Put a few travel bloggers together and you can all but guarantee they will be talking about travel and writing.

But three years ago, a conversation between these four Seattle travel bloggers – Pam Mandel (Nerd’s Eye View) , Beth Whitman (Wanderlust and Lipstick ), Michelle Duffy (WanderMom), and Debbie Dubrow (Delicious Baby) – evolved into something more than just talk about travel plans.

It evolved into a annual fundraising event – Passports with Purpose – that last year raised enough money to build a school in Cambodia (readabout the Passports School in Cambodia) .

This year,  Passports with Purpose is back with the goal of raising enough money to  build a village in Southern India with Land for Tillers’ Freedom (LAFTI) and their non-profit branch based in the U.S., Friends of LAFTI Foundation!

And given the generosity of time and money from travel bloggers around the world, it sure looks like an attainable goal.

            

Here’s what you do.

Head on over to the Passport with Purpose site and pick out prizes that interest you. Then buy tickets ($10 each) for that prize.

It’s that simple.

I can feel December 21st approaching.

That’s the winter solstice, which is also the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.  (Although it’s neither the day for the latest sunrise or the earliest sunset, for reasons having to do with the tilt of the earth on its axis, our oblong orbit around the sun and our speed of orbit — find the science here.)

I don’t mind the long nights, but right around this time each year I realize I’ve been missing something.

Sunset.

Sedona

The sun is still setting each day, obviously — but since it’s down by 4:30 p.m. where I live, I’m almost always missing it.

Now, I realize that my appreciation of sunsets is about as unusual as my fondness for adorable kittens or my peaceful feelings when I’m near the sea.

The Oregon Coast

But perhaps a travel writer’s predilections don’t always have to be quirky?  And besides, I’ve always felt a special fondness for the setting sun. Growing up, my 24th floor apartment gave me a great view of New York City’s pollution-enhanced 1980s sunsets. Like grandma’s cooking, nothing has ever truly compared.

Although some of these that I’ve experienced in my travels have come very close.

The Freycinet Peninsula, Tasmania

I attended the travel tech geekfest known as PhoCusWright last week and penned this rundown of interesting new travel tech that could make your life easier. I came away energized but frustrated, awed but annoyed, and impressed but yawning.

My mixed feelings were shared by many other attendees who are trying to make sense of the tsunami of change occurring around us. Much of it is invisible to us travelers who are booking flights, hotels, and tours, the tech happening behind the scenes or “under the hood” of all those websites and apps. Often I bristle at the thought of travel being sold as a commodity like peanut butter or cell phone plans, but for the booking sites, that’s their reality.

Here on the content side of things, we’re more concerned about the experience—what happens in your dreaming and doing, what happens after you’re on the ground in a new and exciting place. The booking part is just a means to the end.

Thankfully for us, people seem to spend a lot of time on travel websites and blogs before making up their mind. The Experian Hitwise company’s research found, for example, that in the 45 days leading up to a purchase, the average person visits 50 different websites before hitting the “buy” button on a site like Expedia. (So any advertiser or PR person looking for “conversion” from one website is deluding themselves that this is even possible.)

It’s all about Facebook?

Here’s the other factoid of the week from Hitwise: one out of every pageviews in the U.S. now is Facebook. It’s one in six in the UK. Here’s the full report.

Many companies that presented at PhoCusWright took this as meaning we all want to see where our friends went, what they did, and how we can use their recommendations to book travel. I’m not sold on that. Some of my friends are like-minded, but some love cruises and RVs. I meet strangers on my trips that are more attuned to my likes than either group. Kids in their 20s may feel differently though. Time will tell if these companies looking to connect us all and broadcast our likes and locations will actually survive. As the leader of Kayak said at one point, “Social [media] is overhyped—at least when it comes to making money.”

Or maybe smartphones?

The other big wave is mobile, which of course is important and fast-growing, but there’s a tendency to project one’s own experience outward and assume everyone has an iPhone and wants to use it to do everything in life. Being that the attendees at this conference were almost all educated, white, and reasonably well-off, that’s a dangerous projection to base a business plan on. Internationally, smart phones are still a novelty in many countries. Where I am in Mexico, finding someone using an iPhone is almost as hard as finding a good Chinese restaurant. Blackberries, yes, but that’s about it. The data plans are just way too expensive for anyone but the elites or those who need to stay constantly connected in their job. (The one person I know who has an iPhone is a property manager with multiple rental units.)

Plus let’s face it, being constantly connected is not good for your health, your stress, or your creativity. There’s a whole great book on this: Hamlet’s Blackberry. We know this intuitively, but the science backs it up.

What do you think? In the future will you be making all your travel plans through a little handheld screen and relying on your social network for booking tours, restaurants, and hotels? Will you just pack a bag and show up? Or somewhere in between?

Winter holidays, visits to friends and family, and thoughts of gifts and gift lists: should you be looking for ideas, consider these musical ones.

Hanneke Cassel is an American fiddle player and composer who has studied and absorbed the traditions of Scotland, and in recent years has made several trips to teach fiddle in China. All those elements come into play on the original and traditional music she chooses for her recording For Reasons Unseen along with hints of humour and a sense of faith.

Cathie Ryan’s album The Farthest Wave is a thoughtful, grace filled collection that may not be quite what many expect from the idea of Irish music. There are fast paced pieces, to be sure, jigs and reels fir for dancing, and the original song What’s Closest tot the Heart, which swirls with as many questions as answers, in both English and Irish. Ryan also offers also a fine helping of traditional and contemporary song, through which she invites you to reflect on change, choice, chance, and the courage it takes to live though all that.

Another fine piece of Irish music for your consideration, instrumental this time, is Shannon Heaton’s The Blue Dress, with tradtional and original Irish music led by Heaton’s work on the flute, supported by harp, bodhran, and guitar.

Iraqi musician Rahim AlHaj plays the oud. Amjad Ali Khan is a native of India and a master of the sarod. With these stringed instruments unique to their lands and cultures, they have joined up for Ancient Sounds, a group of reflective instrumental compositions. The idea for this collarbration, they write in the notes for the recording, arose out of their wish to come together to deliver a musical dialogue of peace to the world.

For Prism, Beth Nielsen Chapman pursued the idea of connecting with God through the music of varied traditions, languages, and times. The award winning songwriter added several of her own pieces as well. It is a journey at once eclectic — there are songs from Tibetan, Sufi, Navajo, and several Christian traditions among the tracks , for example — and unified, by the idea of worship and by the respect with which Chapman sings them.

If you are looking for music which works especially well with winter, Al Petteway and Amy White’s Winter Tidings is a good choice. It is primarily an instrumental album, with guitar, piano, and other acoustic instruments. The flavour of things is Appalachian and Celtic, and it is well worth listening to in the foreground of your attention, though it would make a fine way to create a seasonal backdrop to holiday activities as well.

Give these albums a listen as you are choosing gifts, for others and perhaps for yourself. In the days ahead, I’ll have more to say about Irish, Scottish and Americana music for the holidays.

If you like what you read here, consider subscribing to our rss feed. Look for the icon over there on the upper right.

By day, it’s a wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-ceiling megapolis of everything electronics.

Shiny new laptops, desktops, printers, and fax machines are packed into the center of the first floor, a showroom for the latest and greatest gadgets to make their way to Bangkok. These premium-priced items are surrounded by booths full of stuff you might find in a yard sale, or down an unkept, poorly lit aisle in a forgotten corner of K-Mart: cheap flashlights, plastic alarm clocks, batteries, sunglasses, belts, memory cards… basically, practical junk.

Most of those booths, however, specialize in entertainment: books and books full of bootleg DVDs and CDs, video games, garden-variety porn. Towards the rear, a number of “electronics repair shops”. (Quotes because my girlfriend once brought her laptop in to have the Wi-Fi card looked at, and had it returned to her with the Wi-Fi card still not working, but with the added bonus of her entire hard drive wiped clean without notice. This courtesy was performed free of charge.)

This is just the first of five floors at Pantip Plaza, Bangkok’s (in)famous electronics clearinghouse on Petchaburi Road, and just a few blocks down from our rented condo at the Platinum Fashion Mall. Upstairs, more of the same–lots and lots of it–as well as an aging little food court, a few department-store style electronics chains (think Best Buy with a Thai twist), and (I think) one or two of those walk-in plastic surgery shops that are popping up all over the city.

You could easily spend a few hours getting lost in here, especially if you decide to buy any DVDs. Here’s how that works: once you’ve finished flipping through the massive books full of all the available titles, you write the picks down on a piece of paper, negotiate the price, then wait as your seller calls in the order and the DVDs are ripped elsewhere in a mysterious satellite location. They’ll usually tell you “20 minutes”, but depending on the day, time, and weather, it could take well over an hour–even two on occasion. It’s all quite a scene and one every visitor to Bangkok should check out, even if just for a quick walk through.

The Sun Goes Down

By night, after the lights have gone out, the books of porn have been zipped shut, and the tourists have been whisked away by grinning tuk-tuk drivers waiting out front, the long steps in front of Pantip become somewhat of an early-evening hangout. A spot to pre-party with friends over a few cans of Leo or Chang beer–bought, of course, at one of the approximately 52 7-11 stores located within a half-mile radius–and snacks from a handful of street-food vendors parked on the sidewalk.

There are few things that are quite as satisfying as downing a cold beer outdoors in Bangkok on a hot, sticky night; here on the Pantip steps, with the sun down and the city lit up, those beers were like a ticket to a live show I could watch over and over again.

We’d sit there surrounded by locals unwinding after a long day at work, watching the candy-colored taxi cabs jockey with tuks-tuks and daredevils riding motorbikes in Petchaburi’s insane traffic. High-pitched whistles, blown by long-deaf traffic cops, rang out like sirens. Oh, how those persistent fucking traffic cops blew and blew and blew those piercing fucking whistles from sun up to sun down, whether their whistles needed to be blown or not. (They never needed to be, but this is Bangkok.)

The familiar ring of 7-11′s front door sliding open and shut, open and shut. Thai movie soundtracks blasting from a booth selling DVDs in a nearby alley. The occasional rat–and not-so-occasional roach–scuttling by on the weathered, cracked sidewalk and down a hole underneath the stairwell for the pedestrian overpass. The long white walls of the Indonesian Embassy to the left, a maze of sois directly across from us on the other side of Petchaburi, and Pratunam Center off in the near distance to the right. My apartment just 3 minutes away.

Looking to have a drink with locals during your next visit to Bangkok? Start with the five places I wrote about over on Lonely Planet this week. If you’re in the neighborhood, though, stop by a 7-11, grab a few bags of fried seaweed and a bottle or two of Chang, and pull up a stoop on the steps of Pantip. Watch the always-entertaining theater that is an evening in Bangok unfold.

Photo Credit Keng Susumpow