Destination: Uncategorized

A recent interview about my travel writing caused me to consider my work in a fresh way. I thought you might enjoy the questions and answers:

What one word makes a great travel story?
Edumotion. I needed two words, so I made up that word from “education” and “emotion.” As I travel to learn, I write hoping to inspire others to learn. A good travel article needs to teach and show worthwhile lessons in a destination. A good article also hits the reader emotionally. (For example, “The Iranian woman poked her finger into my chest and said, ‘We just don’t want our children to be raised like Britney Spears.'”) Emotions illustrate how a travel experience is real, matters, and can carbonate your life.

What’s the one thing you avoid when sharing a travel story?
Guidebook-type data. A newspaper or magazine article needs to inspire someone to travel. It’s designed to be read by a travel dreamer on a couch at home — not weighed down by data to navigate by. A guidebook, on the other hand, is filled with the nitty-gritty data that gets you efficiently from A to B on the road.

What are the similarities between the stories you tell for a living and the travel stories you share with friends and family back home?
I used to talk like Hans Christian Andersen about my travels with friends and family. As my work life dominates so much of what I am, I no longer talk travel with friends and family. If you walked into my living room, there’s no indication that I’ve ever been to Europe.

Here’s the fourth and final installment in my round-up of the ways that we’re tweaking our tours to maximize experience in 2010: I believe that because our Best of the Adriatic tour is heavy on coastal towns, we end up rushing the powerful side-trip into Bosnia-Herzegovina, and don’t go into Montenegro at all. For me, Mostar is a highlight, and a trip into Montenegro would be touristic bushwhacking — which is a big part of what ETBD is all about. But you just can’t offer and sell a tour to Croatia without visiting the fabled Dalmatian Islands. As our itinerary stands now, we sail, have a long stop in Hvar, and spend two nights and an easy day (like a “vacation from our vacation”) in Korcula. Then, after a long day driving, we arrive in Mostar after lunch, and have the rest of the day there. We leave Mostar the next morning for an exciting drive through the relatively wild and completely untouristed Serb part of Bosnia-Herzegovina to get to Dubrovnik.

My sales staff weighed in on this, reminding me that if we add two days to the tour, it will be much more difficult to sell. (Tour length is a critical part of the sales decision-making process.) Given that this tour can’t be longer than two weeks and still sell well in here in the country with the shortest vacations in the rich world (USA), we agreed that for now there was no way to smartly extend the time in Mostar, and that Montenegro isn’t worth cutting existing stops out. I’m still frustrated with this, but we’ll have to go with our existing plan for 2010.

When our Germany, Austria, and Switzerland tour guides reported that a spa visit in Baden-Baden was no longer a part of our itinerary, I was disappointed. To me, Americans are childishly prudish when it comes to enjoying baths in Europe where the dress code is just a towel. This prudishness gets stronger (and makes more sense to me) when the Americans would be getting naked not just with a bunch of European strangers, but with fellow members of their own tour group…including tour buddies of the opposite sex. Much as I wish all Americans could experience the baths in a German spa resort, I finally agreed with my guides that you just can’t build it in as a group activity. So, while I encouraged the guides to recommend this experience, taking the spa is something people will have the option to do on their free time in Baden-Baden (likely sneaking in at a time when they expect nobody else from their group will be there).

Also in Germany, Trier is a fine stop, but I had a problem with giving it nearly a day and a half at the expense of the nearby Mosel River (which hosts my favorite castle, Burg Eltz, and the vineyard tranquility and river-town charm that many dream of — but never find — along the Rhine). So, in Trier, we decided to cut into a leisurely free day to create itinerary space for a long and beautiful day exploring the Mosel River. For 2010, we’ll drive up the meandering river, skip Cochem but have lunch in sleepy little Beilstein (where I go to convalesce when really fried with my work in Europe), then tour Burg Eltz, before catching the autobahn back to Trier in time for dinner.

In Vienna, Art Nouveau sights are trendy. But I learned that the consequence of our guides’ passion for Vienna’s organic and leafy architecture was that the Habsburg palace visit became a “free time option.” (Free time is vital for a good tour. But I’m skeptical about relegating great sights to “free time options,” as they often get beat out by easier, lighter activities — like shopping, laundry, and snoozing.) I may just be the world’s biggest Habsburg fan, and this was their capital for centuries, making Vienna the eastern rival of Paris in Europe. The Habsburgs had two palaces that attempt to outdo Versailles: Schönbrunn and the Hofburg. While Schönbrunn, the summer palace in a gilded park on the edge of town, is the most visually striking from the exterior, the Hofburg — right in the town center and an easy walk from other tour activities — is just as splendid on the inside and comes with a gob-smacking treasury, Vienna Boy’s Choir lore, and the Spanish Riding School. In 2010, we will do the Hofburg justice, and let Art Nouveau (whoever he is) just deal with it.

I am fascinated that British travelers make a virtual pilgrimage to France’s Dordogne to celebrate the force-feeding of the geese and, once the geese are slaughtered, to eat their huge and tasty livers — and yet, many Americans think the whole process should be outlawed. Few American anti-foie gras activists consider actually visiting a goose farm to talk with the owner and hang around for meal time (never much of a wait) to see the forced feeding. I have a favorite goose farm where our tour members could actually witness la gavage, as pulling the goose’s neck up and filling its belly with corn is called (the process reminds me of transferring cereal from one box to another). Our French guides were all for the visit, but when considering our itinerary, being there during hours the farm is formally welcoming the public would rush our Dordogne River canoe trip. I enjoy the canoe experience even more than a Mr. Rogers-type visit to a goose farm. I encouraged my staff to keep the canoe time sacred and beg the farmers — for the love of goose-liver pâté — to let us visit outside of regular hours. If that doesn’t work, we’ll visit an alternate farm, and have both wonderful French experiences as part of our tours in 2010.

Surveying all these changes, I’m satisfied that our 2010 tour will be more experience-packed than ever. I hope you’ll agree.

Still buzzing from the fun, sharing, and brainstorming our tour staff enjoyed with our tour guides at our annual summit last month, we are busy incorporating itinerary changes we agreed upon into our 2010 tour plans. Here is the thinking behind more of what I hope are improvements. (Sorry for the delay in getting this entry out. This has been a particularly busy week.)

For Spain, I suggested Gibraltar rather than the famous Andalusian hill town of Ronda (dramatically straddling its famous gorge). But our guides consider Gibraltar (the British military base-turned-tourist escape nippled onto the south tip of Spain) tacky, and strongly advised we stick with Ronda. Guides suggested we add Toledo’s Mezquita del Cristo de la Luz (a ruined mosque) to balance the sightseeing, since we already visit a church and a synagogue in Toledo. After cringing at that whiff of political correctness, I said I thought that particular mosque is underwhelming at best. Instead, we agreed to visit the new, fully functioning Great Mosque of Granada in that city’s Albayzín district, and see if our groups can actually check in with the imam there to see how Spain’s largest Muslim community (10 percent of the town) is living with its neighbors.

In Northern Ireland, we American visitors (even the sword-carrying Protestants) are predisposed to support the underdog Catholic minority. But to get the full story, we agreed to find an angry Ulster Protestant to talk with our groups about Orangemen activities in what we call a “reflections” setting. Orangemen have seemed to kind of terrorize the Catholic minority in Ulster — with its bombed-out Catholic churches, seemingly hateful Protestant marches through Catholic towns, and menacing bonfires that continue to this day. A reflections setting is when we sit down as a group with a local person in a quiet place, and our guide (without contributing otherwise) facilitates a reflective exchange between the local and our group. After participating in exchanges like this in El Salvador and Nicaragua, I’ve been encouraging them when the opportunity presents itself with our Europe tour program. (While Europe may be less contentious than political flashpoints, reflections meetings here can be just as instructive and inspirational.) We’ve done reflections meetings with Scandinavians who buy a kind of socialism by willingly paying higher taxes, Turkish Kurds supporting a separatist movement that threatens Ankara, Serbian Orthodox priests angry with American involvement in Kosovo, Hungarian grade school classes and their teachers, and American expats who’ve married into Italy (where mothers-in-law take mother-in-lawing to towering heights). We want our tours to connect with Europe in as many ways as possible. And reflections meetings are just another tool for this.

Dublin has a “Musical Pub Evening Tour” in which a trio of local musicians meet a group in a pub and, over the course of the evening (and several pints of beer), lead their group on a crawl. They visit three pubs while explaining and demonstrating their instruments, offering the group an educational foundation for Irish music appreciation (and generally a nice Guinness buzz). I absolutely love the experience. Our guides said they did music evenings in pubs in other towns, and doing that plus taking groups on this music tour would be redundant. Considering how an evening of live traditional music in a small-town pub is even more fun after having the pub tour education, I proposed that this kind of “redundancy” was a beautiful thing. In 2010, we’ll offer both experiences.

In Florence, we have always offered a historic “Renaissance Walk” through the core of the old town. While the Renaissance Walk is the main thing, we also recognize that it misses the town’s scant Roman history, its fascinating medieval history, and the heady years in the 1860s when Florence was the first capital of the new country of Italy. So, for our Heart of Italy and Venice/Florence/Rome tours, we’re covering more dimensions of Florence’s history by adding a local guide who’ll use generally overlooked sights tucked here and there in the old town as a rack upon which to sort out these layers of the Florentine story. Then the guide will walk our groups across the Arno River to lead an artisan-focused walk through the crusty-as-a-cobbler Oltrarno district.

In Slovenia, our guides were skipping the Skocjan Caves because they wanted to be sensitive to claustrophobic tour members. I love these caves and (at the risk of freaking out the paranoid ones) requested that we visit Skocjan instead of the visually impressive but empty Predjama Castle. We’ll include the 1.5-mile hike through Europe’s most awe-inspiring cave — a vast canyon evoking the hidden home of those flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz, and illustrating memorably the honeycombed geology of Slovenia’s Karst region. Some will need to be shepherded across the scary bridge over the subterranean gorge in the middle, and some may simply refuse to enter and wait with the driver at a café near the entrance. But we will include Skocjan Caves in 2010.

I’m recapping a few of the changes to our tours for 2010, following up on our guide summit last month…

Our Heart of Belgium and Holland tour is particularly tuned in to current issues, social issues, and environmental issues. (Our Dutch and Belgian guides love leading it, and I’m seriously considering taking the tour myself.) We deal with challenges facing the EU at its capital in Brussels. We tour a massive dike project to learn about how the Dutch are raising their levies in anticipation of higher seas (people who live below sea level tend to take climate change more seriously than others). And in Amsterdam, we want to hit the hot-button social issues — pot and prostitution. Touring the Red Light District, we make a point to understand the “harm reduction” rationale of having legalized, regulated, unionized prostitution. And we visit a coffeeshop to interview a man who makes his living legally selling marijuana to adults. In 2010, we hope to drop by Ludo’s Paradox Coffeeshop — a mellow, mature, and comfortable place in the charming Jordaan District — for a drink and a Q&A session. While we couldn’t include more than this as a formal part of our tour, those who want more than a smoothie from Ludo will be welcome to stay after, as the Paradox visit is the last organized stop for that day.

Now that we’re staying in the more charming old center of Naples (Piazza del Plebiscito) rather than the gritty train station neighborhood, our guides are more enthusiastic about our time there. Naples offers one of Europe’s most fascinating “urban jungle” experiences, and we’re now able to do it better than ever.

We’ve come up with a clever new plan for our day visiting Pompeii, the ruined Roman city that was buried in ash by a volcano eruption in A.D. 79. First we drive our bus to the end of the road, from where our group hikes to the steaming summit of Mount Vesuvius. After our crater experience, we hit the Pompeii ruins, where our charismatic local guide, Gaetano, meets us. The bus goes into Sorrento without the group (to deposit our luggage at our hotel), and after Pompeii, the group catches the commuter train into Sorrento. From the train station, our guide gives an orientation walk through town, dropping by a famous gelateria for a demonstration and some tasting fun before strolling to our hotel to check in.

For our Best of England tour, we’ve dropped touristy, overpriced, and crowded Warwick Castle, and will stop instead at Ironbridge Gorge to tour the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. I’ve always felt Warwick was a bit cheesy. It’s one of those historic sights that has completely sold out to an amusement park company, which runs it like a very aggressive business rather than part of England’s patrimony. Ironbridge Gorge, on the other hand is classy, personal, untouristy, and — when you consider that the advances made here provided the foundation for British industrial dominance in the 19th century — quite a thrill to see and understand.

The plan in Britain was to zip directly from one pristine natural wonder to another: rushing from North Wales to the Lake District to visit the national park center at Brockhole, then take a steamer ride on Lake Windermere en route to our two-night home base in Keswick. Instead, for 2010, after leaving Wales, we’ll spend the middle of the day eating “candy floss” and taking white-knuckle rides in Blackpool for the “Coney Island of England” experience, and then arrive late in the Lake District. After the tackiness of Blackpool, the magic of the pristine lakes will be even more vivid. By cutting out a little redundancy, we’ll enjoy an entirely different slice of the English sightseeing pie.

Also in Britain, we’ll say goodbye to our “coach” (tour bus) upon arrival in York to avoid an extra day of bus rental. Then we’ll spend that money on train tickets for the group into London, which will get us there in two hours (rather than four hours by bus). Arriving at London’s Kings Cross Station, we stow our bags on a different bus, tour the British Library (which is just across the street from the station), then enjoy a full four-hour introduction tour to London by bus. The cost to us is roughly the same, and we’ll save two hours in transit, enjoy an English train ride, and take full advantage of the time saved to get a substantial bus tour of London before finally arriving at our hotel thoroughly oriented.

I am thrilled with how our Best of Turkey tour connects our travelers with Turkish culture in intimate ways other tours do not. For example, I love the casual sit-and-talk time with the imam in the extremely remote and untouristy central Turkish town of Güzelyurt. I wanted to promise this in our promotional literature, but we decided it’s an example of travel magic that can’t be institutionalized. The same is true of visits with a “whirling dervish.” Much as I’d like our groups to meet with a dervish to hear him explain why he whirls, this is not something that can be done routinely and on a strict schedule with a tour group. Some of my most vivid and wild memories of Turkish travels are in the public baths, or hammam. I was disappointed when I heard that our hammam visits had become “optional.” My guides convinced me that, much as we like to get our travelers out of their comfort zones, we can’t force people to go to local baths. American modesty is quite strong. We can enable people to enjoy this…but I agreed that it shouldn’t be an included part of the tour.

Also in Turkey, I find visiting the House of the Virgin Mary near Ephesus fascinating without getting too hung up on whether or not she actually lived there. I learned that visiting the house is actually controversial on our tours. People either believe she lived here, or they don’t, and to present it either way tends to anger half the group. So, rather than include it as a standard part of our schedule in 2010, we will leave it as an option for those who want to believe it — and help those who stay to tour it easily get back to the hotel with a taxi.

It’s taken a lot of time and effort to brainstorm, debate, and implement all of these tour itinerary changes. But my staff and I are confident than in 2010, our tours will be more experience-packed than ever.