Held this year at Vancouver’s  stylish waterfront Convention Center, the annual two day TBEX Travel Bloggers Conference provided travel bloggers from around the world the chance to gather, to discuss, to network, and learn ways to expand as travel bloggers and writers.

There were plenty of workshops and panels to choose from, led by various well known travel bloggers, travel writers, and travel industry folks who happily share their expertise on everything from non-narrative and narrative travel writing to the realities of making money from blogging.

And as you can imagine, there was a lot of talking going on.

Everyone, it seems, had a story to tell.

Travel bloggers, after all,  are an enthusiastic and passionate lot when it comes to travel, blogging, and social networking.

But they are also a generous group interested in giving back to the world which they love to travel around.

Which is why, a few years ago, the Passports with Purpose initiative was set up by four Seattle based travel bloggers.

At the fun, cupcake filled  pre-TBEX meetup hosted by three of the four PwP founders, a small gathering learned exactly what we, as a travel blogging community, have managed to create, and to be encouraged to participate in the next PwP fundraiser that will be held towards the end of the year.

As a pre-TBEX event, the Passports with Purpose presentation was only seen by a few dozen bloggers.

Maybe next year, when TBEX heads to Keystone, Colorado, the Passports with Purpose team will be given time on stage to reach the larger audience.

(Disclaimer: The video was shot by the writer, using a hand held Flip Video camera)

By Tony Perrottet

With the world’s greatest lover in history as his guide, the author of The Sinner’s Grand Tour sets out to do Venice right.

As any traveler knows, there’s nothing like insider tips from a local to unlock a city’s secrets. So when I was heading to Venice, I carried a package the weight of an anvil — all twelve volumes of Casanova’s notorious sex memoir, The Story of My Life, whose pages brim with a native son’s insights into his illustrious home town.

Consider his thoughts on accommodation. In the winter of 1753, Giacomo Casanova, then an insatiable 28-year-old, needed a short-term rental in central Venice where he could entertain a ravishing young nun he identifies as “M.M.” (Her real name, historians have discerned, was almost certainly Marina Morosini). Like many other aristocratic girls in Venice, M.M. had been sent to a convent by her family so they could avoid paying a marriage dowry, and she chafed at her fate. With golden hair that hung down to her knees, winsome blue eyes, alabaster skin “so white that it verged on pallor” and “two superb rows of teeth,” this enterprising Bride of Christ had made the first advance, according to Casanova, by dropping him a love note after a church service on the island of Murano. Several furtive meetings followed, where the pair agreed it would be safer to tryst in the heart of Venice.

A common inn was out of the question. Casanova wanted private rooms. Specifically, he required a casino—one of the city’s secretive apartments designed for the pursuit of “love, good food, and the joys of the senses.” He scoured the winding alleyways inspecting the options, before deciding on the most sumptuous and expensive of all, near the theater of San Moisé by St Mark’s Square. It had five rooms, including an octagonal boudoir with mirrors on the ceiling, white marble fireplaces and porcelain tiles from the Orient that depicted an athletic array of erotic positions. The extravagant price included a chef, who would deliver meals (“game, sturgeon, truffles, oysters, and perfect wine”) from the kitchen via a revolving dumb-waiter, so the occupants and their guests could keep their identities hidden.

Casanova’s choice, it transpired, was a great success. On the appointed evening, M.M. slipped from her island convent — a feat that evidently was not over-difficult — and was escorted in a gondola to San Marco by her first lover, a mature French ambassador named Joachim de Bernis, who graciously encouraged the adventure. For safety, M.M. had disguised herself as a boy, wearing black satin breaches and a pink waistcoat embroidered with gold thread; her long blonde hair was plaited down her back. The androgyny only increased Casanova’s desire when the group met in the Campo dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo behind a famous equestrian statue. Thanking the ambassador for his broad-mindedness, Casanova and M.M. retired to the five-star casino, where a candlelit feast duly materialized. The 22-year-old novice, Casanova fondly recounts in the second volume of his memoir, “was astonished to find herself receptive to so much pleasure, for I showed her many things she had considered fictions… and I taught her that the slightest constraint spoils the greatest pleasures.”

The pair met regularly for months, swapping oysters in their mouths then making love while M.M.’s older consort, the French ambassador, spied on them through a peephole. Eventually, the ambassador was invited for ménages à trois, then later à quatre when another young nun, “C.C.” (Caterina Capretta), joined in.

Naturally, I became fixated on lodging us in a former casino. I was traveling across Western Europe, visiting salacious historical sites from Parisian brothels to the Marquis de Sade’s castle, and for good measure had lured along my wife and two young boys. The experience had been edifying but also, frankly, grueling, so a sensual and luxury refuge was in order. Unfortunately, like Casanova, I couldn’t actually afford it. But as Giacomo must also have decided, Venice has never been a city for half measures.

The island republic has always held a place of honor in Europe’s erotic imagination. In the 18th century, the whole baroque city qualified as a red-light district, and travelers flocked here to cruise the canals with powdered courtesans and taut gondoliers, gamble in the luxury parlors and recover in the Turkish baths. No figure sums up the era’s hedonistic frenzy more than Giacomo Girolamo Casanova, the ultimate, well, “Casanova,” who cut a swathe through an apparently willing female population. The son of two poor actors, he used his wit, charm and joie to vivre to make himself a sought-after companion in the highest courts of Europe, hobnobbing with the likes of Voltaire, Goethe, Catherine the Great and Ben Franklin. But it was his rollicking sex memoir, written when he was in his sixties, that has ensured Casanova’s immortality.

The innocuously-named Story of My Life would also, I hoped, serve as my guidebook to Venice’s secrets. Although an inveterate traveler, Casanova was obsessed with his home city, and the memoir teems with asides and observations. Being a serious fan of Giacomo, I hoped that if I followed his literary path, I might be connected, if only momentarily, to the city’s past magic — a notoriously difficult feat. After all, no other city in Europe is so physically intact. A few guard railings have been installed on the canals, and the gondolas are no longer crowned with curtained leather booths, where lovers could withdraw for privacy as they floated through the city. But otherwise, Venice looks much the same as it did when Casanova saw M.M. shed her nun’s habit.

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“There are so many cultures. There are so many people like us, who adhere strictly to their heritage yet mix constantly. People are in contact with the world, but they are very proud of their ancestors and culture.” So says musician Zolani Mahola, explaining the vibe and focus of the band Freshlyground, in which she is singer and lyricist. The seven member band is from South Africa.

Guitar, flute, violin, percussion, mbira, voice, classical training and Americana influences, and tribal roots from Xhosa to Zulu and beyond: Freshyground do indeed bring a mix of backgrounds to creating their music, which they usually do together, working out jams and lines in twos and threes and then coming together to finish the songs, which often hold the groove of sunny Afro pop and spin of Cape Town jam along with lyrics that are equally likely to speak of love or politics. Guitarist Julio Sigauque heard his grandmother sing Moto, a song from civil war times in Mozambique, and the band took the idea to groove that is open and new, and distinctly African. Mahola uses call nd response form, an integral part of many sorts of African music which also finds a home in North American gospel, for her song Waliphalala’lgazi, written in the Xhosa language.

Kyla Rose Smith adds violin to the mix, drawing on background in Americana, bluegrass, and Zulu music. She uses traditional Zulu double stops and intervals in her playing. “The violin parts sound similar to the Zulu maskanda guitar style,” Smith says. “The sound is almost Irish, but the harmonies are uniquely South African.” Smith’s playing is well showcased on the piece Baba.

Even for multicultural South Africa, the seven musicians of Freshyround seem slightly unlikely pop stars. In a few years, thought, they have grown from having a small grassroots following to hitting the charts in their home country and singing with Shakira on the 2010 FIFA World Cup theme Waka Waka This Time for Africa. They have engaged audiences in Japan and Latvia, and on foot of their new album Radio Africa, they are making their first appearances in North America this summer. Freshylyground will play a series of dates beginning at the famed Iron Horse Music Hall in Massachusetts and finishing on the stages of the Vancouver Folk Festival in British Columbia.

photograph by Mischa Taylor

I’m becoming more selfish about places I love the more I write about them. Is that so wrong?

There’s a line all travel writers must walk when covering a given destination’s wheres, whats, and whens. It’s our job to inform and to inspire. To lay a foundation of awareness, to provide answers and directions, and to steer travelers towards–or in some cases away from–those experiences which we have gained informed opinions of. Essentially, it’s our job to share. I really enjoy doing it (especially when I get paid to do it).

Sometimes, though, I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to share. Sometimes, I want to keep a local bar, well, local, instead of writing it up and potentially opening the door for all those things that made it so special to be compromised by the bottomless appetite of tourism. Sometimes, I want to write about places in my private journal, and only in my private journal. I want to keep them secret and keep them sacred. Nothing personal, but sometimes I don’t want to see you there unless I bring you or invite you. (Don’t worry, though, I know another great little bar you’ll love. It’s on page 254 in your Lonely Planet guidebook, and… )

I know these places might make for a memorable, sell-able story, or would greatly enrich a listings section, or would help prove that yes, I really do know this destination well enough to discover a place as wonderful as this. The varying levels of restraint that we do (or do not) exercise in these instances, and the editorial filters through which we choose to work are, I think, things all travel writers grapple with from time to time. To share or to not share, that is the question. (Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.)

Of course, it’s not just about me.

Guidebook listings are insanely influential and can obviously have a profound impact on an establishment’s bottom line. For example, there’s a row of restaurants located just outside the main entrance of the Sukhothai Historical Park, in Thailand. The menus at each one are fairly similar and the restaurants themselves all look fairly alike, but on the day I visited one of them was absolutely packed, while the ones on either side of it were nearly empty. After pulling up a table at one of the empty ones, we whipped out our guidebook and, sure enough, the one that was packed was the one that had the featured listing.

The food was delicious and the service exceedingly friendly at the place we chose: all the difference in the world came down to the somewhat arbitrary decision by that writer to eat at that one place and list it. (If you’re the writer in question and actually ate at each one of them before deciding which one to list, hey, more power to you.)

To that end, where do the travel writer’s responsibilities lie, and who is our allegiance to: ourselves, our readers, or to the places we love (or the commissioning editor)? Probably all of the above, to varying degrees and based on the situation. Is it selfish to decide that a favorite local bar is too precious to risk tourism contamination, and thereby my personal enjoyment, and to not write it up? Maybe.

I assume that a listing in the right book, or a mention in the right article, helps keep some places from going under that otherwise might struggle to stay financially afloat. What if that favorite local bar I’ve kept to myself doesn’t catch on with the backpacker crowd–but simply closes down? What if I’m the break the friendly owners needed so desperately? (I’m not actually insinuating that I have that much pull or influence, because I don’t; this is strictly hypothetical.) I think about this a lot; that is, the power my words can potentially wield, and the tenuous line travel writers must walk. There’s no right or wrong answer here.

I had some amazing experiences this week in Bangkok, and I’d love to tell you about them, someday, maybe. For now, though, I admit it: I’m feeling selfish.

Have you ever wondered how big the individual blades are on those giant white wind turbines that are spinning around the world from mountains to plains to Dutch dikes on the North Sea?

While visiting the American Wind Power windmill museum in Lubbock, Texas, I saw one laid out on the ground and marveled at its size. My business partner Becky McCray was with me, and she suggested that I walk down the length of it with my video camera to give a visual feeling to the dimensions.

You know, the old writer’s advice – show, don’t tell.

So, I did.

It takes me 90 seconds to show you how long that blade is (complete with blowing West Texas wind for sound effects.)

Here’s the direct link to the video on YouTube if you can’t see the box below.

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