This week I joined the Facebook generation. That is, I was already in the generation (I think; these things are so confusing), but finally attended the party in person. For a woman who lives in the country and spends days never speaking a word to anyone, Facebook’s an extremely noisy place. The “excrutiating minutae” of countless lives, as someone put it. (Sheila, was that you?)

I also found, on first impression, a rather depressing place. Now, being a cynic myself, maybe I just have more cynical and depressed acquaintances than most people. But the fact of the matter is that crossing from the travels and travel writing world over to Facebook was a jarring culture shock. There’s a lot of frustrated and unhappy people out there. Not my friends of course, but following links to friends of friends of friends and their blogs and websites did not lead me to much optimism. (Plenty might respond that, due to the economy and other circumstances, they’ve got reason to be frustrated, unhappy, cynical, angry, bitter, … well, we’ve all got our stories.)

I found myself running back to the Perceptive Travel umbrella, the travel literature world where the day is ruled neither by cynicism nor by vacuous happiness, but by something of a life raft in any age: curiosity. Those with itchy feet who keep traveling, and those with itchy pens who keep writing about it, seem to be a breed apart, a people who are always eager for the bend in the road, no matter what it might hold. That doesn’t mean they’re blind or ignorant — far from it.

Most of us who read Perceptive Travel, World Hum, books by Jan Morris and Colin Thubron, and other great travel writing, seem to care deeply about environmental and social issues. Extensive travel would expose any of us to enough degradation and deprivation in the world to open up a whole planet of depression. Yet it doesn’t. Even people I know who don’t or are unable to travel, but who, as Thoreau did, travel the world in imagination or their backyards are strangely able to keep a balanced perspective.

Which leads me to the question in the title: are wanderlustians happier than most people? Is curiosity a remedy for despondence?

Scenes in Moscow have broken my heart; environmental threats in Scotland can make me desperate. I’m sure you’ve seen as much, and worse. Yet somehow the traveling we do ensures a kind of equilibrium, an inner sense of yin and yang that you couldn’t get with a year of meditation classes. The world is going to hell in a handbasket in some places; and it is opening up like racous buds in spring in another.

Maybe it’s not that we’re happier, but have a daily awareness that the excrutiating minutae of our lives can be shed in a moment, if we truly wanted to run away. And that in every success or adversity, we’re balanced — travel gives us the sure-footed knowledge that every experience is somehow shared and met by someone across the globe.

I keep going back to a Jan Morris book I read some time back, A Writer’s World (reviewed here). In the epilogue of this book, Morris relates short stories of confused and disillusioned people on different continents, including in her native Wales, and is left wondering what solace or advice she could give them. “The lingering reproaches of imperialism, the mysteries of technology, the antipathies of race, shifts of balance, bewilderments of progress, corrosions of money and power — all, it seemed to me, were reaching some kind of dark climax. …

“The best we can do, I have come to think, is to ignore the conundrum, as we move from one age to another, and to my mind there need be only one commandment to help us cope: Be Kind. … Flexible enough to allow for free will and human frailty, it is, at the core of it, solid as granite.”

As a travel writer and journalist who started out as James Morris and had a sex change in the 70s, when it was even less acceptable than it is now, Morris has faced her own share of adversity and seen a solid lifetime of changes good and bad. And after it all, she is left with a deep love of the world and its people, and only one maxim: be kind. Which seems to me the epitome of the wisdom all of us travelers and travel writers are seeking. The balanced perspective. The world can be good, it can be evil, and through it all what we learn is to be kind to one another.

Thanks to reader Tina for pointing us to the Peterman’s Eye travel photo contest. With a first-place prize of $2000, an entry might permit someone like me to afford one of the gorgeous skirts I drool over every time the J. Peterman catalog hits my mailbox.

The Travel section of Peterman’s Eye (which bills itself as “a community of curious minds”) is actually a fun place to spend a little time. With a softened, old-world website design and J. Peterman’s distinctive old-world voice, the site provides a little breathing space from the hectic pace of “10 best Whatevers” of newspaper travel sections. A bit like our own fantastic Perceptive Travel magazine. A place where travel lovers and readers have more time to ponder.

As much as I enjoy websites like this, however, as always, if you’re entering any contest with your own written or photographic material, read the terms and conditions carefully: “By posting or submitting content on or to the website (regardless of the form or medium), you are giving Peterman’s Eye Publishing, and its affiliates, agents and third party contractors a nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, sub licensable, royalty-free license to use, store, display, publish, transmit, transfer, distribute, reproduce, rearrange, edit, modify …”

You get the idea. You lose all rights to your work once it’s posted on the site. I’m not judging these terms one way or another (unusual, I know, not to have a highly prejudiced opinion, but I still am unsure whether opportunities like this are a way for nascent travel writers and photographers to get a foot in the door — instinct says no, but common sense says maybe). You should just always be aware of what you’re signing up for. And hey, if you win, two thousand bucks isn’t a bad price for a good photo.

Deadline for the contest is 12th March 2009.

Rental car companies are starting to add more hybrid cars to their fleets. Latest numbers indicate that Enterprise currently has 7,000 nationwide, with Alamo and National at 2,000 between them.

Planet Green suggests 9 Questions You Must Ask Before Booking a “Green” Hotel.

Travelwhere, a map based web travel directory and portal, is offering tour operators and their customers a green online brochure distribution service featuring page-turning e-brochures.

RezHub’s Green Travel Hub lists 10 Top Green Hotels in Washington, DC

Inhabitat reports that Monterey Bay Shores Set to be Greenest Ecoresort in the World.

There’s a new ‘green’ 62-room boutique luxury inn and spa opening in Napa Valley.

terracurve writes about travelocity and expedia new ‘green travel’ booking tools in Being skeptical: The big online players step up to green travel, sort of…

This week’s green city guides: Detriot and Chicago.

The January 2009 issue of Ecologist magazine could put just about anyone, from farmers to investment bankers, in a fit of misery.

Add wanderlust devotees to that list. “Out of This World?” an investigative report by Paul Miles, takes a serious lok at the real social and environmental impacts of travel. His conclusions, backed by hard statistics and research, aren’t pretty.

The piece starts out wondering, after we’ve tapped out adventure tourism, where we’ll go next — the obvious answer being, of course, space. (Not to toot my own horn … nevermind, I’ll toot it. I do think I addressed the issue of space travel and the human race’s inability to travel without being destructive much better in this New Year’s post.)

But the real meat of the article is in the investigations into sustainability- and eco-tourism. So-called, that is, since so much of what’s called “eco” and “sustainable” is just pure marketing cotton candy. Some of Miles’s examples are sobering: Wilderness Safaris, “a company with a hitherto good record on social and environmental matters,” has gone ahead with a safari camp, “complete with swimming pool — in Botswana’s Central Kalahari Game Reserve, when nearby Basarwa (bushmen) are denied access to water. [This] seriously challenges the hypothesis that tourism is a force for good.”

“It is well known,” he states, “that as much as 75 percent of tourism income ‘leaks’ from host countries back to foreign-owned companies.” Which explains why, he points out, “98 percent of the population of the Dominican Republic lives in poverty, despite its being the most popular tourist destination in the Caribbean.”

I won’t get into a debate over tourists versus travelers here, because the truth is we’re all responsible. Whether we’re backpackers, travel writers published in glossy magazines, wanderers teaching English abroad, or a couple on our first-ever whirlwind trip to Europe, we’re culpable.

This is especially true for those of us who consider ourselves environmentalists, which I do, and also travel addicts, which I also do. If you care about both, ignorance in this case really is bliss. Once you know, though, that indulging your deepest passion might contribute to drowning the remote island you’re visiting, or that the eco-tour safari you’re on is taking water out of the wells of native people, you can’t forget. And you shouldn’t try if you could.

How does one move forward? I don’t think buying into marketing about volunteer tourism, eco-tourism, or sustainability is really the answer, not unless you do your research first. So how do we actually reconcile our heart’s desires and the issues we feel passionately about?

First, you can’t treat travel as a shopping binge. We should each think carefully about what we’re doing, where we’re going, and what mark we leave — environmental, social, personal, and economic — on every place we’ve tread. You can’t travel consciously or conscientiously if you’re simply bagging countries. It’s like the Slow Food movement: you’ve got to savor, even if your current moment-mouthful is a five-hour delay at the airport.

I’ve taken a hard look at my own travel practices, and they don’t by any means come up to scratch. Like any addict, there is some other need I’m satisfying by the constant urge to be anywhere-but-here.

The going is my environmental sin. When I’m actually there (anywhere), the footprint is relatively small. I am essentially a walker and observor. I try to eat gently, support locally, and, helped now by my son’s extroverted personality, interact with people in a way that leaves us both with a wider worldview.

Curiosity is always my guide, kicked forward by an ever-present laziness that always likes to remind me there’s a cup of coffee nearby and a good novel in my handbag. So far that curiosity has been a good guide, but moving forward I think my choices for food, sleep, and transport, abroad or at home, are going to require more consideration.

There is no one-size-fits-all environmental or socially good choice for travelers. Everyone’s got different habits and desires. For me, I am first and foremost a writer. I can hope that something I say or an interaction or sight I describe will change, even incrementally, the worldview of someone I’ve never met, for the better.

At the end of his article Paul Miles references both philosopher Blaise Pascal (“All of man’s unhappiness stems from his inability to stay alone in his room”) and Alain de Botton, from his book The Art of Travel, in which he says that “the finest journeys are those that can be taken within our own minds, without leaving the house.” Miles asks, in the end, “if what we’re really seeking is simply our own inner selves.” (Well, yes. But if you didn’t know that you’ve got some other issues to resolve.)

My answer is this: long ago, when I was in high school, a friend and I were discussing our desire to travel and that desire’s conflict with Henry David Thoreau, whose Walden we’d just been reading. “I have traveled much in Concord,” Thoreau said, referring to his ability to travel the world in his imagination, through reading. Were we lesser people for wanting to actually see what we read about? No, I said. No. And I still say it. Life is always a journey, whether physical or mental, and for many of us, the path is to find the world in person before we can find it in our own backyards.

The magnificent Forbidden City in Beijing is an enormous complex, with one set of impressive buildings after another, all strung together across wide open courtyards and with entry gates through to the next set of buildings.

Next to each building, I noticed these gorgeous copper or iron pots.  What were they for?

(Note: it is alarming how much you start to resemble your parents as you get older – my Mom is a curious traveler and reads any sign or historical marker she can find. I found myself scouting for a sign about these pots, all the while rolling my eyes and mentally thanking Mom for making me so nosy.)

The sign I found said that there are 308 of these vats, of various sizes, spread all around the City. They held water used in firefighting.

The earliest ones were cast in the late 1400′s; this particular one has decorative lifting rings with a lion/beast-like head, so are probably Qing Dynasty.

Eighteen of the copper ones were also inlaid with gold; I’m sure my local VFD (Volunteer Fire Department) would be suitably impressed.

In the winter, the vats were covered with quilts (or even had fires built beneath) to ensure that the water remained liquid and ready for use in battling blazes.

I’m not sure how the Chinese got the water OUT of the pots to get to the fires….bucket brigade, perhaps?  They probably had plenty of hands available to answer the call.

Related posts:

• Video: Tsingtao Brewery
• Renaming a place doesn’t make it Shangri-La
• Chinese city lopping a few towers for World Heritage designation
• Dining Xinjiang (Uighur) style in Shanghai