Photo of the Day (10.12.10)

by Alex Robertson Textor on

If you’re feeling the need for a little underground adventure, October is the perfect time of year to visit the Karst region in Slovenia. Ranking as one of the largest underground canyons in the world, Slovenia’s Škocjan Caves stretch for 5.8km at depths of 250m below ground. Why October? Travelers headed this way in the autumn months can skip the summer crowds and take leisurely tours before the unpleasant bitterness of winter sets in.

This rare picture was captured on the sly by Flickr user StrudelMonkey in the Škocjan’s final cavern. Here, visitors can peer at the Reka River which flows just 50m beneath the carefully marked paths. Taking photos isn’t permitted in the caves (hence the blur in the picture), so follow StrudelMonkey’s lead and turn your flash off if you want share your memories with the folks at home.

Do you have epic (or prohibited) tour photos shot from the hip? We want to see them! Upload your best to our Gadling Flickr pool and it could be our next Photo of the Day!

From World Cup to contemporary tourist destination: part one

by Alex Robertson Textor on

The World Cup is first and foremost a sporting event, though it’s also a chance for national brands to be disseminated widely, and for a sense of shared excitement to gather around the countries competing. No country has the opportunity to launch an ambitious branding effort like the host country, of course, and South Africa has done a good job drumming up interest in its people, history, and sights.

The next step, at least for anyone interested in tying an increased national profile to prospective tourist revenue, is to motivate people to actually visit the countries in question. Following, one hotel or resort each from countries selected from World Cup Groups A, B, C, and D ideal for putting their country’s modern (and in most cases relatively reasonably-priced) foot forward.

Group A. Mexico: Hotel Básico, Playa del Carmen.

Hotel Básico is minimalist yet completely Mexican in spirit, a blending of edginess and warmth. The tourism portrait of Mexico doesn’t usually extend to contemporary cool. This is a shame, especially given Mexico’s strong modernist bona fides. Hotels as bold as Básico go some distance toward rectifying the impression. Doubles from $178.

Group B. Argentina: Home Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires.

There are pricier and cushier hotels in Buenos Aires, but none gathers the ridiculous cool of post-economic crisis Buenos Aires like Home. Décor is chic and fresh, and the location in ultra-hip Palermo is perfect for stylish city slickers. Doubles from $130.

Group C: Slovenia: Nebesa, Livek.

The marriage of modernity and mountains is wonderfully center-stage in Slovenia. Nebesa, from its mountain perch in the tiny village of Livek on the Italian border, gathers this Slovenian tradition. The views are extraordinary (see above) and the houses are perfectly executed. Houses for two from €210 per night.

Group D: Germany: Arte Luise Kunsthotel, Berlin.

Berlin, in the immortal words of its mayor Klaus Wowereit, is “poor but sexy.” Germany’s most electrifying city isn’t just sexy and poor. It’s also remarkably easy on the wallet for visitors, and happily this fact extends to the city’s hotel stock. The Arte Luise Kunsthotel, located in the exciting Mitte ‘hood, features artist-decorated rooms in a range of themes. Double rooms from €79.

(Image: Flickr/Andrea Musi)

Trade Mocked

by Andrew Evans on

You were a cheerleader, you dated a cheerleader, or you hated the cheerleaders. As I recall, that’s how high school worked.

Thanks to travel PR, that same primeval paradigm lives on long after graduation. That miniskirts-shouting-slogans thing still works, whether you’re a used car salesman, Miley Cyrus on VH1 or the tourist board of a small Balkan nation. When it comes to selling your destination in today’s busy world of busy people, a country’s name just isn’t enough–just like school spirit, you need colors, a pep band, a mascot, a brand and most important–a cheer.

It’s tragic but true: tourist boards don’t trust their country’s name to inspire appropriate thoughts in your brain. Toponyms are too open-ended and too untrustworthy–also, way too obvious. For example, what’s the first thing that pops into your head when I say . . . Monte Carlo? How about Australia? The Bahamas? Kuwait? The Gambia?

Whatever you’re thinking, it’s not enough. Tourist boards want you to choose their destination over all others, then allocate all of your vacation days to them and then come spend your money on very specific things–like miniature golf by the sea or hot air balloon rides across the prairie. In short, they want your school spirit so much they’re churning out cheers to fill up all the Swiss cheese holes in your mental map of the world.

Like a good cheer, a good destination slogan is simple and so memorable it sticks in your head like two-sided tape. Sex sells, but then so does love: “Virginia is for Lovers”, Hungary offers visitors “A Love for Life”, Albania promises “A New Mediterranean Love”, while the highlighted “I feel Slovenia” spells out sweetly “I Feel Love”. Meanwhile, Bosnia & Herzegovina call themselves “the Heart Shaped Land” and Denmark’s logo is a red heart with a white cross. Colombia and Dubai have red hearts in their logo. Everybody else uses sunshine.
There is a direct correlation between sunshine deprivation and travelers with disposable income–sunny places sell, which is why Maldives is “the Sunny Side of Life”, Sicily says “Everything else is in the shade”, Ethiopia quizzically boasts “13 Months of Sunshine”, Portugal is “Europe’s West Coast”, and Spain used to be “Everything Under the Sun”. Spain was also the first country ever to have a logo-the splashy red sun painted by Joan Miró in 1983. Some destination logos work–like the black and red “I LOVE NY” design of Milton Glaser that’s been around ever since the 70s. Others fail to grasp the spirit of a place (cough, Italia). Reducing one’s country to a crazy font and some cheesy clip art often detracts from that country’s best assets. Like nature.

When chasing the crunchy yuppie granola suburbanite dollar on vacation, you’ve gotta roll out Nature and promise them the kind of purity that lacks from their daily life. British Virgin Islands claims “Nature’s Little Secrets” while Belize counterclaims with “Mother Nature’s Best Kept Secret”. Switzerland urges us to “Get Natural”, Poland is “The Natural Choice”, Iceland is “Pure, Natural, Unspoiled”, Ecuador is Life in a Pure State, “Pure Michigan” is just as pure, Costa Rica is “No Artificial Ingredients”, and like a clothing tag that makes you feel good, New Zealand is simply “100% Pure”. New Zealand also wants us to believe that they’re the “youngest country on earth” but that’s pushing it. The youngest country on earth is actually Kosovo (Born February 2008)–so young they’re still working on their slogan.

And there’s a tough one–how do you sell a country that’s just poking its head out from under the covers of war and bloodshed? Kosovo’s big bad next-door neighbor Serbia asks us frankly to “Take a New Look at Your Old Neighbor”; “It’s Beautiful–It’s Pakistan” steers clear of the conflict, Colombia owns up to its knack for kidnapping by insisting, “The Only Risk is Wanting to Stay”, and Vietnam nudges our memories away from the past and towards “The Hidden Charm” of today.

Our nostalgia for simpler, better, pre-tourist times invokes our most romantic notions about travel: Croatia is “The Mediterranean as it Once Was”, Tahiti consists of “Islands the Way they Used to Be”, and Bangladesh employs a kind of reverse psychology to insist we “Come to Bangladesh, Before the Tourists.” Such slogans of unaffectedness mirror the push for national validation by tourism, where actual authenticity is second to perceived authenticity, hence Malaysia is “Truly Asia”, Zambia is “The Real Africa”, and the Rocky Mountain States make up “The Real America”. Greece is “The True Experience” and Morocco is “Travel For Real”. Everybody wants to be legit.

Countries without the certified organic label try merely to stupefy us: Israel “Wonders”, Germany is “Simply Inspiring”, Chile is “Always Surprising”, Estonia is “Positively Surprising”, “Amazing Thailand” amazes, and Dominica claims to “Defy the Everyday”. To that same surprising end, Latin America loves trademarking their exclamation points (see ¡Viva Cuba!, Brazil’s one-word essay “Sensational!” and El Salvador’s “Impressive!”)

Where punctuated enthusiasm falls short, countries might confront the traveler with a challenge or a dare. Jamaica projects the burden of proof on its tourists by claiming “Once You Go You Know”, Peru asks that we “Live the Legend”, Canada insists we “Keep Exploring”, South Africa answers your every question with a smiley “It’s Possible”. Meanwhile, Greenland sets an impossibly high bar with “The Greatest Experience”.

Working the totality of a country’s experience into a good slogan is a challenge that often leads to open-ended grandstanding: “It’s Got to be Austria” might be the answer to any question (and sounds better when spoken with an Austrian accent). Next-door Slovakia is the “Little Big Country”, insisting that size is second to experience. Philippines offers “More than the Usual” and small, self-deprecating Andorra confesses, “There’s Just So Much More” (I think what they meant to say is, “come back please”). Really big numbers carries the thought even further: Papua New Guinea is made up of “A Million Different Journeys”; Ireland brightens with “100,000 Welcomes”.

When all else fails, aim for easy alliteration, as in “Enjoy England“, “Incredible India“, “Mystical Myanmar”, and the “Breathtaking Beauty” of Montenegro. (For more on the correlation between simplistic phrases and high mental retention, See Black Eyed Peas-Lyrics).

The point of all this is that today, the internet is our atlas and Google is our guidebook. It’s how we travel, how we think about travel and how we plan our travel. Punch in a country like Tunisia and you’re greeted with a dreamy curly-cue phrase like “Jewel of the Mediterranean”–Type in next-door neighbor Algeria and you get a glaring State Department warning saying “Keep Away.” In a scramble for those top ten search results, destinations compete with a sea of digital ideas that pre-define their tourist appeal. It’s why we’ll never find that page proclaiming Iran “The Land of Civilized and Friendly People” but why a simple “Dubai” turns up Dubai Tourism in first place, along with their moniker “Nowhere Like Dubai” (which should win some kind of truth in advertising prize.)

That aggressive, American-style marketing has taken over the billion-dollar travel industry is obvious. Nobody’s crying over the fact that we sell destinations like breakfast cereal–that countries need a bigger and brighter box with a promised prize inside in order to lull unassuming tourist shoppers into stopping, pulling it off the shelf, reading the back and eventually sticking it in their cart. I guess the sad part is how the whole gregarious exercise limits travel and the very meaning of travel. By boiling down a country into some bland reduction sauce of a slogan, we cancel out the diversity of experience and place, trade wanderlust for jingoism, and turn our hopeful worldview into a kind of commercial ADHD in which we suddenly crave the Jersey Shore like a kid craves a Happy Meal.

Nobody’s ever asked me to join their tourist board focus group, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have my own opinions and tastes. For instance, my daily reality is a stereo cityscape of car alarms and jackhammers. Any country that simply placed the word “Quiet” or “Peaceful” in lower-case Times New Roman, 24-point font white type in the upper right hand corner of a double-truncated landscape spread–well, I’d be there in a heartbeat. Better yet–how about a one-minute TV commercial of total silence. (“Oh, wow honey, look!–that’s where I wanna go.”)

This is probably why I’ve never been in a focus group. For all the focus on authenticity and reality, I find most tourism slogans lacking in both. For the most part, they are limiting and unoriginal, easily dropped into any of the above categories. Even worse, today’s slogans challenge actual truths gained through travel experience. One day spent in any place offers a lifetime of material for long-lasting personal travel slogans. My own favorites include Russia (“Still Cold”), Turkey (“Not Really Europe At All”), England (“Drizzles Often”), Orlando (“Cheesy as Hell”), and Ireland (“Freakin’ Expensive”).

As a writer, I must argue against the cheerleaders and in favor of words–the more words we attach to a destination the better the sell. I think it’s safe to assume that Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia has done more for Argentina tourism than any of their own slogans. Similarly, Jack London gives props to Alaska, Mark Twain mystifies us with the Mississippi, and Rudyard Kipling keeps sending people to India. All four authors wrote about love, nature, and sunshine. They wrote long books filled with enthusiasm and punctuated with exclamation marks. They made us fall in love and yearn for places we never saw or knew.

No matter how many millions get spent on tourist slogans, today’s trademarked PR phraseology has generally failed to hit the mark. Perhaps they’ll make us rethink a place–reconsider a country we’d somehow looked over, but can a two or three word slogan ever touch us in that tender way, make us save up all our money, pack our bags and run away?

I don’t think so.

Hitchhiker’s Requiem

by Andrew Evans on

My father taught me to never, ever hitchhike because I would die. He illustrated the point with dinner table horror stories starring chopped up teenage bodies strewn along the highway and acid-crazed madmen speeding across America at 120 mph: “Those are the kind of people who pick up hitchhikers.”

I followed his advice until I turned 18, which–in this country–is the legal age to stop following your parents’ advice. I don’t remember my first time, though. I was probably in Europe and it just happened–I stuck out my thumb and got a free ride. It was so easy and I was so hooked. Others chased drugs and girls but I chased cars. Free travel is addictive.

I started small and safe, catching lifts with blonde families in minivans in the Benelux. I branched out and grew bolder in places like Sardinia, Poland, and the Sahara–I shrugged, pointed and thumbed my way across the map. I crossed foreign borders in the backseats of strangers, I rode shotgun in diesel-farting trucks and talked my way onto fishing boats that ferried me between islands. Once, when stranded up in the English Cotswolds, I managed to flag down enough cars to carry myself and ten grad school friends all the way home. I became a legend among my worrywart peers.

I devised a “hitch rate” for countries–the average number of cars that passed by before I got a lift. France has a better hitch rate than Spain, Spain better than Italy, Italian Switzerland worse than German Switzerland. Russians always pick up, as long as you have cash. Scandinavia is surprisingly good. The smaller the island, the better the hitching–unless it’s a British colony. And then there’s stuck-up bourgeois countries like Slovenia, where I waited 2 hours and walked over 10 miles before getting a lift from a bleach-blonde Austrian man who had crossed the border to buy a vacuum cleaner.

It wasn’t always movie montage bliss. I’ve had my fair share of scares:There was the self-proclaimed, card-carrying terroriste in Corsica with his pair of hound dogs atop a pair of loaded shotguns in the backseat. I played it cool, showed great interest in the Corsican liberation movement and nonchalantly pointed to an upcoming crossroads where he could drop me off. He drove past it, turned up unpaved roads that winded higher and higher into the lost mountains of the interior. I panicked and mentally practiced a Dukes-of-Hazard exit from the moving car window but there was no need. Le terroriste only wanted to show me the sunset from his village before driving me on to the next larger town.

There was the Ukrainian sailor in Crimea who rode his little Lada like a speedboat, chain-smoking with all windows rolled up, chewing and puffing on his cigarettes and conversing wildly, dropping inches of grey ash each time he shifted gears. Also, maybe he was a little bit drunk.

And I won’t edit out all the pervy creeps out there, like the beady-eyed, fifty-something French baker who wanted a male friend on this, his day off. Although, the one good thing about creeps is that most of them look like creeps. Hitching is all about judging a book by its cover and I’ve probably refused as many rides as I’ve accepted. I also accept that my own occasional creepiness has worked against me.

Like the time in Polynesia–sweat-soaked, red-faced and unshaven–when I stuck out a thumb and waited hours before getting a lift from a nice old lady in a flowery dress. I promptly fell asleep in her car (oh no, was I snoring?). Twenty minutes later she gently woke me at my destination. I thanked her and wiped the drool from my cheek, feeling like a numskull.

Hitching humbles you and makes you grateful for others. As I got older and wiser and less broke, I stopped taking so many lifts and started giving them.

In Costa Rica I picked up two Nicaraguans-a young mother and daughter who worked illegally in the banana plantations. In Zimbabwe–where a car with gas in the tank is viewed much like a free bus–I managed to fit 15 people in the back of an open truck. My passengers knocked on the window when they wanted to get off, then clapped their hands in thanks. In New Zealand, I picked up two Eurokids at the tail end of their gap year. They pretended everything was cool but displayed classic symptoms of backpacker poverty. They were out of cash and hungry with three more days before their return flight home. I drove them all the way to Christchurch and gave them dinner, then watched from the rearview mirror as they set up their sleeping bags under a bridge. Every true traveler needs to be broke on the road at least once. Everyone else is a poseur.

Like in Iceland when I picked up this soaking pair of entitled German campers with blonde dreadlocks and matching nose rings. They complained about the lack of space in my rental car, dripped their icky hippy wetness all over the backseat and demanded a monetary contribution for their organic, low-impact lifestyle. I offered them a fistful of blue pixie stix and dropped their ungrateful, low-impact asses off in a rainy parking lot. Kids these days; they got no respect.

There are no rules to hitchhiking but there are definite social graces–a delicate etiquette between giver and receiver. In America, that relationship of trust was broken long ago.

I don’t need to spell out all the gruesome ways people have been killed hitchhiking or giving lifts–I have a word limit and besides, you can read it all on Wikipedia, right under “serial killer”. Basically, a lot of people have died hitchhiking in America. It’s just one out of many head-shaking United States’ ironies–that in spite of our great freedom and multiple first amendment rights, imitating On the Road is against the law in most states because you might die. Meanwhile in “repressed” Europe, hitchhiking is legal, a rite of passage and the latest trend in charity fundraisers, kind of like our lamer walk-a-thons but way more fun.

Forget the economic woes, endless war and healthcare mess of the news: The real sign of America’s troubles is that Rousseau’s social contract has failed at this most basic level-between hitcher and driver, lift and lifted.

There’s a hundred ways to philosophize this phenomenon: As a car culture, all respectable Americans own cars or have friends with cars–hitchhikers are Americans without cars and therefore undesirable vagrants of ill character. Or that Americans prize freedom of expression above quality of expression (see American Idol), which inevitably leads to victory of the lowest, loudest element. Whatever the reasoning, something bad happened in my country that turned hitchhiking into a vehicle for death.

I never hitchhike in America, nor do I give lifts to strangers. Maybe my dad’s stories still haunt me, maybe I know better now, and maybe I have my own stories to tell: things that I’ve read in the paper, melodramatic TV newscasts, horrible stuff that’s happened during my own lifetime.

As the English say, it’s a pity really . . . how we’ve squandered this innocence, how we’ve closed the open road just a little bit, how our unfettered wanderlust is lost to precaution and cautionary tales. The American fairy tale of hitchhiking hovers on the verge of mythology–a belief rooted in history that might inspire young travelers, but nonetheless remains a kind of modern fiction.

It’s a pity really because some of my happiest travel moments occurred while hitchhiking. Like getting a ride in Scotland on some long rocky isle in the Outer Hebrides. A farmer motioned me into the back of his pickup and I sprawled out across a pile of freshly chopped logs. Everything smelled like sea and pinewood; the ocean wind whipped my hair wildly. I watched the world pull away from me, backwards, the red-brown moorland swept up into high crags and then over the edge of broken sea cliffs. To this day, this is how I remember Scotland: from the back of a truck.

And that’s still the way I like my travel: from the back of a truck.

Related:
* One man’s search for the best pizza in Naples, Italy, the birthplace of the pizza.
* Another man’s exploration into rediscovering a city he thought he knew completely.

Or watch the guys visit the “top of New York” and dive into the spiciest food the city that never sleeps offers. (Spoiler alert: Only one of them ends up sick, in the bathroom.)

Ask and ye shall receive… beer glasses – Souvenir tip

by Gadling Staff on

I enjoy collecting beer glasses for national brews that I sample when traveling, but tracking down stores that sell the glasses is time-consuming and logistically difficult, if not impossible.

However, on a recent trip to Slovenia, while enjoying a locally-brewed Lasko Pivo, I asked my bartender where I might be able to buy a glass featuring the logo. After hearing about my collection, the pub owner offered to give me two glasses of his own.

Now I ask all my bartenders the same question — more often than not, they are happy to help me build my collection, at no charge.