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CNN had an article about Americans invading the ski slopes for winter. While ostensibly about the trend toward flashpacking, it actually had a lot to say about how Americans do backpacking.
I found the comments on privacy, sharing and personal space especially illuminating. When people are used to living in a big house and driving a car, then sharing a room with other people and riding buses can seem jarringly different from the normal routine.
Any thoughts on this article? In particular, I wondered if the article was stereotyping Americans from a certain region. People on the coasts are quite different from those in middle America, and Hawaii is another story altogether!
I was browsing CNN.com’s travel section today and found this article entitled “Confessions of a hotel housekeeper”. In the article, Allison Rupp tells all about her experiences as a hotel maid, including some techniques she would use to make things appear cleaner than they really were:
Instead of vacuuming, I found that just picking up the larger crumbs from the carpet would do. Rather than scrub the tub with hot water, sometimes it was just a spray-and-wipe kind of day.
After several weeks on the job, I discovered that the staff leader who inspected the rooms couldn’t tell the difference between a clean sink and one that was simply dry, so I would often just run a rag over the wet spots. But I never skipped changing the sheets. I wouldn’t sink that low, no matter how lazy I was feeling.
But are we really surprised by this? I’ve seen so many news exposés about the less-than-thorough cleaning practices of some hotels. I distinctly remember a clip from a hidden surveillance camera which showed the cleaning lady spray toilet bowl cleaner on the drinking glasses. The truth is, you can never really be sure about how clean a hotel room is, unless you’re the one doing the cleaning yourself.
You can also give more generous tips to the maids as a gesture that you appreciate any extra effort they put in. This kind of encouragement from guests is few and far between. While a rare $100 tip inspired Allison Rupp to clean more thoroughly one day, this inspiration did not last long.
If you do want to make the effort to avoid dirty accommodations, Trip Advisor has listed the dirtiest hotels in the world [via Standard Upright Position]. The items are categorized by region or country, including Asia, France, Italy, India, Spain, the UK, and the US. Only the “top 10 dirtiest” are listed in each region. The link is worth a visit if you’re planning a trip to any of those places soon. There’s also a list for Germany, but there were only 3 hotels which made it to their list.
Have you ever stayed in a dirty hotel? Did you ever suspect that your room was much dirtier than it looked?
As a kind of follow-up to yesterday’s post on the rising popularity of slum tours in Mumbai, I thought I would share a link to The Places We Live. The site features panoramic photos of slums around the world and is narrated by the people who live there (through translators).
There are also a number of startling figures in the intro, like the fact that one third of the world’s urban dwellers — more 1 billion people — live in slums and, according to the U.N., slums are the fastest growing human habitation — the number of slum dwellers will double within the next 25 years.
Not exactly a portrait of the world that tourism boards want to promote, but it is a reality.
The site is well worth a visit and does an excellent job of getting across its message through the words of the people who live in slums.
Unfortunately the site is Flash so I can’t like directly to the individual stories, but once you make it through the intro, just click on one of the featured areas and then you’ll see links to people’s individual stories.
Perhaps not strictly travel-related, but an interesting glimpse of a world most of us, even when we’re traveling, get very little exposure to.
There’s also a book, if the site strikes a chord.
[via Kottke]
I’ve never really understood how movies inspire people to travel, but for better or worse, they do seem to — consider what Lord of the Rings did for New Zealand or what Australia is supposed to do for Australian tourism.
Both of those cases probably fall in the “better” category. Vagabonds might not be the target audience, but if it gets a few people out on the foreign roads, that’s generally a good thing.
But there’s also the more disturbing scenario, such as the film Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle’s film about an orphaned street child in Mumbai who overcomes hardship, wins a fortune on a game show and gets the girl of his dreams. The film recently picked up ten Oscar nods and has proved a hit with western audiences.
I haven’t seen the film, so I withhold judgment (though I will say it sounds pretty cliche), but the Telegraph reports that Millionaire is inspiring an uptake in westerners who want to join one of Mumbai’s already-controversial “slum tours.”
Couple that with a film that Indian’s have called “a white man’s imagined India,” adding that it’s “not quite snake charmers, but it’s close ,” and you might begin to see why many Indians are a bit upset about Millionaire.
But as with thorny travel questions — like, should you go to Burma? — the reality is never as cut-and-dried as we’d like it to be. Your first instinct is probably to see the slum tours as exploitive and a “very bad thing.”
But the Telegraph’s Nigel Richardson actually went on a slum tour and reports:
A television programme damned them as “poverty tourism” and a government tourism minister threatened to have them shut down, although they are run perfectly legally, with the blessing of the local police as well as residents.
But they are conducted with exemplary sensitivity, and the cooperation of the residents, and 80 per cent of profits are donated to local charities. Most importantly, they certainly did not feel exploitative to me. In fact I found touring a place like Dharavi to be an education.
It’s hard to outright condemn the film, the slum tours it might be inspiring or the people going to either. After all, the idea of seeing the slums of Mumbai isn’t in itself a bad thing, it all depends on the context in which it’s presented. If Richardson’s portrayal reflects the typical slum tour, then perhaps they aren’t as bad as I’ve been imagining them.
I’m curious how Vagablogging readers feel about slum tours and other controversial travel ideas — is it exploitive? And if it is exploitive, is it possibly still worth it if the tours inspires participants to help, or at least opens their eyes? Or is it simply too ethically murky to judge?
[via World Hum, photo by Wen-Yan King, Flickr]
I’ve noticed quite a few travel-related contests recently with deadlines approaching. Some are more elaborate than others, and some have pretty great prizes attached. Check them out:
Wanderlust and Lipstick/Intrepid:
Write a non-fiction travel story, between 800-2500 words. Win a 15-day trip in Peru. Deadline: January 31, 2009
Via Dream Vacation Contest:
Describe the best travel day you’ve ever had, in 150 words or less. Win $2500 certificate good at AAA Travel. Deadline: January 31, 2009
Northern Lights Awards Canada:
Submit previously published travel articles and photography. Open to Canadian and US writers and photographers. Win $200-600. Deadline: February 16, 2009
Show Us Your Florida Photo Contest:
Share your favorite photo from a Florida trip and the backstory. Win a 3-day/4-night trip to Miami. Deadline: February 16, 2009
World Nomads Travel Scholarship:
Create a 3-minute travel-focused podcast on “Is home where the heart is?” Win a trip to Guatemala that includes volunteering and a homestay, and by the end you’ll create a podcast for Indie Travel Podcast. Deadline: April 5, 2009
It will not be of much surprise to most of you when I tell you that this is my last post on Vagabonding. Waah.
I’ve been a reader of this blog for over 4 years, and have been writing for it for 15 months. Rolf’s book “Vagabonding” changed the way I think, the way I travel, my outlook, my life.
Whether you like it or not, change is permanent. Things you start, have to finish. But that’s fine because when one thing comes to an end, it makes room for another, something new.
Although I have put my vagabonding life on hold for the moment, I leave here more passionate about life than I’ve ever been. I’ve learnt a lot, traveled a lot, grown a lot, made wonderful friends, and have experiences that I will cherish for the rest of my life.
Thank you to all those who read and contribute here. Good luck to all those beginning and/or on the vagabonding path. If there is anything I can help with, please feel free to email me at abha.malpani@gmail.com. Adios amigos!
I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence, I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for love. I felt in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in quiet life. — Leo Tolstoy, “Family Happiness”
The story of Chris “Alexander Supertramp” McCandless has inspired hundreds of vagabonders — Chris’ ideals of heading into the wilds, surviving on his own through hitchhiking, hiking, hunting, gathering, left many feeling overwhelmed with the loss of their own lives to the obscurity and drone of everyday money-making and idealism.
Jon Krakauer’s book, “Into the Wild” inspired a movie (of the same name), and I personally have encountered friend after friend along the road who cites Krakauer’s work as pivotal and seminal to their own life. My friend Colleen, with whom I traveled through Honduras and Guatemala last year, love it. I found it in the bookshelves of people who have opened their homes to me, in the traveling cases of rideshares who hopped into my car (glorified hitchhiking!), and even my own mother, who had never heard of it before, praised Chris’ ideals. ”He just wanted to live his own life, his own way,” she said.
Yet McCandless’ death, after hurling himself into Alaskan wilderness armed only with a light-gauge rifle and ten pounds of rice, made many people certain that he wasn’t showing proper respect for the nature he claimed to love. He was arrogant, they said, and so he died. The land is dangerous. The land deserves respect. Wandering deserves respect.
Wandering, vagabonding, call it what you want…it’s outside the realm of usual societal rules, so it requires different rules, rules of its own. We have to find or create those rules ourselves, because no-one will make them for us. We are creating a new world, albeit one that already exists in some ways, and a new way to be in it.
“Homicide, The Corner, The Wire, Generation Kill — these are travelogues of a kind, allowing Average Reader/Viewer to go where he otherwise would not. He loves being immersed in a new, confusing, and possibly dangerous world that he will never see. He likes not knowing every bit of vernacular or idiom. He likes being trusted to acquire information on his terms, to make connections, to take the journey with only his intelligence to guide him. Most smart people cannot watch most TV, because it has generally been a condescending medium, explaining everything immediately, offering no ambiguities, and using dialogue that simplifies and mitigates against the idiosyncratic ways in which people in different worlds actually communicate. It eventually requires that characters from different places talk the same way as the viewer. This, of course, sucks.
“There are two ways of traveling. One is with a tour guide, who takes you to the crap everyone sees. You take a snapshot and move on, experiencing nothing beyond a crude visual and the retention of a few facts. The other way to travel requires more time—hence the need for this kind of viewing to be a long-form series or miniseries, in this bad metaphor—but if you stay in one place, say, if you put up your bag and go down to the local pub or shebeen and you play the fool a bit and make some friends and open yourself up to a new place and new time and new people, soon you have a sense of another world entirely. We’re after this: Making television into that kind of travel, intellectually. Bringing those pieces of America that are obscured or ignored or otherwise segregated from the ordinary and effectively arguing their relevance and existence to ordinary Americans. Saying, in effect, This is part of the country you have made. This too is who we are and what we have built. Think again, motherfuckers.
“And the only difference between what we’re doing and a world traveler getting off the beaten path is that our viewers don’t really have to play the fool. They don’t even have to put their ass out of the sofa. They now have a sense of what is happening on a drug corner, or in a homicide unit, or inside a political campaign—and our content, if gently massaged to create drama, is nonetheless rooted in accurate reporting and experience.”
–TV writer-producer David Simon, interviewed in The Believer, August 2007
“I think the challenge is what it’s always been, which is to make the reader see a place, experience a place, smell the place, hear the voices. It’s like the great challenge in fiction, which is to persuade the reader that he or she is there in the place and seeing it. It’s quite a big challenge, but that’s what it is. It’s to make the place palpable. You know when you’re reading something like that.”
–Paul Theroux, World Hum interview, August 18, 2008
While the decision to take a round-the-world trip might be the exciting culmination of a lot of hard work and deep thought on your part, it might catch some of your friends and family off-guard. And for some people, it might seem like a totally bad idea even after they’ve had a chance to get used to it. If you’re lucky, the people in your life who think you’re making a giant mistake will be far outnumbered by the people who cheer you on, but what if they don’t?
BootsnAll member VicBC has been on the receiving end of some pretty negative feedback ever since he started telling people he was going to take four months off after graduating from high school to travel around Europe. Some of the comments he’s gotten include:
“Are you even thinking about the future? You’re going to be a light year behind everyone else that’s going to school.”
“Why not wait? You can still travel while in college or when you have a career.”
“Why waste 12 grand for just a short amount of happiness?”
VicBC’s not feeling pressured to change his mind based on this feedback, but is asking the BootsnAll membership whether it’s worth it to argue with these people or not. And if it’s worth trying to reason with them, what’s the best argument to use? You can add your thoughts to the thread on the BootsnAll boards – and while you’re there, check out the new look and feel of the BootsnAll Message Boards which just got unveiled this week!
