The intrepid and widely published travel photographer and writer — and former Perceptive Travel blogger! — Steve Davey is bringing his photographic and travel expertise to a wider audience. Not that you could get a lot wider than his books Unforgettable Places to See Before You Die and Unforgettable Islands to Escape to Before You Die, both excellent travel and photography compilations that took Steve to the higher echelons of the travel writing and photography world.

But now Steve’s doing something different. To coincide with the release of his new book Footprint Travel Photography, Steve Davey is launching a series of travel photography tours, with Morocco and India both being offered this fall.

It would be hard to pass up an opportunity like this. Long-time readers of the Perceptive Travel magazine and this blog will know that few people know India and Morocco like Steve Davey, and even fewer can give those incredible places the photographer’s eye like this long-time travel photographer and writer. If you doubt me, just check out this post on Marrakech or some of Steve’s thoughts on India in “On the veranda of my bungalow in my khaki pyjamas.”

So if you’re at all interested in these places, or in learning travel photography in the field from a renowned expert, these are tours you don’t want to miss. Impressions of Morocco starts 21 September 2009, and runs for 13 days, visiting the evocative cities of Fes, Casablanca and Marrakech, trekking in the High Atlas Mountains around the remote village of Armed, exploring ruins, gorges, kasbahs and holy sites, and spending a night under the stars in the Sahara Desert.

Impressions of India visits the stunning Taj Mahal, and the holy city of Varanasi before spending three days at the Sonepur Mela festival in Bihar. The largest livestock fair in Asia, this festival is noted for the ‘Haathi Bazaar,’ or second-hand elephant market. The tour will also visit the Buddhist pilgrimage site of Bodh Gaya with its strong Tibetan influence and the bustling city of Kolkata. The tour runs for 16 days from 26 October 2009.

Tours in the next two years will also include Southeast Asia and Southwest France. For more information about all these tours, including pricing and more extensive discussion of the technical photography aspects covered and taught, visit the Photo Tours website.

Last year I wrote a post encouraging aspiring travel writers to enter the Summer Literary Seminars writing contest for the chance to win free airfare and tuition to the program’s White Nights session in St. Petersburg, Russia. That time has come around again, although sooner than I realized. February 28th is the deadline for the poetry and fiction contest, so if you’ve got a piece you’ve been hanging on to, this is the time to send it out.

Although nonfiction, sadly, is not a contest category this year, I still think that anyone interested in a cross between travel and writing can find no better opportunity than the Summer Literary Seminars (SLS) experience. I’ll quote the mission statement again, since it bears repeating: “SLS is premised on the not-so-novel idea that one’s writing can greatly benefit from the keen sense of temporary displacement created by an immersion in a thoroughly foreign culture and street vernacular.”

SLS offers a unique opportunity to immerse yourself in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry writing workshops, as well as lectures, tours, and cultural classes, in a completely foreign environment. Not only that, but you get exposure to writers working in several other countries, people whose work you might never see in the mainstream English-speaking world. I can attest to the benefits mentioned above — in no other conference or workshop have I found my writing and imagination more stimulated.

SLS has expanded its venues beyond its original location in St. Petersburg, Russia. While the Russia program is on hiatus until summer 2010, you still have time to apply for the literary seminars being held in Lithuania, Italy, and Kenya this year. Whether or not you enter the writing contest, the application deadlines for some programs are coming up soon, so check out the SLS website for application information and dates.

There’s something to be said for bringing to light undiscovered places. Saying that goes against my grain. As a wilderness lover, I’m always itching to walk into territory where other people aren’t, and to keep those others from coming for as long as possible. But reading this story from the BBC has me rethinking my priorities. On official maps of the Democratic Republic of Congo, there are areas so thickly forested (or so inaccessible due to ongoing conflicts) that existent villages haven’t been ‘discovered.’

To the traveler’s mind, this automatically sounds like a pretty good thing. But it turns out that forestry and timber contracts are being handed out partly on the basis that there aren’t any living people in the areas under question. A new mapping technique, using GPS and local villagers instead of satellite, has found that an area thought to have only 30 villages actually contains at least 190. The Rainforest Foundation is behind the effort, and points out the importance of establishing prior claims before logging and mining contracts in the resource-rich Democratic Republic of Congo are handed out willy-nilly to foreign corporations.

This story seems to me to be part of a wider worldwide tale, in which travelers and travel writers have brought previously unknown cultures to the world’s attention, and in doing so have helped slow the resource-grabbing (or rape, or theft, or whatever you want to call it) of those areas by faceless conglomerates.

In our world, where there is no real undiscovered country, no real new places to explore, the intrusion of travelers has arguably led to an expansion of consciousness, where people of any geographic location are given a smidgeon more power to determine their own fate and the use of the land they live on.

I stumbled across Jon Haggins awhile back, when I found his video about Norfolk, Virginia.

Today I felt like getting a little more exotic. While poking around for a good travel video, I found Jon’s enthusiastic take on the North African country of Tunisia (it’s on his GlobeTrotterTV3 channel on YouTube.)

I just love finding random people who are holding up a camera and letting it rip!

For those reading this post on RSS/feed readers, or anyone else who can’t see the video box below, click here to go to the Tunisia video on his YouTube page.

I’ll just say this straight out, so there’s no confusion: The World Without Us is not a depressing book.

Well, not entirely.

Called “one of the grandest thought experiments of our time” by revered nature/place writer Bill McKibben, The World Without Us sidesteps the calls to action over issues such as global warming and chemical manufacturing, and instead takes us to a place that no human will ever visit: a world in which the entire species has simply disappeared. Not done ourselves in through boiling the place or nuking one another or ingesting too many miniscule plastic grocery bag particles, but just gone.

What would happen? To answer the question, Weisman travels to places that represent the forefront of Industrial Revolution technology, and to places that are the last preserves of what the world looked like without our insatiable need to dominate nature and create waste.

Weisman walks into the Bialowieza Puszcza forest in Poland, virtually the only original ancient forest left in Europe, under constant threat from development. There, he asks how the forests would recover and reclaim their land without humans to constantly cut them back. He flies over Gambe Stream National Park in Tanzania, tracking the paths of elephants whose territory is shrinking in the face of housing development and an explosion of rose farming (note to self: being a person who prefers animals to people, I am never buying flower shop roses again).

He crosses Europe, notes the return of wildlife to the Chernobyl region, pokes around the miles of chemical and gasoline refining plants near Houston (awesome in their massiveness and arrogance), plans out the demise of the Panama Canal without people to maintain its locks, gives readers a glimpse of the precarious and unkown battle of New York City’s workers to keep the megalopolis’s head above water every time it rains, and floats to the great whirlpool of the Pacific where the planet’s millions of plastic grocery sacks, Styrofoam containers, Ziplock sandwich bags, and snippets of clingfilm end up — in short, the Earth’s plastic sewer.

Weisman did not intend this book to be a travel book. It is, as Bill McKibben described, a thought experiment. What will happen to balance out wildlife without the constant sprawl of human suburbs? How long will evolution take to develop a microbe that eats the plastic grocery bags that we each use by the thousands every year with abandon? What happens to a human body in a hermetically sealed, decay-proof coffin? (Answer: I’d rather rot under a tree, thanks.) But it succeeds in doing what the best of travel stories have always done. That is, to make us look at specks of our world in a different light — in this case, the light of what our wasteful natures hath wrought, and how long it would take to unwrought it if nobody were here to shoot the endangered tigers or fix our roofs.

The World Without Us is superbly written and endlessly fascinating. It takes us to corners of the world with little to tell but stories of past existence and the destruction unfettered wilfullness leads to. And how futile our industrial energy becomes when set against our own existence.

It’s a pity that the wilderness it ultimately shows us is one that will never appear in a glossy travel magazine.

(On the book’s website, Weisman has set up a GoogleEarth tour to virtually visit most of the places he traveled to. Along with the usual GoogleEarth perspective, the links give a little history and information about each location.)