Laos

Ask most people who don’t travel outside of  mainstream destinations what scares them about more adventurous travel and you’ll get a variety of answers. Some will mention terrorism, others a fear of foreign food and others still will be put off by the heat. But there is one thing that turns so many people away from treading lesser worn paths, and it can strike fear equally to those who travel constantly: the hole in the ground toilet.

Top of the pile in crap toilets is undoubtedly the communal walk-in shed. No more than a hole in the ground with a wooden housing lifted on top, you approach it and the smell hits you before you even open the door. The very thought of closing the door and entrapping yourself in a miasma created by an entire village’s month old poo is enough to make you wretch. On the other hand you know that others use this routinely, and you can’t show disrespect by running out of the box in tears. I must admit to avoiding these like the plague (maybe a bad choice of words) and will normally make a stop on the roadside to enjoy the fresh air.

Hole in the ground, Belarus

And yes, I know us guys have it easy. It’s one time when all men are pleased to be men, and the females just wish they could pee as easily as men do.

I have stayed in several homestays and also relatives’ homes in Poland and Ukraine where the set-up is the same and the smell is only marginally better, having been the product of only one family. I think I have perfected the technique of holding my breath for the duration, but it’s not a foolproof method and you can occasionally breathe out by accident, causing your nostrils to fill with the nasty stench. Some sheds have built in ventilation, and if there’s two of you it’s possible to have one person stand guard while the other does the business with the door open. As far as preludes to romantic evenings go, it’s hard to beat.

A word of warning with these dark pits. If you’re going to be drinking heavily make sure you become familiar with the layout while you’re still sober. I almost learned the hard way when invited to a party in a gypsy neighbourhood of Bucharest some years ago. After many beers and well into the night, I made my way uncertainly across the garden to the little room. I opened the door, put one foot forward and it hit thin air. I stumbled and managed to grab the walls of the hut and hold myself up, retrieving my foot before it made contact with anything unsavoury. A very close call, and as a way of sobering up quickly it was very effective.

There are ways to minimise the trauma of a bad toilet experience, and without doubt the facilities should not prevent you from visiting some of the world’s great places. But just remember; stay sober, or getting sloshed might take on another very unpleasant meaning.

(An honourable addition goes to Mike (@Chinamike1410) who shares this picture of a Beijing toilet, inside a fresh fruit and veg market!)

George Orwell (taken from Wikipedia)

Did you know that the complete works of George Orwell are now online and freely available?  I only discovered this yesterday, and I was instantly drawn to a page from Homage to Catalonia, the story of his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Born as Eric Arthur Blair but known around the world by his pseudonym, he went off to Spain in 1936 along with many other idealist young men from around the world to fight the rise of fascism. The book tells of his adventures and traumas during his two years in Spain.

Why my interest in this book, and one page in particular? I was fortunate to meet one of the characters from this book in 1985 in Spain, and he was happy to share his recollections of that time with me. He was by then an old man, but even in my short encounters with him I could easily fit him into the picture painted of him by Orwell 50 years earlier.

“The company we were relieving were getting their kits together. They had been
three months in the line; their uniforms were caked with mud, their boots
falling to pieces, their faces mostly bearded. The captain commanding the
position, Levinski by name, but known to everyone as Benjamin, and by birth a
Polish Jew, but speaking French as his native language, crawled out of his
dug-out and greeted us. He was a short youth of about twenty-five, with stiff
black hair and a pale eager face which at this period of the war was always very
dirty. A few stray bullets were cracking high overhead….. I peered cautiously through a loophole, trying to find the Fascist trench. ‘Where are the enemy?’ Benjamin waved his hand expansively. ‘Over zere.’ (Benjamin spoke English– terrible English.) “

You can read the rest of the chapter here.

So how did I get to meet him? As a teenager I had travelled down to Sitges, a holiday resort just south of Barcelona, to visit my uncle and aunt who had retired there. My uncle was a dominant and influential man, and even in retirement had quickly become a central figure in the local ex-pat community. He introduced me to many foreigners in Sitges, mostly British and some from elsewhere; one of these friends was Benjamin.

When he mentioned that he was fluent in 18 languages I was intrigued to meet him, and spent some time sitting in the plaza during the siesta periods listening to his stories. He was happy for an audience, and although he didn’t dwell solely on his distant military past he was very eager to dish out advice on life to a naive young 16 year old. He was very opinionated and as a head-strong man he often clashed with my uncle. I think they were two old men who needed to argue with one another to keep themselves mentally active.

One thing that Benjamin said to me stuck in my mind, and although it’s far from original it was the first time I had heard it. He said “Are you a communist? You should be a communist. If you’re under 25 and you’re not a communist, you’ve got no heart. If you’re still a communist when you’re over 25 you’ve got no head.” I never appreciated the link between his advice and his own bitter experiences, but still wonder now how much his views were shaped by his time in the Civil War, and how much by the changes that took place in the world in subsequent years.

A chance encounter, but since my meeting with Benjamin in that Spanish summer I always remember him when I hear the name of George Orwell.