Tomorrow the Dawn Princess World Cruise arrives in Venice with a ship shipload of passengers and crew all wanting to get out and about.  Many (including my mother) plan on taking the organized shore excursion tours that cover all the usual tourist places.

But I plan on jumping ship, hopefully getting away from the crowd, and maybe even getting lost (if just for a short time) into the maze that is Venice.

I won‘t,  however, be totally alone. – I’m taking my copy of Lonely Planet’s Venice & Veneto 2010 for company.

I have been keeping company with Lonely Planet guidebooks for a few years now and they have never let me down. Guaranteed to provide background information of where I am heading and give me direction as to where to eat, stay, and play, these guidebooks have always managed to help re-locate me when I lose my sense of direction.

And this latest edition of Venice & the Veneto looks to be no different.  

I was hooked from page one, reading about Venice’s fascinating history, learning about it’s diverse neighbourhoods, and studying the numerous walking tours laid out. 

There are numerous of maps and continuous cross-referencing of information aimed to help to keep travelers orientated to their surroundings. In fact, this guidebook makes Venice look real easy to navigate - at least on paper.

There’s even a pull out map, which, of course, I not only pulled out but also marked with all my planned destinations, creating my own walking tour.

All in all, I’m feeling pretty confident that, despite the fact that I’ll only be in Venice a very short period of time and need to make sure that I get back to the ship before it set‘s sail, with Lonely Planet’s Venice & the Veneto I’ll be able to get off the beaten track without getting totally lost.

I guess I’ll know tomorrow whether it does.

(Disclamer:  A complimentary copy of the Lonely Planet Venice & the Veneto was provided by Lonely Planet for review)

This past Saturday, I participated in a TBEX panel about travel writing with a group of guys that are among my personal writing heroes. Jim Benning, David Farley, Don George, Mike Yessis — thank you.

There were a few things that I spoke about during my portion of the panel that require more detailed attribution than I could give at the time.

• The Situation and the Story

Great travel writing, I opined, goes beyond the situation and tells a story.  The situation is the circumstances, the what-happened. The story  is the larger sense of what the writer can make of what happened. I first encountered this analysis of Vivian Gornick’s book The Situation and the Story, which I’ve read so many times now that the pages are wavy. (I tend to spill things on books I read often.) In fact, I’d stashed the book in my purse just in case I’d have an opportunity to whip it out during the panel and read one part that directly applies to travel writing:

I remember once my then husband and I, and a friend of ours, when on a rafting trip down the Rio Grande. The river was hot and wild; sad, brilliant, remote; closed in by canyon walls, desert banks, snakes, and flash floods; on one side Texas, the other Mexico: a week after we’d been there, snipers on the Mexico side killed two people also floating on a raft. Later, we each wrote about the trip. My husband focused brightly on the “river rats” who were our guides, our friend soberly on the misery of illegal immigration, I morbidly on what strangers my husband and I had become.

Shared situation, totally different stories. We travel writers are absolutely rich with situations, it’s stories that are the challenge.

• All Great Stories are  Mysteries

A story, defined: a character experiences change through conflict. We often think that these complications have to be physical: i.e. outsmarting a murderer! Outrunning the bear! Sometimes both at the same time!  And the truth is, those are easier stories to identify and to tell.  But the complication can also be an important question, or something more subtle. Also, because we’re writing nonfiction, the resolution doesn’t have to be satisfying, and the change doesn’t have to necessarily be profound. But you must have complication/conflict and you’ve got to have a change or a shift.

For all of this, I am indebted to Robert McKee’s Story workshop — which was a fairly unpleasant, but incredibly useful weekend. And his book Story.

And as for the element of mystery: “All good writing is mystery writing,” writes Rebecca McClanahan in Word Painting. “We may begin reading out of mild curiosity, to pass the time, but we keep reading to unravel the mystery. If there is no tension, we stop caring.”

• Take Your Experiences Seriously, But Not Personally

Travel writing that I find not-so-enjoyable tends to lack self-awareness, self-implication, or both.

By self-awareness, I mean, having a sense of where you are in relationship to what you’re writing about.  Your story is only a small part of the overall story of the place you’re visiting.

By self-implication, I mean that it’s important to turn your scrutiny on yourself. (David Farley does this very well in his PT story My Special Education: The Semi-Retard’s Guide to Learning Italian.)

In other words, take your experiences seriously, but not personally. I read it in a book having nothing to do with writing or traveling, called Coming to Our Senses, by Jon Kabat-Zinn. I like the full quote even better, although it’s long and convoluted. It’s important to:

“take one’s experience seriously but not personally, and with a healthy dose of lightheartedness and humor, especially in the face of the colossal suffering we are immersed in by virtue of being human, and in light of the ultimate evanescence of those distorting lenses called our opinions and our views that we so often cling to in trying desperately to make sense of the world and of ourselves.”

• “Panic has its narrative uses”

That was an oft-Tweeted quote from my remarks. It was entirely off the cuff, and mine, all mine. I am a panic artiste.

• Finally: TBEX Community Keynote and Introducing #travelstory

On the second and final day of TBEX,  Mike Barish and Pam Mandel selected and read a few great travel narratives.  I was not at all involved in this effort, but it struck me as the perfect bookend to the panel on travel writing: examples of great stories in action. And I want more more more!

So I’ve started a Twitter hashtag #travelstory — if you’ll tack that on to a tweet when you’re sharing a great travel story I’ll be grateful–  or let me know about your great stories via a DM or an @ on Twitter or by email at alisonstein at gmail dot com.  I’ll curate the results here on Perceptive Travel blog each month.

I’ve started with the stories that were read during the keynote, among them: Cuba’s Secret Weapon: Little Old Ladies, A Windswept Night in Orkney; and The Making of a Flyover American.

As a community, let’s support the kind of travel writing that we want to read!

*PS: The title of this post is the first line of The White Album, by Joan Didion.  She was not on the TBEX travel writing panel. If she had been, my panic would have been of no use to anyone at all.

On the recent stop in Egypt on the Dawn Princess World Cruise, over 1,000 passengers and crew loaded into buses at Port Said where the ship had docked and took a 3 hour ride into Cairo, heading for the pyramids.

But while most everyone else was heading in the same direction, 26 of us had decided to head off the beaten track in 4WD vehicles. So we parted company with the police escorted bus convoy on the outskirts of Cairo and headed out to Sakkara where we would find not only Egypt‘s oldest pyramid but also a collection of 4WD‘s that would take us away from the crowds.

But before we got dusty four wheeling around the desert, we had a good look around the Step Pyramid, designed and built by Imhotep in  2650 B.C. for the Pharaoh Djoser.

The  Step Pyramid  and it’s surrounding enclosures, was the prototype for all other pyramids.

It’s currently undergoing extensive conservation work, but visitors can easily wander around the complex, viewing the colonnaded corridor, ancient limestone wall, and even 12th century tourist graffiti.

Then it was off again in convoy, but this time in  4WD’s and minus the police escort. Bouncing around in the dusty desert, we headed out in search of  first the Bent Pyramid and then the Red Pyramid of Dahshur 

At each pyramid, we exited the air-conditioned 4WD’s, surrounded not by hoards of visitors and vendors but only the desert and the obligatory policemen and their camels standing guard over the pyramids. 

Of course, no visit to Egypt is complete without a visit to the Great Pyramid of Giza and Sphinx. So we reluctantly gave up the 4WD vehicles, climbed back into the bus and headed back into crowded Cairo.

By the time we arrived at Giza in mid-afternoon, the crowds were already there, along with what seemed like hundreds of persistent and insistent vendors trying to sell Egyptian kitsch and camel rides.

(photo credits: Liz Lewis)

But having been up close and personal with the Step, the Bent, and the Red Pyramid, we were happy to stand back and let others crowd around the Sphinx.

Yellowhead to Yellowstone a song about change, loss, what to keep and what to let go, and handling all that, told in the voice of a wolf who is relocated from western Canada to Montana. It is the title track of Ian Tyson’s most recent album and opens the door to a group of songs about personal confrontations with change, and reflections of the changing landscapes and ways of life in the Rocky Mountain west.

That’s a landscape and a way of day to day living Tyson knows well. “Music and horses, they’ve been my two loves all my life,” he said.

For the last three decades, Ian Tyson has lived on the eastern slope of the Canadian Rockies, in Alberta. It’s ranch country, mountain and prairie, and although it is changing, still a place where those who live there both wrest their livings out of the land and know they have to work with land and weather to survive. “It’s just a mosaic of western values and emblems, ” Tyson said.

He should know. He has been a force in re inventing the image of the west and rewriting the history of cowboy music. It began when he was invited to come to the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, in the early 1980s. “Back then, that was really the beginning of a whole renaissance of the cowboy movement, from silversmithing to saddle making, to poetry, to music,” he said.

“When I went down there, those people just said hey, there’s this Canadian guy, he’s a cowboy, he sings good and we’re gonna go hear him. They didn’t know anything about Four Strong Winds, they didn’t know anything about Ian and Sylvia, they just knew this guy’s a cowboy and he sings good. Which was fantastic. And I slowly came to the realization that I could change this music.”

Tyson was the man to do that. In addition to being a working cowboy and knowing and loving the way life goes in the mountain west, he had, through the folk revival of the 1960s and early 1970s, been half of the duo Ian & Sylvia, one of the top acts of the era. The combination of Ian’s strong tenor and Sylvia’s edgy alto gave them a distinctive sound. They each had a fine ear for song, as well, creating arrangements of traditional music such as Jesus Met the Woman at the Well and V’La L’Bon Vent which foreshadowed both country rock and Americana. They recorded songs by then little known musicians Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Gordon Lightfoot. They each wrote songs, too: Ian’s Four Strong Winds and Sylvia’s You Were On My Mind are but two which remain enduring classics which have been recorded by artists around the world.

When the couple came to a parting of the ways in the 1970s, Ian had returned to western Canada, and while keeping his hand in music by gigging around the region, focused on raising horses. Then came Elko.

“Here I was in my forties, “ he said, “and I realized that I could take the old Saturday afternoon Western movie music and leave that behind, and make a new music. Forge a new music out of my writing — and I did. It changed my life, basically, and gave me a whole new career.”

Tyson’s songs include character pieces about people who have shaped the west, clearly drawn descriptions of what it’s like to ride the range, to be out in the weather, to make a life in an often unforgiving land, stories of the beauty of that land, and stories of working out the joys and sorrows of love, framed in that life and those western landscapes. The album titles give an idea of the direction of the songs within them: Cowboyography, Eighteen Inches of Rain, Old Corrals and Sagebrush.

Yellowhead to Yellowstone is a bit darker than some of those. “You write about what you have,” Tyson said. Loss and change, connection and disconnection, regret and pondering what’s next make their way through ten songs, which end on a note of hope, in a song called Love Never Comes at All. “That’s a declaration of continuance, you know,” he said. “Love will continue.”

Now in his mid seventies, Tyson is pondering what’s next in his own path. “There are a lot of things I’d like to do before I tip over,” he said. “More songs, more cowboy stuff? It might be something else, a novel, a biography, maybe some short stories.” Later in the day of this conversation, he planned to go down to the small stone building on his ranch where he often works on his music. “I’ll play for a few hours,” he said, “just to keep the chops choppin.’”