Writing about travel in the age of one million blogs

Since I began writing this travel blog, my inner Google has been working its way through the gazillions of blogs on the Internet devoted to this subject. Initially I was looking for inspiration but ended up drowning in choices. (There is a reason I have never stepped foot in a Costco store.  Heavy volume of anything—tinned goods, cars or words—overwhelms me.)

The search engine spits out blogs written by young travelers, old ones, the aging and the coming-of-age. There are traveling couples, lots of singles, the newly singles, and those who-don’t-want-to-be-single anymore. Sick bloggers, healthy or recovering ones and those who-are-worried-about-being-too-sick-to climb say, Mount Kilimanjaro, are also well represented. Conveyances are another organizing theme, so there are bloggers on bikes, on boats, or just in hiking boots. Finally but certainly not exhaustively, there are destination listers, bucket and otherwise, as well as the niche travel bloggers advising readers on every conceivable angle on the subject. Or so it seems.

How the heck to choose what to read? Worse for a writer, how the heck to choose what to write in order to offer something different? And worst of all, how to find readers?

In the 25 years I spent being a go-to expert on the subject of expats, handing out advice like I was Dear Abby or Dr. Phil,  I had a significant global audience for my website, my books and my blog, indeed all of it.

Was I so brilliant on the subject? Not really. As I used to tell the lovely audiences that invited me to lecture, I wasn’t writing about rocket science. In fact, everything I wrote and articulated about global living most expats already knew. The words common sense came up a lot.

My success hinged on one major fact: I was an ‘early adopter’ of the Internet (my website went up 15 years ago) so I was almost first to market with all of it. There was no need, as there is now, to be outrageous to cut through the noise and find the story that would go viral. That was a concept years away from even being invented.

Writers have always had to be provocative and original to attract readers. So I’m wondering, is it time for me to do something completely different? Should I ditch the safe and predictable?

I asked my son what he thought I should write about on this travel blog.

“Why don’t you just write about all the places in the world you’ve smoked pot?”

Anyone interested in hearing those traveler’s tales? I can share them, if I can remember them.

Desperate Travel 1.0

Long before I became a desperate über traveler, I was an ambitious young, single broadcast journalist. I spent most of my time trying to tear down sexist barriers long entrenched by the old boys club that ran news operations forty years ago.  

I desperately needed a time out from carrying the standard for all that women's lib stuff. Oh, did I forget to mention I was the ‘token’ woman reporter? Among other dubious distinctions, it meant my ‘beat’ was the Act of God stories: that would be your floods, blizzards, forest fires, mosquitoes and any other plague apparently only a woman could  cover.

The revolution could carry on without me for a little while, I decided. I was way too young to be committed to a full time job with car payments. I needed to grab some free spirit time.

After hearing so many wonderful stories from my girlfriends of their life altering experiences involving travel, I desperately wanted that life. I loved my friends' traveler’s tales as they usually involved finding love on a Greek island, making out with a Greek hunk, and drinking too much Greek restina, typically in the reverse order. I wanted in.

My employer gave me a six month leave of absence, filled my job temporarily, and even paid to keep all my furniture in storage until the day I returned to work.

My trip turned out to be an unmitigated disaster, a failure on every possible level. I returned home within a month with my tail between my legs, my self-esteem in the gutter, limping from an infection on my foot, the most banal and unglamorous of afflictions, a plantar wart! I loudly proclaimed to anyone who would listen: I will never travel again.

Well, we know how that worked out.

Travel was not a huge part of my formative family life. Most of my holidays were about duty, not destinations. Family visits always came before exploring the Amazon (as if I would ever do that, but it sounds good).

Initially, I planned my trip to Europe as a solo since everyone I knew had already done the Grand Tour. My plans were made without any input or advice from anyone other than a nice travel agent (who of course, easily convinced me to buy the more expensive air ticket, stay at a ridiculously expensive hotel in London, and well, you get the picture). I was so completely clueless, relying only on the stories of my friends and their hunks that I didn’t even think I needed a traveling companion since naturally I would meet someone on the plane as all my friends apparently had done before they hooked up with the Greeks.

Well, the sixteen-year-old kid who threw up on me all the way across the Atlantic was definitely not my soul mate.  Even before landing in the UK, my entry point, I knew I had miscalculated my timing. I should have traveled when everyone else did. I had waited too long for the unencumbered, un-tethered rite of passage which is one’s first overseas trip.

I more than made up for it!

But I think about this now after reading about the tragic death this week of two young, thirty-something British travel bloggers Peter Root and Mary Thompson. They were living their dream: ‘camping wild’ and blogging about cycling around the world. Their lives sadly ended on a highway in Thailand. Some desperate travel destinations are not for sissies.

Check out the link to Two on Four Wheels and read about lives well-lived. They didn’t wait.

When we forget to pack our humility...

We’d all like to believe that when visiting different cultures our behavior marks us as modest and respectful individuals, genuinely appreciative of our good fortune.

Until, that is, we would appear to be none of the above—just assholes.

There can be no reasonable excuse for acting like spoiled, decidedly not humble idiots when guests in someone else’s country. There can be extenuating circumstances, however. Clearly, I’m winding up to a story here and it’s certainly not one that puts me or my better half in a terribly flattering light.

How does one recover humility when it’s been blown out of the water by a hissy fit on the road? Mostly by stepping outside yourself and listening to how utterly obnoxious you sound. Endless apologizing and big tips work too.

While checking in a few years ago to the spectacular Le Meridien in Marrakesh, Morocco, Rodney and I totally melted down at the check-in when handed a pencil for the registration rather than a pen. (Could I make this up? Doubtful.)

Incredibly stupid, spoiled, idiotic comments from both of us ensued all the while standing in the gorgeous lobby with a concierge named, what else, Mohammed, soothing us like the little children we had become.

“Oh, you will forget everything that has made you unhappy today,” wise, seen-it-all-and-probably-much-worse Mohammed assured us. “By the time you leave here, you will be very relaxed.”

“Right,” we both said. “Now where’s the bar?”

It had been a travel day from hell. Actually, from Istanbul via Casablanca where we had been dragged aside upon entry for holding Canadian passports (our first sign the world had gone upside down) to be ‘examined’ by ‘faux’ doctors to ensure we didn’t have avian flu. They diagnosed us by looking at our passports.

The luggage on our flight was held hostage for more than four hours without explanation. Fellow frustrated travelers lit up cigarettes under the No Smoking signs. Yes. I did too but only after another passenger, the spitting image of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asked me for a light. It wasn’t a good day to quit.

Next, we searched the airport for our domestic flight to Marrakesh. It did not appear on any notice board but a packed waiting room indicated people knew something we didn’t. Away we went.

After circling the empty airspace above the Marrakesh airport no less than three times, we finally landed but found ourselves once again in a lineup for customs. How many times did we have to officially enter Morocco?

Luckily, we encountered passengers who lost their humility before we did. We were still holding our tongues and clinging loosely to our manners when they let loose on airport officials. We managed to exit the airport with them and headed for our hotel.

Where, we discovered to such horror (!) we couldn’t fill in our registration forms with ink.

Over the course of our stay in his hotel, Mohammed became our new BFF. I would have given him my first born child as an apology but I doubt he would have accepted her. The tip, though, was very much appreciated.

Travel must surely provide the greatest lesson in humility. Can there be any experience more grounding than one that brings you face to face with unearned privileges?

The Hidden Costs of Desperate Travel

Vacationing in Scottsdale, Arizona last week—my second visit to the Southwest Sun Belt since late December—I stopped to consider, and not for the first time, the cost of this privileged life I lead.

I’m not talking dollar and cents either, although one can never ignore the bottom line altogether. Rather, what is the emotional cost of always being somewhere else?

“Oh, I assumed you guys were away so I didn’t bother to invite you to our party,” friends and acquaintances often say to me on the phone. Or: “Were you guys in town that week? I didn’t even think to phone.” Then there’s my own internal monologue that typically begins, “I’d volunteer, own a dog, take a part time job, etc etc but I’m not sure exactly if I will be in town then.”

Always being somewhere else, means I’m not here a lot, wherever ‘here’ may be. Not that I don’t enjoy a lovely west coast life, but it’s one that sees me heading out to the airport a lot.

As a former expat who later engaged in a global career that had me out of town at least a third of the year on business, it has been extremely difficult to build up a network of friends and on-going activities that require my physical presence and engagement. Compounding matters, we chose to move to Vancouver for Rodney’s job, a city in which we knew next to no one. Seventeen years later (gasp!) I can honestly say I know tons of people but none I would call immediately upon returning from a trip (the ultimate sign of a close friend).

In our early years when Rodney was away on business most of the time, I used to fret that I could die while he was away and no one would be at my funeral, least of all my husband. Pathetic you may think, but I’m not the first former expat spouse to have such thoughts. I just have the nerve to write them down.

Now, as I contemplate celebrating my sixtieth birthday in a few months, the same rule holds. I could give a party, but no one would come from the corners of the earth where most of my oldest friends live.

I’ve made my trade-offs and take full responsibility for them (and lots of pictures).  I could have done things differently. Soon after we moved to Vancouver, for example, I certainly could have jumped in and joined any number of groups and made a ton of friends. But I was terribly gun shy about meeting new people after surviving the incestuously small, Canadian Embassy communities abroad. Too often for me, someone’s nose would get out of joint because the turkeys, salmon, Alberta beef, apples, maple syrup you-get-my-drift were delivered by our Embassy to me before someone else (shoot me now!)

It also was never my personality to be part of a small gang in which everything about you is known (or made up!) I like to spread my friendships around because it works for the curious side of me. The more people I know, the more interesting stories about life I hear and the more experiences I collect. This is why travel is so appealing to me.

Still, as I approach an important milestone in my life in a few months (and begin hearing about parties parties and more parties going on around me to celebrate other people’s 60^th) I confess I do sigh at the idea of a being such a loner. It’s so true you can’t have everything (although I come pretty darn close!)

So I’ll settle for seeing the world and enjoy the company—even if it has to be virtual at times—of a few good friends.

It’s a price I’m willing to pay.