• 1. Lists are a common device in travel writing. I just browsed the travel magazines at Barnes and Noble, and among the many enumerated promises, I found 30 romantic dream trips, 7 delicious trips, 12 fun festivals around the world, 25 Ultimate Beaches, 10 Blissful Little French Islands, 30 Smart Tips and Tricks to Ski America.  And that’s not to mention the travel books that tell you all the things to see before you’re dead, and travel writing online, which is a hive of lists.
• 2.Travelers use lists a great deal. I make lists of things I want to see in a place, along with their addresses, which I keep it folded up in my pocket. Some people make packing lists. I have a master packing list that I keep in my jewelry box from a time when I traveled less often, but I never look at it anymore. Itineraries are a kind of a list.
• 3. Lists are not just found in travel writing, they are common in all kinds of “lifestyle” coverage — 50 Best Recipes to Pair with Food, Wine and Cocktails, 10 Easy Tips to Look Better Naked. Lists are less common in places that publish writing with more serious intent.
• 4. I find “top” destination lists annoying. They are marketing devices if you take them cynically and overly autocratic if you take them seriously — analogous to that person you meet at parties who says, “oh, you haven’t been to XYZ place? And you call yourself a traveler!” Which is further analogous to the people you meet who say, “oh you went to (China, say) recently? Too bad you didn’t go ten years ago, it’s not the real China anymore.” What nonsense. Any place you’re physically traveling to is by definition real and not imaginary. But that’s a digression, which isn’t really allowed on a list.
• 5. The US is the only advanced nation that does not mandate paid vacation time, one in four workers have no vacation time at all, among those that do, the average number of days off is 12. Therefore, international audiences with more guaranteed vacation time can probably make better use of long lists. No one will go to 50 beaches on their vacation, they want to know one beach to go to on their limited vacation time.  If properly described the magazine cover line would say: 49 beaches you won’t go to, but we’d like you to browse through them all to find the one you will.
• 6. A very long list (like, say, the 500 best hotels in the world) is too inclusive to be useful,  more like a catalogue than a list; while a shorter list is idiosyncratic and only useful if you understand the proclivities and prejudices of the list maker.
• 7. I don’t like it when people ask me to name my favorite destination. I don’t know how to answer this question; it’s impossibly broad. (Like the question, “how was your trip”, which wants an answer not longer than what you’d politely answer when asked “how are you?”, in other words summary bordering on dishonesty. )  I can group the places I’ve traveled to by certain characteristics: places I’ve found most relaxing, places I’ve found most stimulating. But every place I visit is tinged with my state of mind when I visited, it’s not a clean sample. It is not relaxing to be on a deserted beach when there are challenges going on at home. It is relaxing to be in the middle of a bustling city without a care in the world.
• 8. Lists are imperious, judgmental, absolute, aristocratic, anti-democratic and flattening. They allow no subtlety. I do not think that one city, or beach, or hotel is necessarily better than another, it depends on what you’re looking for.
• 9. The making of a list defines insiders and outsiders. This is why Social Register mattered a great deal for many years. But lists used to matter more, when printing was scarce and there were fewer of them. Now, anyone can make a list. Evidence of the death of the important list may have been the Facebook “25 Things About Me” meme.
• 10. I’ll allow that a list is a convenient way to organize information. I have written and published many lists and doubtless will continue to do so in the due course of my writing career.
• 11. Lists imply. They are meant to be a legend to something larger, something more. When you put oranges on a shopping list, you know the firmness of the orange that you prefer. You don’t need to write that on the list.
• 12. An outline is a kind of a list. A Table of Contents is a list.  A list on its own is a table of contents without further content.  A list is an opener without a closer. When people exhibit this sort of behavior, we call them a tease.
• 13. Lists are extremely popular online. Anyone with access to site metrics will confirm this. This is because lists are “scannable”, a fancy way of saying “skimmable”.  You are not meant to read a list. Rather, you let your eye  sweep over the page,  as across a shop window,  before you commit to reading a full sentence. Most likely you will not. “Elements that enhance scanning include headings, large type, bold text, highlighted text, bulleted lists, graphics, captions, topic sentences, and tables of contents.”
• 14. A list is a concession that information matters more than style.
• 15. Lists are more about graphic design than they are about writing.  Questions of page layout have been relevant since before the printing press. An illuminated letter in a medieval scroll made the page more scannable, you could say. A list with bold faced keywords makes use of only a few tools graphic design. (Emphasis, introduction of negative, or blank space.) There are many more. The popularity of the list online is related to writers functioning without the benefit of a designer creating a custom layout for each page.
• 16. An article that is solely a list is called a “listicle”.  This sounds more vulgar than “charticle” which is an article that consists of all graphics. I texted this fact to a friend who enjoys vulgar things. He wrote back suggesting that we call them “rocky mountain round-ups”. I thought this was funny and said I’d steal it. He wanted credit. Duly given: Andrew Collins, who once won a contest relating to the eating of a great quantity of Rocky Mountain oysters.
• 17. A list can mean to lean, in a boat. A list can mean to roll, in an airplane. A list can be a place to joust, if you are a Medieval knight.

When I was a teenager, my favorite television series was Star Trek: The Next Generation. I still love it, and I’m thrilled whenever it plays on television. One of my single most favorite moments in Las Vegas came during my first visit, when in my first free moment, I beelined for the Star Trek Experience.  (I only hesitate to call myself a Trekkie since I have never once donned Vulcan ears, cannot arrange my fingers into the “live long and prosper” salute, have never attempted to speak Klingon, and own no Star Fleet memorabilia.)

“Space opera”, this genre of sci fi is called, and it’s always struck me as a subset of fictional travel writing. My favorite parts of these stories aren’t the technological gee gaws, or the intergalactic politics, but the part where you get to “explore strange new worlds”. I love the idea of looking up into the sky and seeing four or five moons instead of just one.

James Cameron’s movie Avatar falls into this category, which at its best is a travelogue to the planet of Pandora.  In fact, I’d argue that it would have been better without the silly plot and God help us, the infantile dialogue, better if it was simply that: a travelogue.

If you haven’t seen this new 3D technology, it’s pretty amazing. Things don’t really jump out at you, it’s more like the screen has a depth of field that’s similar to what you see when you’re looking out of the window. And so in the beginning, as the characters first explore Pandora, I thought, wow, this is a lot like my life — traveling around and seeing new, beautiful, amazing and sometimes disturbing things.  I wondered whether it would inspire travel here in the real world.

I’m not sure that it will though — first of all, some people are apparently crashingly depressed that they can’t actually go visit Pandora.  So okay, they’re carried away by the fantasy, but it’s not only this fantastic place that they want to visit, it’s the way that the characters in the movie travle that I think is also very compelling, and taps into a fantasy that people have about real-world travels on earth: that you can travel with any real personal involvement or risk.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the movie’s conceit, humans are somehow mentally joined with Avatars, essentially alien mannequins, so while the human lies asleep in a special chamber, they’re out cavorting in Pandora in their alien puppet costume.  In other words, the part of you that’s real slumbers safely, while your traveling persona is out learning about a new environment, culture, way of life.  (Bonus: in Avatar, your travel persona is taller, better looking, and more physically skilled.)

Of course, that safe remove is a fiction — even in the movie, the characters really begin to care about Pandora and its people, in the same way that travelers who really immerse begin to care about the places they visit and its people.  But that creates a conflict for the characters in the movie, whose allegiances are now divided, as it does for actual travelers.

The movie solves this neatly — the characters move to Pandora and through some magic are able to abandon their human form. (The movies is filled with pat solutions like this.) And it should be said,  it happens with some travelers too — they fall in love with a place and a way of life, and they never come home again. But most of us do return home, and want to, and the conflicting allegiances that travel can create are not at all easy to deal with. It’s an interesting conundrum, and not one that the movie takes up at all.  (Star Trek, in all its many movies and series, often does, ahem.)

But should Avatar inspire deep real-world , on Earth travels, it will be an issue the inspired will certainly have to consider.

When I first heard that Royal Caribbean was planning to dock its cruise ship off Haiti, as scheduled, mere days after one of the most deadly natural disasters in this hemisphere, like many I pursed my lips and shook my head. How could it be that a cruise ship could roll in to Haitian waters for fun in the sun, while hundreds of thousands are dead, dying or grievously injured?

The question occurred to people on the ship too, according to this oft-quoted Guardian article :

The decision to go ahead with the visit has divided passengers. The ships carry some food aid, and the cruise line has pledged to donate all proceeds from the visit to help stricken Haitians. But many passengers will stay aboard when they dock; one said he was “sickened”.

“I just can’t see myself sunning on the beach, playing in the water, eating a barbecue, and enjoying a cocktail while [in Port-au-Prince] there are tens of thousands of dead people being piled up on the streets, with the survivors stunned and looking for food and water,” one passenger wrote on the Cruise Critic internet forum.

“It was hard enough to sit and eat a picnic lunch at Labadee before the quake, knowing how many Haitians were starving,” said another. “I can’t imagine having to choke down a burger there now.”

Certainly, there’s visceral level of queasiness that results from juxtaposing the images of cavorting cruising tourists with the images of wholesale death and destruction in Haiti. It seems like a “let them eat cake” level of callousness.  But I would argue that refusing to go ashore, especially when Royal Caribbean pledges all its net profits from the visit to disaster relief, is making a choice on the basis of appearances rather than logic. It’s a choice that allows travelers on the ship to feel better about themselves and their position in the world, rather than doing any actual good at all. It’s a panacea.

Yes. It hardly seems fair that while some people are dying and starving and thirsty, others are living it up, with not only plenty of food and water, but with extras like booze and ziplines and hammocks. Inequality is a serious problem in this world, and it’s one that any traveler who ventures past the boundaries of wealthy nations must grapple with if they’re paying even the slightest bit of attention. Check out the UN Human Development Index, which is a composite index which takes into account life expectancy, access to knowledge and standard of living – more than half the world places in the medium to low development categories. (And Haiti placed in the “medium” development category, for what it’s worth.)

While I understand that it feels unseemly to be eating, drinking and enjoying while others suffer, and especially in the face of such extreme suffering, the fact is, even without a natural disaster, this is happening every single day. The inequities of the world don’t disappear simply because you opt to take your entertainment inside a cruise ship, rather than disembarking in Labedee, or choosing a ship with an itinerary that goes to different port, or even if you’re traveling somewhere else entirely.  It is a moral problem to be a person of privilege in a world where the majority of people are not.

There are many ways in which you can choose to deal with this moral problem, but the economic impact of travel is indisputable. International tourism generates over one trillion dollars a year, more than $3 billion dollars a day. These dollars generate jobs, income, access to health care, education, mobility. (In some cases it even protects natural resources, since it’s often natural resources that attract tourists in the first place.) No, I’m not saying tourism is a perfect solution to the world’s woes, or that its receipts are equally distributed or even fairly distributed –  but countries that cannot attract their share of tourist dollars have a hard time digging themselves out of the hole.   Look at the 24 countries that qualify as “Low Human Development” according to the UN.  Most are an in Africa, a few are in outright civil war, but none of them are major international tourist destinations at this point.

The port in Labadee is unsuitable for cargo ships, it can’t be used in the relief effort.  It is suitable for cruise ships.  There are two hundred people that are employed in this area, and they are doubtlessly experiencing a huge strain on their own personal resources as their country lies in shambles around them. How would losing their jobs, even temporarily, help these people?  If you’re planning to travel, and want to help, booking a trip on this ship isn’t all that different that doing something that you’d normally do, like dining out, or purchasing a product on Etsy, or the like. (Giving directly is better, of course.)

I also recognize that there are arguments to be made about what Royal Caribbean can and should be doing. I’m generally persuaded by attorney Jim Walker’s argument that Royal Caribbean could and probably should be doing more in Haiti. But when I asked Walker for a clarification on Twitter today, he said “I’m not proposing leaving Labadee, rather paying Haiti fairly – $100 per psngr = $600,000 rather than $36,000 per week.”

Still, common sense says that something is better than nothing. So if you’re on board the ship — or a have already booked your itinerary through Haiti, or are contemplating a cruise holiday, I urge you to go ashore, spend some money, spend a little extra, even. In any event, don’t discount Haiti out of hand. Yes, if you go elsewhere, you’ll likely avoid this particularly uncomfortable confrontation of your own luck and fortune stacked up against the misery of many others. That’s not for everyone. But remember, the choice to go elsewhere — and certainly to stay aboard the ship — won’t make anything easier for anyone but yourself.

At some point in the not-to-be-finely-pinpointed past, I was in Paris with a small group of writers, and we took a tour of the Printemps department store. It’s a lot like any department store in the U.S., with the exception of its 6th floor Brasserie, which is beneath an incredible Art Nouveau cupola of 3,185 pieces of stained glass. As I ate steak tartare and frites with the store’s representatives, I learned that the dome was taken apart, tile by tile, during World War II, and then reinstalled afterwards, by the same company.

Anyway, one of our group was a true fashion maven, and earlier that day, she’d disparaged Printemps, vigorously. It was, it seemed, not a place that she thought that anyone with an ounce of fashion sense would shop. But during the tour, those sentiments had not only vanished , but were entirely replaced. “I think you’re doing a deeper buy of the fashion lines than all the other stores,” she said, as we toured the second floor, packed with hyper-expensive apparel by international designers.  And of the hotel we were staying out, the InterContinental Le Grand, she said “I was thrill-ed to be staying there, not because it was near the Louvre, or not far from views of the Eiffel Tower, no no, it’s because it was so near to Printemps!”  She had an appointment and left the tour early,  but she vowed she’d be back before they closed to do some shopping on her own. As she dashed out the door, I knew she’d not be setting foot in there again on our trip, and she didn’t.

Whatever you want to call it — hypocrisy, a social fib, a white lie — for better or worse, they’re a part of travel.  We’re guests, by definition, when we’re in another city, state, country, if not in someone’s home.  (True, we’re often paying guests, which gives us a little more latitude,  but paying a bill doesn’t relieve you of the obligation to be polite.) So what’s the right thing for a traveler to do when when you really don’t like something?  Most etiquette books that I’ve seen over the years counsel against being untruthful, but I’m not sure I have the savoir faire to tell an unpleasant truth without seriously derailing the social dynamic.  Once, when I was in Nome, Alaska, I was served a delicacy called mukduk, which is hunks of whale skin and blubber tinged pink with blood,  frozen, and then hacked into small pieces with an ulu. To me, it tasted like a cold, chewy piece of a frozen dirty aquarium. I didn’t say that, though. I said  “mmmm”.

So yes, I’ll lie and say I like something when I don’t. I tend to keep it brief — one of my regular travel companions has said that he can tell when I haven’t enjoyed something if I say “it was lovely”, and no more. “It’s lovely” is actually my standard, and sincere, compliment, and I didn’t really think about it until he pointed out, but when I’ve actually enjoyed something I want to say more and more and more about it. When I haven’t, I want to say very little, if that.* I think that’s why my Parisian colleagues’s lies stood out to me — they were so detailed.

Still, I can understand the damage that’s done even with the small social lies I tend to tell. Someone you’re with probably knows what you’re up to, and it can’t help but damage your credibility in their eyes. “I guess it’s a dance we all do,” I wrote in my notes about Madame Printemps.  “But when [she] left to go to the airport and said, “it was like traveling with friends, really,” I had to wonder.”

And when she hugged me goodbye, we clunked heads.

_{*You’ll earn my (sincere) admiration if you can identify the movie that I’m quoting.}

Here’s the set up: It’s August 2003, and Peter Rudiak-Gould, 21, has volunteered at WorldTeach, a nonprofit organization that places teachers in schools throughout the world. He’s selected one of the hardest duties – solo teaching duty on a remote island called Ujae, which is part of the Marshall Islands in Micronesia.

Ujae is as teensy as it is remote: population 450, land mass: one-third of a square mile. Rudiak-Gould picked it because he, like so many,  romanticized the remote. He was seduced by the promise of a simpler life, and of exoticism and natural beauty.

Well, the natural beauty part met its promise, but the rest proved to be…shall we say, more nuanced? He finishes exploring the island, circumnavigating it in 45 minutes, so it’s sort of boring, and he can’t communicate with anyone at first, and he’s lonely. The sun is omnipresent, the heat malevolent, and the food is bland. The people shout, and treat their children harshly, these children shriek in a kind of nasal Conehead-esque alarm as a way of communicating displeasure. Plus – and this would definitely rule me out – you wake up some mornings covered in flying cockroaches. The school is a mess, the culture doesn’t support education, and plus, everyone seems to idolizes  the last volunteer who was there and constantly compares our hero to his predecessor unfavorably.

But Rudiak-Gould isn’t the sort to let his senses get obscured by sulking. He appreciates and admires the resourcefulness of people who live without any possibility of shopping – for instance he learns to fix a flip-flop by fashioning string out of a torn sheet, and attaching it with the help of a sharp rock and a pencil. He enjoys the island’s conception of time, particularly for the men who were freed from the work of subsistence hunting by government food subsidies, and have elevated the art of coffee klatch into a leisurely art form. And, he sheepishly admits, he enjoys being the local celebrity, as the one white guy/foreigner on the island.

Surviving Paradise is an account of the year that Rudiak-Gould spends in the Marshall Islands. While the book is roughly chronological, it’s hard to classify in form – it’s not a travel journal and it’s also not a unified narrative. It’s more of a collection of well- knitted sketches that as a whole amount to a portrait of a lifestyle — what life is like in Ujae at this particular moment in history, as its people blending their traditional ways and attitudes with the influences of the 21st century and the developed world.

Rudiak-Gould is particularly adept at showing how tradition and outside values intersect and interact, providing deft description of traditional Marshallese fishing techniques, say, while at the same time allowing us to see Ujae kids making gang signs and wearing t-shirts that say “I –Heart- Being a Princess”, and interjecting their games with quotes from movies that they watch on video, like “drop the gun motherfucker”.

At the same time, the book also does a good job of capturing the startling change in self-conception that happen when you are in a self-imposed temporary exile. For instance, about midway through the book, he takes Christmas break in Majuro, the biggest city on the Marshall Islands, where he sees white people — including his own reflection in the mirror — for the first time in months:

“I was shocked to see what I had become. I was bearded, and my brown hair had become long and streaked with bleached blond from sun and saltwater…I was even more shocked to see what I had always been: Caucasian. I had never noticed that before.

White people now looked very peculiar: sickly, bleached. Their hair was unnaturally light, and the high lists of their complexion were too reddish. I could see the blood glowing pink right under their skin. Caucasian children looked like ghosts.”

But here’s what I find the most interesting about Surviving Paradise: while it’s a portrait of a lifestyle, and of its participant-observer, it’s not really about particular people. We don’t really learn that much about what makes any individual on the island tick – Rudiak-Gould included. He observes his surroundings, and himself in those surroundings, with a clinical but compassionate gaze. His tone is amused but restrained – in fact, I got to thinking he was British and was startled when he reminded me midway through the book that he’s from California. (Apparently, I’m not the only one who’s noted this, as I just spotted on his website.)

We don’t know what, besides obvious things like air conditioning, he misses about California. (And I didn’t know until I visited his website that he’s from Berkeley — he doesn’t say in the book whether he was from a city, the suburbs, a farm, or what.) We don’t know what his life was like growing up, what his romantic inclinations or attachments are, what music he likes. Towards the end, he mentions two people who he refers to as his closest friends on the island, but we never see that friendship unfold. He refers to letters and packages from home that were sustaining, but we don’t know who they’re from or what the substance of that sustenance is for him.

I actually liked this restraint — I originally wrote lack of histrionics –  since I think most stories of this type stray into needless, seemingly endless, self-disclosure but it would have been interesting to have had, say, an understanding of what his experience of childhood was, for instance, given that he describes the Ujae way of childhood in great detail. In any event it’s certainly not a surprise to learn that he’s studying anthropology, since that’s clearly his natural stance.

But for whatever Surviving Paradise lacks in strong characters, it more than makes up for in its portrait of evolving intellectual understanding of a place, from confusion into insight. One of the brooding questions he has about Ujae is about its treatment of children: they’re basically on their own after age four. He moves from a position of disgusted judgment to understanding, and something just short of acceptance, which seems just about right to me. It’s a process that I’ve experienced myself, albeit in a different environment – rural Alaska – and it’s one that’s rarely well-depicted in travel writing of any length.

Oh, I should add that Surviving Paradise has more urgency because the low-lying Marshall Islands are in imminent danger because of rising ocean waters thanks to global warming – besides which, this place should dwell more on our American minds, considering that we used a part of it – the Bikini Atoll – as a nuclear proving ground at the end of World War II, the horrifying aftermath of which exists to this very day. But those are additional justifications for buying the book, the story itself only briefly touches on either subject.