With King Ludwig of Bavaria

Here's a treasured Royal souvenir - a mousemat showing me and the King of Bavaria.

I went to a very good Bavarian workshop in the West End a few days ago. They'd hired two huge rooms in a Georgian mansion just off Hyde Park. One contained a large breakfast with authentic German bread from Backhaus and lots of sausages. The other room was full of Bavarians eager to tell us about their region. And King Ludwig was waiting at the top of the stairs. He really was extraordinarily regal, not just in appearance but in manner.

I was specially intrigued by the Saltzeitreise It's a salty theme park ride - no doubt with plenty of glitz, too, since it's now owned by Swarovski Crystal. Salt has been considered good for the health for many centuries, and the region also has lots of spas. I had been considering taking a winter trip - the Bavarian alps aren't for serious skiiers, which suits me just fine. But events got in the way and now I'm already booked up with things to do this winter. Another time, I hope.

The salt mine also happens to be near the Eagle's Nest, Hitler's hangout. Needless to say the tourist board don't make a deal about this. Nothing to do with Hitler is treated as a tourist attraction in Germany, including the famous bunker in Berlin. I was told that it's the No.1 thing that visitors to Berlin are keen to see, but they can't. It would be good if certain other countries followed the German line in not making a tourist attraction out of icons of barbarity, but unfortunately that's not always so.

When one of my kids told some German friends that her mum had met King Ludwig of Bavaria, they were very dismayed, and told her that Bavaria no longer has a king. Little do they know. My King Ludwig mousemat will join other items such as the Maltese Virgin Mary musical box, the Angela Merkel lemon squeezer etc. in my box of treasured souvenirs.

A Gourmet Tour From Hell

Blogging about travel writing is totally different from writing about your travels. When sharing your travels with the world, you can be frank and free. With professional travel writing, your best bits have to go into the article or book, not on your blog. Duh. Seems obvious when you think about it.

And you don't want to commit professional suicide by being too frank, however amusing the PR's screw-up was, or however hideously memorable that restaurant meal was.

Actually, though, let's write about the string of awful meals I had on one "gourmet tour" of a region which had better be nameless.

The worst meal was hot meat with gravy and raspberry sauce, served in a dizzyingly decorated restaurant to the sound of a PR woman yelling non stop about the chef, his ingredients, his philosophy, etc. No place to hide. Boy, that woman had some lungs, and she was mortally offended at anyone who left a scrap.

Next day of our gourmet tour, the highlight was plates of small spiky fish plus patented pink goop (tasting like kiddy toothpaste with a touch of vinegar.) No veggies, no bread, nothing but lots of spiky little fishes and pink goop.

The third day, we attended a cookery demonstration for - well who knows? Because everyone was riveted by the absolutely enormous cockroach making its way slowly up the demonstration podium, oblivious of the demonstrator clashing her pots and pans above. Nobody, but nobody wanted to eat the dish she had just so lovingly prepared for us.

The fourth day I pleaded illness. I ate nothing all day and went to bed in the evening with a bagel. How I loved that bagel's little dry-bread face! I still remember it with appreciation!

El Gouna Writer's Residency - and Germanwings

The Red Sea resort of El Gouna is launching a Writers Residency programme next year. Check it out here for the details. It's to celebrate their 20th anniversary. I'd be exploring rather than writing, probably, maybe tempted by those piles of sickly but delicous cakes they sell in the Middle East to spend my time in coffee shops rather than toiling at my computer
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Meanwhile, I'm sorting out a December trip to Cologne, in Germany, where I think I can confidently guarantee that things won't be so colourful. I've been looking at Germanwings which turns out to have flights not only to Germany but to many other places besides - and from regional airports too.

Online PR

Went to a British Guild of Travel Writers meeting about the future of professional travel writing a couple of nights ago.

Travel writing is suffering just like so many other mainly media-based or media-related businesses, from studio design to music sales to magazine writing. The internet is changing the way people think and we're in the middle of a new industrial revolution.

Technological change has been so enormous in the last two hundred years that we tend to forget that we need to adapt. I don't suppose it was immediately obvious to everyone in 1790 that they should be junking their handlooms pronto. Nor would Mr. Investor of 1835 have known whether to sink his life savings into the expanding canal network or into these new fangled railways. And many people who ran stables in 1900 thought that there would always be a demand for horses, even if motor cars DID take off. And those highly skilled printworkers in the 1980s....

Anyway one sign of the times is Surf PR, the UK's first PR agency to work entirely in online media, or so they say. Actually, the company Go Ape (not one of Surf's clients) contacted me a while ago offering me and 20 of my friends the chance to try their treeclimbing adventures and blog about it. So perhaps Surf PR isn't quite so much in the forefront as they say.

Indeed, in some parts of the world I'm told that social media manipulation is becoming so widespread that that attempts are being made to regulate product placement in blogs. Bloggers will have to reveal whether they have been paid, either in cash or in kind.

And no, I have not been paid anything by Surf PR to mention them. And I certainly don't think my friends are up for Go Ape. I suspect if someone is going to ask most people I know to swing around in trees, they'll need to provide a nice cup of tea at the end of it, or something even stronger, actually.

Travel Photo Competition - Coast

Coast Magazine is running a photo competition (click on the button on their main page). Last year's winner is unusual because it captures a feeling of light and sun and movement in a way that is hard to do - technically, I mean.

The V & A Museum in London is running a project about beach photography : click here for one of my favourites but people have found so many other ways of turning beaches into art.

As far as my own pictures are concerned, sometimes I look through them and think, wow, I like that one. I don't have any pretensions, though. The picture of the double rainbow near Avebury (below) pleases me but I am sure the purists would say that Silbury hill ought to be completely visible. In fact even I'd say that.

In self justification, I was perched on the verge, with the car rather dangerously parked in the road, though, desperate to catch the rainbow before it faded.

And it's miles from the coast.

Be A Travel Writer - Win A Holiday

The BGTW has launched its first ever travel writing contest, open to unpublished travel writers - that is, writers who have not had travel articles published. (They can have published other types of writing, though).

First prize comes courtesy of Travellers' Tales, the training agency for travel writing and travel photography, and the winner will enjoy a four-day travel writing holiday in Istanbul, discovering the city while practising your writing skills with a small group of fellow writers under expert tuition.

Second prize is a trip to Berlin courtesy of WEXAS, Hotel Berlin and Lufthansa. Two return flights, plus two nights in the Hotel Berlin.

Third prize is the winner's selection of 10 travel guides from award-winning publisher Bradt - whose guides Michael Palin has described as 'expertly written and longer on local detail than any others'.

Oh, (just adding this to clarify) "unpublished" means not having been paid for articles. And articles can be either in print media, or on the internet.