March of the eco-travellers

It’s often difficult to square the desire to travel with your environmental conscience, especially if flying is your favourite way to get to various exotic locations.

One transatlantic flight emits the same amount of carbon dioxide as running a diesel car for an entire year.  It makes you shudder to think about the carbon footprint of a round-the-world ticket.

The more die-hard environmentalists are talking about limiting people to a couple of flights a year, or banning budget airlines with their super-cheap fares.

This awful solution will just result in only rich people being able to pollute the earth, while the poor pay for their excesses.

People are not going to stop travelling, especially in this digital age when once-remote parts of the world are suddenly within reach.

The key is promote sustainable travel solutions, and if these involve replacing air travel with other forms of transport, so much the better.

The more ‘socially conscious’ newspapers have recently been writing some brilliant articles about the possibilities of travelling oversea and overland instead of by air.

Another favourite, inspired by the credit crunch as much as by the environment, is to list Britain’s hidden holiday gems – all within easy reach of anyone with a diesel car…..

Unfortunately, the only fail-safe way to be a true eco-traveller is to venture no further than the bottom of your garden.  Of course if you’re an avid walker there are no limits (save the Irish sea) to your ambitions, if you have enough time on your hands.

This brings us to one of the main flaws in the anti-fly brigade’s argument.  As the Guardian journalists proved you can get to China without flying, provided you have six weeks on your hands just to make the round trip.

Budget airlines have allowed holiday-makers to utilise the most precious gift of all – time.  When you’ve only got one week to go to the Alps you don’t want to spend two of those days in a sweaty car.

So while the enviromentalists are certainly succeeding in arousing some pangs of conscience every time I walk up the steps of an aeroplane, they haven’t made me give up my flight socks just yet.

Beware the bloggers

Ever since the popularity of blogging sky-rocketed a couple of years ago there have been dark murmurings about the end of professionnal journalism.

The pessimists argue that now everyone has the opportunity to air views and describe experinces on the web, there is no need to rely solely on newspapers for information and comment.

Of all forms of journalism travel writing is the most vulnerable to the rise of the citizen reporter.  There are thousand of travel forums where travellers swap tips and compare experiences.  Everyone goes on holiday and everyone has a story to tell, so who needs to fork out twenty quid for a copy of Lonely Planet when you can just log on to Aardvark Travel?

Newspapers have definitely spotted the potential for using free feature writers.  Times Online travel has a whole Your World section dedicated to readers’stories, with the enticing proviso that they may use your piece for the newspaper if they think it’s good enough….

For both readers and editors the formula is a winner.  One gets their words published in a national newspaper, the other gets free copy.  The only losers are the freelance travel writers who depend on such work for their livelihood.

Some freelancers may be moaning the new democratisation of travel writing.  But the more forward-thinking will be seeing it as great opportunity to showcase their skills and build up a portfolio of work that will impress prospective editors.

Check out some of the best and the worst:

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/travelog/

http://blogs.statravel.co.uk/

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/travel/

 

 

Trivial travel?

Picture this: you’re a staff writer on the Daily Telegraph travel section.  Elsewhere in the newsroom fellow journalists are filing copy about a devastating earthquake in China, the Government’s astonishing mini-budget announcement, yet another stabbing in London.  Meanwhile you are putting together a frothy feature on France’s top hotels.  Might your job feel just ever so slightly frivolous?

Travel writing often gets by the same criticism as sports writing – at the end of the day, it’s not that important.  Talking about market bargains in Morocco and the purity of sand on various antipodean beaches is hardly ground-breaking journalism.

At it’s best, good journalism is about holding to account those in authority and safeguarding the principals of democracy.  Travel writing at it’s best, sneer the critics, simply puts more money in the pocket of tour operators and airlines as herds of impressionable readers stampede towards yet another not-so-secret slice of paradise.

 There are two valid retorts to the critics.  The first is to shrug your shoulders,smile somewhat sheepishly and admit, ok, yes, travel writing is frivolous but everyone needs a sun-kissed day dream to distract them from the daily grind.

The second response is a bit more Guardian-esque.  Travelling expands a individual’s cultural, personal and geographical frontiers and can promote greater racial harmony through better understanding and empathy with other nations.

Again, it’s easy to sneer at these slightly pretentious world-peace-and-international-brotherhood ideas, but good travel journalism does fulfil some crucial functions.  It gets the readers interested in places they may never have heard of, raises topical issues, and even more importantly, makes them want to go there and check it out for themselves.

Some good recent examples include:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jan/20/cuba.cuba

 http://www.geographical.co.uk/Features/Brazil_Nov07.html

In fact, this is pretty much the mission statement of National Geographic who say they are “inspiring people to care about the planet.”

Getting paid to travel and write about it may sound like the ultimate pretend job – at least, it still does to me – but it can be about a lot more than “What I did on my holidays”.

Hmmm…..Where to start?

It may be the future of journalism and a great way to showcase your talents to the rest of the world, but a blog still feels a bit like a grand excuse for an ego trip.

 Ah well, here goes……

Travel writing may not be the most high-brow of the journalism genres, but let’s be honest – it’s got to be the most fun.  Perhaps my visions of freebie trips to exotic locations, interspersed with banging out the odd 1000-word feature for Conde Nast, aren’t exactly realistic, but travel writing certainly has a romantic and adventurous image.

It seems to be one of the few areas of journalism where you can go to town on descriptive prose and imaginative writing, while still reporting the facts.  Good travel writing is an art form – just read the works of Colin Thubron, especially his account of travelling across the Siberian steppes,  and you’ll see what I mean.

It also represents a good way for many journalists to realise their own personal holy grail – becoming a published author of a real live book.

All the best travel writers – Sara Wheeler, Dervla Murphy and of course Graham Greene – seem to have started out as journalists.  It certainly lends the genre some extra credibility when you consider that these globe-trotting free-loaders are in fact trained professionnals who would have written for some of the best newspapers in their countries, if not the world.

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!