I have been quiet for the last couple of weeks. The plan was to have a couple of weekends away, get out of London and relax. After spending so much time away last year shooting Unforgettable Islands to Escape to Before You Die (where I flew the equivalent of 7.5 times around the world) I have been taking things a lot easier this year. I guess I had forgotten just how stressful leaving home can be.

First weekend away, driving down to Bristol to see my parents. Less than 150 miles, motorways most of the way. We left on a quiet day, sailed out of London without seeing a traffic jam or a red traffic light. Things seemed to be going well until with just twenty miles to go the engine blew up. Ever seen a Formula 1 race when an engine blows? That was what it looked like. Clouds of smoke, no gear box, cruising in to the hard shoulder. Waiting with a baby at the side of the motorway for a tow truck!

Last weekend, a train down to Cornwall. Five hours passed well. It was a modern train and even had electricity points, so I could catch up with some work on my laptop. That is when little Amber Sashi wasn’t thrashing the keyboard. I knew that downloading Alpha Baby was a mistake.

St Ives in Cornwall is a beautiful Cornish town with a traditional fishing harbour, three very different beaches (including a surf beach) and a number of galleries. At the tail end of the season, the weather was good, and the summer crowds had gone. All was perfect until I got a phone call from the neighbour who was looking after my aged, arthritic, diabetic cat saying that he had disappeared. To cut a long story short he had been rescued/kidnapped by the RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) with a suspected broken leg.

I say suspected as they had him for three days, didn’t bother x-raying him and would have only kept him on their kitty-death-row for a week (still with an untreated broken leg) before killing him! It says a lot that after three days at an RSPCA hospital he had to spend three days on a drip at my vets until he was well enough for a x-ray. His broken leg now pinned, he is in a confinement cage at my house, lucky to be alive. The RSPCA is of course one of those phenomenally rich organisations who encourage old grannies to leave money to them in their wills and make all those reality tv shows about how they rescue sick animals. It’s a shame that Rolf Harris wasn’t there when Simba was picked up, they might have just treated him if a tv camera was there!

After two relaxing weekends away, I now need a holiday. My fear now is that if I do have a holiday, I will need another one just to recover! Travel is stressful. If only I had read this New York Times article, before I left, I might have opted for a quiet weekend at home!

© Steve Davey 2007

The New Seven Wonders of the World list shows more about the problems with democracy than the state of the World’s Wonderfulness. Why the Christ statue of Corcovado in Rio beat Angkor Wat to make it into the list I don’t know. Well I do know - my guess is that the list has been hijacked by Brazilians, or Christians, or Brazilian Christians! The one thing you can safely say is that it probably won’t be Christians with Brazilians!

We live in a World ordered by lists. We seem to be surrounded by them. They tell us where to go on holiday, what to do there and generally fill pages of magazines and newspapers with easy to produce copy. Probably the bizarrest example of list-obsession is the British hobby of trainspotting. Not, as you might think if you have seen the film, involving Glaswegians and Heroin, trainspotting is the hobby of collecting train numbers! Obvious figures of fun, you can see trainspotters hovering at the end of most British railway stations, in all weathers, ticking off the numbers of trains in specially printed books.

As the author of two different books which seek to list the most Unforgettable Places and Islands, I am probably somewhat on dodgy ground when criticising any type of lists, so here in no particular order is a selection of some of my favourites!

Any list which labels the Fench as the worst tourists in the world has to be on my favourite list. I can even get over the shame of British being fifth!

I can’t say that I agree to all of Road Junky’s list of Worst Cities to Travel To, but the inclusion of Manchester and Liverpool did make me laugh. Especially as my town, London, is on their best citites list. Their reasons should amuse (unless you are a scouser).

If food is one of your reasons for travelling then this list of Worst Food might make you reconsider. And they don’t even have the Thai, deep fried bugs on here. Yum yum!

Well, we can all dream! This list of Sexy Beaches does it for me. Now where did I put my Speedo?

It’s a strange world out there, and this list of Weird Festivals has some of the freakiest that the planet has to offer.

Words & pictures © Steve Davey 2007

That America is a little drug-happy (the legal kind) is a statement of yawning obviousness these days. Doctors’ offices are rife with stories of people who come in asking for “the pink pill” or “the yellow pill” or whatever pill is going to solve all their emotional and physical problems, and make them slim and happy and popular all at the same time. I’ve even been in the office for a specific complaint, and had the doctor ask if I needed any other random medications for whatever imaginary ailments I could come up with.

But this story takes the problem to absurdity. A mother and her toddler were kicked off a Continental Express flight after she refused to medicate her kid, who was engaging in what sounds like mildly annoying, but perfectly normal, behavior. The above link is to the original Washington Post article, but it’s more interesting to read the post on the Broadsheet blog. Carol Lloyd relates a similar flight-attendant confrontation regarding her own kids, and wonders if it’s simply America’s attitude toward children that’s the problem.

If you flick through most travel magazines you would imagine that the world is made up of a series of luxury spas where compliantly servile locals will anoint you with unguents and stroke away the cares and woes of the modern world. It is a world where you can look from the luxury of a cruise liner upon quaint little natives, who are allowed on board long enough to dance for you, but where you never have to get your feet dirty or sleep in a bed without a choice of pillows no matter how remote the destination. It is a world of refinement where poor people are kept away from the best beaches, where the only locals you will encounter are making beds or serving cocktails, wearing mauve waistcoats or calling you “Bwana”.

This is ‘fluffy travel land’, a place inhabited by travel editors and low grade travel writers. It is a place that PRs for travel companies would like you to believe in. It is a place where everywhere is “the new Shangri-la” – like Narnia with palm trees.

Yet the real world as we know isn’t like that. Those quaint natives have their own lives to lead, and that sometimes involves the odd war, a few famines and the full gamut of human behaviour. Our governments warn us off visiting great swathes of the world, and the travel industry pretends that they just don’t exist.

There are good reasons for this – travelling to these sorts of places is in essence, pretty stupid! Yet there is a small hardcore of travellers who seek out the worlds dangerous places, not because they have any good reason to be there, they just like the buzz.

The patron saint of all disaster tourists has to be Robert Young Pelton. He is the man behind Fielding’s Guide to Dangerous Places – the bible for travel to the world’s more screwed up places. Pelton’s website is optimistically called combackalive.com and like Dangerous Places, it is packed with information to help you do just that – and to feel damn cool whilst you are there!

As well as facts and figures there are a number of stories about walking on the wild side of life. Getting Arrested gives you a few hints how to avoid spending a little more time in a country than you had intended, and has a salutary yarn about photographing planes in Mali.

The On The Ground section has stories from various frontlines around the world, including Derek Flood’s dispatches from a Maoist Insurgency in Assam in India in The Candlelight Rebellion

There is even a discsussion forum where scary sounding people with handles like mercenary1, whose signature is ”Come on you Sons of Bitches. No One Lives Forever” ask and answer badass questions.

Another site website that deals with some of the less salubrious parts of the world is Polo’s Bastards, whose strapline is “going where we ain’t supposed to!” They certainly do. This extensive collection of stories will take you from Colombia to Chechnya and from Peshawar to North Korea. The stories on this site go far deeper than travel yarns, but there is a real feeling of adventure and exploration. Spend some time here, and that package to Cancun just won’t seem so exciting!

Words & image ©stevedavey.com 2007

It is, a sad fact, that most travel writing is limp, regurgitated pap. Awful phrases from the travel-writer’s book of clichés: witness crashing waves on soaring cliffs. or that laziest of descriptions: ‘it was like a scene from [insert name of lousy Hollywood flick here]’. And if I see one more place described as the ‘Paris of the East’, or the ‘New Ibiza’ someone will get hurt!

A large part of the problem comes from the publications that actually run the stories. Magazine and newspaper publishing is a fantastically difficult way to make money. In the last year or so, two magazines in the UK have folded, and a third is wobbling it’s way into a ‘redesign’ – a magazine’s last desperate attempt at turning its fortunes around, but regarded by all in the media as the same as sitting down to write a good suicide note. Everything in a magazine or newspaper is down to advertising. You want to write a yarn about riding a beat-up motorbike on mescaline across the Mexican desert, they want a ‘Long Weekend in Paris’ piece as it will bring in more advertising.

Similarly, most travel magazines and sections work in an inane Prozac-overdosed happy world, where everything is cuddly, fluffy and so positive. Any criticism is bullied out of features. I remember once reading a restaurant review that was run over two pages. The gist was that this place was so bad, you had to go there. The reviewer assured me it was the worst restaurant in the world and even lampooned the other customers. I was hooked! I even tried to make a reservation, but they were full.

Restaurant and theatre critics can flex their acerbic wit, travel writers can’t – certainly not in print. The whole process doesn’t help. A writer gets a commission, then approaches an airline and a tourist board to help. They are hooked up with some boutique hotel and a local operator. They make friends – they owe people. Then if the place sucks what do they do? The magazine has been promised a story and doesn’t want anything negative that will annoy advertisers. All of the people who have helped are on the phone asking when ‘their’ feature will be out. The correct thing to do would be to email everyone saying the place is too crap to write about, but hell, even travel writers have to eat. So we act like unpaid PR reps and drag out the ‘book of clichés’ and perpetuate the myth that everywhere in travel-land is fluffy. In short, we sell our souls.

Then there is the celebrity travel writer. People who are utterly useless in their chosen career, but who have stumbled their way out of rehab and their agent has swung them a travel-writing gig. The travel pages of the UK are full of their ghost-written self indulgences.

This is why finding good travel writing is so difficult – especially in print! Yet there is good writing out there – much of it on the web where normal advertising pressures don’t apply. It does take a while to wade through a world of dross but that is why we are here – to guide you to some of the better examples of the art.

One such gem is Jon Ronson, who writes for the Guardian newspaper in the UK. The whole Guardian travel site is a haven of less obvious stories and Jon is someone who certainly doesn’t play the PR game and is prepared to make a few enemies in the industry. His story about the Gleneagles Hotel probably wouldn’t put me off visiting, although his experiences on a Ryan Air flight just might!

Words ©stevedavey.com 2007