Is this what a traveler (but not a tourist) to Paris would wear? Order yours at comedyshirt.co.uk.

I’m happy to have permission from my friend writer Cynthia Ord to re-publish a blog post of hers: Us and Them in Travel Literature. She voices many of the same thoughts I’ve had over the years, especially regarding the pretension with traveler (seasoned=good) vs. tourist (amateur) although I must red-faced admit I looked for the mindfultraveler.com URL before mindfultourist back when I started this crazazy blogger way of life! Read part of her article below and make sure to click at the end to read the rest over at her blog. Thanks, Cynthia!

Within travel writing, nobody wants to be a tourist.  Tourists are amateurs at travel.  They have no travel etiquette.  They are easily duped and get robbed.  Tourists are just on vacation for a week or two, they’re just consumers with mundane lives back home.  They take snapshots, get sunburned, then pack up their suitcases and leave.

We travelers are different, says travel literature.  We are the master craftsmen of travel. We have artfully escaped the “mundane” and the “back home.”  Maybe we started as tourists, but we have evolved.  We transcend time zones. We have been everywhere. We take photographs, not snapshots.  We are nomads seeking enlightenment.  For us, travel is a way of life.

The tourism industry definition
To me, this “traveler” persona is riddled with pretension and cliche.  The travel and tourism industry doesn’t care much for travelers either. Based on per-day spending patterns, it would prefer a tourist to a traveler any day.  In fact, the industry doesn’t even bother to differentiate between the two.  The industry definition, as established by the UN World Tourism Organization, is:

“Tourism: the activities of persons travelling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business, and other purposes”

Interesting.  So that hardcore “traveler” who cycled from Canada to Argentina in ten months?  He was actually a tourist.  And that “travel writer” who spent six weeks in Iceland for a feature story?  Also a tourist.  What about myself?  When I volunteered for six months at an ecolodge in Guatemala, that was tourism.  My summer internship in Albania?  Tourism too.  Anything away from home for less than a year is tourism, and anyone who is doing it is (gasp!) a tourist.

A more dignified tourism
I’ve been lucky enough to have done a fair amount of travel. I’ve even done some travel writing. I’ve also studied tourism academically and I’m now working within the tourism industry.  So I think about this terminology a lot. Continue reading this post at Cynthia’s blog.

Photo: Francesc Guillamet/Courtesy of El Bulli

Ha! Now this is funny. As you surely know, I love to whine and complain about things I don’t like, including banal, regurgitative, one-upsman, and/or pretentious writing. Come on, don’t we all? Oh, be quiet, Double Rainbow guy and why do you keep hanging around here?

But because I’m not as gifted a writer as some (I know, shocker) (could it be all the parentheses perhaps?), I never capture my annoyance as well as has been captured here by Slate’s Noreen Malone. I haven’t followed Spain’s famous Ferran Adria restaurant El Bulli as much as others. That is to say, I knew of its existence and the fact that people in North America and other places flew to Spain for one night just to have the opportunity to eat one of his multi-multi-course cutting-edge dinners. But that’s it.

Apparently (and who could this surprise now that I think about it?), food writers and others for years have been falling over themselves to write about their “unique” and “amazing” experiences at El Bulli.

Here’s a snippet from Malone:

… Take this classic one, from an early example of the genre, a 2001 Esquire piece: “It came down to a question of faith. And I suddenly felt the presence of this man, Ferran Adria, somewhere in the shadows, holding the fork in my hand, guiding it to the plate, impaling a mound of caramel-covered, sweet-smelling tenderness that had been introduced as ‘rabbit apple.’ ” But even the Adria worship pales in comparison to the self-congratulation the genre draws out. Bard-of-excess McInerney begins his IAAEBP [Malone has named the genre "I Ate At El Bulli Piece"] with his signature second-person narration (”It begins with a glistening, olive-colored sphere, wobbling on a spoon as you raise it toward your lips, exploding in the mouth to unleash a bath of intense olive-flavored liquid”) and then, as if compelled by the inherent egotism and bedpost-notching of the IAAEBP, reverts to using a more personal pronoun to crow about “the best miso soup I’ve ever eaten.”

IAABPs, naturally, involve a great deal of one-upmanship. Oh, so you ate the regular meal at El Bulli? That’s cute. I ate the staff meal. And it was “very, very good.” You’ve only been there once? Poor thing, how little context you must have. Oh, you wrote an article about eating at El Bulli? Try a little. I cartooned my experience. Or, even better, I wrote a 29-minute electro-orchestral musical work inspired by my 35-course meal there. Oh, you ate a 35-course meal there? I ate a 37-course meal, and managed to work it into my New York Times wedding announcement. (Perhaps then, in those famously status-obsessed pages, scoring a meal at El Bulli is akin to a Yale law degree or an ancestor who came over on the Mayflower.) A mere 37? When you’ve had a 38-courser—and picked out extensive hypothetical wine pairings for it—then maybe we can talk. You just ate there? I ate there WITH Adria. Oh, you ate with him at the restaurant? I had him cook me a meal in my own kitchen.

Travel writers also have trouble putting a fresh voice on various places so I’ve seen this phenomenon in other ways and I sympathize with the authors but on the other hand, if it’s been done, sure, go ahead and eat there but don’t write about it or if you do, try a new twist (if possible).

Or am I just jealous because I want a 37 course meal complete with black sesame sponge cake with miso? Yeah, that’s probably it.

Now, for the best part of this post: Hurray! to Claudia for agreeing to answer some questions by email. Here’s the part where I brag that I actually know this wonderful writer but not well enough that she couldn’t have easily and nicely declined my request. So, thank you, Claudia! To everyone else, enjoy and buy this book!

Mindful Tourist: As you know, I really liked your book for many reasons. Because I enjoy traveling and learning about other cultures, I found the parts of the story that took place in Spain to be quite compelling. Spain was almost another character in the book. Did you set out to write it this way?

Claudia Ricci: It’s always hard to know how a book takes hold. I know though that Ronda – the place – was very much a part of what set the story in motion. I cannot fully express how beautiful that Andalucían city is, perched up hundreds of feet on a cliff over a Disney-like river valley. Maybe it was just that geography – it feels kind of precarious when you are up there, that gave me a proper setting for Ronda, a woman who was in a series of precarious predicaments during the story. I would say that Ronda, the city, and Spain, were both characters in the book!

MT: Could this book have been written without Ronda experiencing another country? Why or why not?

CR: That is a great question and one I have not thought about. I think because Seeing Red is a book that features flamenco, and because flamenco is so much a part of Spain, it feels somehow necessary for Ronda to be in Spain. Also, it felt to me as though this character needed a complete removal from her life in New England, and all of its influences, to make the passage into her new identity as an artist. Naturally that transformation could happen anywhere and yes, it could certainly happen in the U.S. – I could imagine someone from New England going off to live in say, New Mexico, the way Georgia O’Keeffe did (she had left Lake George and New York City behind and she said the landscape in New Mexico spoke to her!)  The landscape in Spain, particularly Ronda, spoke to me!

[Minor Spoiler Alert:] Curiously Ronda never actually gets to Ronda in this book (something that I hadn’t really thought about until the late stages of editing the book!) In a late edit, I added the mention of Ronda on the last page, suggesting a promise that she might be going there! Does that mean there is a part two? Not that I know of!

MT: The focus on flamenco dancing is unique and I understand this comes in part from your own experience with the dance. Can you tell my readers a bit about how and why you came to flamenco dancing?

CR: First, I must emphasize that it isn’t dancing that I do – I took ONE flamenco dance class before I realized I have six left feet! But I have been studying flamenco guitar with guitarist Maria Zemantauski since 1999. (I’ve been on hiatus since January.) I wrote in the acknowledgements that I cannot explain my fascination with flamenco. I heard a shred of the music in January 1995 and it set in motion my love affair with this very passionate music. But it really kind of came out of the blue. I do think that the notion of “duende,” a deep passionate embrace of life, and an encounter head on with the inevitability of death, are what attracts me to the music. I copy here an excerpt from wikipedia, regarding duende:

“El duende is the spirit of evocation. It comes from inside as a physical/emotional response to music. It is what gives you chills, makes you smile or cry as a bodily reaction to an artistic performance that is particularly expressive. Folk music in general, especially flamenco, tends to embody an authenticity that comes from a people whose culture is enriched by diaspora and hardship; vox populi, the human condition of joys and sorrows.”

According to Christopher Maurer, editor of “In Search of Duende,” at least four elements can be isolated in Lorca’s vision of duende: irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical.”

MT: While she never went to Spain as a tourist, Ronda did go thinking it would be a quick trip but eventually she sheds that “tourist skin” and comes to think of Spain almost as her home in only a few weeks.  What do you think is key for travelers to experience in order for them to truly understand a country or culture?

CR: My only experience living abroad for more than just a tourist visit is when I lived and worked in Norway as a young woman. I worked in a “magarin fabrik” (a margarine factory) in Oslo, packaging huge slabs of margarine. I wore white clogs, a white outfit complete with a little white cap. The factory also packaged peanut butter and caviar (strange). I lived in an apartment near the Edvard Grieg museum, and the apartment had an OUTHOUSE (this was modern day Oslo!). I learned to eat all the Norwegian foods (and gained 20 pounds in the process!).

All of this is to say that it is difficult or impossible to have an immersion experience if you remain a tourist. You have to live in a culture to understand it; you have to work (or study) there, living with people, interacting with their daily lives. When I was in Norway, I was living with a young woman who had been an AFS student in my high school. I spent the entire summer living in an apartment with her, traveling to her family’s homes, getting to know all of her friends. I think Ronda is able to shed the tourist “skin” when she meets Leely (who is in my mind based a bit on my guitar teacher, Maria.) Leely feels very, very real to me, and she leads Ronda not only into a deeper and more authentic encounter with Spain, but also, into a very deep encounter with flamenco and her identity as an artist and dancer.

MT: To capture Spain the way you did, with the intricate descriptions of places and people, you must have traveled there multiple times. Can you tell us about those travels?

CR: You know, I am flattered that you find my descriptions so real. And I have traveled there multiple times, but the truth of the matter is, I am trained as a reporter. That plus my imagination helped me create the sense of reality that you feel. The honest story behind the novel: I had been to Spain in 1998 visiting Sevilla and Granada. I did not get to Ronda on that trip. I actually wrote Ronda’s journey consulting travel guides. AFTERWARD, Rich [Claudia's husband] and I followed her trip in the book exactly and most everything I had written was absolutely on target. Fiction writers have a knack for creating reality that very much conforms to REALITY, even when they haven’t experienced it themselves. Subsequently, in 2005, our family made still another trip to Spain, when our oldest daughter Jocelyn was studying in Granada. During that trip (I flew to Spain early to meet and travel with Jocelyn) I made a second trip to the caves at Nerja, and also to Ronda.

MT: You’re a traveler in general, aren’t you? I happen to know you’ve also been to Italy in the past year. What are your favorite places to travel and why?

CR: I adore Italy, particularly Florence and Tuscany, and neighboring Umbria, and would love to write a novel based in my “heritage” country! Rich and I also have a special fondness for Positano [me too!] and the Amalfi coast. The Italians, like the Spaniards, really and truly enjoy the moment (recall the book, Eat, Pray, Love? [Yes, I do!]) The Italians love to eat and spend a lot of time and effort creating delicious food. The art, and the sense of aesthetics in the architecture is so exhilarating. Another reason I love Italy (and Spain) is that it’s so often sunny there. For that reason, I also love the southwestern U.S., particularly New Mexico – Georgia O’Keeffe country – and Arizona. And of course, there is also California. I went to grad school there (Berkeley) and never wanted to leave. Currently, I am writing two interconnected books on-line, a novel called Castenata and the companion book, Sister Mysteries. Castenata is the story of a nun, Sister Renata, who in 1883 in California is accused of killing her cousin. Sister Mysteries tells the story of the modern woman writer who thinks she is that nun.

MT: After living in Chicago, San Francisco, and other places, and after having traveled to many others parts of the world, you’ve been settled for years now in upstate, semi-rural New York. What is it about that part of the world that you love?

CR: I think in all honesty that it is really not upstate New York where I yearn to live. My family however is in New England and we’ve found a beautiful rural community where, in the summer, with the flowers and the pond, it is lovely.

MT: What’s next for you – in your travels and your writing?

CR: The two on-line books are keeping me very busy. And I am also contemplating writing a non-fiction book about the writing exercise I developed for my Happiness class this spring. It’s called “Flip the Script” (the original post here) and it is a technique I have found very helpful to students. Basically, it’s a way for them to confront painful life stories and to find distance and redemption in revising them. The Happiness class has its own blog at , and I have been posting examples of these “Flip the Script” exercises there and on MyStoryLives, my community writing blog. I am thinking of trying to teach a class this summer in the community in which I feature the “Flip the Script” exercises.

I also love to garden and paint and do collage and I have a good time doing both.

As for travels, I haven’t got any planned at this moment but I sure would love to go to Greece! The sun and that great Greek food really call to me!

No, it’s the surplus of travel articles in which the author decides to boldly go into the deep blue yonder without access to a smart phone and/or other electronic devices.  God, am I sick of this!

The most recent article I read on the subject was Unplugging in Chicago. Nancy leaves her beloved BlackBerry in the hands of the hotel staff and finds that, lo and behold, she can find good and unique information by actually talking (gasp!) to local people and to those who are actually in the tourism business.  A particularly disheartening part of this story is when this seasoned (and good!) travel writer admits that because she doesn’t have her device, she stops to admire Chicago’s famed architecture and that her trip to an art museum is heightened.  It makes me think, what is she and therefore I, the reader, usually missing in Nancy’s travels and subsequent stories when she is glued to her BlackBerry, as is typically the case, according to her?    To my mind, engaging in conversation and appreciating your surroundings in the moment are meaningful and rewarding parts of travel – be it to the town an hour from your house or a metropolis halfway around the world.  Why does this come as a surprise to these writers?  

Some of the writers act as if they’re Cristobal Colon – discovering new frontiers – when in fact, 1. This is how most of the world travels; and 2. This is how everyone traveled up until a few years ago.  Get a grip: You are not as adventurous as you make yourself out to be in this case.

Of course, I agree that traveling without the iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry, Droid, etc. is a good idea and in fact wrote about this two years ago but this was before the dearth of smart phones and travel apps made having a phone not just a way to connect to folks back home but a way to completely disengage with your actual surroundings.  (Local and mindful travel enthusiasts have been blogging about this for a while now – see them here, here, and especially here…) 

But can we just ask editors to stop requesting these “cutting-edge” stories in which we are subject to the CrackBerry withdrawal symptoms and the Double Rainbow Epiphanies?  Can it stop, please?

Question: While the villagers are better off financially and are taking better care of the land, part of their culture is now gone. Originally, they believed that the waterfall would enchant them and that mermaids might make them disappear if they visited it. Now, that’s gone. What else might change within their culture due to new tourists?  Is it presumptuous to even raise the question?  I make no judgment myself but am wondering what others think: good, bad, or both?

Luckily, the miner survived although I doubt he’ll be firing up the crock pot anytime soon.  (URL is likely to be corrected so screen shot here.)

Sadly, this trip is not for us, but it is for someone very close to us who is contracting with us to help plan the trip.  Here are the destinations:

• Chile
• Argentina
• New Zealand
• Laos
• Thailand
• Vietnam
• Cambodia
• Bhutan
• Nepal
• India
• Oman
• Jordan
• Turkey
• Eastern Europe (no firm decisions yet on which countries)

This trip will be epic and deserves a lot of research and thought.  If you have experience or ideas on any of these countries, on tips for a yearlong or solo trip, or on travel for the 60+ set, please let us know.  We are totally open to all advice and opinions from our readers.  We’re interested in a combination of places, activities, and lodging but all must be mindful and culturally/environmentally-friendly. 

Thanks for your help and check back for updates.  Grazie.

Lake Atitlan in Guatemala

Whenever we travel, we don’t feel like writing about travel – ironic, no? 

So, since we just got back from a nice road trip in Chile, we’ll leave you with the following two articles from this week’s New York Times:

1.    An opinion column on the nastiness of slum tourism.  We’ve written about this before but this article really captures the essence of why slum tourism is wrong-headed in so many ways.  A snippet:

Slum tourism has its advocates, who say it promotes social awareness. And it’s good money, which helps the local economy. But it’s not worth it. Slum tourism turns poverty into entertainment, something that can be momentarily experienced and then escaped from. People think they’ve really “seen” something — and then go back to their lives and leave me, my family and my community right where we were before.

I was 16 when I first saw a slum tour. I was outside my 100-square-foot house washing dishes, looking at the utensils with longing because I hadn’t eaten in two days. Suddenly a white woman was taking my picture. I felt like a tiger in a cage. Before I could say anything, she had moved on.

When I was 18, I founded an organization that provides education, health and economic services for Kibera residents. A documentary filmmaker from Greece was interviewing me about my work. As we made our way through the streets, we passed an old man defecating in public. The woman took out her video camera and said to her assistant, “Oh, look at that.”

For a moment I saw my home through her eyes: feces, rats, starvation, houses so close together that no one can breathe. I realized I didn’t want her to see it, didn’t want to give her the opportunity to judge my community for its poverty — a condition that few tourists, no matter how well intentioned, could ever understand.

2.    The Frugal Traveler (yo, Kugel bro!) stays with a family in a tourist-friendly but not tourist-heavy lake town in Guatemala.  Makes us want to head on over there ourselves!  A snippet:

San Juan La Laguna is a captivating place to run such a program. Its 10,000 or so inhabitants are almost entirely Tz’utujil, one of the Mayan peoples who make up a significant part of the population of modern-day Guatemala. They maintain their own language, most still use traditional dress, and despite strong attendance at the Catholic and evangelical churches in town, many still depend on Mayan priests to give spiritual guidance and perform traditional ceremonies. The people are touchingly friendly to outsiders, and the streets are cleaner than those in just about any other town I’ve been through this summer.

And most importantly, unlike San Pedro and some other towns on the lake, it hasn’t been drastically reshaped by foreigners. The town has cultivated a gentle sort of tourism, fueled in part by the presence of nongovernmental organizations staffed by a mix of local residents, Guatemalans from the big city and foreigners.

Cooperatives have flourished. The fishermen have one and the coffee growers have another, for example, but the most noticeable are those of the traditional weavers. Among the results has been a return to the use of natural dyes, not the bright, synthetic colors you see on fabrics sold at touristy markets around the country. The shops run by the cooperatives have boutique-like feels, and you’re liable to be invited to the back to see women at work, either weaving or extracting dye from natural sources like willow bark or pomegranate seeds.

There is also a homegrown tourism organization called Rupalaj Kistalin, which organizes a ton of activities – a town tour, fishing tours, coffee- and corn-themed tours, and a hike up to the “Mayan nose” (the highest point of a face-shaped mountain overlooking the town), to name a few.

More on our own travels in the next couple of weeks!

Angelina and Brad will most likely NOT be guests at our lodge. Did their pictures get you to click on this post? If so, maybe we should invite them! Hmmm...

As you may know from our previous post about this super-exciting Life Pivot (new phrase – expect it to be all the rage on Twitter for a day), we are embarking on a quest to buy some land and develop our own humble eco-retreat center.  Our plans have changed just a bit from what we wrote about earlier but the overall gist remains.

While we have the whole thing mapped out in our head, the first step remains: Find and buy the land.  We have narrowed it down to one region in one country but aside from that, we’re open to suggestions.

What we need from you, Dear Reader, are your deepest desires in a travel destination.  Do you want a beach within walking distance?  A ranch-like quality where you can see for miles?  Or is close proximity to shops and restaurants more important?  River, hiking, cities, museums, what?  We have an idea of what we ourselves would like but that doesn’t mean others are on the same page.  Later, we’ll be asking you about other details related to our project, like internet capability and televisions vs. “getting away from it all,” etc.

For now, will you help us narrow down possibilities for our eco-retreat location?  Either send us an email at mindfultourist@gmail.com or write in a comment below.  Thanks for your help!

 For Immediate Release:

Innovation Award: Best Practice Examples in
Sustainable Tourism Innovation Wanted

The International Ecotourism Society’s New Award Recognizes Innovation Leaders Uniting Conservation, Communities and Sustainable Travel

The Innovation Award has been created by TIES to recognize those individuals and organizations who demonstrate leadership in innovative actions that effectively promote sustainable tourism and bring tangible benefits to communities and conservation. The Award winners – one individual and one organization – will be honored for their best practices and innovative actions, judged based on one example of an innovative project, product, or program developed in the previous year that supports the goal of uniting communities, conservation, and sustainable travel.

WASHINGTON, July 13, 2010 – The International Ecotourism Society (TIES), as part of a series of initiatives commemorating the 20th anniversary of the founding of the world’s oldest and largest association dedicated to promoting ecotourism, has launched the annual Innovation Leadership in Sustainable Tourism Awards to recognize and honor accomplishments by sustainable tourism leaders and pioneers.

 “Throughout the history of TIES,” says Dr. Kelly Bricker, Chair of TIES Board of Directors, “we have been working with our members from around the world towards the goal of uniting conservation, communities, and sustainable travel. TIES Innovation Award offers a unique opportunity to share tangible examples of the importance of this goal, and to honor those who are driving positive change through leadership in conservation efforts and travel product development. It really is a wonderful opportunity to honor those making a difference.”

Nominations are being accepted now for the 2010 TIES Innovation Awards. Nominations must be received no later than Midnight Monday, August 2, 2010 US Pacific Daylight Time. The winning two finalists will be honored at the Ecotourism and Sustainable Tourism Conference (ESTC), being held from September 8-10, 2010, Portland, Oregon, USA. The Innovation Award Presentation Ceremony will be held annually during the ESTC, to be hosted by TIES and ESTC sponsors. More information on TIES Innovation Awards and nomination instructions are available at: www.ecotourism.org/innovation-awards.

# # #