The tourist vs. traveler one-upmanship game

by Sean McLachlan on

Forget beautiful sights and friendly locals, the real joy of travel is proving you’re a rugged, independent traveler and the rest of the backpackers at your whites-only youth hostel are simple tourists. Here’s a game you can play to determine which of your travel companions rivals are worthy travelers and which are embarrassing poseurs who should really have stayed at home. The rules are simple: first make sure you aren’t automatically disqualified, then each person goes through the list, adds up their score, and compares it with the other players on the table at the end.

Automatic disqualifiers
* Going with a package tour
* Staying at a hotel with more than one star
* Having anything other than a backpack as luggage

Points
* Using the Lonely Planet: zero points (everyone else does)
* Not using the Lonely Planet: -10 points
* Traveling third class to save a dollar: +10 points
* Spending an extra two bucks to travel in first class: -10 points
* Hitching: +15 points
* Having a cool piece of gear nobody else does: +5 points
* Not giving to beggars: +5 points
* Shouting at beggars: +15 points
* Not buying something you really want because you couldn’t haggle the price down another three cents: +5 points
* Lecturing a fellow foreigner with material you learned from the Lonely Planet: +5 points
* Lecturing a local with material you learned from the Lonely Planet: +10 points
* Teaching a fellow foreigner a word in the local language: +1 per word
* Loudly correcting their pronunciation: +2 per word, +5 if you don’t know them and you’re shouting across a restaurant
* Dressing in traditional local clothing: +5 points
* Dressing in traditional local clothing even though everyone under 50 wears jeans and a t-shirt: +10 points
* Visiting more countries than your opponent: +1 per country
* Staying at a cheaper hostel than your opponent: +5 points
* Staying at a cheaper hostel than your opponent, and it serves awesome pizza: +10 points
* Being American: -5 points, unless you have a Canadian flag on your backpack
* Admitting your parents are paying for the trip: -5 points

Results table
You and your opponent add up your points and check the table below. If you have:* 20 or more points than your opponent: You win!!! You’re a real traveler and they’re just a common tourist. You don’t get to brag, though, because they’re beneath your notice.

* 10 to 19 more points than your opponent: You are a real traveler and they’re a wannabe traveler. Congratulations, you get the right to lecture them!

* Fewer than 10 more points than your opponent: Same as above, but don’t travel with them because they might win the next time you play. Sneer, and then never speak to them again.

* Equal number of points: Invite them to travel with you and play again. Do anything you can to beat them!
* 1 to 9 points fewer than your opponent: Start lying to make up points.

* 10 to 19 points fewer than your opponent: Move out of the hostel in the middle of the night and go somewhere your opponent has already visited. That way you can start again with your reputation intact.

* 20 or more points fewer than your opponent: Hang your head in shame and book a package tour.

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Lonely Planet’s 2010 Anthology: call for submissions

by Don George on

Lonely Planet has just asked me to edit their annual literary travel anthology for this year. I edited the first three — The Kindness of Strangers, By the Seat of My Pants, and Tales from Nowhere — and each time it was a tremendous challenge and pleasure. One of the things I’ve loved best has been publishing a mix of authors spanning the spectrum from best-selling to never-been-published-before. I think this has added to the richness of each book.

The title this year is A Moveable Feast: Life-Changing Food Encounters Around the World. The fundamental premise is that the food factor unites every traveler and every journey. Wherever we are, we all need to eat. And because we need to eat, food becomes one of the traveler’s fundamental fascinations – and pathways into a place. On the road, food nourishes us not only physically, but intellectually, emotionally and spiritually.

I believe every traveler has some unforgettable food story – a larger-than-life feast, a mind-bending immersion in a rural market, the homemade, heart-opening treat shared by a stranger on a claptrap train, an adventure on the trail of an edible exotic. In all these tales, food is an agent of transformation, taking travelers to a deeper and more lasting understanding of and connection with a people, a place and a culture. And if they’re really lucky, it tastes good too!

A Moveable Feast will present true travelers’ tales set around the world. The theme threading through them will be the inimitable ability of food to inspire our serendipities, satiate our senses, and enlighten our journeys – in short, to transform the planet into a moveable feast for mind, soul, and stomach.

I’m looking for original, unpublished pieces of exceptionally high literary quality. Length is from 1,000 to 3,000 words. Deadline is April 19.

If you have a great food story to tell, email it to me at don DAWT george AT sbcglobal DAWT net, with Food Anthology in the subject line. All submissions are on speculation.

If you wish to see what kinds of stories have been published in the three previous Lonely Plant anthologies, pick up copies of The Kindness of Strangers, By the Seat of My Pants, and Tales from Nowhere.

A Moveable Feast will be published this fall.

Good luck!

[Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/moody75/ / CC BY-SA 2.0]

South by Southeast: Avoiding the hordes

by Jeremy Kressmann on

I had high hopes for my arrival in Hoi An. This historic city, set along Vietnam’s Central Coast, has all the ingredients to be the perfect destination: a charming downtown lined with ancient Chinese buildings, a picturesque waterfront setting and a unique culinary history. So it was a shock when I stepped off my bus to find the city the epitome of a tourist trap, stuffed to the gills with tour groups, souvenir hawkers and pushy tailor shops. Hoi An, in my eyes, sucked. What happens then when travelers come to Southeast Asia with visions of the exotic and come away with a bad taste in their mouth? And how can we manage our expectations to best experience this fascinating destination?

As it turns out, increasingly we have to share the deserted beaches and charming historic quarters of our dreams with other visitors – and there are a lot of us these days. According to Vietnam’s Tourist board, the country received 3.7 million foreign visitors in 2009. Thailand is even higher, welcoming almost 14 million tourists. These travelers have left an unmistakable footprint, altering the places we love, the food we eat and the way we’re seen by locals. This influx of visitors (and their resulting impact) will only increase in the years ahead.

Yet despite the rise in tourists, Southeast Asia can be and still is the exotic destination of our dreams. You just need to come armed with a few simple strategies to maximize your enjoyment. Keep reading below to see how.Leave your expectations at home
Our idea of places we’ve never visited rarely matches with what we find when we get there. For Southeast Asia in particular, a steady diet of movies, books and glossy travel magazines have conditioned us to hold unreasonably high expectations. We come in thinking we’ll walk out the airport doors in Bangkok and plant ourselves on the beach beside a row of postcard-worthy palm trees. Instead we find superhighways and rows of 7-11’s.

Remember that people live in our fantasy destinations and they have everyday lives just like you and me. Revise your idea of what is and is not worth seeing. Sometimes watching Thais hang out at the mall can be just as interesting as a Buddhist temple.

Reconsider the “must-sees”
Hoi An is truly one of Southeast Asia’s most unique, one-of-a-kind destinations. But with that “wow factor” comes huge crowds and overwhelming popularity. To beat the tour buses you need to be flexible. Can you schedule your trip during an off-peak time of the year? Maybe you could get up early in the morning before the tourist hordes have descended? You can even consider alternate destinations that provide a similar atmosphere but with less fuss. Don’t be the guy that’s “too cool” to see Angkor Wat, but a little creative planning will make your visit far more enjoyable.

Get out of your guidebook
Guidebooks rule. I love the background information, the helpful maps and the suggested sleeping, eating and activities sections. But when you follow Lonely Planet to the letter, you’re following a well worn trail. It’s not a bad trail, mind you, it’s simply a path followed by thousands of other travelers each year. The prices you pay will be higher, there will be more travelers around you, and merchants will often view you as just another backpack with a giant dollar sign on it.

Don’t be afraid to skip the guidebook suggestions and follow your own instincts. You’ll often find some of the best adventures (and lower prices) off on your own. Not to mention less tourists.

Gadling writer Jeremy Kressmann is spending the next few months in Southeast Asia. You can read other posts on his adventures “South by Southeast” HERE.

Nokia Green Explorer — discover a new way to be an eco-friendly traveler

by Scott Carmichael on

During my visit to the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show, I came across an interesting eco-friendly product from mobile phone maker Nokia. Their “Green Explorer” site is part destination guide, part eco-friendly guide, and part mobile guide service. The site covers all continents, and offers content from Lonely Planet, the WWF, UNESCO, routeRANK and TripSketch.

The end result of these 5 companies working together is a single “portal” of eco-friendly travel information, user submitted guides and photo galleries of each destination. The guides cover the basic things you’d expect, but adds information like the UNESCO world heritage locations, WWF eco facts and a green trip planner which allows you to calculate the most eco-friendly way to get there.

Because the site is part of the Nokia OVI labs, you can even tag locations and routes, and save them to your Nokia phone. Combined with the recently announced free navigation service and Lonely Planet guides from Nokia, you can turn your phone into an eco-friendly GPS unit. Add the Nokia CO2 offset application and you can create a pretty impressive green travel companion.

The user submitted content on the Green Explorer site is pretty limited, but the site is still quite new (and in beta phase). Once more people start adding their own content, the Nokia Green Explorer has the potential to turn into something very impressive.

Up next in airplane design: Donut planes?

by Grant Martin on

Should the airline industry begin designing donut shaped airplanes? It’s a suggestion posed by the folks over at Lonely Planet, who after running an informal survey discovered that over 60% of respondents preferred sitting in the aisle over the window on an airplane.

Problem is, few seats on an aircraft are actually adjacent to a window. And that’s where the crafty design comes in.

In jest, LP put together a few different concepts to engineer more window-room into an aircraft. Their most adventurous? The donut shaped airplane, where a hole in the middle of the body allows passengers on the inside of the cabin to look down (and across) out into the blue sky.

Another option proposed was the glass bottomed aircraft, so that all passengers can see directly below them at all times. Yikes.

Admittedly LPs sampling for their study is probably a bit skewed — anyone reading their guides or site is probably already more adventurous than three quarters of the world (and thus might have a higher probability to stare out the window) but the survey is an interesting study in “what if.” For now, passengers will have to settle with watching the nose and belly cam of their aircraft on the right In Flight Entertainment.

You can check out the designs crafted by LP over at their travel blog.