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One of the most infuriating things for a travel writer is being told, “You haven’t stayed long enough” or “you can’t see everything/anything here in a month – you can’t even see it in a year!” Let me explain why…

A bit of background first. One of the reasons we packed up our apartment in Dubai and put our worldly possessions into storage in January 2006 was so that we could work full-time from the road as travel writers. We had one year’s worth of back-to-back book commissions lined up and had we have kept a home in Dubai, aside from that first commission – yet another guidebook to Dubai (and Abu Dhabi) – we wouldn’t have spent much time there at all that year.

Besides, it had been our plan to try a new way of working we’d already tested out on a couple of guidebook commissions, and that was to stay in the destination for the duration of our work on the book, from research through writing to manuscript submission. The way that most guidebook authors work is that if the destination they’re writing on is not their home, they fly in to do the research then fly home again to do the write-up. We’d also been working that way and found it incredibly frustrating.

Trips were too rushed, each day crammed with too many things to do and see. We’d spend the whole time running around, from the time we woke to the time we went to sleep, and they were early mornings and very late nights. A typical day researching a city guide might include mad dashes around two or three museums, lunch, visiting a neighbourhood of shops, inspecting a few hotels, trying a couple of cafés, devising a new walking tour, back to the hotel to check email, re-group and change, visit a couple of bars, eat dinner, visit more bars and perhaps a couple of clubs, sleep, then do it all over again the next day.

And the whole time wasn’t just spent critically appraising a place, we’d be checking details and facts, we’d be talking to museum curators, hotel PRs, chefs, waiters, sommeliers, shop owners, bartenders, and club managers, we’d putting dots on maps, furiously writing notes, and taking ‘memory shots’. And I can’t even begin to describe the pace if Terry also had a photography commission for the same book.

Depending on the size of the guidebook (whether it was a compact or standard), the size of the city (was it, say, Lisbon or Paris), and how well we knew the destination (had we been many times or just a few), the research period might take 3-6 weeks and then we’d spend the same period (maybe longer) doing the write-up and mapping. And months later after it was edited, when we were in another country working on another book, we’d have to answer editor’s author queries or AQs.

Aside from the frantic pace, sometimes we’d leave a city having missed seeing a few places on our list or double-checking a couple of points of a map, we might not have been able to go back to check if that empty restaurant ever got full, whether that neighbourhood was more interesting on weekends, or whether I could find a better hotel to replace one I wasn’t 100% happy including. And in our rush to run about everywhere every day, while we’d seen and experienced more than many residents do (so people continually tell us), maybe we hadn’t got to explore every neighbourhood we wanted, or returned to see a band at that little jazz place that wasn’t in the book that we’d so badly wanted to include. And so on.

When we went on the road permanently, our aim was to avoid that mad pace, to ensure we saw and experienced as much as we could, and to settle into the place for the write-up. Even though we would be on our computers at a table in a room for the most part of every day writing, we could go to the shops to get supplies for the long day ahead, go for a stroll and explore a new neighbourhood when we needed to clear our heads, pop out for dinner or a drink, and have time to return to those places we wanted to double-check or visit a new restaurant we wanted to try. This meant that rather than fly into a city for a few weeks, we might stay for anything from six weeks to a few months.

Six years later, that’s still how we’re working. Now, we’d find it hard to work any other way. For the first few years we were mainly doing guidebooks and the occasional magazine or newspaper story, now it’s the other way around, mostly stories with the odd book. But we still settle into places for a while. We couldn’t envisage flying into a city just for a few days, as many writers do. For instance, we just spent five weeks in Melbourne researching a handful of stories, and last September we were there for two weeks for one story. But still, some locals will say it’s not long enough to get to know a place to be able to write about. So, how much time is enough time in a place?

To be continued…   

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“Did you imagine you would really be travelling the world and earning your living from your travels?” one of my dearest and oldest friends Becky wrote in an email to me the other day. “It’s quite extraordinary when you look back,” she wrote. “It probably seemed like an impossible dream to many.”

While travelling the world has been a dream since I was a kid, working as a travel writer came much later in life. My dream as a ten year old was to write books (yes, I was a very serious little girl) and by the time I was fourteen I wanted to be a journalist. In my first year at uni, I began the courses I hoped would prepare me for newspapers – politics, philosophy, psychology, and fine arts – and then I went and changed my career aspirations. A year later, I switched universities to pursue my new dream, to become a filmmaker. Over twenty years later, I’m working as a travel writer.

Life takes us places we could never have imagined. That’s what’s so wonderful about it. In the process of living – through a combination of events, encounters and interactions, from moments, meetings and minds that inspire us – we begin to form ideas, to shape goals and to create dreams for ourselves. But how many of us ever get to live those dreams? It takes imagination, spirit, determination, stamina, passion, verve, and some kind of magical combination of circumstances – along with a little serendipity – to live a dream.

My dear friend Becky has a wonderful life. A husband and four children she loves, family and friends who love her, successful businesses, a career she can be proud of, academic success that would be the envy of any student. I’ve known Bek since we were 14 and starting a new school together with another dear friend who was also a new kid in town. The three of us bonded and we’ve been loosely bound together ever since, even as our dreams and our lives have pulled us apart and tossed us all over the world.

As teenagers, Becky and I knew everything about each other. Living in the same neighbourhood, at times it felt like we spent more time with each other than we did our own families. We rode our bikes or caught the bus to school together, we spent weekends on the beach, and we slept over at each other’s houses. My parents treated Becky like a daughter. I was one of her bridesmaids and made a speech at her wedding. Becky came to visit me in Dubai when she was pregnant – just weeks before she was to give birth! Yet, as close as we were and have always been, I never knew about Becky’s dream…

Today my dear friend Becky is fulfilling a dream. Becky is one of a 23 all-women crew sailing the only tall ship, the South Passage, a 100’ gaff rigged schooner, in the Brisbane to Gladstone Yacht Race. Around 308 nautical miles, it’s Australia’s second biggest ocean going yacht race after the Sydney to Hobart, and it’s on the international yachting calendar.

The race will take Becky’s team about 40 hours to complete. They left Brisbane at 11am today eastern standard time in Australia and they will sail into Gladstone Harbour on Easter Sunday, the 8th April. Around 60 yachts will compete and the difficulty of the race depends on the weather. They’ll travel up to 40 miles off shore, so they’ll be well and truly in the rolling swell and away from safe harbours.

Becky’s team is called WomenRace4…Redkite. WomenRace4… gives 23 novice female sailors, of all ages and abilities, the opportunity to participate in the race. While an experienced crew of seven oversees the journey, the 23 women sail the ship, handing it back after they cross the finish line. (If you’re in Australia, you can watch the coverage on Channel 9 on Good Friday.)

Becky and her gutsy team-mates are using the journey to raise money for Redkite, a charity that supports families of children and young people with cancer by providing practical, financial and emotional support. In Australia, around five children and young people are diagnosed with cancer every day, yet at the time of diagnosis only one in five families know about Redkite and access its support. Becky wants to increase awareness of their service and raise funds so Redkite can expand its coverage.

So far, the 25-member crew of WomenRace4…Redkite have raised A$11,000 through Everyday Hero and their goal is to hand over a cheque to Redkite for more than $20,000. Becky herself has raised $2500 and she has a personal goal of $50,000. There’s still time to donate to this important cause, and it is a great cause, and you can donate as little as $5 or $10.

“Thanks for your interest, encouragement and support,” Becky emailed me the other day. “I have had some interesting responses from different friends and I can tell you, it is opening my eyes in so many ways. It’s a journey of the spirit for me – but then, I think, everything is!”

So, to all my traveller friends around the world, the people who share Becky’s same sense of adventure and see travel as a ‘journey of the spirit’, the people who have dared to live their dreams, even when those around them didn’t understand why they wanted to pack a bag and get on a plane or boat to see the world, if you can spare $5 or $10, please click here www.everydayhero.com.au/womenrace4redkite2012. Thanks in advance x

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The re-launch of Cool Travel Guide has been a long time coming. And while this is a soft launch of sorts, we still have a few tweaks to make, loads of archival posts to re-tag, and some text to finish. But something has motivated me to re-launch today, and I’ll tell you about that in a minute.

After fairly regular posting from the time I started Cool Travel Guide in 2007, I reluctantly put my little blog on hold when we went on our 2010 HomeAway UK sponsored grand tour of the world, as I was simply far too busy travelling and blogging about that trip on Grantourismo. When we settled in Bangkok in 2011 following the grand tour, I had all intentions of blogging here again, but our travel writing work – the stuff that pays the bills and allows us to travel perpetually – left me with little time to write anything else and Grantourismo still remains a priority.

Cool Travel Guide always seemed to slip to the bottom of the to-do list despite my intentions, and yet barely a day went by without me thinking “I should blog about that on Cool Travel Guide…” and add a topic to an ever-growing list. Sometimes, there were other reminders, like my writer friend Paul Castle (aka @DaddyBird) in Dubai who DM’ed me on Twitter the other day: “Poking around some of your and Terence’s old posts Has it really been almost 2 years since your last post on the Cool Travel Guide?? 8-O” Two years? Oh my god, it almost has been 24 months since I posted here! That was a shock. (Thank you, Paul.)

Then there are other surprising reminders, like the occasional advertiser (“Are you sure you want to advertise on Cool Travel Guide?”) or the PR company representing a national tourism body that contacted me the other day to say they wanted to nominate Cool Travel Guide for an award (“Really? But I haven’t posted in a very long time…”). And then there are the reader stats, increasing all the time, that arrive in my In Box each week. Terence re-designed the blog for me late last year (the plan was to re-launch in January) and shifted my old content over here from Blogspot and from the moment it went live more and more readers (and a fair amount of spammers too of course) have been visiting. Embarrassing.

But I haven’t really needed external reminders. There have been enough internal nudges. There have been countless moments when I would have killed for 20 spare minutes to blog a rant about some aspect of the travel industry, about the stagnation in writing fees, about some mad editor or dim-witted PR I’ve had to deal with, about the challenges of juggling writing projects, about some misplaced tourism campaign, about the difficulty of meeting deadlines on the road, about the ethics of travel blogging, and so on.

And then there are the moments when there’s been something wonderful that I wanted to tell you about, something magical – a place we’ve been, a person we’ve met, a meal we’ve eaten, a landscape we’ve seen – something that reminds me of the reasons why I travel, why I persist with this mad life as a travel writer, this crazy life on the road, and why I think travel is cool. Which is one of the reasons why I first started Cool Travel Guide.

I didn’t begin the blog to document my ‘escape from the cubicle’, my round-the-world adventures, or my path to becoming a travel writer. I’ve never worked in one of those claustrophobic work environments you see in American movies, and I’ve loved every full-time job I’ve ever had. My husband Terence and I had already been living out of our suitcases for two years when I began blogging, and we’d already been living overseas in the United Arab Emirates since 1998. I’ve always been a writer of some sort – on the arts, culture, film, fiction, and travel – since I started writing for the Sydney Uni newspaper Honi Soit in 1986.

And yet Cool Travel Guide still has a place in my life. For me, Cool Travel Guide represents a space where I can write about the things I can’t write about anywhere else, a place for me to rant and a place for me to rave – which was the main point of starting the thing in the first place, to write about the things that are cool (and not so cool) about travel. So, fasten your seat belts… and join me for the ride again.

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This is the longest I’ve gone without posting on my poor neglected Cool Travel Guide. You want to know why? Drop by Grantourismo and you’ll see that we’ve been a tad busy on our yearlong grand tour of the world, which we embarked on in February in partnership with HomeAway Holiday-Rentals. So far our trip has taken us from Melbourne via Dubai to London, Marrakech, Essaouira, Madrid, Jerez, Barcelona (pictured), Ceret, Perpignan, Paris, and now we’re in Kotor in Montenegro. We’re busy, but we’re meeting some amazing people, having some extraordinary experiences, and we’re generating some top quality content of which we’re really proud: go take a look! I won’t be neglecting Cool Travel Guide for much longer though… I have plans to re-launch the blog, which I’ll share with you shortly. In the meantime, do come and visit us at Grantourismo – even if it’s just to drop by and say hello!

Continue reading »]]> Life has been keeping us busy as usual with our Grantourismo project now well and truly under way; you can keep up with our travels and what we’re doing here. We’ve had a few bits and pieces published in print and online in January and February, which we wrote last year, that I wanted to share with you.
* The first edition Cyprus TwinPack guidebook I wrote for the UK’s AA Publishing was released in January. I really like AA’s revamp of the TwinPack series – the book’s design is much more clean and stylish-looking now.
* In the January issue of Gulf Life, Gulf Air’s in-flight magazine, Terence and I had a piece on the sleek one-of-a-kind sheesha pipes that the manager of Doha W’s Wahm Bar commissioned in Designer Sheesha in Doha: blowing bubbles has never been so cool, while in the February issue we’ve got a piece on Wild Peeta, a fantastic fusion shawarma eatery started by two Emirati guys.
* The February issue of J Mag, Jazeera Airways in-flight magazine includes more of our stories and pics, including Twitterabia, about the rise in popularity of Twitter in the region and how tweeps in the Middle East are meeting face to face and forming ‘real’ friendships; Future Planning, about three young Kuwaiti architects hoping to make Kuwait a better place to live through their re-thinking of what’s appropriate architecture for the country and their blog Re:Kuwait, aimed at opening a public dialogue on the subject; and Guitar Heroes, a piece about the heavy metal scene in Kuwait, though we’re not happy with this last story at all, censored for political/religious reasons. We were asked to remove references to the ‘devil’s music’ and the real challenges the musicians are facing – and we never called the guys geeky! If you’re interested in the full story and would like to see the original piece, leave a comment below and I’ll email it to you.
* The Jan/Feb/Mar edition of Carlson Wagonlit’s Asian-based business travel magazine, Connect, features a ’24 Hours in Dubai’ piece I wrote.
* The January edition of UK travel magazine Wanderlust contained a special Jordan supplement with a couple of pieces I wrote on Jordanian guides, including a profile of an award-winning guide and recommendations and advice by some of Jordan’s best guides.
* In the Ritz-Carlton magazine’s Winter 2010 edition, you’ll also find a small piece I wrote for the Doha hotel’s concierge.
* We also had a couple of pieces on the Viator blog, including UAE: a Winter Wonderland, and a piece introducing our Grantourismo project (Viator is one of our project partners).

Pictured: a wall of graffiti in Kuwait City, against which Terence shot fantastic portraits of Kuwait’s heavy metal heroes for our Jazeera magazine story.

Continue reading »]]> Terence and I have been dreaming about doing a grand tour of sorts for a few years – since way back when we wrote the Grantourismo blog for Charles and Marie. We started to seriously develop the idea of a reincarnation of Grantourismo about a year ago, but we hadn’t yet begun to think about how to fund it.

Our original plan was to stay in one destination for a month at a time, and to really try to get beneath the skin of the place, to get to know the locals, learn as much of the language as we could, to learn some things unique or special to the place, and to write a book about the project. We were over the moon when we discovered that HomeAway Holiday Rentals had a similar marketing exercise in mind, their idea being to send a couple of travel writers around the world to explore a more enriching and authentic way of travel that was possible through holiday home stays, rather than hotels. It was a godsend that they believed our project would fit, and we were happy to compromise a little (two destinations a month instead of one) to be able to make it work together. I’ll tell you a little bit more about Grantourismo in coming posts.

Continue reading »]]> Finishing writing projects (books, stories, reviews) and planning our exciting new project called Grantourismo, a contemporary grand tour of sorts, has kept us busy throughout December and January, and once again prevented me from updating this poor neglected little blog. Early this week we left Australia, where we went to spend Christmas and New Year with family and work at my uncle and aunt’s beautiful house in Bendigo, for the UAE, our home since 1998, and the base for the intensive globetrotting we’ve been doing these last 12 years.

Today we kick off Grantourismo with a little pre-launch party at a swish villa on The Palm in Dubai, on Monday we fly to London for the official launch of the project, and a week later we head to Marrakech to properly start the project. So what is this project then, you ask? Well, essentially, we’re trading hotel rooms for holiday homes for a year (phew!) and partnering with HomeAway Holiday Rentals, who are sending us around the world to stay in their properties and write about the homes, the destinations, and the experiences they enable us to have. The aim is to inspire people to choose holiday homes over hotels when they’re planning a trip, because we believe homes enable people to travel in a more enriching and authentic way. You can read more about the project on our pretty Grantourismo blog (which Terence designed) and here on the HomeAway site. And I’ll tell you more about how the project came about and what it involves in another post. Because I have a party to prepare for now…

Continue reading »]]> I’m a fan of Twitter but I was on deadline and only half-following tweets a few nights ago as messages streamed in from people in the UAE at the inauguration of the world’s tallest building Burj Dubai, since renamed Burj Khalifa. A few made me giggle, like that of @OmaReina who re-tweeted @trebbye:”#BurjDubai is now Burj Abu Dhabi…I mean #BurjKhalifa, as stated by his highness”, a reference to more affluent neighbouring emirate Abu Dhabi’s financial bailout of its debt-ridden cousin Dubai. (For further explanation, see this piece by Dubai’s Financial Times writer Simeon Kerr).

While there were the usual expressions of cynicism from Dubai’s many critics (some very witty), I was drawn more to tweets by Emirati and expat tweeps for their raw emotion and passionate expressions of elation and pride. As the messages streamed in at a rapid pace by tweeps determined to see the symbolic structure become a trending topic on Twitter, I have to admit I got a tad emotional and wished I was there with friends. You see, although I’m Australian I moved with husband Terence to the UAE in 1998 to work, and while we’re permanently on the road now, the country is still our base. I’ve lived there a quarter of my life and feel more home there than in Australia where I have to admit I feel, well, um… foreign. So when twitter pal and Matador editor Julie Schwietert (@collazoprojects) tweeted: “You know what I don’t care about? The Burj, that’s what.” I felt compelled to respond. Not criticize. Just explain that “The people who care about the Burj are the people who live there & love the place, and for whom it’s symbolic of so much…” (and, cause I needed more characters) “…which is why I care about it; I think we must feel the way Aussies felt when the Opera House or Harbour Bridge opened.” Because that’s what I’d been thinking as I half-watched the tweeps coming in that evening.

As I read tweets about workers injured during the construction of Burj Dubai, I recalled reading many years earlier in a popular culture class at uni about the many men who had died, were injured or went deaf while working on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, an initiative that created a phenomenal debt that wasn’t paid off until the 1980s. I also remembered old black and white photos I’d seen of the opening ceremony, presided over by the state premier, with a 21-gun salute, Air Force fly-past, marching bands and decorated floats, all considered very extravagant during times of depression. Sydney’s bridge is now a major tourist attraction, the Bridge Climb considered a must-do activity for visitors, and a place of celebration, with Sydneysiders streaming over it for its anniversaries and other significant events. The bridge is the centrepiece for every New Year’s Eve fireworks, when the country anxiously waits to see (after weeks of speculation) what illuminated symbol will appear on the structure following the dazzling display – it was a disco ball one year, a dove of peace another.

But, more than anything, like the Sydney Opera House and other great iconic monuments, the Sydney Harbour Bridge is a source of immense national pride. Its completion not only united the city when it connected Sydney’s northern and southern shores in 1932, but it also united a nation during very challenging times. I suspect Burj Khalifa has done the same.

P.S.my tweets motivated this lovely post from Julie on Matador: How Twitter Helped Me Care About the Burj.

Continue reading »]]> The posts I will be popping up on my poor neglected travel blog over the next few days have been a long time coming. Some I drafted back in Beirut in November, others I scribbled almost a month ago while I was recovering from bronchial pneumonia from a hotel room in Bangkok where we were working on a guidebook. That diagnosis, by the way, based on nasty symptoms like coughing up blood, came from my doctor uncle in Australia by email because I was too busy working to get to a GP.

It would be an understatement to say that 2009 has been a hectic year of travel and writing for Terence and I – something I only recently appreciated glancing at all the books we’ve written which have been published this year sitting on the shelf beside my desk here at my family’s house in Bendigo, Australia: Footprint Italian Lakes, Thomas Cook Northern Italy, and Thomas Cook Travellers Calabria, plus a handful of books I updated for AA and Thomas Cook. Then there are others we’ve written that I haven’t even seen (like the Rough Guides Clean Breaks, which I contributed to) or are not yet published, like the new edition to the Rough Guide to Australia (for which we updated four and a bit states – half the country! – on a four month-long road trip from October 2008 to February 2009), and another first edition, Back Roads Australia for DK. I skim down this page scanning my posts, and while there have been few compared to last year or the year before, when I stop at In Print and Online and then take a look at that archive I see why. We may continually read the claims that print is dead yet we’ve spent more time writing for magazines this year than any other, and up until we returned to guidebooks in December we’d spent six months solid doing little else but write for magazines.

The irony is that we’ve now been hired by HomeAway Holiday-Rentals for a year to travel the world, stay in their properties, and blog about the experience – something I never could have predicted. So the travel blogging that for me had been an escape from my ‘day job’ as a travel writer now becomes our main source of income. Print is still not dead, however – as much as our new client appreciates social media, they are still going to pay us bonuses for every article we get published in a magazine or newspaper. So I’m expecting it’s going to be another busy year, but I’m pleased to say that we’ll be slowing down considerably. No longer will I be envying a donkey his pace. More on our new project, Grantourismo soon.

Pictured? Fortune tellers in Bangkok.

Continue reading »]]> Which hotels do travel writers check into when they go on holidays? That’s what Mark Hudson, a writer himself for The Sunday Times, among other publications, was keen to know, so he asked 50 of them (including myself) and published their recommendations, ‘Where travel writers pay to stay’, on his site 101 Holidays. I’ve been meaning to share this one with you for a while. If you’re a regular Cool Travel Guide reader, you’ll know (from this post and others) that I’ve been increasingly frustrated with user-generated content of the kind you get on Trip Advisor, and find myself looking more and more for recommendations by experts, so I was pleased to see Mark do this.

Ah, but you say, aren’t all hotel reviews in magazines and papers written by experts? Well, yes they are, but they aren’t always the kind of hotels that the experts actually stay at when they have a choice. Sometimes hotels are reviewed because they’re ‘hot properties’, newly opened, relaunched, or because an advertiser/business partner has asked for them to be reviewed. Pictured above is a detail from the sitting room at the Novecento, a hotel we stayed for pleasure, not work, when we attended the Venice Biennale in June – it’s not new and not ‘hot’, but it has loads of charm, is in a wonderful location, and the staff are some of the best around.