Traveling through Africa with Border Jumpers

A very cool blog contacted me last week. It's called Border Jumpers and it's pretty much what it says on the tin. Bernard Pollack and Danielle Nierenberg are on a mission to visit nearly every country in Africa, writing about their experiences with a special focus on community groups, NGOs, and local people. Sounds a bit like the Africa Heartbeat project I've covered here before.

They started in Addis Ababa last year and so far have made it to an impressive list of nations. They've talked with conservationist farmers in Ghana and written about using traditional crops to fight climate change in Zimbabwe. These are just two of the dozens of projects they've covered.

As I discovered on my recent trip through Ethiopia and Somaliland, Africa thrusts beauty and poverty at you simultaneously. Just look at the above photo, courtesy of Border Jumpers, of a palm oil processing center. It's little more than a bunch of grotty drums and a lot of hot steam in an already hot climate. Yet the woman standing in front radiates grace, beauty, and pride.

Border Jumpers, Africa Heartbeat, and I are headed the same direction with our writing. We're experienced travelers who have learned that the world is not the big, scary place TV tells us it is. It's big alright, but filled with intelligent, kind people doing all sorts of interesting things. The single most important thing a travel writer can do is communicate that simple truth to as many people as possible. So check out those sites for some uplifting reading, and some facts about Africa the mainstream media don't bother to cover.

Does being a travel writer affect the way you travel?

On my writing blog I recently posted about celebrating a year working for Gadling, the most popular travel blog on the Internet. This got me thinking about how being a travel writer affects the way I travel. I also asked some of my fellow Gadlingers.

Like any pro, Tom Johansmeyer is always on the lookout for story ideas. He recalls a recent trip to Norwich, VT, to visit family.

"We stopped at a rest station along the way, and I saw a flier for “The Strolling of the Heifers,” which is some local event. My first thought: I can use that! Even when I’m on the road and not looking for anything, I can’t help noticing opportunities, and recreation becomes work, which itself is recreation."

I do this too. Even walking in my barrio in Madrid I end up with a handful of fliers about cultural events and interesting shops, and any trip gives me far more leads than I can possibly follow. The constant search for story ideas becomes a compulsion for both of us.

"When I ride the bus from New York to Pennsylvania to see my son, I’ll get ideas (“Five Ways to Cope with Winter Bus Travel”) or run into situations worth covering (e.g., poor service). I even did a video review on a Port Authority hot dog," Johansmeyer says.

Annie Scott says being on the job makes her more active and aware, "I go out and see things even when jet lagged. I get up and try the breakfast at the hotel instead of sleeping. I try new foods that look scary. I'm less afraid to ask silly questions and explore inappropriate places because I know that my curiosity is validated; it's a professional tool."

Willy Volk agrees.

"I think I look around a lot more, and notice what might be interesting to OTHER people, as well as what is interesting just to me," he says.

Like them, when I'm on assignment I keep my reader in mind. Who that reader is depends on the market I'm writing for. The demographic for British Heritage is very different than Gadling. I'm always asking myself, "What are my readers interested in? What do they think is important?"

"It's our duty to go one step beyond the realm of the average tourist," says David Farley. "It's our job to gain insights about the place that can sometimes only come from a more immersed experience. Part of our job--or, at least, my job--is as reporter and fact-gatherer, which isn't always something the average traveler does. For that reason, when I'm on assignment (which is about 99 percent of the time I'm traveling), I always arrive in a place with a small cadre of friends of friends waiting for me. I also schedule interviews with people who will help inform my story, which is something I wouldn't do if I were just a tourist. Travel writing is a job, not a vacation, so when I'm on the road, it's a lot of fun but at times it's also a bit exhausting."

"I notice nitpicky things," says Laurel K. Miller, "like when hotel rooms are lacking enough electrical outlets/if they're in lame locations, if the bathroom doors open into the toilet, etc."

I get this way too, but only when I'm writing reviews of the actual place. Then I can get really nitpicky. The more expensive the place, the less forgiving I am.

Friends sometimes ask me if working on the road kills my enjoyment of travel. It never has, and it doesn't seem to bother David Farley either.

"Because I'm forced to interview people and cross a certain threshold that I wouldn't normally do as a 'tourist,' I end up having a more enriching travel experience. Then I try to shift that enthusiasm into my writing about the experience," Farley says.

"I actually think travel would be rather boring for me if I weren’t a blogger," Johansmeyer agrees.

But Miller says it's made her "jaded."

"While I'm grateful every day for this career, I no longer feel the need to take photos of every beautiful beach or sunset, and it's harder for me to be impressed by locations/service/food/accommodations," she says.

Miller also finds hopping back and forth between travel and regular life a bit strange.

"While I actually enjoy mixing up high end assignments with "real" travel, as I'm a broke-ass dirtbag journalist, I struggle with the schizoid existence of living large one day, and dealing with drunken idiots in bunkbeds the next. Even more bizarre, I wait tables and do other random jobs when I'm at home, to supplement my writing. I've actually had moments where I've worked at a restaurant one night, hopped a plane on assignment the following day, and later that night found myself dining at an extremely high end restaurant. I'll actually have to suppress the urge to bus a table out of habit," she says.

Having ridden across a desert on a crowded African bus one day, then had a picnic in an English park with my kid and his friends less than a week later, I can sympathize with the "schizoid existence" comment!

While it seems the consensus is that being travel writers affects how we travel, there are times when it doesn't affect me at all. These tend to be on my more adventurous trips, such as traveling in Ethiopia or Somaliland, or hiking Hadrian's Wall. I'm doing those trips for me, and even though I write them up for Gadling they are from a personal perspective. When you read my newsy bits for Gadling you're just getting facts. When you read my features, especially my series, you're getting me. So I guess I have a certain protectiveness with my dream trips. When I finally get to The Gambia to do my long-planned river journey, I will of course write it up for Gadling and maybe some other markets, but the trip will be all mine.

Photo courtesy Leo Stolpe. It shows me taking notes in the painted caves of Laas Geel in Somaliland. Yes, that's a Gadling shirt I'm wearing.

My first week on Twitter: a travel writer's perspective

I finally broke down and got a Twitter account (@WriterSean). I've been slow to get into the whole technology thing, despite being a cybercommuting writer. I didn't get my first mobile phone until two years ago, and then it was a slippery slope of personal blogging, getting a job at the world's largest travel blog, getting an account on Facebook, and now this!

I've been on Twitter exactly a week. I've done 52 tweets, am following 113 people, have 95 followers, and have been listed ten times. I have no idea of the significance of all this and I don't really care.

I got onto Twitter for two reasons: to give my novel's fanpage a higher profile in preparation for the contest it's a finalist in, and to network with other writers. As far as the first reason goes, I've only gotten one more fan from my first week on Twitter--a Missouri history writer I'm glad to meet. Of course it takes time to build a following, so I'll have to wait and see how well Twitter can be used as a promotional tool. There's a fine line between self-promotion and spamming; I have to tread carefully.

The second reason, networking, has succeeded beyond my wildest expectations. I've met tons of interesting writers. Most of them are travel writers and bloggers who found me because of my links with Gadling. Their advice and retweets have given me leads to three different stories already!

So all in all I think Twitter is worth the time if you have a specific reason for using it. If you just want to blab with friends and strangers there are better outlets for that. My wife, for example, is an astronomer. She doesn't need to network through Twitter because the astronomy community is small enough that everyone pretty much knows everyone else and they have their own networking communities. She talks to distant friends on Facebook, her chosen timewaster, so she doesn't need to add Twitter. For writers, however, Twitter is fast becoming indispensable.

Riding across Africa on a motorcycle

OK, I'm officially jealous.

I've done a lot of adventure travel in my day but I've been outclassed as an adventure traveler by an old friend of mine.

Thomas Tomczyk has just started out on a motorcycle tour of Africa, starting in South Africa and passing through 22 countries before ending up in Spain.

He says that he's past the stage of travel for travel's sake (I know the feeling) and so he's set up Africa Heart Beat, an online project to showcase various innovative NGOs he meets on the way. I've already blogged about his project here for Gadling, as well as the array of gear he's taking along to keep in touch with his Facebook page, his blog, and his YouTube channel.

Thomas is a professional writer and photographer, so you can expect some good stuff coming out of Africa for the next eight months.

I'm looking forward to hearing his insights on such projects as an AIDS theater group in Botswana, and a Muslim-Christian vocational center in Mali. I'm also hatching a plan to meet him in May or June of 2010, probably in Niger, Mauritania, or Western Sahara. Stay tuned. . .

What have I been doing?

OK, so I spend six months in Oxford and I barely blog about it. Sorry folks, but I got a bit distracted by the real ales, beautiful countryside, and watching my kid become bilingual.

I did get a fair amount done, however, and most of my experiences ended up on Gadling. As you can see from this picture, I hiked the length of Hadrian's Wall. I started out the day after my 40th birthday as sort of a midlife crisis. I figured walking 84 miles across England would be a nice way of celebrating my imminent decrepitude. I wrote a whole series about it for Gadling.

I also visited Avebury, which got written up, along with a friend's photos, as my 101st post for Gadling. I've also ranted about Americans hiding behind the Canadian flag, studying at Oxford, medieval churches and lost villages, and Alien Big Cats. Plus a whole bunch more. So yeah, I've been busy on the blogosphere.

So what's coming up in the next month on Gadling? A tour of Jesse James sights in Missouri, and a weekend in St. Louis. What's coming up on this blog? More musings about life in Oxford and what it's like to divide your time between three different countries. Stay tuned.

Back to a different Oxford

I spent most of last week in The Netherlands doing some research for my next book and writing articles for Gadling. I had a great time and managed to see the grand opening of the Amsterdam branch of the Hermitage. I'll be posting more articles on Gadling next week, including a feature on Delft and one on Dutch castles.

Now I'm back in Oxford, but it's not the same as when I left. Two weeks ago the students were in the throes of exams. Now they're finished and most have left, to be replaced by ever-increasing hordes of tourists. I'll miss not having the students around; they are a big part of the atmosphere in any university town, and now that term has ended there will be fewer functions at the university. The best lecture I saw was by archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson about his Stonehenge Riverside Project. There won't be any more of those until September. Now I'll have to deal with big crowds of people walking agonizingly slowly through the center of town.

So far it hasn't been so bad. I suspect the economic downturn has slowed things down. Amsterdam had noticeably fewer people than when I last visited, and my traveling companion who was there last November said it was even slower than before, strange considering he was last there in winter and now it's summer. Maybe bad economic times will give me some respite from the tourist hordes this summer.

A book a week

Fellow blogger and Missouri writer Donna Volkenannt, who describes herself as "a full-time grandmother and part-time writer, editor, and reviewer", has started a new blog where she discusses a new book every week. Every Monday she will review a book she's read.

The first book she's looking at is Secret Keepers by Mindy Friddle. This sounds like an interesting regional tale set in South Carolina in the Eighties. I won't steal Donna's thunder by repeating much here, just go over to her A Book A Week blog and check it out for yourself!

Posting on Gadling

Hi everyone. Yeah, it's been two weeks since I posted on this blog. I've been pretty busy with various writing projects, including a new gig as a travel blogger on Gadling. I just started yesterday and should have a post or two on there every day from now on. As an introduction they sent me a bunch of interview questions and posted the interview here. They didn't use them all, so here's the rest of them. It's been so long since I posted you probably need to be reminded who I am anyway.

Favorite travel author? Sir Richard Francis Burton. He was an adventurer in the nineteenth century and helped discover the source of the Nile. Burton was able to pick up a language in only a few days and learned more than twenty in his lifetime. Unusually for English travelers of his day, he had a real sympathy and understanding of the African, Asian, Arab, and South American cultures he explored.

You may become the leader of any country in the world. What country and why? How would you rule? The United States because I’d have the most potential to make a change in the world. Hopefully I would get to rule as an absolute dictator so I could force a switch over to renewable energy and say goodbye to Middle East politics forever.

Person you’d most like to interview for Gadling? Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the adventurer.

Favorite tourist trap? The pyramids in Egypt. They’ve been a tourist trap since the days of Herodotus, but they’re so stunning it just doesn’t matter.

Hotel, hostel, or other? Couch surfing with friends.

Dream travel destination? Ethiopia. I’ll be going there in early 2010, so keep an eye out for my trip report!

Most remote corner of the globe you’ve visited? The border of Pakistan and Afghanistan (on the Pakistani side!). Sadly, that's Taliban territory now, so I guess I won't be seeing it again.

The ideal vacation is... me, a small backpack, a strange country, and no guidebook.

The most unusual food I’ve ever eaten is... Fried eel, in Denmark. Oh, and the various mystery meats I’ve had in some of the more remote countries I’ve visited. Best not to dwell on that too much.

Where do you hide your emergency cash? This is a family website so I better not say.

Leeches or mosquitoes? Mosquitoes. They’re harder to avoid and carry more diseases.

Favorite foreign dish? Restaurant? Pretty much anything Ethiopian. Currently my favorite restaurant is Merkato Ethiopian Restaurant at 193 Caledonian Rd., London. The owner brews his own tej, an Ethiopian mead or honey wine. It’s delicious, as is his cooking!

Worst place to catch a stomach bug? Anywhere is the worst place when it’s happening to you. The worst place I caught one was Cuzco in Peru. A beautiful city that I saw nothing of for my first two days staying there. That time in Allahabad, India, was pretty rotten too.

Solo traveler or group traveler? Solo is my preference, but one of the reasons I married my wife is because she’s one of the few people I can travel with for long periods of time without wanting to kill. She also found me ginger ale to settle my stomach when I was sick in Cuzco. Any woman who can find ginger ale in Peru at a moment’s notice is a keeper.

Connected or disconnected (re: phones, computer)? When I’m at home I’m way too connected. When I’m on the road I want to be totally disconnected.

Favorite music to listen to while traveling? None. I want to hear the sounds of the place I’m in.

First culture shock experience? When I was sixteen I was an exchange student in Denmark. My host family owned a farm. I was jetlagged and disoriented when I got there, and the first thing that happened was I discovered there’s a nasty variety of stinging grass in Denmark. The second thing I discovered was that the Danes serve fried eel as a delicacy. Then the horses started getting friendly with each other. All this happened within my first five minutes. The trip got better after that.

How did you get started traveling? I went on an exchange program to Denmark when I was sixteen and got hooked. I worked as an archaeologist for a while and that got me lots of travel. Now as a freelance writer I still get to travel.

How did you get interested in travel writing? By reading it. When I was a teenager I loved the old Victorian travel narratives. Most were horribly stuffy, but some of the adventures these folks had were truly amazing.

Type of traveler -- vagabond, luxury, camper, package, adventurer, etc.? Vagabond/adventurer when I have the time, but more and more of my trips lately have been work related. Even my trip to The Gambia later this year is partially to do a magazine article!

Favorite Gadling story? The Cuba series has gotten me terribly jealous. I need to get there.

Favorite means of transportation? I love trains, especially in India because you get to see the countryside and meet lots of people.

Other jobs? Freelance writer. I’ve written several history books and a couple of guidebooks. I also appear in magazines occasionally.

Favorite travel book? Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al Madinah and Meccah by Sir Richard Francis Burton.

Where would you buy a second home/retire? I love Oxford for its academic atmosphere and good pubs. I’m not sure the weather would agree with me when I’m in my seventies, however.

Country with the most beautiful women? Spain. Why do you think I live there?

Favorite foreign film? Kagbeni, a Nepali film. It’s a remake of the famous story The Monkey’s Paw and features beautiful shots of the rugged Nepali landscape. It’s also a really creepy ghost story! I reviewed it here.

Worst armpit visited? Taftan, on the Pakistani side of the Iranian/Pakistani border. It’s a sandy dump of a place strewn with trash and feces, both animal and human. The air is thick with flies, and the streets thick with pickpockets. I got my pocket picked the first and only hour I was there. They only got $5 in Iranian rials, but it’s the thought that counts.

Languages spoken? English (obviously!), Spanish, and I can kind of bluff my way through French and German. I learned but have forgotten Arabic, Latin, and Danish for lack of anyone to practice with.

The first thing I set out to pack is...? Spare contact lenses. They’re not easy to replace on the road. The second thing I pack are my glasses, just in case.

When I'm not writing for Gadling, I’m...? Writing for someone else, playing with my son, reading, hiking.

Most recent trip? To London, to attend the London Book Fair.

Celebrity you’d most like to sit next to in first class? Neil Armstrong. I’d love to talk to him about what it was like to walk on the Moon.

New Writing Blog

I have teamed up with eight other writers to start Charge of the Write Brigade, a blog dedicated to the genres of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. It promises to be quite a useful blog. I hope to learn a lot myself, since I'm one of the least published writers on it! The first post, by yours truly, went online today.

Amadis of Gaul--Classic Fantasy

Friend and fellow writer Sue Burke has started the epic task of translating the classic fantasy Amadis of Gaul from Medieval Spanish into modern English and she's putting it up chapter by chapter for free on the web.

I hadn't heard of Amadis until I moved to Madrid. Sue describes it best. "Published in Spain in 1508, this novel is a masterpiece of medieval fantasy. It inspired a century of best-selling sequels in seven languages and changed the way we think about knights, chivalry, damsels in distress, and courtly life in castles. These books made Don Quixote go mad and imagine himself a heroic knight-errant like Amadis."

I've been reading along and find it very entertaining. It reminds me a bit of Orlando Furioso, which was probably inspired by Amadis. Lots of quests, knightly battles, and honorable derring-do.

Sue is publishing a new chapter every Tuesday and a commentary every Thursday. Her translation is excellent (she's a tireless student of Spanish) and her commentary brings the world of Late Medieval Spain to light. This book is well worth a read for anyone interested in the origins of fantasy fiction or anyone who simply loves a good read.

As Sue says, "This book drove Don Quixote mad. What will it do to you?"

Midlist Writer Awards Spirit21 the Premio Dardos Award

Last week Donna over at Donna's Book Pub awarded my other blog, Midlist Writer, the Premio Dardos Award. The award is given in recognition of cultural, ethical, literary, and personal values transmitted in the form of creative and original writing.

By accepting the award, I must follow two rules:

1) Accept the award by posting it on my blog along with the name of the person that has granted the award and a link to their blog.

2) Pass the award along to blogs I find worthy of this acknowledgment.

I'm passing the award on to Shelina Zahra Janmohamed at the Spirit21 blog. Shelina is a leading voice in moderate Islam in the UK. Her work appears in the Guardian and other media outlets. She spends a lot of effort on encouraging Muslim women to speak out for themselves. It's interesting that the Western media spend so much time saying Muslim women need a voice but so rarely give them a chance to have one. Shelina has broken through this barrier and her blog and articles are well worth reading. I don't agree with everything she says (otherwise there would be no point in reading her) but her posts always give me something to think about.

Facebook Culture

As I said in my last post, I've joined Facebook. It's an interesting little world. I've already hooked up with a lot of my old Tucson crowd, now spread over several states and a couple of countries. I've even had a few of my blog readers request to be my friends! So it's fun.

One thing I've noticed though is that it's all very frivolous. "Well yeah," you say, "It's a social networking site, what did you expect?" OK, I expected it to be a bit light, but I didn't expect people to be spending real money to send their friends virtual balloons and birthday cakes. I mean come on.

But is it really so frivolous? In her excellent book Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour, anthropologist Kate Fox says that all this social networking, texting, and twittering is important for its very frivolity. It replaces the day-to-day casual interaction our species got from millennia living in villages or wandering in tribes. Now we live in sprawling suburbs or impersonal cities, and we don't get the friendly "Hello, looks like we're in for rain" that we exchanged with the farmer two fields over, or the semi-concerned "Is your mother over her lumbago?" from the second-cousin-twice-removed at the village well.

Apparantly we need that, and it only took a generation without it before modern civilization found a way to replace it.

But I'm still not paying good money for virtual puppies.

My Favorite Travel Post for 2008

Looking back at this blog, which I started in March of this year, I see I've written 108 posts. Not bad for a beginning blogger! I think my favorite post was about the day I didn't see a yeti. It was certainly an eye-opening experience for me.

Do you blog about travel? What was your favorite post? Send me a link at seansontheweb (at) yahoo (dot) com and I'll post it here. It could be a favorite trip, a great photo you took, or some cool postcard someone sent you. Check out my other blog for similar "best of" posts I'll be covering from across the blogosphere.

This Week's Madrid Travel Tips

My latest travel tips to Madrid are up on PlanetEye. This week I write about a multicultural fair in Plaza Lavapiés, a very cool Egyptian cafe, and the Titanic exhibition. Drop on by and check it out!

This Week's Madrid Travel Tips

My latest travel tips are up on PlanetEye. This week I talk about my favorite sandwich shop in barrio Malasaña, a cool museum that was once an artist's house, and the shrunken heads at the Museo Nacional de Antropología.

Today I finished my last deadline for the year, so you'll be seeing more posts from me for the next couple of months until crunch time starts again!

This Week's Madrid Travel Tips

Check out my page on PlanetEye for my latest travel tips. This week I give you a tour of some of the strange shops of Madrid (in case you need to look like a bullfighter or Dracula this holiday season) and I review an intimate café and a smoky rock bar.

This Week's Madrid Travel Tips

Yes, my postings on this blog have been a bit thin lately, but that's because I've been buried in work, not to mention being a single dad while Almudena works in Oxford and Bonn. I did post on Planeteye this week (it's a job, after all). You can check out my reviews of a great Indian restaurant and a literary café, and a recommended reading list about the Spanish Civil War here.

This Week's Madrid Travel Tips

I've posted this week's travel tips on PlanetEye. It's a month since I got this job and it's been a lot of fun. It gives me a great excuse to go out at night. "Research" has become a euphemism among my friends for "going out and having a good time." I need more jobs like this.

This week I cover two art exhibits, one on Star Wars and another on the art treasures of the Catalan monastery of Montserrat. I also review a pretty good restaurant in the heart of downtown. You can see my latest postings here.

Madrid travel Tips

This week on PlanetEye I'm talking about my favorite café in Madrid and my first experience with Senegalese food. Our editor also wanted us to review the dining options in our local airport, so if you want to know where and where not to eat in Madrid's Barajas International Airport, or the airports in any of the dozens of other cities we cover, check us out. I can't guarantee fine dining while waiting for your plane, but I can help you find a decent meal.

Madrid Travel Tips

This week's postings are up on the Madrid section of PlanetEye. I talk about an upcoming film festival, my favorite plaza, and my first experience with Guinean food. If there's anything you'd like to see me blog about on PlanetEye, drop me a line or leave a comment here.