“Your home away from home” is how many hotels like to market themselves. It’s an easy slogan to use, but for many hotel owners I am fairly sure that if they had to live in the properties which earn them a living, they wouldn’t put up with many of the irritations to which they are happy to subject their paying guests. So what are the most basic things a hotel should include to make a guest feel comfortable?

Of course there’s a complication here, in that every person has different requirements and different opinions on what is most important for them in a hotel room. So my wish list is just about my own preferences. But I think the points that annoy me probably annoy most people who stay in hotels (I would think that, wouldn’t I?)

Anyway, here’s what would make the perfect hotel stay for me. Best of all for hotel owners, none of these things are particularly expensive.

1. Decent pillows. Not the ones which are so flat you could post them home in an envelope. And not those which are full of uneven lumps. And no, I don’t want to phone reception to request a pillow from your menu. Just leave a good quality pair of pillows on the bed, and a slightly harder and softer option in the cupboard. Cheap pillows make you look… cheap.

2. A strong, easy-to-use shower. Fancy hotels can be the biggest culprits here. I want to get in the shower, wash myself and get out. I don’t want to spend 10 minutes trying to work out which lever to pull to make the water hot or strong. If you need to explain to guests how to use a shower, you need to change your interior designer.

3. Showers that don’t flood. In an average year I stay in 30 to 40 different hotel rooms. I reckon in at least 10 of those I’ll step out of the shower onto a soaked bathroom floor. Again, the incidence of flooded bathroom floors is not related to the class of the hotel. It’s all very well saying that the cleaner will take care of it, but there’s no fun using a bathroom and getting your feet soaked as you get ready for the day ahead. It’s usually a simple design fault, caused by a hotel choosing style over practicality.

4. Bathroom amenities which don’t need a magnifying glass to work out. It’s not rocket science. Most people over 45 (and many younger ones too) need glasses to make out small print. Glasses are the last thing you think about before going into the shower. And yet most bottles of shampoo and shower gel include tiny writing, often written in a ridiculous font and in a colour that’s almost certainly been chosen to make deciphering them as hard as possible.  Large, clear print would make life a lot easier for many guests – believe me, they might even stop cursing you while they take a shower.

5. Free WiFi without hassle. Fortunately, the majority of places now offer free WiFi. Too many places however still make the process of logging on a real pain. Again, it’s the posher hotels which are often the worst, with separate passwords for each device which have to be entered every time you reconnect your phone or laptop. Why so many hurdles? Are you really scared of outsiders (or even former guests) returning to the hotel and stealing a few precious MB of your WiFi? Don’t make life unnecessarily difficult. A one-time simple log-in should be all that’s required. Nobody would put up with this at home.

6. Decent lights. Having 24 light switches in a single room is annoying enough, especially when there’s no master switch and you have to try and switch each one off before going to bed. Worse still is when all those lights combined still provide little more than a dull glow in the room. How about a central light which lights up the whole room, along with a few lamps at desks or chairs – you know, like you’d have at home? For some reason I’ve never been able to work out, this appears to be too difficult.

7. Painless check-in and check-out. When I arrive at a hotel I want to be in my room as quickly as possible. I don’t want anyone to come up and show me how the lights work, and I don’t want to wait for a welcome drink. 5 minutes should be the absolute maximum time between entering the hotel lobby and being left alone in my room, with all my luggage. And that thing when I’m made to wait at check-out while someone goes into the room to check I wasn’t lying when I said I hadn’t taken anything from the minibar? Not a good way to end things. If a hotel is going to adopt that approach, better to do without the minibar altogether.

Enough of a rant for now. There’s plenty more to add to this list, but I reckon if I stayed in a comfortable hotel that managed to adopt these simple steps (along with great service of course, the definition of which is another topic entirely), I would be singing its praises to all who would listen.

Comfortable hotels – why are they so rare? is a post from: 501 Places

This was not our rental car. Obviously.

I loathe every aspect of renting a car abroad.

Even the process of booking a car for our recent Sicily trip took far too long; every time I was about to book a car I made the mistake of checking a review site and ended up getting distracted by a stream of one-star ratings from angry customers. In the end I was hooked in by a price of £65 for 8 days rental, and booked a car with Sicily by Car through Holiday Autos, who appeared to have a slightly more favourable (or less terrible) review profile than their competitors.

With such an attractive price I shouldn’t have been surprised by the queue at the Sicily by Car desk in Catania airport. Still, 40 minutes later we were in our Citroen C3 and leaving the car park, ready to set off on our trip. And it was then, before we’d even reached the exit, that I ran into trouble. The gate in front of me was blocked, and I was instructed by waving staff to reverse and turn down an alternative and far too narrow lane, marked out by yellow bollards. Sure enough, I didn’t make the turn cleanly and my rear door brushed against the bollard, leaving a 5mm scratch and a skim of yellow paint. The paint didn’t shift with water or soap, and despite the gallant efforts of a very helpful hotel owner who took me to his friend’s garage to see if he could help, I returned 8 days later to the airport with a small but noticeable scratch.

The Sicily by Car staff were practically salivating when they saw the mark. Within minutes the calculator was getting hammered, seemingly random numbers being entered before a figure of €405 was presented to me with what I remember to be a sneering grin. During our time at the office, we saw 5 or 6 people return their cars and to my knowledge, only one got away without getting clobbered with some sort of charge. Being late for an onward bus and unable to argue my corner, I paid up and left, loudly cursing Sicily by Car and my own stupidity in choosing them for my rental ahead of a less cheap but more reputable firm.

And so the story should end as a lesson about the folly of going for the cheapest car rental. But as I said, there is a happy ending. I had chosen not to pay the £49 fee charged by Sicily by Car and their agents Holiday Autos to take the excess liability from €900 to zero. While the guy at the desk was tapping into his calculator working out how much he was going to extract from my credit card he mocked me with the question, “Why didn’t you take our insurance?”

Instead I’d taken out a rental car excess insurance policy with Direct Car Excess Insurance. It had cost me £17, and I would soon discover whether it was money well spent. I emailed them that day to ask for a claim form, as directed on the policy document. I got the form back immediately from a claims handler at AIG, and having been notified that a claim would be coming they were happy for me to wait until I returned home before submitting the necessary documents.

And so on the day after we returned to the UK, I emailed them with scans of rental contracts, driving licences and credit card statements. Within 2 hours I had a call from the claims handler to check the details, and by the end of that day, the full €405 was sitting in my bank account. Not only had the claim been settled at lightning speed, but they’d also applied the exchange rate at the time of the claim – the pound had strengthened in the subsequent 2 weeks, and I would have lost out by £10 if they’d applied that day’s rate.

I can’t speak highly enough of my interaction with Direct Car Excess Insurance, and would recommend them for anyone renting a car abroad who wants to eliminate their excess without paying the high fees charged by the rental companies.

A tale of car rental woe with a happy ending is a post from: 501 Places

Every journey we take, whether we’re walking up the road to post a letter or flying to the other side of the world, poses a certain level of risk. Some of the risks are easy to identify (getting run over, being involved in a plane crash or a terrorist incident), while others are impossible to predict, but exist nonetheless. Yet on any trip we take, we make judgements of the risks involved, whether or not we stop to think about the thought process beyond them. All too often, these judgements are based on very shaky reasoning.

On our recent trip to Indonesia I rented out a motor scooter, despite having never ridden one before. I would probably never have thought of doing this in the UK, but here it was the only option to get around in this one particular place. I was aware of the risks, but once I’d decided to do it, that was that. Even passing the wreckage of a fatal bike accident hours before didn’t deter me from renting a bike; I explained it away in my mind as something that could have happened anywhere, and even to a pedestrian. Only a couple of weeks earlier I wouldn’t have entertained the idea of getting on a motor scooter; and yet when faced with the option of being stuck in a small town for a couple of days and missing the main nearby attractions, my perception of the risk appeared to change.

We were in Indonesia at the time of the tragic Air Asia crash. On several occasions in the previous weeks, we’d encountered fellow tourists talking about their travel plans in SE Asia and how they’d decided on their itinerary according to the Air Asia timetable. They were determined to avoid any of the Indonesian carriers, many of who are known for a less-than-stellar safety record. Immediately after the crash we heard travellers expressing their anxiety at getting on an Air Asia flight, seeking instead any available alternative. Had the risk equation changed so suddenly with that single incident? Or are our decisions based far more on a gut reaction and influenced by the news headlines rather than hard facts?

We’ve been guilty several times of this same reaction, changing a trip because of negative news, even when the UK government travel advice has suggested there was no reason not to go to our planned destination. Most notably we skipped a trip to Istanbul in 2009 at a time when a series of protests were taking place in the city, choosing instead to go to Syria.

And these risk calculations go to a far deeper, more mundane level than the big ‘to go or not go’ question. Are we as diligent in wearing seat belts in the back of a taxi when nobody else appears to be wearing them – even when the standard of driving would suggest it’s more necessary than ever? What about walking on hiking trails or exploring old ruins which, in the UK, would have safety railings and multiple warnings – how and why do we change our perception of what is safe, according to the local variances in safety practices?

Perhaps it’s just as well we do make highly individual, often irrational, and generally unpredictable decisions based on what we perceive as the risk involved in a particular activity or journey. A universal approach might mean a pattern of boom and bust for many businesses associated with tourism.  We make our own risk judgements, and even when we stop to think about them, in many cases we’re not making decisions based on anything more sound than the current direction of the wind.

Safety – should we trust our own judgement? is a post from: 501 Places

This is one of the longest blog posts I’ve added on 501 Places, and other than a short introduction, I’ll leave the words to my parents. It’s a travel story in the loosest sense of the term, but one which I’m sure none of us would ever wish to undertake.

My parents spent their early childhood years in what was then eastern Poland (now Belarus and Ukraine). The outbreak of war in 1939 saw the almost-immediate invasion of their homelands by the Soviet Union, and my dad’s father was soon arrested and never seen again. In the early hours of 10th February 1940, their families, and tens of thousands of others like them, received a sharp knock on the door in the middle of the night. Within hours they were forced to leave their homes in temperatures as low as -40ºC. They carried the bare minimum of possessions as they set off on a journey which would see them deported to Siberia. Although they couldn’t know it at the time, they would not return to their home villages for another 68 years.

Here’s my father’s story, told in his own words:

No one was expecting that they would take us to Russia. Maybe one of the local Jewish men had an idea; he called a few times, offering to buy the timber which my father had got ready for the building of a new house. This man would often say to my mother; “I’ll give you a good price for that timber, it will be of no use to you. I’ll pay in zloty or in roubles, whichever you would prefer.”

On the 10th of February 1940, very early in the morning, there was a fierce knock at the door with the cry; “Open the door, I have news of your husband.” Before my mother could open the door we were already on our feet. Four “Red Army” soldiers entered through the door, carrying rifles with bayonets, wearing peaked caps, with big red stars on the front. Behind them entered a politruk, a high ranking Red Army propaganda officer.

The politruk carried a case, from which he took out a paper ordering that we were to be taken to a different part of the Soviet Union, where we would be reunited with my father. He read the order and told my mother to hand over any weapons, and the rest of us to get dressed and packed, giving us two hours to get ourselves ready.

We only had two sleighs, so we couldn’t take much with us. My mother told my sisters to get together that which would be most valuable and useful. Not realising that we would be travelling on the train for over two weeks, we didn’t take much food, which was what we needed most during the course of our journey. Our most valuable possessions, gold necklaces, rings, and brooches, were buried in the garden under some wood. There was no question of being able to dig them out from under two metres of snow. Also some of my father’s clothes such as his boots, his suit, and many other things, had been hidden away in case of a raid, at the time of the Red Army invasion. My mother had given these things to a Belarussian family who rented the farm next to ours. This family had helped us a lot, not least by warning us of any trouble from the locals, during periods of unrest.

After a long conversation with the politruk I was sent together with one of the Red Army soldiers to get things for my father, to whom the politruk said we were going. As I left the house it was still completely dark, the stars were glistening brightly; it must have been a very sharp frost. We could hear the howling of the dogs from neighbouring farms. It was about 500 metres to our neighbours’ house and although the road was covered in snow, we soon found ourselves at the door. We woke up our neighbours and I explained what was happening. The Belarussian lady gave me many of the things my mother had asked for and the soldier and I brought back all we could carry. When we got back the sleighs were already loaded up and we soon hit the road. The howling of the dogs resounded round about, as if they were wishing us well for the journey; it made for rather a gloomy atmosphere.

Dawn was breaking as we arrived at the school building where we found many families from neighbouring settlements such as Adampola, Kosy Dworu, Marysina, and also families from our own settlement of Niechniewicze. There were families of administrators, forestry officials, and families from the more wealthy farms.

We were told to take our luggage off the sleighs and to find a space in one of the classrooms. My mother soon found her sister and nephews, as well as her own mother and her brother. I took a walk to the edge of the school buildings to look in the direction of our farm. In the distance I could see our house and farm very clearly, and I could see smoke coming from the chimney. Someone must have already occupied our house, and was feeding our cattle and chickens. Many of the locals had told my father that they wanted our farm; they thought that then things would be so good for them that they would want for nothing more in life.

I can’t remember exactly how long they kept us in the school, maybe two or three days. They were waiting to gather together all the families of settlers, and all the others who were destined for exile. The next stop on our journey was Nowogródek. Here we were placed in a big building, where they were collecting people from the whole county. In the big hall there was an electric light, and a toilet with running water. These intrigued me, for it was probably the first time I had seen them. We were being gathered from the whole county of Nowogródek to await transportation into the heart of Russia.

From Nowogródek we were taken on sleighs to the station at Nowojelni. The journey took over half a day, and the frost was severe. The Red Army soldiers were on the look out for newspapers, so that they could protect their legs against the cold, they were better prepared than us. Even with their heavy boots they felt the cold, and they looked for extra protection.

To warm ourselves up, the soldiers would tell us to get of the sleighs, and they often pointed to our faces, telling us to rub our nose and cheeks to stop them freezing.

The journey from Nowojelni to Baranowicze lasted a few hours. We travelled in Polish passenger trains, but we had to change at Baranowicze to Russian trains which ran on a wider gauge.

On the station at Nowojelenia, my mother met some people she knew, who sympathising with us and saying goodbye, gave her 50 roubles which she spent on soup and bread at the station.

My mother’s story, although it took place over 400 miles away, was eerily similar and is evidence of the coordinated deportations which Stalin ordered to rid these eastern regions of Poles, who were regarded by the Soviets as ‘enemies of the people’.

It was a very severe winter with a lot of snow and frost, so we children spent most of the time inside. There was no school because of the war, so I began to learn to read and write at home. I also helped Mother and Father with small jobs around the house, and of course played with my younger sister and brothers. Father began to work on his loom again, though because of the war there wasn’t much work. I often saw Mother and Father listening to the radio very carefully, and I noticed that Father stayed at home most of the time, keeping a low profile. He did not go out into the city, nor even visit his family and friends in the old village. There were rumours going around that the Russians were going to deport all the Polish people, especially land owners, to Siberia.

As my mother came from a local Ukrainian background, she thought she might be safe, but it was a false hope. On 10th February 1940 I woke up and saw two Russian soldiers in our house. Father was sitting in the corner of the room, and one of the soldiers was stood with a gun over him. The other soldier was throwing things about in the room, looking for guns or pistols. Mother was standing in the other corner with my baby brother crying in her arms. After searching the house, they told us to dress up and pack as much as we could on the cart, including food, because they were going to move us to another town for our own safety.

At that point Mother said to them: “I know you are going to take us to Russia, but could you tell me if we will ever come back here?” One of the soldiers replied, “The time will come for the devil’s fall”, and he took my crying baby brother and said, “He will grow up into an outstanding worker.”

Fortunately, Mother had baked some bread the night before, so she put everything into a sack. The soldiers, seeing that she had small children, offered to help, and one went outside, caught a few chickens, cut their heads off, and put them in the sack for us to take.

The winter was very severe that year and there was a lot of snow and frost. My mother dressed us as warmly as she could, wrapped us in bedding and pillows, and put us on top of the cart, already piled up with other things. When we were packed they drove us quickly to the railway station at Jeznupol. A train was waiting, consisting of a long row of cattle wagons, and there were a lot of other people, with their belongings packed onto carts, just like ourselves.

The soldiers ordered us to move fast and get ourselves and our belongings into those cattle wagons. Inside each wagon there were two or three layers of planks, which acted as bunk beds. They were bare boards, with only just enough space in between them on which to sit up. Our family found itself on the top layer; I can remember looking through the gaps between the boards and the roof of the wagon. In the middle of the wagon was an iron stove, on which we cooked that which was available, and which kept the wagon warm.

The soldiers packed as many people as they could in each wagon, and then they locked the doors from the outside so that nobody could come in or out. When everybody was squashed in and all the wagons locked, the long train started to move east.

We travelled in those cattle wagons for two or three weeks. For the first couple of days the doors remained locked, but after we crossed the border into Russia the doors would be opened at some stations and people were allowed to collect some hot water from time to time. Inside the wagons it was dark, cold, and overcrowded. Everybody took turns to sleep, cook, and attend to necessary personal matters. There was a hole in the floor which functioned as a toilet, and we children used a bucket which was emptied by our parents through the hole. It was very hard for old people and small children, and since there were four small children in our family, my mother and father must have had a very hard time.

I do not remember a lot from that journey, only that I spent most of the time sitting on the top deck looking through the gaps in the boards at the icicles hanging from the roof of the train. I remember that one night we travelled across a very long bridge and people were saying that we must be crossing the Volga. I can recall people standing around the metal stove to warm themselves, and queuing up to prepare themselves some food. At that time I did not feel sorry for myself or anybody else. I suppose it was a new adventure for me, not a great tragedy.

In both my parents’ cases, their journeys would last for almost 8 years and would take them through Siberia, Central Asia, and Iran. My father spent five years in Egypt in the Polish army cadets before arriving in Liverpool in 1947. My mother meanwhile lost her father, sister and two little brothers to illness and starvation, ending up in India with her mother in 1943 and staying in a refugee camp until 1948, when they sailed to England. My parents have lived in the UK ever since.

Although so many years have passed since that night 75 years ago, and they have in recent years made emotional journeys back to their childhood homes, the night of the 10th of February 1940 will always be one which changed their lives forever.

75 years ago – the night when everything changed is a post from: 501 Places

Often I read travel articles and blogs which make an attempt at informed analysis about a place from which the writer has just returned.  And it’s hardly surprising: most of us at some level attempt to make sense of what we see and experience, usually by framing it in the context of our knowledge of our home environments. In the course of a week we may come face to face with a few dozen people, more perhaps, depending on our plans, our comfort at opening up to others, and simple serendipity. How can we hope to form an informed opinion of a country in such a short time, with such minimal exposure? Yet that’s what so many writers are tempted to do. To declare a place as friendly, to say that people love their government, that they’re hard-working, easy-going, fiercely independent… the list goes on.

There’s a natural desire to try and make sense out of chaos – to reach conclusions from whatever information we’re given. And yet it’s often a dangerous, foolish or at the very least a naïve path to follow. It was brought home to me on our recent travels in Indonesia. We spent a month there – a long time for casual tourists like us, but by no stretch long enough to form a sensible view on the stories behind the stories. Perhaps more than in many countries, the multiple murky layers of Indonesian politics appear to have an impact on almost every place we visited. I couldn’t have hoped to understand these complexities in such a short time – it was enough to know that they exist, and any attempt at an amateur drive-by analysis would leave me looking silly.

But the temptation is often there – to make sense of what we see, however inadequate our information may be. On our two recent trips to Japan I was keen to try and explain those aspects of Japanese behaviour which appear quirky to western outsiders. But what could I say of any value – other than merely relay my own experiences? And in Micronesia, a region about which I had no insight of cultural or political nuance – what could I offer to explain away the islands’ dependence on foreign aid or their all-too-visible social problems?

So as a writer I’m aware of often consciously suppress the urge to give what passes as an expert analysis opinion, which would stand out as uninformed at the very least to anyone who lives in a place and is familiar with its contradictions and subtleties. So what does this mean? What should I write and what should I resist the temptation to mention? Does being cautious result inevitably in bland nothingness?

Let’s say for example I encounter half a dozen people who are kind and hospitable – should  I describe the whole nation as friendly? Ok, that’s an easy one.

What about if I get into a conversation with a local who talks about his government’s corruption and how he regularly has to pay bribes to go about his everyday business – can I draw out any sensible conclusions about the country or its people?

More typical still, if I have a great time exploring a country which has a dubious record when it comes to democracy, human rights, dealing with protests – should I attempt to address these issues in a general travel article? Does it destroy any meaningful analysis of that country, and in the process damage my own credibility as a writer, if I choose to ignore them entirely? Or is the insight about the politics of a country which I gain from a trip so narrow that any mention is meaningless?

On most trips, describing personal experiences with the right detail and eloquence will by itself paint a vivid picture to a reader. As for personal reflections and attempts at wider analysis, perhaps these are best presented as being exactly what they are: the thoughts of one short-term visitor who has seen only what they happen to have seen; and no more.

The perils of trying to making sense out of nonsense is a post from: 501 Places

A friend recently asked me for suggestions of where to go and what to do for their upcoming visit to London. As I was typing out a long list of recommended restaurants, it struck me how many restaurants I was consciously leaving off my list; places which were long-time favourites and which for some reason over the years we’ve fallen out of favour with.

Then I started to think about the reasons why we’d lost our enthusiasm for these restaurants and it struck me just how hard it must be for a restaurant to keep its customers constantly satisfied; especially so in a big city, when most of the time the staff aren’t even aware that someone is a regular diner.

There’s a Korean restaurant in London which was one of our regular haunts. We must have been there at least a dozen times over the last few years. We’ve always been happy with the food, the place is usually full, mainly with young Koreans who chat in a mixture of English and Korean and come in with their shopping bags from nearby Oxford Street. It’s a good place to sit back and watch and listen to those around you and the food generally comes very quickly. Service is efficient rather than warm, but we enjoyed it as a good place to go for a fix of spicy chicken, kimchi and seafood pancake.

On a visit a few months back our waiter told us we hadn’t ordered enough and needed to spend more money (three of us had each ordered a main course and a drink). Odd, rather brusque, but given the previous good experiences we were prepared to overlook it. The two of us returned for another visit a few weeks later and were asked to squeeze onto someone else’s table for four, despite there being another empty table nearby. While it was understandable that they wanted to maximise revenue per table, we know from experience that with our normal order involving five or six plates there is no room for our meal on half a table. We made our excuses and ate at an alternative nearby Korean restaurant, but gave our regular haunt another try (they really had built up a lot of good will). This time the restaurant was quiet but we were again prompted towards a small table. We politely said we’d rather have a larger table and, unwilling to make a scene, the waitress gave in but told us we might have to move if a larger group arrived. This was the last straw and although we did stay to eat that day, we have no desire to return. The goodwill has been fully exhausted.

I’m sure the owners of this restaurant don’t really care as they have plenty of other punters to fill their relatively small restaurant. None of the incidents warranted a major complaint on our part and I’m a very reluctant complainer. Besides, the staff were merely trying to be as efficient as possible. So they don’t know they’ve lost a customer, but if we’ve chosen to stop going there I suspect  others have probably done the same.

That’s just one example of several I can readily think of. I’ll never set foot in a branch of Patisserie Valerie again – apart from what I consider their rather plasticky cakes, our last experience left us feeling ripped off. Having ordered a drink (£2.50) I assumed I’d be getting one of the 500ml bottles that were displayed on the counter. I was shocked to be offered only a small glass of that drink to go with our cakes. Apparently that’s what they serve for customers who dine in; whether that’s company-wide policy or not, we won’t be falling for that trick again. London is not short of good cake shops.

And then there are the places that think it’s reasonable to add a 12.5% or even 15% optional service charge onto the bill. If I’m happy with my meal I’ll tip in line with usual British custom (around 10%) but don’t appreciate a restaurant adding this onto the bill automatically. I’ve only refused to pay it once, after a particularly bad experience in a branch of Thai Square. I crossed out the optional service charge from the bill but felt extremely uncomfortable in doing so. It’s also a reason why we haven’t returned to Masala Zone, even though their food is generally pretty good. The discretionary 12.5% service charge is an unnecessary annoyance and while they are free to apply it as they wish, we’re free to choose alternative places at which to eat where tipping is left to our discretion.

Those are just a few examples but when I reflect on them it’s striking how a place can serve consistently good food and still lose our favour. At the same time it can skip on the smiles and friendly service and still keep us happy. What is it that makes us fall out with a restaurant? Maybe it’s a sense of feeling ripped off or the feeling that we’re not really welcome; whatever it is, it’s a largely intangible thing and that really doesn’t help restaurant owners (or business owners in general) who want to keep their regulars coming back for more.

Reasons to fall out with a restaurant is a post from: 501 Places

I’d like to travel responsibly. I mean, who wouldn’t? It would be nice to think that wherever I choose to go I make a positive impact on the places I visit while at the same time the process of actually getting there involves me burning up as little fossil fuel as possible.

But how do I go about achieving this laudable goal? Let’s start by trying to make as small a negative footprint as is possible. Flying is a big no-no, what with the gazillion tons of carbon dioxide emitted on every flight. On a one-way 12-hour trip to SE Asia for example I am personally responsible for the emission of 3 tonnes of CO2.* A tonne of CO2 is equivalent to the weight of 10 baby elephants and would fill a typical 25m swimming pool**. That makes 3 tonnes sound like a frighteningly high amount. Add that again for the trip home and add the same for my wife; that’s one hell of a lot of baby elephants and gas-filled swimming pools just for a simple return trip for two.

Trains are a little kinder on the emissions, cars less so; cycling and walking are better still, with only the fuel used in the manufacture of our bikes or hiking boots to worry about. In short, the slower we move, the less trouble we’re causing for the future of the world.

So shouldn’t we all just stay at home and explore our own back yards instead? Many avid travellers argue that the positive impact of visiting other countries outweighs the negative effect of the oil-burning greenhouse gas-creating process of getting there in the first place. So how does that work?

If you spend a few months delivering medical services, training essential workers or building basic services in a community in need, the argument is probably a strong one and your good v bad equation is probably in credit; polish your halo and move on. But what about the rest of us, going as tourists to see what we’ve come to see, or even as travellers to see what we see?

It’s pretty hard for me to measure any positive impact from a trip and try to claim I’ve justified all those elephants and swimming pools’ worth of gas. Even if I’ve spent my time working with elephants for a week or two, the good that I’ve done is compromised by my getting there in the first place. But enough of elephants. What about our interactions with local people – our acts of commerce, of cultural exchange, of learning and spreading positive values that help create a better world? How much benefit do we create for others or for ourselves when we visit a place for a week or a month? Does it justify the environmental harm we do in getting there? Could we not have just as good a trip, experience as many new things and leave as positive an impact by throwing on a backpack and heading off for an adventure near to our homes? Just think: fewer airports, fewer big hotels, fewer gas-choking minibuses tearing around packed holiday resorts. Consider all those elephants of gas that would be saved.

And then, even if we’ve decided that our travels are necessary for ourselves and the rest of mankind, we need to think about where our money is going. Are we rewarding rogues and scoundrels with our money and propping up their corrupt regimes, immoral practices and intolerant ideas? Shouldn’t we avoid countries with a record of poor human rights, a lack of basic freedoms, repression of minority groups or questionable foreign interventions? What about those where animals are exploited in the name of entertainment? That’s at least 90% of the world off the list already and we’ve barely started; dig a bit and we can soon find reasons to exclude the rest.

Can travel ever be a responsible act? Tour operators, whose business depends on you thinking about faraway lands of smiling people rather than elephants and gas, would have you believe it does. But if the figures are to be believed, the return flights alone for our recent trips to Brazil and Japan account for a whopping 24 baby elephants’ worth of CO2 emissions. The simple act of travelling, especially by air, creates such a negative balance that we’d need to do a massive amount of elephant-sized goodness for our wanderings to have a positive effect. Perhaps to get on a plane and then hope to travel responsibly is a contradiction too far; instead of talking about responsible travel we should perhaps aspire to nothing more grand than the act of travelling less irresponsibly.

*Source: Carbon Independent 
** Source: University of St Mark and St John, Plymouth 

Travel responsibly – stay at home is a post from: 501 Places

It’s a subject I’ve covered here a few times over the years and it’s one that I’m reminded of every time I see yet another company sharing with us their vision of the future of travel. These dreams have the same consistent elements: families gathered round a computer screen wearing excited expressions; travellers young and old tapping into their mobile phones (still with those same grins); updated Facebook pages and Twitter streams (with family members locked in happy mode); this is, we are led to believe, how travel will look in the not-too-distant future.

Here’s the latest offering from the all-powerful Tui:

If you believe this clip, the future is a world where a website  will know what sort of holiday you really want and it will give you the answer quicker and more reliably than you could ever work it out for yourself. It’s a world where every surprise is eliminated by clever planning and you’re never left standing outside the locked gates of a museum which happens to be closed because the owner has other things to do on a Thursday. You’ll never end up in a restaurant that has a two-star rating on Tripadvisor and you’ll always choose the boat with the best cocktails for the sunset cruise. Travel planning mistakes will be a thing of the past.

What is missing from this utopian dream? In short, everything that gets me excited at the thought of going on a trip. An uncertain bus connection from the city to the airport; wandering into a dodgy-looking restaurant because the person we met in the café told us about it; stopping at a roadside shack for a glass of fresh juice and ending up with a delicious lunch; finding the museum that all the folks on Tripadvisor hated and discovering that it’s the best one in town, or in fact that it’s so awful that we end up laughing about it for days.

We can plan our travels almost down to the finest detail thanks to technology. Of course this progress has its benefits, but let’s not pretend that there are no downsides. People make plans well in advance because they can, then tell us that they can’t make it or that they’re running late at the last minute, again because they can. Long gone are the days when there was no way to change that 3 o’clock meeting and you simply turned up on time. Coffee shops, once a great place to sit and relax in a sea of contented noise, now often resemble somewhere between a library and a morgue; another result of our ‘connected’ world. 

But enough of my rant; I appreciate that for many the idea of using technology to plan and manage their holiday is a very appealing one and that I’m probably showing my age in being suspicious of this new world. For now I’ll look back on the day we missed a bus connection in small-town Chile by 10 minutes only to find that the next one left the following morning and we stood to waste an expensive pre-paid hotel night; the adventures that followed still make me smile, but I suspect would never have happened if I’d bother to plan properly.

Plan the perfect holiday? No thanks is a post from: 501 Places

I’ve never been one for buying expensive souvenirs from our travels. We travel with backpacks and I tend to be fairly ruthless when it comes to packing; lighter packs make for a more comfortable trip. My wife has no doubt lost count of the number of times I’ve asked “Do you really need to take that?” while sorting out what to pack.

I’m even worse when it comes to buying stuff while away from home. And yet the things we do bring back can sometimes take on an added significance that far outweighs the effort or expense involved in buying them.

This postcard bought in Ulan Bator railway station cost us a dollar, yet the Trans-Siberian memories attached to it, especially of the conversation with the man who sold it to us, have kept us smiling for almost 20 years.

On a trip to a 99 yen store in Tokyo to buy a late-night chocolate fix I was inexplicably tempted to buy the sign below. The Japanese katakana characters spell out the word “Ramen” and the sign would probably be used by an outdoor vendor, who would hang it on his stall to attract customers to his large pot of steaming hot soup – it also sits very comfortably in our kitchen.

I’m sure everyone has at least once bought and packed a souvenir only to find when you get home that the item didn’t survive the journey in one piece. Fixing up the damage works better with some gifts than others; the cracks in this piece of ancient Nazca pottery add to its authentically fake appeal.

While the vast majority of mementos evoke happy thoughts, some will do the opposite, through no fault of their own. While a souvenir stands still in time, the world from which it has been taken moves on and in the case of these Syrian olive soaps, collapses in a tragic mess.

We bought these in the central market in Aleppo in 2009, little knowing that the market itself would be largely destroyed only a few years later. I don’t know the fate of the noria wheels of Hama or the citadel in Aleppo depicted by the soaps; I worry more for the fate of the warm, cheerful man from whom we bought them.

We try to buy something small for each of our trips, although I’m never comfortable with the thought of adding yet more clutter to our house. Sometimes, as with the gifts above, they serve far more of a role than merely adorning our walls and shelves. I must try to remember that when I’m next dragging my wife away from a foreign market stall.

The stories behind our souvenirs is a post from: 501 Places

Having visited London quite literally hundreds of times in recent years and being cursed with a well-documented weak bladder, I’ve often been caught short on my trips around the city. Central London is a haven of presentable and reasonably hygienic toilets and there’s absolutely no reason why you’d ever need to pay any money to spend a penny or why you’d queue impatiently at the few public toilets that are found in the main tourist areas.

I’ve been meaning to write this list for a while, so here goes: a list of free toilets in London that I turn to when I’m in need (note: some of these places would not welcome you entering their premises purely to use the toilets if they knew your true intentions).

National Gallery  – many of London’s museums offer free admission and by extension free toilets. Few are as conveniently located as the National Gallery. Avoid the busy and often grimy public toilets in Trafalgar Square and walk up the grand staircase in front of you instead. The toilets here are reasonably well- maintained and rarely busy. Exit through the gift shop.

London Eye – useful if you’re caught short on the South Bank, these toilets are down in the basement of County Hall through the same entrance as the London Eye ticket office. The downside of these toilets is that they are very busy at peak times.

National Theatre, Southbank – this is my preferred option on the South Bank. Far more civilised and cleaner than the ones in County Hall, you may even be tempted by a temporary exhibition or a cake in the cafe.

Piccadilly – two good places to visit here. Closest to Piccadilly Circus is Waterstone’s bookshop, with toilets on the stairwell on each level. If you can hold out for another 5 minutes, or feel as though you might be staying awhile, stroll a little further along Piccadilly to the upmarket Fortnum and Mason for a more refined lavatory experience.

St Paul’s Cathedral – you might to have to work hard to persuade the staff to let you pray for free in London’s most famous church, but peeing for free is easy. Just enter through the side entrance that leads to the cafe and find the toilets on your left. They’re not grand and you’re unlikely to want to hang around for a cake, but free loo stops are quite hard to come by in the east of the city.

Charing Cross Hotel – I probably shouldn’t admit to this, but when I really want a top notch toilet I head to the 5 star hotel to the side of Charing Cross station. Walking in with confidence and smiling to the doorman and receptionist, I’ve yet to be stopped as I walk through into the lobby, up the stairs and to the rather pleasant loos on the first floor. They’re so clean and bright that you could bring a coffee and newspaper and make a morning of it.

Apple stores (Covent Garden and Regent Street ) – I’m no Apple fan and their conveniently-located toilets are the only reason I’ve visited these stores on so many occasions. I’m usually asked at least twice how I’m doing and always offer a more cheerful response on the way out of the store.

A guide to free toilets in London is a post from: 501 Places