2008 Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award Winners

by Abha Malpani on


The 2008 Society of American Travel Writers Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition recently announced its winners. In its 24th year running, the competition attracted 1,356 entries in 24 categories from which 81 winners were selected. The competition, named after American writer and traveler Lowell Thomas, is today considered to be one of the most prestigious awards in the world of travel journalism. The entries were judged by members of the Missouri School of Journalism Faculty.

National Geographic and the Boston Globe took most of the awards, and freelance writer/photographer Christopher P. Baker won the Lowell Thomas travel journalist of the year. Other than him, and bronze winner of the same category — Sarah Wildman, all other winners are part of established travel titles such as the Miami Herald, the Chicago Tribune, the Globe and Mail, the New York Times, and a bunch of other American news titles.

You can find the list of gold winners with relevant links to their stories at the LA Times Daily Deal travel blog; the LA Times won a gold for the best travel section. A list of all the winners (gold, silver, and bronze, across all categories can be found on the Society of American Travel Writers website.

So, if you’re looking to read some good travel-writing, spend some time going through the links of the winners. The full list of winners has the titles of the winning stories so you can dig them up to read. I thought I would go through them all and give you my top three, but there are just too many good ones! Perhaps a good time-spend idea for a Sunday afternoon.

Three ways to capture sense of place in a travel story

by Rolf Potts on

In my last post I mentioned how I spoke with Thomas Fox Averill‘s writing students at Washburn University — and specifically about how you can use travel experiences to improve your “sense of place” descriptions, in fiction as well as nonfiction. Of course, mere travel isn’t the only way to improve your sense-of-place writing chops — it’s also useful to use research information and creative juxtaposition to enliven your descriptions of place. From the pages of Marco Polo Didn’t Go There, here are three strategies and examples for creating a stronger feeling of place in a story:

From Chapter 9: Evoking sense of place using direct description and contrasts

“Driving along the desolate and gorgeous Sandover Highway northeast of Alice Springs, there are only two sure indicators that life exists in this parched red-orange landscape. One is the curious ubiquity of pink cockatoos, which dart out of the bush and swoop over the Land Cruiser, occasionally exploding into the grill in a suicidal puff of pastel feathers. The other is an abundance of junked cars — sun-bleached Ford Falcons and rusty station wagons that have been abandoned at the side of the road by Aborigines going to or coming from their isolated homes in the outback. In the heat of the afternoon, when the horizon shudders like a mirage and towering dust devils swirl across the highway, this place can feel like the end of the world. Perhaps seized by irony or optimism, the German immigrants who tried to settle this area in the 1920s named it Utopia.”

From Chapter 12: Evoking sense of place using historical context, description, and sense of time

“Compared to the marquee islands of the Cyclades — Santorini, Ios, Mykonos — Sifnos doesn’t have much of a reputation. According to Herodotus, the Classical Era gold and silver mines on this 30 square-mile island made it the richest in the Aegean; a century later, Sifnos won notoriety as the site where the Spartans met with the Persians to plot against Alexander the Great. For the most, part, however, Sifnos has existed as a nondescript suburb of an island, with 2000 or so inhabitants, known more for its poets and pottery than political or geographical distinction. During Ottoman rule, the Turks never bothered sending a garrison to the island, and though pirates periodically haunted the Cyclades, the patron saint of Sifnos, Panaghia Chryssopighi, is best known for protecting the island against grasshoppers. “Despite such lack of distinction, however, my boat-mates and I immediately fall in love with Sifnos. The tourist crowds have left with high season, and we have the island mostly to ourselves. Renting motorcycles, we cruise up intricately terraced valleys to the central plateau, where the houses of Apollonia town lay scattered like big white dice among blue-domed churches and olive groves. We wander out to the far coast and swim on empty beaches under ridges dotted with almond trees and clumps of wild juniper. We explore the mazelike alleyways in the hilltop fortress of Kastro, where bright pink bougainvillea creeps over shuttered windows, and stray cats blink in the sunlight. In the evening, we sit outdoors at wooden restaurant tables and dine on tzatziki, olives, stuffed peppers, lamb, and local white wine. After dark, we hike up to the empty monasteries overlooking the harbor, where we listen to the sound of the wind and the tinkling of goat bells. One day on Sifnos stretches into two in this manner, and two days stretch into three.”

From Chapter 10: Evoking sense of place using the people who populate that place

“The best belly dancing in Egypt, it is said, costs $50 a show and can be found at five-star hotels like the Meridien Le Caire or the Parisienne. At the Palmyra club, which is within walking distance of the Sultan Hotel, admission is about $1.50. The performance value (I suspect) is calibrated accordingly. “When our disheveled traveler posse arrives from the Sultan to take a table in the back of the Palmyra, a man in a djellaba and two women in chadors are happily shaking their moneymakers on the dance floor. At first I think this is a prelude to some kind of Islamic-themed striptease, until I realize that these people are just overzealous customers. The real dancer — a big-haired, large-breasted girl in a faux snakeskin jumpsuit — is at the back of the stage, idly joking with the accordion player. As my eyes get used to the darkness, I take in the surroundings. The club features tall ceilings and textured rock walls, accessorized with red curtains. If the lighting were improved and the velvety curtains replaced with, say, country knickknacks, this place could easily pass for a family restaurant in Minnetonka, Minnesota. “The crowd, however, is decidedly non-Middle America: Bedouins in red-checkered kaffiyehs and long gowns wave 5-pound notes (each about $1.45) at the edge of the dance floor; Egyptian office stiffs with wrinkled neckties leap up from their tables to clap along with the music; fat men with thin mustaches sit alone in corners, sweat stains growing out from their armpits. The band looks straight out of a David Lynch movie: the melancholy lute player who blinks and stares at the floor as he strums; the grinning, leather-faced bongo drummer who wears brown pants over white, patent-leather shoes; the keyboardist who stops playing in the middle of the song to light a cigarette. The music is rhythmic, dissonant, deafening. “Eventually, the girl in the snakeskin jumpsuit starts to dance again, humming to the music into a cordless mike. After 30 minutes of this, she yields the stage to a dull-eyed blond with feathered hair and a sequined evening gown. This new dancer is so amorphously plump that her rear end seems to start just below her neck. As she dances, the slightest wiggle sends her sequined extremities into a gelatinous fury of motion. For those of us at the Sultan table, the effect is mesmerizing and somewhat disturbing. The Egyptian men, however, go nuts, shouting along to the music and periodically jumping onto the stage to bust a few dance moves and shower the blond with 1-pound (30-cent) notes.”

Taiwan’s road signs will make more sense next year

by Jamie Rhein on

When I lived in Taiwan, I normally didn’t have a clue where I was going. The signage was not particularly helpful. I didn’t read Chinese, and, outside of Taipei, that’s mostly what you saw. Even when there were signs in English, there was an inconsistency with how street names were spelled.

Ask people to spell a word phonetically, and you’ll see variation. In Taiwan, up until recently, there were various systems used to translate words from Chinese into English. Unless there are standardized rules that everyone adheres to, variety might remain the spice of life, but getting from here to there is problematic.

Recognizing that when visitors come to Taiwan, whether for business or pleasure, they have a desire to be able to find their way easily, Taiwan has officially adopted the “hanyu pinyin writing system” for translating Chinese to English. This Reuters article explains the details about how the government is publishing a spelling guide in order to redo road signs in order to reflect the consistency. The changes will start in 2009.

No longer will you see “Minquan Road,” “Minchuan Road,” “Binjiang Street,” and “Pin Chiang Street” on various signs for the exact same street. See what I mean? Wouldn’t that drive you a bit NUTS?!

(Although, as you can see from the Flickr photo by onkio & di’s, some signs in Taiwan do reflect the adage, “A picture speaks a thousand words.” At least the part about the car getting towed.)

Virtual exhibition: Calling all Paolo Coelho fans

by Abha Malpani on

If you’ve read the The Alchemist and want to be a subject of a virtual art exhibition hosted by the man himself — Paolo Coelho — the process couldn’t be easier. Send a picture of you reading the book, and voila, you will forever be part of virtual art history!

The exhibition is to celebrate the 20th anniversary of The Alchemist, that has till date sold a 100 million copies. Holy gonzoly. So far, 38 people have sent in some cool photos of them reading the book; the photos will be uploaded for the rest of the year.

Coelho is quite the tech-savvy writer dude. He keeps a regular blog, and has the occasional vlog. Obviously, he understands the importance of connecting with his readers, and enjoys the process too.

So take that picture and send it in to: paulocoelhocovers[at]gmail.com, perhaps you will be displayed in a gallery somewhere someday! If you don’t have the Alchemist on hand, any of his books will do. Coelho wants to see your face, so be careful not to cover it with his book, and don’t stress about quality.

(In the image, I’m holding his book Eleven Minutes, one I enjoyed way more than The Alchemist. I haven’t read any others. Urrr…yup, I’m going to send it in.Cheap thrills.)

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.