If you cashed a check for a Nigerian prince and you're still waiting on that payout, then have we got an offer for you!
World Swirl Press is looking for stories related to all kinds of travel misfortunes. If you've been pick-pocketed, scammed by your travel agent, kidnapped or were positive that he was a she or she was a he, then they want to hear from you. You'll even get paid if your story is selected, but just how much hasn't yet been decided.
Don't forget the details, as they want to know about every little miserable misfortune of your personal travel hell. If you've got a winner just bop on over to their site and submit away. They're accepting stories through the end of this year and hope to go to print sometime in 2009.
Were you already criticizing the American Airlines blog by the time we posted about it? Are your fave spots in LA ruined after they appear on "The Hills?" Do you have a collection of glamour shots--of Airbus planes?
You should probably be writing for us, then. And here's the good news: We pay our writers.
For those of you who love to read about travel almost as much as travelling itself, Canadian writer Michelle Orange has published The Sicily Pages with small publisher Hobart Pulp, which describes it as "a series of letters she wrote while traveling alone throughout the region.
Though originally meant to reassure an anxious correspondent, over time the letters--both high-spirited and frank, searching and satisfied--grew into something larger than the sum of their parts: a love letter to Italy, to an uncertain future, and to the lost art of letter writing itself."
The book is simply cool to look at, too, with its passport design and full-color Sicilian maps. Mama mia!
What's in a name? A lot, if that's how you like to chose your travel destinations. Steve Knipp, over in the San Francisco Chronicle, points out that the name of a place can be considerably more evocative (and pleasant) that the reality. Atlantic City sounds pretty nifty to a Kiwi, right? Until they find out about the whole decay and Donald Trump thing, anyway.
We'd add that while the name changes of countries can be frustrating, not say a little bit disappointing, for the armchair traveler, they do tend to live on elsewhere. Ceylon is now Sri Lanka, but you can still buy Ceylon tea. Burma changed its name to Myanmar, but you can still listen to Mission of Burma--post-punk art bands and Southeast Asia go hand in hand, after all. Some names are just more fraught with excitement and possibilities: That's why there's not a single Vietnamese restaurant in the U.S. that's called Ho Chi Minh City Grill.
In this weekend's FT, Tyler Brûlé tells us the story of how he came to purchase his Swedish summer idyll. It's a circuitous story, with several twists and turns. Quick summary: it's on an island north of Stockholm; it has a detached outhouse; and it's less than an hour from Arlanda. If we're impatient with Tyler this week it's because love Baltic summers and wouldn't mind having an island hut of our own.
The real treat FT Weekend section treat this past weekend, however, is Rahul Jacob's guest "Slow Lane" column. Jacob, who is currently filling in for Harry Eyres, wrote a meditation on the value of train travel this past weekend.
Jacob's column is basically a dossier of all the ways that train travel is superior to air travel. He pays particular attention to the ways that train travel allows its passengers to gradually track physical and cultural shifts. Rather remarkably, Jacob then writes about a number of richly sensory personal experiences, all of which took place on train journeys or were enabled by them. Along the way, he lauds DC's Union Station and crafts an enticing picture of Kerala.
More! We can't get enough of this kind of concept-driven travel writing.
With the World Cup on our minds, we almost forgot to say some snappy things about Tyler Brûlé's FT column this past weekend.
Tyler is focused on the perfect carry-on bag. Of course, he designed his own at first, working with "factories in Florence and Naples", but he wasn't satisfied with the end result. If only we had a nickel for every time our attempts at luggage design didn't pan out.
We can't think of a good response to this particular issue, as it's approximately three million miles away from our own travel obsessions. We recently snagged an Outdoor Products duffel bag, and it works fine. It appears that Tyler would agree with our approach, as his current bag of choice is a duffel bag that's only available in Japan.
We've said this before, but we think Tyler should return to doing what he does blisteringly well, which is giving us a sense of which destinations, newspapers, television shows, and architecture firms are worth googling, not to mention issuing forth fantasy urban planning directives. In the future, we hope he leaves the quotidian luggage concerns to someone else.
Oh, woe is the guidebook writer! He (or she) must traipse around a country, staying in hotels that are creepy and dirty, seeing sights that rarely pass muster, and then turn it into many thousands of words for a guidebook like Let's Go, Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, Frommer's, Fodor's, or anyone else we forgot to mention (and there are lots).
Or at least, that's the case according to the New York Times. Honestly, when we pick up the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times, we expect to be infuriated, but even this was a bit much. We'll just give you a taste:
Indeed a day in the life of a guide writer can be wearying. Amelia Atlas, a recent Harvard graduate who is now in Berlin researching a guide to that city for Let's Go, said that last Wednesday she set out early to case a new neighborhood, Prenzlauer Berg, for her Berlin guide. She visited three hostels and three restaurants before collecting the shopping and eating options around a particular square. She visited a section of the Berlin Wall that still stands, made notes about the historical displays there, and set about walking the neighborhood block by block to see what she might find. After a quick dinner, Ms. Atlas went to her apartment to write about the day's findings. Then she planned to go out to sample the night life. "Manic is a good word," she said.
That may "hard work" to some, but it still sounds like an enjoyable day (outside of an office) to us. What's more, anyone who's traveled with a parent that believes in rigorous vacation scheduling would agree that they've been forced to visit and least three more monuments during a day like the one described by the "manic" Amelia.
Every time we take a trip and write about it, we experience the twin joys of travel and writing. Even when the days drag on, or the hotels are gross, there's still no reason to complain.
Rolf Potts is showing off his extensive personal network these days by interviewing travel writers that made it onto World Hum's Top 30 travel books. He's asking authors like Pico Iyer what they would choose for their own personal lists, but since it's unlikely Rolf will pick our brains on the topic--by virtue of not making the list ourselves, and also not having any published books--we thought we'd toss out another few recommendations out there.
We know it's still a little gauche to love Dave Barry, but the books are funny, and some of the lines have stayed with us for many, many years after reading them. Bill Byrson gets more accolades, for some reason, but the two are quite similar. Scratch that: Dave Barry is funnier. Besides, how many walks across the Middle East can you read about in a year?
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by kjb
For those of you who love to read about travel almost as much as travelling itself, Canadian writer Michelle Orange has published The Sicily Pages with small publisher 
