I like to find those funky little local restaurants.

Sure, when you’re a lonely traveler who longs for the familiar, I don’t get all snooty about hitting McDonald’s.

Let’s face it, sometimes that is the only way to find a clean bathroom when you have a kid’s diaper to change.

There are also some interesting local menu items that you won’t find at, say, the McDonald’s in Toledo. Check out this great list of worldwide McDonald’s items, like India’s veggie nuggets with masala and chili dipping sauces.

Still, when I turn up an independently-owned local dining place, there’s a real sense of joyful discovery. For example, far from the tacky Duval Street mass of humanity in Key West, Florida, you can get your socks clean done while munching on great Cuban sandwiches at Sandy’s Cafe, because it’s attached to the M&M laundromat. What a deal.

I’m thinking a lot about this “eat local” topic lately because I just wrote “In Tacos Veritas” for CHOW magazine, about the Austin, Texas stalwart Las Manitas Avenue Cafe.

This funky enchilada/taco/migas joint started out in 1979 as a taco pushcart run by the Perez sisters, Cynthia and Lidia. They are very different women, but they have a united vision of good homey Tex-Mex food, served fast in a friendly downtown atmosphere. Says Cynthia, “Lidia is the bills and numbers, and I’m the Communist.” They don’t take “no” for an answer and they are a part of what makes Austin weird.

Now, a developer is planning to build a massive Marriott hotel complex on their block of Congress Avenue. Since they’ve only rented the space for Las Manitas, the Perez sisters have no obvious leverage other than the general outrage of an entire community….to say nothing of all the out-of-towners who depend on going there to snarf down migas during South by Southwest (SXSW.)

The good news is that the sisters do own a nearby building, currently housing their La Pena art gallery, and that property may end up as the saving “bolt-hole” for Las Manitas.

Note to self and others: Renting is great, but the sooner you actually own something, the better odds you face against those who might push you around. There’s my capitalist pig/property rights rant of the day.

I won’t get into any more detail here, but I want to issue a clarion call. Go eat at your local joints and support them. Ask around when you visit places, and go eat at their local joints. Help them all to flourish, unless you like always eating at the McDonald’s in Toledo.

Update 4 March 2008: The rest of the story on Las Manitas

Technorati tags: travel, Las Manitas, Austin

It is, a sad fact, that most travel writing is limp, regurgitated pap. Awful phrases from the travel-writer’s book of clichés: witness crashing waves on soaring cliffs. or that laziest of descriptions: ‘it was like a scene from [insert name of lousy Hollywood flick here]’. And if I see one more place described as the ‘Paris of the East’, or the ‘New Ibiza’ someone will get hurt!

A large part of the problem comes from the publications that actually run the stories. Magazine and newspaper publishing is a fantastically difficult way to make money. In the last year or so, two magazines in the UK have folded, and a third is wobbling it’s way into a ‘redesign’ – a magazine’s last desperate attempt at turning its fortunes around, but regarded by all in the media as the same as sitting down to write a good suicide note. Everything in a magazine or newspaper is down to advertising. You want to write a yarn about riding a beat-up motorbike on mescaline across the Mexican desert, they want a ‘Long Weekend in Paris’ piece as it will bring in more advertising.

Similarly, most travel magazines and sections work in an inane Prozac-overdosed happy world, where everything is cuddly, fluffy and so positive. Any criticism is bullied out of features. I remember once reading a restaurant review that was run over two pages. The gist was that this place was so bad, you had to go there. The reviewer assured me it was the worst restaurant in the world and even lampooned the other customers. I was hooked! I even tried to make a reservation, but they were full.

Restaurant and theatre critics can flex their acerbic wit, travel writers can’t – certainly not in print. The whole process doesn’t help. A writer gets a commission, then approaches an airline and a tourist board to help. They are hooked up with some boutique hotel and a local operator. They make friends – they owe people. Then if the place sucks what do they do? The magazine has been promised a story and doesn’t want anything negative that will annoy advertisers. All of the people who have helped are on the phone asking when ‘their’ feature will be out. The correct thing to do would be to email everyone saying the place is too crap to write about, but hell, even travel writers have to eat. So we act like unpaid PR reps and drag out the ‘book of clichés’ and perpetuate the myth that everywhere in travel-land is fluffy. In short, we sell our souls.

Then there is the celebrity travel writer. People who are utterly useless in their chosen career, but who have stumbled their way out of rehab and their agent has swung them a travel-writing gig. The travel pages of the UK are full of their ghost-written self indulgences.

This is why finding good travel writing is so difficult – especially in print! Yet there is good writing out there – much of it on the web where normal advertising pressures don’t apply. It does take a while to wade through a world of dross but that is why we are here – to guide you to some of the better examples of the art.

One such gem is Jon Ronson, who writes for the Guardian newspaper in the UK. The whole Guardian travel site is a haven of less obvious stories and Jon is someone who certainly doesn’t play the PR game and is prepared to make a few enemies in the industry. His story about the Gleneagles Hotel probably wouldn’t put me off visiting, although his experiences on a Ryan Air flight just might!

Words ©stevedavey.com 2007

The Lonely Planet’s writers’ blog is a massive, tasty resource of travel tidbits from hundreds of writers currently in the field. Many of the postings are simply that–blog snippets of little experiences or “where to go and what to do” advice. But one series caught my eye. LP’s Frances Linzee Gordon is evidently the first person to be granted a visa to travel through Saudi Arabia as an independent tourist. Her most recent posting (the sixth in a series of eight) in the Middle East blog confronts her odd encounters with the secret policeman following her and her driver. It’s worth reading the previous postings, as well, from discovery of some of the best coral reef diving in the world to finding unexpected relief in the disguise of a full veil.

Reading a travel essay is such a sensory experience–we smell cities and taste food, and, most of all, we rely on authors to give us a visual tour of their journeys through the close, detailed observation that is almost automatic to a travel writer. But visual observation is a luxury Ryan Knighton lost many years ago.

Knighton, a Vancouver-based writer, started losing his sight in his teens and is now almost completely blind. In April’s The Walrus, he turns to a sense we rarely read about–sound–to give a short aural tour of “As Slow As Possible,” a song being performed on an organ in Halberstadt, Germany’s, St. Burchardi Church. The song, written by John Cage, is set up to last 639 years (assisted by tiny weighted sandbags). Knighton timed his arrival to witness the changing of a new chord, which will play for another two years. He arrives during the last minutes of the old chord, at least ten minutes of first maddening, then familiar sound, punctuated by the “blasphemy” of his white cane tapping on the church floor.

The tour of sound is almost visceral–it reverberated in this reader’s chest, and I had the strange experience of creating a visual tour for myself, guided by Knighton’s ears.

(Note: The Walrus is a Canadian national magazine of culture and public discourse. Most travel pieces are in the Field Notes section. While the online articles are available only to subscribers, you can read an excerpt of Knighton’s article here. –AM)

Clarification: Jordan from The Walrus posted a comment (copied here) regarding subscriptions and archives: “While you do need to be a subscriber to gain full access to the current issue of the magazine, anyone is welcome to register for a free trial, which will allow them to read Ryan’s article plus the rest of the current issue.

The magazine’s archives — everything excluding the current issue and the one previous — are free for all users.”

Do Scotsmen have a hardier sense of humor than the rest of us, or do they receive special school classes in thumbing their nose at the world? How many people could write about an avowedly pointless journey without being sentimentally spiritual or just plain silly?

Okay, so Kalder doesn’t always succeed in avoiding silliness. He’s young, he’s adventurous, and he’s enamored of his role as an “anti-tourist.” He’s often unnecessarily crass. But his very real curiosity about countries, peoples, and rituals that most of us have never heard of trumps the often self-indulgent passages, as well as the hodgepodge of scenes, characters, and proposals for screenplays, of an aimless author’s first book. From a stomach-churning display of bottled mutant babies in Tatarstan to a disappointing pagan ritual in Mari El, Kalder takes us on a bizarre journey through the forgotten republics of the Soviet Union. Did you know there was a city entirely devoted to chess–Chess City–in the Republic of Kalmyk? Neither did I. Did you know there was a Republic of Kalmyk? I won’t tell. While trying to maintain a clever, self-abasing tone, Kalder can’t help but show his meticulous attention to–and interest in–obscure histories of obscure cultures. I don’t ever want to visit Kalmyk or Udmurtia, but I know a heck of a lot more about them now than I did last year (their existence, for one).

Kalder seeks out desolate fields of empty apartment blocks and an abandoned Buddhist temple in the middle of nowhere. He actively avoids anything that might be “something,” to the disgruntlement of his sometime travel companions. Of course, you can’t write much of a book without writing about something–the center of the Slavic wife trade in Mari El, or a surprisingly excellent theater production in Elista, for example. What I liked about Kalder’s search for nothing was his admittance that, tired of living an aimless existence, he really was looking for meaning in his life, combined with the honest knowledge that he wasn’t going to find any. And he doesn’t. You can’t read this book hoping for enlightenment any more than you can read it to help plan your next vacation (unless it’s where not to go). You read it because you, like Kalder, have an insatiable curiosity that will never be satisfied by armchair journeys to comfortable, beautiful, or interesting places. And you, like Kalder, are willing to poke a little fun at the world.