British Guild of Travel Writers

Went to the British Guild of Travel Writers' Yearbook launch on Monday at the Intercontinental, Hyde Park.

This year, the cover art theme of the Guild handbook was "windows." I sent off some of my best photos of worldwide windows, and was thrilled to be told that one of them - of a small-paned Austrian Christmas window - was to be used.

And so it was. Unfortunately, all the Christmassy stuff was Photoshopped away, and my window frame was used as the frame for everyone else's pictures.

Never mind - glad to be of assistance, as they say. Above is another Viennese window. Not publishable because the perspective isn't right, but attractive, all the same.

Below is a window picture which disturbed me. It shows workmen in the museum in Aleppo, Syria. I've never seen such lack of care for the artefacts. You can just see a few valuable old jars to the left, simply waiting for a direct hit from some of the building materials being manhandled by men balanced on ladders. Elsewhere in the museum it would have been perfectly possible to walk in to the galleries - which were a shambles - and help yourself.

That photo was taken two years ago and I imagine that the museum is now renovated.

The Good, the Bad and the Indigestible

I'm writing a magazine story about Suffolk, one of my favourite English counties.

A pleasure of doing this kind of work is getting the chance to boost places that deserve it. (It is not always possible to do this within the constraints of the article - and won't be in this case. So let me just pause here to mention a couple of great Suffolk teashops "Weavers" in Peasenhall and the Bridge Nursery in Dunwich.)

I don't usually like doing this the other way round and naming the disasters. It's so easy to get places on a bad day and I'd feel awful if I damaged someone's business because of a one-off event.

Sometimes it's tempting, though. I sometimes think of the immensely posh hotel in South Africa where all my costume jewellery disappeared while my room was being made up (and the hotel refused to investigate).

Or the pretentious restaurant in Louisiana which served meat with both gravy and strawberry coulis - a truly disgusting combination that I still feel quite ill to think about.

Travel Insurance with Pre Existing Medical Conditions

Travel writers really do need good travel insurance as they scramble around strange corners of the globe. It covers medical treatment and lost baggage, delayed and cancelled flights, etc. and can make all the difference between being able to complete an assignment - or even staying alive.

In Britain, however, it can be very hard to get insurance if you have a pre existing medical condition, however mild. If you do, after much shopping around, it can cost a bomb.

I had always assumed this was a tough fact of life, but Nicky Gardner, co-editor of the Berlin based travel magazine "Hidden Europe" has been researching travel insurance options in different EU markets, and she said:

"The European notion of insurance as a shared social and economic risk – an act of communal solidarity on all sides – seems to have disappeared in the UK as insurance companies pursue profit"

She goes on to say that, in Germany, public health insurance programmes aren't ALLOWED to ask applicants anything about their health when they apply for membership!

Of course the helpline is probably in German. And just by sheer coincidence I've started up my German classes again today.....

Don't Just See The Sights

Travel writers often have an interesting time because they have to build their trips around a theme - more memorable than just seeing the sights. Give it a try on your next trip. Even a few days can yield some unusual experiences.

I had a good trip to Canada a few years back on the theme of "Toronto and Film." The city has a surprisingly fantastical side, and my memories are also strangely fascinating. It was winter and everywhere was deep in snow. One night I battled through the dark whiteness to watch silent movies in an echoing bike workshop, where a man in a top hat played on a piano wheeled out from somewhere amongst the cranksets.

I had a strange conversation wtih Reg Hartt, whose Cineforum is a Victorian house with boarded up windows on Bathurst St, with surrealist 16mm movies and free pizza.

I ate in a restaurant to streams of bizarre, ancient television advertisements on screens all round the room - and those 1950s Japanese washing powder ads were accompanied some pretty passable salads.

Of course I talked to everyone I could. Hearing about their lives plugged me into the life of the city, and it would never have happened if I'd only come to see the "sights".

Press Trips

Anyone who works in the travel business will know about press trips, or "fam trips" as they're known in the travel trade. The idea is to get journalists out to a destination, be it Spain or Stow-on-the-Wold, and show them what that destination wants them to see.

So are they a good thing?

Some travel editors, specially in the US, are so against press trips that they won't take pieces based upon them. They say that being wined and dined by tourist boards is so far from the average punter's experience that it gives an unfair picture of the destination.

There's some truth in this, although in my experience it doesn't make as much difference as you'd think. Nine times out of ten a bad hotel or a lousy destination gives everyone (including journalists) a rotten time because it just doesn't know how to be good.

I'll be writing about particular press trips in future posts. But I'll end this post with a link to my other blog, which is about a book I'm writing on Lewis Carroll). On it, I posted a picture of a magical garden which I saw on a press trip the Portuguese Alentejo. It was like entering another world, and I'd never have discovered it for myself.

My First Blog Post - On the Road to Damascus

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How do you start a blog? Oh well, here goes.

I was already a freelance feature writer and doing quite well, when I had a "road to Damascus" moment and realised it might be possible to get people to pay me for going to see new places (like, indeed, Damascus).

So I became a part time travel writer. I never became a full time one, and I'm still not one but did lots of articles and eventually got together enough of a portfolio to join the British Guild of Travel Writers. It is a brilliant organisation, and what a bonus it is to be able to mix with top travel pros.

I've concentrated in the last few years mostly on Europe. But this blog aims to cover some of the curious quirky bits of travel both in Europe and outside it - little things that are part of the job of travel writing but don't always get into the final article. Not to mention a few things you wouldn't normally guess about the travel writing life - and some useful hints too, I hope.

In short, it's a glimpse of part-time, but (I like to think) very professional travel writing.

As for Damascus, that's a picture of it above, which I took from the roof of a house in the Christian Quarter. In many Arab countries, the roof of the house is a sort of open air attic.

I like it because it looks like a street scene at first glance, and then at second glance ... it doesn't.