See Rolf Potts in person: Another Gadling connection at book culture

by Jamie Rhein on

As you’ve probably gathered we’ve geared up for a Rolf Potts extravaganza here at Gadling. Here’s just another plug for Potts, but more so a shout out to one of Gadling’s former bloggers who is bringing travel to your armchair through books.

Kelly Amabile, fellow world traveler and voracious reader –she created Gadling’s feature One for the Road–is combining those passions as the events manager at Book Culture, an independent book store in Manhattan. Considering that Kelly is a whiz at travel and books, who is more better for the job than Kelly? I’m thinking, no one. She’s gathered quite the line-up for October which is rapidly approaching.

For example, Rolf Potts is scheduled for October 21 at 7 p.m. He’ll be reading from his book, Marco Polo Didn’t Go There.

Also on the schedule are Stephanie Elizondo Griest who wrote the travel memoir, Mexican Enough (Oct. 8) and an encore with Rolf Potts on October 23. He’ll be appearing along with Pauline Frommer and Matt Gross to talk about how to make travel happen.

Whenever I read about events like this happening in Manhattan, oh, how I want to go there. If you do go, tell Kelly I said “Hi.”

Book Culture is on 112th Street and is a hot spot for browsing even if you can’t make one of the events. It’s an independent book store after all, and those are few and far between.

Nokia and Lonely Planet team up to bring guides to your phone

by Scott Carmichael on

Nokia has teamed up with Lonely Planet to bring their travel guides to select Nokia Mobile Phones.

Nokia phones with support for the free “Maps 2.0” application can purchase and download Lonely Planet guides directly to their phone. Each guide costs $13.99 which is slightly cheaper than their paper versions, which normally sell for around $18 each.

Lonely Planet currently has 100 different guides available for mobile use, with more on the way. By combining the GPS receiver built into many current Nokia phones, you can make the move from paper guides, to an advanced guide with turn by turn directions. Of course, for some people there is no replacement for a good old paper guide full of scribbled notes and bookmarks.

This is the second phone Lonely Planet has added mobile support for. Previously, they introduced a lineup of spoken phrase guides for the iPhone, it is however the first time they have made their popular guides available for a smartphone.

With more and more phones adding GPS receivers, it is probably only a matter of time until other phones get access to the guides, location based services are taking off in a huge way, and within the next few years it is expected that 50% of all new phones will have GPS built in.

To get Lonely Planet guides on your Nokia phone, you will have to install Maps 2.0, you can check whether your phone supports this here. To download a guide, simply open your maps application, click “extras”, then “guides”. Alternatively, you can download the Nokia maps loader program to your PC and install the guides locally. If you are traveling abroad, I highly recommend purchasing the guides you need on your PC, to save the insanely high data charges when you roam on an international network.

Source: Nokia press release

Great American Road Trip: Travel books for the road-3 of 4: So Many Enemies, so Little Time

by Jamie Rhein on

#3. So Many Enemies, So Little Time: An American Woman in All the Wrong Places–Elinor Burkett

When I chose this book as one of my road trip to Montana books, the title caught my attention. As an American woman, also hooked on travel, I wanted to delve into someone else’s experiences. What I found is a book that taught me much–always a delight when on the road.

Excerpt:

But as I trudged to school each day and ambled through the markets, I couldn’t find the face of hatred. I saw worry that a flood of Afghan refugees might flee north, washing extremists across the border. I heard fear that homegrown fundamentalists might be emboldened by the fires lighting Manhattan’s night. Mostly, I sensed the same resignation that had engulfed everyone I knew, all across the plane, that we were captives to forces we had not yet begun to dissect.

Elinor Burkett is a woman who is not afraid to take chances when she travels, but is not fool-hardy. As a journalist, she knows how to make and use her connections to help her access people and places.

When she and her husband Dennis traveled to Kyrgyzstan to live after she received a Fulbright to teach journalism at a college there, their purpose was to shake up their lives a bit so that they didn’t settle into complacency. They wanted some more adventures under their belt. After September 11, there was worry across the globe for what exactly that might mean, but the two of them decided to stay put.

Since I was pregnant living in India at the same time, wondering what my family and I should do when faced with a few of the same questions of safety, reading Burkett’s take on her decisions and what was happening in her world added depth to my own experiences.

Burkett’s book has several storyline threads. One of them is what it’s like to teach journalism in Kyrgyzstan when students do not have questioning authority is also part of their make-up. This also reminded me of my own working in another country experiences. I felt better about my own reactions after Burkett’s account.

Burkett tidily weaves together details about Kyrgyzstan’s history, politics and topography with her musings and observations about the people and her experiences about what it’s like to set up house there.

Along with her time in Kyrgyzstan, Burkett and her husband traveled to Afghanistan after 9/11 where she interviewed several women about the effects of living in Afghanistan. She also spent time in Iran, Iraq, Mongolia, China, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. As an aside, which really isn’t an aside, but one that Burkett doesn’t rest on too often is she is Jewish.

One of the things I really, really, really liked about this book is how much I learned and came to see the places Burkett traveled as those filled with engaging people who are nuanced and, for the most part, good. Burkett is has an authoritative voice that I trust. I believe that her impressions are not histrionic and ones developed to make a sale. This is one smart, on the ball woman who is not all full of herself.

I was also touched by how close she became with several of her students and they with her.

Burkett also doesn’t sugar coat how complicated it can be to be from one culture with different values trying to understand other cultures. She also sticks to her own convictions throughout, although this does not mean she changes her perceptions. It means she knows who she is and stays true.

For book 1 of 4, click here.

Book 2 of 4, click here.

Great American Road Trip: Travel books for the road. 2 of 4: Honeymoon with my Brother

by Jamie Rhein on

When I was picking out books to read on my road trip to Montana from Ohio and back, I wanted a mix of types so that each book would be distinct from each other. The titles also grabbed me. The premise of the second one I read is unusual. That also led me to check it out from one of the branches of the Columbus Public Library.

#2. Honeymoon With My Brother: a memoir — Franz Wisner.

Excerpt: Latin America during our winter, its summer, was the obvious next segment. But that was too far in advance. What if one of us fell in love with a tour guide from Thailand? What if we wanted to make some money teaching English in Indonesia?

What if Kurt and I want to strangle each other?

Franz Wisner, the author of this gem, was dumped by the love of his life right before his wedding day. It’s a long story. Wisner gives you the gist of the fiasco that broke his heart, along with his job shifts as a high-powered political lobbyist and fundraiser that led to his decision to pull up stakes and make major changes.

In the process of the storytelling, you find out specific details about how Wisner and his brother Kurt turned into world travelers. His brother, recently divorced, agreed to take an extended trip with Wisner in order to regain his own footing. This trip turned into two years.

One reason I liked this read is because Wisner doesn’t hide. Part of travel is the personality you bring to it. Wisner seems like a likable guy who falls in love with aspects of the 53 countries he and his brother visited. In the process of their journey, he is willing to let go of his notions about himself and others.

This book truly points out how travel not only connects you with the world, it connects you to yourself. The details about the countries they spent extended amounts of time are carefully observed. It’s one that made me want to hit the road immediately, even though I was already on the road in Montana and South Dakota when I was reading it.

Wisner’s story also elucidates just how terrific travel is for people who are in need of time to transition from one time of life to another, and shows just how easy it can be to get up and go once the wheels are in motion.

Yes, you can sell your house for example. It is possible to get rid of your car. It’s also possible to transition back to the U.S., or wherever you call home, when you need to. Having friends in various places helps and so does chucking guide books. Somewhere in the middle of their trip, they chucked guide books and traveled to places based on instinct and recommendations.

Because this book has a story line that continues throughout, this is one to read if you have time to read every day or so. It’s engaging, though, so I found it hard to put down.

According to the book’s jacket, Wisner is continuing with his writing and traveling.

For book 1 of 4, click here

Talking travel with the notorious Thomas Kohnstamm

by Jerry Guo on

Thomas Kohnstamm is the author of this year’s most talked about (i.e. controversial) travel memoir, Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?,The book centers around his recent days as a Lonely Planet writer on assignment in Brazil–shortly after its release earlier this year, press reports surfaced all around the world that he supposedly admitted to plagiarizing large chunks of his Lonely Planet write-ups and accepted freebies.

Here to set the record straight is the guy himself (oh, and he also happens to be an accomplished writer and traveler).

When’d you get your first passport stamp? Looking back, how do you feel about those earlier, carefree days of traveling? (Before you went pro)

United Kingdom (Gatwick Airport), summer 1989. As a kid, I traveled a lot with my family. We would take long overland trips through Europe and North Africa, staying in hostels, renting short-term apartments and camping. I did my first solo trip at age 17, worked as a volunteer interpreter at the Folklife Festival of the Pyrenees and then ended up traveling around Spain with a bunch of Germans in an old Mercedes ambulance. I loved travel then and I still love travel now, but, back then, things were on a slower pace so I could enjoy the details a bit more.
How’d you land your first LP gig? In your book, it seemed like you suddenly got an envelope while working on Wall Street inviting you to be a travel writer. But you must’ve paid your dues somehow?

In the book I discuss how I had written a phrasebook for Lonely Planet in the late 90s, right after I finished college. I studied Spanish and Portuguese since I was young and had been working as a guide in Costa Rica. I noticed that LP only had a single phrasebook for Latin American Spanish. There is a staggering difference between, say, Argentine Spanish, Cuban Spanish and different types of Central American Spanish, so I came up with the idea to write a specific Costa Rican Spanish Phrasebook. After selling the book to LP, my career took a few different turns, but I still had some contacts at LP when I later looked into travel writing gigs.

How much do you rely on other travel guides when you’re on assignment?

I didn’t rely on them at all during guidebook assignments. You have so much to do and so little time that you are mainly following the last edition of the Lonely Planet. I sometimes looked at other books to see if they had coverage of a town or some other destinations that seemed worth including, but usually LP was more comprehensive than the others in the first place. I don’t write guidebooks any more, but I would assume that blogs and wiki-travel sites are outpacing other guidebooks in terms of providing new information.

Why Lonely Planet? What do you see as the downsides of Fodor’s, Frommers, and Rough Guides?

I have said a number of times that I think that Lonely Planet makes some of the best guidebooks out there and that I still use LP. I was not out to get Lonely Planet. I was simply writing about my experience as a guidebook writer. That said, I see inherent flaws in all guidebooks. My point in my book is that guidebooks should not be followed slavishly or treated as “The Bible” as they are essentially subjective and much of their information is included on a somewhat arbitrary basis.

Lonely Planet still makes a big deal of their “we don’t accept freebies” policy. However, in your book, you seemed to play a bit fast-and-loose with that rule. What’s your take on the policy (NYT Travel section has a strict
“if-you’ve-ever-accepted-freebies-you-can-never-even-write-for-us rule”)? And can you clarify what happened with your LP assignments on that respect?

Lonely Planet states that their writers “don’t accept freebies in exchange for positive coverage.” That is different from “don’t accept freebies” period. That reads to me as no quid pro quo, which is the guidebook industry standard. People can be as sanctimonious as they like, but I know what really happens when guidebook writers are trying to cover so much ground with so little time and so little money. I am just the first to be honest about it. And, as Rick Steves said, if you stay in a hotel you may come away with a worse impression than you would have if you were just there for a ten-minute run through. Maybe you’d notice that there are cockroaches in the bathroom at night or that the train passes right behind the building every couple of hours.

I never set out to accept freebies or discounts. As a matter of fact, you will see in my book that I avoided them until I realized that I needed them in order to be able to complete the massive amount of research. Again, I have never made any sort of direct exchange of a freebie or discount for positive coverage and I say that explicitly in my book.

As for the NYT, I think that their policy is fair. Guidebooks and travel journalism are really different animals and the research processes can barely even be compared.

And just to get this out of the way, can you explain, for the last time to put this to rest, the allegations that you “plagiarized” chunks of your travel writing text. Did you rather mean that you based your research off other guides rather than literally cut-and-paste?

I never plagiarized anything in my life and I never claimed to plagiarize anything. I never based my research off of any other guides. All of the media controversy was based on a sensationalist article from an Australian tabloid that invented the idea that I had claimed to have “plagiarized and made up large sections of [my] books.”
The words “plagiarize” and “make up” were stripped out of a tongue-in-cheek sentence towards the end of my book. The full line reads:

I should be able to write some decent introductions and establish a sense of the place that conveys why a traveler might actually want to visit a destination. That’ll have to be enough-even if I don’t get all of the mundane opening hours and hotel prices right. When it comes to those details, what I can’t plagiarize, I can always make up.

Unfortunately, the journalist used the words like a print version of a sound bite and they were then repeated out of context across news wires and then the blogosphere. Talk about fabrication.

In writing this book, I was impressed by your descriptions of place and characters. How’d you capture that? Did you take extensive notes or did you rely on memory when you were typing out the manuscript?

I do have pretty solid notes, but I rely mainly on my memory. People can say what they will about me, but I do have a good memory.

How do you find that to-be-discovered “it” destination, the place that hasn’t been gushed over in a travel guide. Is your most important source local knowledge? Or is it Internet forums, blogs, etc?

I am a traditionalist on that front, so I use a combination of local knowledge and talking to other travelers on the road. I think that a big part of being a travel writer is being a bit of an extrovert and just talking to as many people as possible and keeping track of when you hear about the same place a few times from different people who aren’t connected to each other.

What are your must-carry travel accessories?

Chapstick, sunglasses, and, these days, (unfortunately) a laptop. I also like to stash some extra $20 bills here and there in case of emergencies.

Any tips to booking cheap flights? How do you go about it?

I usually use kayak.com. Am not much of an expert on cheap flights. I do my best to use miles when possible.

Can you give us a preview of your next book?

It is about a period of time when I thought that I had a Patagonian love child with the drummer of an all-female Chilean punk band. I tried to give up travel writing and step up to the responsibilities of international illegitimate fatherhood — with decidedly mixed results.