Travel Blog: Life of a Travel Writer
Who Do We Have to Thank for This New Travel Book? Courtney Love, Sort of.
by Michael Yessis | 08.01.03 | 12:43 AM ET
After her unauthorized biography of rock star/actress/rabble-rouser Courtney Love was published in 1996, Melissa Rossi hit the road. Why? Primarily to avoid Love’s lawyers. Along the way, she became a travel writer. Her latest book is “What Every American Should Know About the Rest of the World,” and she recently sat for a Q-and-A with the Boston Globe’s Alex Beam. There’s more at Rossi’s Web site, armchairdiplomat.com.
Email to friend
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Mixx
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Yahoo! BuzzYou Ordered in Cantonese
by Jim Benning | 07.29.03 | 1:08 AM ET
Travel writer Daisann McLane is learning to speak Cantonese. Not many foreigners take up the language these days. Mandarin is the official Chinese language, as well as the one that Western professionals are racing to master for business reasons. As a result, the practical-minded Chinese in New York’s Chinatown, where she studies, think she is a little crazy.
But as she writes in a thoughtful and inspiring story in Friday’s New York Times, her new language skills have unexpectedly opened new doors in her hometown.
“I’ve lived in New York for more than 25 years, and for most of that time I related to Chinatown the way I suppose most non-Asian New Yorkers do: as a fun place to eat dinner that is exotic, mysterious but ultimately unknowable and even, on occasion, brusque,” she writes. “But when I spread my Chinese homework out on restaurant and coffee shop tables, unexpected things happen. It is as if a door swings open and Chinatown invites me into the house to meet the family.” McLane, who also writes the “Frugal Traveler” column for the New York Times, fielded questions from World Hum last year.
Honey, Let’s Move to Rarotonga. Okay, Dear.
by Jim Benning | 07.26.03 | 1:12 AM ET
I didn’t get the sense that Carla Sinclair and Mark Frauenfelder set out to inspire readers when they wrote about their unlikely move recently from Los Angeles to tiny Rarotonga in the Cook Islands. But it’s hard to read their piece in this week’s LA Weekly without concluding that you can do anything you set your mind to, as long as you accept that there will be wrinkles along the way. The idea for the move was hatched while they were hanging out in a Los Angeles coffee shop, engaging in their annual New Year’s Day tradition of setting goals for the coming year. “We both felt like we were in a rut, and with a new baby due in a few months, we knew that rut was sure to become deeper,” they write. Then Carla offhandedly suggested they move to Rarotonga, a place they’d visited 10 years earlier. “Maybe it was Carla’s pregnancy-induced hormones or the first throes of Mark’s midlife crisis, but the idea of moving to an island in the South Seas didn’t sound as preposterous as it would have at some other time,” they write. And so they did. At the time they wrote the story, they’d been living in Rarotonga all of 10 days. Their tale is terrific, and fortunately for readers, future installments are on the way.
How to Be Canadian
by Jim Benning | 07.09.03 | 12:00 AM ET
When Canadian Cleo Paskal visited India after the 1998 Winter Olympics, the Indian people she met asked her to explain the sport of curling. She struggled. She didn’t know the rules and wound up feeling less Canadian. “When I returned home,” she writes in the National Post, “I resolved to make a pilgrimage of penance to one of the great curling capitals of our great, icy nation: Winnipeg.” Paskal’s story about that pilgrimage appears in the Post and begins a 10-week series in which she seeks out quintessentially Canadian vacations that will bring out her “inner Canuck.”
The Pleasures and Challenges of Long-Term Travel
by Jim Benning | 07.02.03 | 12:17 AM ET
Shameless self-promotion: A story I wrote about my five-month trip to Asia appeared in Sunday’s Minneapolis Star Tribune. Why did I go? “Nearly a decade earlier in Europe, I’d fallen in love with long-term travel. Two years out of college, I had quit my job, bought a couple of rail passes and spent five months backpacking my savings away, from Istanbul, Turkey, to Belfast, Northern Ireland. The journey was a revelation. With so much time, my entire approach to travel changed. Instead of rushing from one landmark to the next, as I’d once done on a three-week trip to Europe, I improvised my way across the continent like a street-corner jazz saxophonist riffing through a standard, adhering to only the most basic framework, digressing often.”
Terror and Travel in Morocco
by Jim Benning | 07.01.03 | 12:21 AM ET
Terry Ward had just arrived in Morocco for a six-week Arabic course when she heard about the previous night’s terrorist bombings in Casablanca, 230 miles away. “Four explosions in Casa. Suicide bombers,” the receptionist at her Tangier hotel told her. “Many, many people dead.” Ward spent the coming days trying to make sense of the attack and how it might affect her stay in the country, which she chose to visit because she thought it would be safe. Her evocative account appears in Sunday’s South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
Have We Read the Last Bill Bryson Travel Book?
by Michael Yessis | 06.26.03 | 12:39 AM ET
Best-selling travel writer Bill Bryson has received rave reviews for his latest work, a science book called A Short History of Nearly Everything. (Short, in this case, meaning 544 pages.) According to a recent interview with The Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman, his interest in writing non-travel books isn’t just a passing fancy. “I don’t know how I could sit down and write another passage about being presented with a disappointing plate of food,” he says, “because I’ve done that so many times.” Burkeman’s take on Bryson’s situation: “You can’t help thinking ... that [he] was growing uneasy in his role as everybody’s favourite travelling uncle, and chose a new direction in order to establish himself as a more dispassionate, authoritative voice.”
Q-and-A With Paul Theroux
by Jim Benning | 06.13.03 | 12:01 AM ET
The writer responds to questions from readers in today’s Independent (UK). Among them: “Do you ever wish you’d lived in an age when the world was less explored? What is left to discover?” Theroux responds: “I would have loved to live at a time when the interior of Africa, the interior of South America and the heart of Asia were unexplored. But we are still exploring areas of human experience, and the human mind contains wonders. It sounds pompous to say so, but there are Everests within us and impenetrable swamps in our hearts - those are the places that I seek.”
Why Do We Travel?
by Jim Benning | 06.05.03 | 9:06 PM ET
Many writers take a crack at answering the question. Pico Iyer’s meditation is a travel-writing classic. This week, Lonely Planet’s Don George explains in his column why he travels. His essay is eloquent and full of heart. “At some point early on in my life, I decided that I wanted to understand everything,” he writes. “Or at least as much as I could. It seemed to me that this was the best we could do as human beings, to get to know our world as completely as possible. It was the ultimate quest, the reason for our being here. By ‘understand everything,’ I didn’t mean simply intellectually, by reading books. Reading books was part of the process, but an even more important part of the process was by living everything, understanding everything by experiencing it. So I started to travel.”
Talking Ethics in the Ethosphere
by Jim Benning | 06.03.03 | 3:04 PM ET
Should Americans abroad always come clean about their nationality, or, fearing ill will, is it okay for them to lie and claim to be Canadian? Are some cruise ships more environmentally friendly than others? Those and other issues are now being debated on the newly created Ethical Traveler message board, Ethosphere. It promises to be a thought-provoking forum. “We hope that our many members—from 17 countries—will use this discussion board to share tales about travel
in these skittish times, and to focus attention on situations that might impact our decisions about where to travel,” founder Jeff Greenwald wrote in a recent e-mail. The message board is but one component of Ethical Traveler’s mission. As the veteran travel writer told World Hum in a recent interview, “I’d like [Ethical Traveler] to be a community of like-minded travelers that uses its collective power to address and improve environmental and human rights issues around the world.”
Talking with Paul Theroux
by Jim Benning | 04.18.03 | 3:36 PM ET
In his latest column, Lonely Planet’s Don George chats him up about his new book.
Geoff Dyer: ‘I’ll Be a Backpacker Till I Die’
by Michael Yessis | 04.14.03 | 3:42 PM ET
“Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It” author Geoff Dyer reveals his taste in travel friends, his refusal to take photos while on the road and why he’ll always be a backpacker in a Q-and-A in Sunday’s Washington Post. “Recently, I was in Tahiti and I was staying at a big hotel, a Sheraton. That experience turns the world into a huge golf course. Even the ocean looked like it was part of a golf course,” Dyer tells David Wallis. “This kind of tourism is marked by a lack of independence. Everything is arranged for you. All your relationships are just with slaves, the servants of huge multinational hotel chains. There people are snooty and dismissive of backpackers, but all hail the backpacker in comparison, because they have an authentic experience and the money they [spend] goes directly to the family that owns the pension. In a version of the Bryan Adams song ‘18 Till I Die,’ I’ll be a backpacker till I die.”
‘Should We Travel Now?’
by Jim Benning | 04.01.03 | 8:54 PM ET
Lonely Planet editor Don George has been asked that in a number of interviews lately. His response? “[T]his is an extremely subjective decision, as it has always been,” he writes in his column this week. “I always counsel people to identify their own comfort threshold and not to cross it.”
With the War Underway, Do People Want to Hear About Travel Writing?
by Jim Benning | 03.27.03 | 9:02 PM ET
Paul Theroux, one of travel writing’s greats, read from his new travel memoir, Dark Star Safari, on the first stop of his book tour Wednesday evening in Southern California. Given all the war hoopla, I wondered on the way there how many people would turn out for a book about travel in Africa. Maybe everyone would stay home, glued to the news. Or, more hopefully, perhaps the city’s travelers, waiting out the war before heading abroad again, would be itching for a little escapism.
Happily, 20 minutes before Theroux was to appear, the bookstore’s reading room was so packed that employees hurried to bring out more chairs. By the time Theroux walked in, smiling, at least 75 people were on hand. Not bad at all. Theroux quickly launched into an explanation of why he traveled to Africa. He wanted to see the place where, four decades earlier, he’d worked in the Peace Corps. He wanted to get away from it all. “I’m sick of people calling me up, saying, ‘Can you do this for me tomorrow?’” he said. Between e-mail, fax machines and cell phones, “Anyone can find you,” he said. “We’re so connected. It’s a kind of craziness. One of the great thrills of traveling in the world is losing yourself. I wanted people to call up my wife and say, ‘Where’s Paul?’ ‘Oh I don’t know. He just went and disappeared.’” The audience erupted in laughter.
Theroux spoke of getting robbed in South Africa and, on another occasion, ducking behind cows to avoid getting shot. He suffered five months of parasites but barely mentioned it in the book. “Who wants to read about that?” he said. He read a paragraph, took a few questions, signed copies of the book. He made only one brief mention of the war. By the time I left, with visions of Africa in my head, I felt as though I had disconnected, if only briefly. It was a fine evening.
Rory Stewart Quit British Foreign Office, Walked Across Asia
by Michael Yessis | 03.25.03 | 9:09 PM ET
Rory Stewart quit a promising career in international relations to walk across central and southern Asia. “I think when I set off, my motivation really was to try to put myself in the background and get a feeling, almost an anthropological feeling, of how it is in villages in very remote places, how they see the world, how people see Islam, for example,” he told Guy Dixon, who recently profiled Stewart for Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper. Stewart chronicled his journey through Pakistan, India and Afghanistan—he’s thought by some to be the first tourist there after the fall of the Taliban—in articles for the London Review of Books and other publications. The stories were so well received, Stewart landed a book deal. “The Places In Between,” which covers his two-year walk, will be released later this year.
