Away on Business

Picasso vs. Potter

2011-01-06T17:26:00.002-08:00

SEATTLE, WA—Two blockbuster exhibitions are currently attracting crowds to Seattle, where Pablo Picasso, the 20th century’s greatest master of form and colour, is doing battle with Harry Potter, to date the 21st century’s most popular fictional figure. Both are using wands.

At the Seattle Art Museum, Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée Picasso, Paris is a generous display of 150 works from the artist’s own collection representing an astonishing eight decades of output. But visitors can optionally wave the audio wand supplied and shrink the experience to 25 sample works, listening to recorded introductions to them through its earpiece.

Meanwhile, at the Pacific Science Center’s Harry Potter: The Exhibition, audio tour headsets are also offered (for an extra fee), but the wands are in glass cases: those of Potter and his arch-enemy Lord Voldemort as well many waved by supporting cast-members.

For those with little interest in art, and whose knowledge of Picasso may amount to no more than familiarity with his name and its connection to cubism, the great variety of the works on show and the very approachable and even charming nature of many of them will come as a surprise. From a moving “blue period” portrait, via paintings with strong African influences, to a simple sculpture of a bull’s head made from the saddle and handlebars of a bicycle, Picasso proves to be the art world’s answer to the Potter stories’ shape-shifting boggart: his work comes in almost any style you care to imagine.

And when the works are more demanding the audio wand offers explanations. Cubism, for example, is the attempt to show a subject from multiple points of view at the same time, and later the fusion of multiple subjects and media in one work. Once that’s understood the relevant canvases become visual puzzles it is a pleasure to solve.

For those lacking previous experience of the Harry Potter books or movies, it’s the Pacific Science Center show that must prove harder to understand, beginning perhaps with the question as to what an exhibition starring the improbable suspension of the laws of physics is doing in a museum devoted to science.

It opens with a live section the Picasso show certainly cannot match, when volunteer children are invited to wear the Sorting Hat, a sentient and loquacious piece of headgear that decides and then announces which house each new arrival at Hogwarts School should join. Here it is recreated in 3D with a clever bit of animatronics under the control of an actor playing the part of one of the school’s professors.

But from then on it’s the Potter show that seems the more static of the two, despite the presence of screens on almost every wall showing clips from the films. From Hogwarts robes to broomsticks, and from centaurs to house elves, shorn of both their context in the stories and the CGI magic that animates them on-screen, every item seems more dead than any still life. Unlike Picasso’s canvasses, there’s no puzzle to solve and no imagination is needed.

Past a steaming but stationary replica of the Hogwart’s Express, and along a meandering route through various prop-filled hints at Hogwarts classrooms and a partial recreation of half-giant Hagrid’s house, there’s a chance to uproot a mandrake plant and make it squeal, and to throw a quaffle ball through a hoop.

But like the Potter narrative itself, the exhibition becomes more sinister and glum as it proceeds, with a Dementor (fiend), an Acromantula (giant talking spider), and a visit to the Forbidden Forest, although the really scary part of the whole show is the gift shop. This is a trap to which the whole experience, like some cunning Voldemort plan, has really been leading.

Here groaning shelves of merchandise, much of it at higher prices than those of ordinary toy stores, conjure up visions of financial doom in the minds of parents.

Visit both shows. But you may find that even younger members of the family, when armed with audio wands, find more magic in Picasso than in Potter.

ACCESS

Move fast: Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée Picasso, Paris closes on January 17, and Harry Potter: The Exhibition on January 30. Both are sufficiently popular to require timed entry, and both should be booked on-line well in advance where possible.

The Seattle Art Museum is right in the compact city centre and can be reached on foot from many hotels. Full details of the Picasso show, opening hours, supporting activities, downloadable audio files, and on-line booking information can be found at picassoinseattle.org.

Similar details for the Harry Potter show can be www.pacsci.org/harrypotter. The Pacific Science Center can be reached directly by monorail from downtown Seattle, the train having been temporarily redecorated as the Hogwarts Express, complete with steam whistle. The very comfortable Hotel Monaco (www.monaco-seattle.com) is offering packages that include discounted tickets for both the show and the monorail.

Seattle

2010-11-13T17:09:00.003-08:00

It's a Saturday in Seattle. I arrived by train on Friday for an afternoon appointment, and I have another on Sunday morning before leaving. But today I have the whole city to myself (with family--I'm on a family travel assignment) and Seattle Tourism has helpfully provided free entry to Seattle's six main attractions. None, however, is part of the story, so none have been seen, and instead other than a little walking around to the Pike Place Market (ugh!) and some other shopping (US dollar weak, birthdays ahead) much of the day has been spent in the very comfortable room at the Hotel Monaco; reading, chatting, and playing with the children. The highlight of the day was finding a café that makes and serves crumpets: proper crumpets, even better than those my mother used occasionally to give me. Of course, they destroy them in the time-honoured American way by adding absurd toppings made entirely from saturated fat that dwarf the crumpet itself, but there's no need to order those.

The Friday appointment was to see the Picasso show at the Seattle Art Museum, on loan from the Musée Picasso in Paris, and very substantial. The Sunday one will be (sublime to ridiculous) at the Harry Potter Exhibition at the Pacific Science Center.

One of the best ways to like somewhere. Don't see too much of it. And when I don't have to go somewhere, the best thing is staying still and not doing very much at all. That's a holiday.

'China's Humiliation Is No Mere Put-On'

2010-11-08T15:18:00.003-08:00

A letter in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, linked above, replies to my recent short piece there (see below) on activities surrounding the 150th anniversary of the destruction of Beijing's Summer Palace by British and French forces. Or, rather, it doesn't reply at all, but makes a masterly attempt at misdirection worth of a PR pro, and entirely in line with the Chinese government's own policies. Since I've been meaning to expand on the earlier piece anyway, which deals with matters far more important than mere travel writing, let's have a closer look at this response, and then proceed to a number of other loose ends, probably becoming incoherent with rage in the process.

Peter Neville-Hadley criticizes China for opportunistically exploiting history by commemorating the Anglo-French destruction of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing 150 years ago ("Preserving China's Humiliation," op-ed, Oct. 22-24). In China as anywhere, apology and reconciliation are charged subjects. But Mr. Neville-Hadley's piece degenerates into a "China-deserved-it" polemic.

The piece is indeed about the opportunistic exploitation of history (where 'exploitation' means 'lying' and the promotion only of carefully selected events and carefully selected pieces of information about them) by the Chinese government with the aim of diverting attention from its own crimes. But it is simply false to assert that any suggestion whatsoever is made that China deserved the destruction of the Summer Palace, as anyone actually reading the piece can see. But by this time the piece isn't visible to most readers, of course, the edition containing it having gone to wrap fish, so such assertions can be safely made.

The question of whether the destruction was right or wrong was not even addressed, and isn't to the point, although surely the destruction was highly regrettable. China neither 'deserved' it, nor, indeed, received it. The palace complex was a Mongol and Manchu creation, there was no such thing as China at the time, but only the rather larger Great Qing Empire. As pointed out in the piece, the view of the invaders was that the alien Manchu rulers of Chinese territory did indeed 'deserve it', and the looting and destruction was entirely targeted at them, in response to the murder of envoys under a flag of truce, in preference to taking other actions that would have cost Chinese lives. At least one Chinese historian, Yuan Weishi, agrees that the Manchus bore responsibility and has stated that other professional Chinese historians know this, too. Of course, there's no public debate about such matters in China and only the Party's highly manipulative view is permitted. The magazine that published Mr. Yuan's article on this subject was suspended from publication, and its editor was fired.

None of this means that the British and French were right to do what they did, but to concentrate on this question is entirely to miss the point, perhaps intentionally. Let the blame be entirely theirs, by all means.

His key argument seems to be that the palace's destruction could have been much worse but wasn't. He writes: "[T]he destruction of the palace was intended as a retaliation for the torture and murder of 18 foreign envoys, and was chosen as an attack on the property of the alien Manchu rulers of the Chinese in preference to one on the lives of innocent Chinese." By the same logic, should the Prussian army be lauded for destroying and pillaging the Palace of Versailles in 1870, because in doing so Germany "saved" innocent French from Napoleon's Corsican dynasty?

My key argument doesn't seem to be anything of the kind. It's that the Chinese government repeatedly feeds its subjects manipulated history in order to fire up hostility to foreigners and unite them behind the Party as supposedly the only bulwark against foreign depredations in modern times. What I criticise is that the Party doesn't give its citizens a full account of events, nor permit them to come to their own conclusions, nor discuss them publicly, and that there are some extremely gormless foreigners who themselves fall for the propaganda, or who pretend to do so for their own ends.

And there is no logic whatsoever to what follows, which continues its manipulation of the original piece. No one has 'lauded' the foreigners, and the events under discussion are those in China in 1860. Invasions of Paris by anyone at any point in history have nothing to do with it. But again such assertions serve to deflect arguments away from criticism of the Party's 60 years of destruction and brutality.

And contrary to Mr. Neville-Hadley's insinuation, Victor Hugo's criticism of the pillage of the Summer Palace is no less valid just because he had never been to China. If that were the case, then the only people allowed to criticize the Holocaust, Hiroshima or American slavery would be those who were actually there, at Auschwitz or in Southern plantations.

Some very nice use of language here. Victor Hugo is entirely entitled to his view (one that I share) that the destruction of the Summer Palace was a bad thing, and no one has 'insinuated' anything else. That doesn't have any effect on the fact that his actual descriptions of the Chinese and of the site itself were childish nonsense, although very appealing to Chinese egos, nor on the fact that that those actually present--and there are many printed accounts and diaries available from which to choose from 1860 and earlier--and who saw what went on would make better witnesses. Of course not all of those accounts were so grovelling in their descriptions of the Chinese nor as quick to resort to hyperbole about the palace complex, so they don't get quoted in China at all as they would if there was any genuine attempt at education and debate. As far back as the 1790s, George III's envoy to the Qianlong emperor had reported on the dilapidated nature of the buildings and their unsuitability for residence. The waterworks for the Jesuit-built fountain had already been allowed to fall into decay, and the lead piping been stolen.

Some early foreigners gave vast overestimates for the size of the park which wildly differed from each other, and all far greater than the figure given by the park authorities today. They wanted to impress their readers, and much of this hyperbole started with the Jesuits who performed various tasks for Kangxi and Qianlong in particular, and who wanted themselves to promote China's glory and potential in order to justify the high cost of keeping them there. Nevertheless, just as with Hugo's ignorant but pleasing-to-the-ear remarks, and as with other foreign over-estimates of the longevity of Chinese history, the visibility of the Great Wall from outer space, and the complexity of the language, the Chinese are always happy to play these inventions back and amplify them further in order to awe foreigners.

The destruction of the palace complex was certainly a loss, but (to borrow a phrase from later in the letter) a 'cultural catastrophe' it was not. The real catastrophes were to come, and they were inflicted on the Chinese by the Chinese themselves.

The insinuation (I'll borrow the word) that the destruction of the Summer Palace is to be placed on the same scale as 'the Holocaust, Hiroshima or American slavery' is one that should utterly revolt all who read it. All of us can condemn all of these events, both the massive loss of human life and liberty and the relatively minor if still regrettable burning of a few wooden palaces and treasures, few of them unique. All can sift for accurate accounts from those who were there, rather than randomly choosing someone who wasn't, but whose ignorant complaisance appeals.

The humiliation of the Summer Palace is one of many unfortunate traumas that shape China's modern national psyche, even though the scale of the physical destruction was much smaller than the Sino-Japanese War's or the Cultural Revolution's. Likewise, whether there have been apologies or not, the Holocaust, Hiroshima and slavery will stay in the national psyches of Israel, Japan and the United States.

Again, an utterly revolting and highly inappropriate comparison, equating the deaths of millions of people with the destruction of a limited amount of property.

The 'humiliation' of the destruction of the Summer Palace was the direct result of the murder of envoys captured during a truce requested by the Manchus to stall foreign forces from entering Beijing. The intention was indeed to humiliate and punish the Manchus, who had built and owned most of the palace complex, to which none but a tiny number of Chinese were permitted entrance. It did not humiliate the Chinese in any way, but rather avoided the humiliation of putting the former Chinese now Manchu capital under occupation.

What might be thought truly humiliating would be to have your entire country absorbed into a foreign empire, to be forced to shave your head in pattern indicating subjection (if male), and to be ruled by foreigners you outnumber more then 80 to 1 from 1644 to 1912: 268 years. A slightly greater embarrassment than having a handful of foreign troops show up and torch a few buildings, even if the narrative was indeed that simple?

Clearly national psyches are what they are taught to be, and highly selective at that.

A 'put-on'? Absolutely.

Setting aside the vastly different scales, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and slavery are within living memory or the memories of the children of those who experienced them, while the events of 1860 are not. France is not teaching its schoolchildren to hate the Germans because of the events of 1870 (whatever they may have been). British children are not taught to hate the Chinese for the murder of their envoys, nor for the shelling of HMS Amethyst, nor the invasion of the British embassy in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, although if public debate were stifled and newspapers controlled, a campaign of disinformation about China might easily be begun.

Despite the suffering experienced in World War Two the British are not taught to not the Germans or the Japanese, and when they do it's because of direct personal experience of, for instance, Japanese concentration camps, or forced labour on Japanese railway projects in Thailand. The majority alive today were born since the War, and none blames or hates the other for actions for which they were not themselves responsible, although still in living memory, and captured on film. It makes no sense whatsoever to do so. Dunkirk, a tragedy for the British, is celebrated not as a humiliation but as triumph of courage against adversity, and even so it will be less publicly marked as the last survivors of the war finally pass away.

If modern Chinese are aware of 1860 it is because they are taught a false and incomplete version of those events as part of an organised programme of xenophobia. In Hong Kong, as part of the heritage of British rule, a far more balanced view is available, public debate on foreign depredations in the 19th century is permitted, and the school books, as Yuan Weishi pointed out, tell a quite different story from those on the mainland, with assorted points of view. With the exception of a few top-end professional historians, most of whom know when it is wisest to keep quiet, no one in the mainland is capable of entering debate on these matters, the facts being having been kept from them.

The world is now dealing with a China that is behaving with a mixture of nouveau riche pride and insecurity. China seems still to be trying to right the many wrongs from the 19th century, whether rightly or wrongly. In either case, there is no need for Mr. Neville-Hadley to defend a cultural catastrophe as though he were speaking from a moral high ground.

No defence of the British and French forces actions has been made at any point. Either the article has not been read, or this is a deliberate distraction. A little extra detail (the murder of the envoys) was added in passing. And the importance of that detail--the importance of knowing all the facts that can be brought to light--is obvious from the defensive reaction. Should readers also be reminded that the foreign forces were given extensive assistance by Chinese labourers? That the Chinese themselves joined in the sack of the palaces, and continued the destruction long after the foreigners had gone? These inconvenient facts are not available in mainland China, and their lack leaves public opinion misinformed.

The Chinese government has no interest whatsoever in righting wrongs from any period, and as the piece specifically pointed out, there is no desire for any past wrong to be righted even if that were possible, for instance by having some pea-brained foreigners with their own proselytizing agendas, who don't even share a nationality with those responsible, show up to make utterly meaningless apologies for deeds done a century before they were born. The point is to stay in power, and teaching sensitivity to mendacious accounts of ancient history for the purposes of promoting xenophobia and uniting an increasingly sceptical public behind the Party helps to ensure that.

If the Party actually wanted to right wrongs, surely it would begin with those wrongs it has itself committed. It would begin with the vast catastrophes it has rained down on the Chinese since 1949, amongst the greatest disasters in human history, overshadowing in their death and destruction the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and American slavery put together. Anyone wanting to bicker over the detail of events in 1860 is simply party to the cover-up of the Party's horrifying history, and suffering from a collapse of any sense of proportion. Of course, the Party's massive murderousness does not absolve any other group of other crimes of any kind committed elsewhere, but it is the Party that links the destruction of 1860 and the holocausts it itself unleashed on innocent citizens by trying to hide the one behind the other.

If we're going to look for Holocaust comparisons, let's look at precisely the events from which the constant harping on 1860 is a diversion: a minimum of 45 million people killed in the 1958–62 Great Leap Forward campaign from brutality but mostly from starvation caused by deranged Party policies. And while families sold their children, or even ate them, and died wholesale at the roadside, Mao gave interest-free loans to other 'socialist' countries, denied that China had any problems, told cadres to make sure some fields were left fallow since China had such an abundance of food, and exported grain in vast amounts in order to convey the triumph of socialism and the rise of China under Party rule.

Forty-five million dead within living memory: isn't this something worth getting really angry about, rather than the burning of a few palaces 150 years ago. The economy crippled, 30% to 40% of the country's entire housing stock pulled down for use as fertilizer, and instead of sweeping these thugs from power people are diverted into wittering on about the loss of a few palaces.

Nor was that the end of it. The 1966-76 Cultural Revolution saw more insanity, with further tens of millions of deaths, the vast nationwide destruction of historic buildings and cultural artefacts by the million; some smashed, some melted down, some sold off en masse to foreign collectors by weight. The destruction of the Summer Palace by a few foreigners was a pin prick compared to the complete decapitation of culture carried out by the Chinese themselves less than 40 years ago.

Is the Party going to apologise to anyone for any of this? Far from it: instead is suppresses critical commentary, attempts to bury most discussion altogether, and still claims its legitimacy descends through Mao, and the victory of 1949, as the true inheritor of the revolution of 1911-12.

Where's the national psyche now? Could any other countries mentioned above, so unable to get worked up about wrongs done by the previous generation, or the one before, let something on this scale, committed in the last 50 years, go largely unacknowledged?

As it is, almost none of the claims made about the events of 1860 are true, and many are the most enormous lies. On the anniversary of the destruction last year the Summer Palace authorities claimed that about 1.5 million items from the Summer Palace were in museums overseas, with the worst offender being the British Museum with 230,000 items. The British Museum's entire Chinese collection amounts to only around a tenth of that. Of these, the curators estimate that perhaps 15 may have come from the Summer Palace, and this includes pieces of roof tile and roof ornaments--not exactly fantastic treasures. It was claimed that most of the collection remains locked away because the museum fears that if it is on show it must be returned to China under international law. In fact much of it is on permanent display, all but the more delicate objects (which can be seen by appointment) of the rest are rotated, and although the UK has signed international agreements on cultural acquisitions none of them apply to the museum's Chinese collection. All these claims are entirely false.

The authorities' announcement that Summer Palace items in museums overseas would be catalogued for publication and display in time for the 150th anniversary has met with embarrassing failure. Attribution is difficult since few of the items in the palace collection were unique, and it's a nice irony that those that can easily be identified were created by Italian and French Jesuits at the behest of the Manchus, notably the rather ineptly executed bronze heads from a fountain-water clock that occasionally come up for auction. These are odd choices for the title of Chinese national treasures.

The Chinese team has failed to show up at the much-excoriated British Museum, and probably hopes that we'll quietly forget about the project. Nevertheless, visitors to the site can currently view an exhibition of rather more Summer Palace items than the British Museum can muster, including 150 'repaired items' and 85 pieces of stone carving. But these 'lost treasures' as the Chinese media calls them, have apparently been recovered not from thieving foreigners but from universities, public institutions, and private citizens in China itself. Oops.

Some people (Donald O. Young amongst them) think it's outrageous that the bronze heads now change hands for millions of dollars, although for years their sale went unnoticed (and the sale of other items with supposed Summer Palace links still goes unnoticed) and they changed hands for modest sums until their propaganda value was recognised. It's the Chinese government itself, which practically guarantees that it will find some stooge to make the highest bid at all costs, that has driven the price up, each time using the media to whip people who should know better into a froth of nationalistic outrage.

It's difficult to know where to start with Gaetan Roy and Donald Young, who have swallowed the propaganda whole. Young made it clear that he thought the loss of 18 foreign lives of less importance than the destruction of Manchu property--a disgusting proposition. Bizarrely, Roy blames foreigners at least in part for the deaths in the Taiping Rebellion, which he numbers at 50 million (most other estimates are around half that, but still an extraordinary number of deaths). Given that it was foreign training and leadership of Manchu armies that eventually crushed the rebellion, this is a particularly peculiar claim. He even blames foreigners in part for the Boxer Rebellion, and for the eventual fall of the Manchu Qing dynasty. Since the Party claims the (heretical Christian) Taiping and the Boxers as proto-revolutionaries, and bases its legitimacy on the fall of the Qing, these are not arguments likely to be well received, and may explain (along with the fact that the last thing the government wants to do is to have to accept an apology for any of this) why in six years his project has made so little progress.

Young cannot say enough good things about the current president, while being entirely clueless about the meaning of 'harmony' when the word is used by Hu Jintao. This is despite the widespread repression, the lack of religious freedoms, and so on. Young thinks Hu is doing his best, and all of this was particularly comical to hear (in a painful way) on the day that the Party was mustering its entirely negative response to having a Nobel Peace Prize winner and attempting to suppress all knowledge of the announcement within China. Young wants to separate the current leadership from the past (although Party statements do the opposite) while not seeing that precisely the same separation applies when considering whether the people of the UK and France have any apologising to do for the actions of previous governments 150 years ago.

All this is utterly clueless, and at the same time rather sinister.

Just to add to the whole muddle, Donald Young was president of a Georgia bible college until forced to resign when the college's student newspaper revealed that he had falsely claimed to have a Masters degree. And the man on the ground supposedly making all their arrangements, one Shaun Bao, has been repeatedly reported to claim that he is the grandson of the last emperor, and even, according to one article, that he was born in the Forbidden City. He appears to be Aisin-Gioro Baoxun, relationship to the last emperors unknown: the last two emperors both died childless, and the last emperor was evicted in 1926. Bao appears to be in his forties, and certainly not in his 80s. Supposedly organising information for the press, he failed to reply to emailed questions, and the Yuanming Yuan Society, for whom he was organising the events, provided a cell phone number that didn't work.

There's a long tradition in China of foreign businessmen employing some middle man supposedly with excellent connections to decision-makers at high level who then leads his clients a merry dance, taking what he can from both sides. Contracts are always just about to be signed, just a little more investment is needed, and there's always some excuse depending upon a non-existent inscrutability in which the gullible foreigners are eager to believe when in fact contracts, business, and profits fail to materialise. It came as no surprise when, given that only ten days before the anniversary neither man knew exactly what the sequence of events on the ground would be and that they were still 'waiting for clearance', that most events failed to take place, and neither party wants to talk about it. One even failed to travel to China at all, and no one will say who spoke or said what. The line, 'People like yourself who've followed the events of the past weeks will understand,' was almost laughably corny.

No one comes well out of this: Certainly not the foreign armies of 1860, certainly not the barbarous and bloody-handed Communist Party of China (although the problem is that it comes out far better than it should, with attention successfully deflected away from its atrocities); but least of all the disgusting and embarrassing apologists for the Party who make themselves parties to the cover-up, whether Chinese or foreign.

Preserving China's Humiliation

2010-10-24T14:06:00.003-07:00

There's a very great deal to say on this subject, but in the end I was only able to find home for a mere 900 words tackling one aspect of it in the Wall Street Journal. Article with comments section linked above. I'll post at greater length on this subject another time.

On Oct. 18, China began a month-long series of events marking the 150th anniversary of British and French forces destroying the old imperial Summer Palace. As on many previous occasions, the Chinese media is replaying with relish the bowdlerized official view that this was simply a wanton act of foreign imperialism.

Most Chinese just yawn at this, but a few well-meaning foreigners swallow the propaganda whole. They reason that if the Chinese government and people are still upset, then an apology should be made so as to bring the matter to a close. They don't realize that the Communist Party keeps harping on this episode to emphasize that its authoritarian style of government, which unified the country and threw out the foreigners, is still needed. Foreigners' acknowledgments of their past crimes are welcome, but attempts at reconciliation are, well, inconvenient.

The results of this misunderstanding have been entertaining. American Donald Young works for Global Partners in Hope, an organization that describes its mission as "bringing hope to communities around the world through partnerships between people who can help and people who need hope." In a speech he drafted for use on the anniversary he described Oct. 18, 1860 as "one of the most tragic days in all of Chinese history."

Canadian Gaetan Roy, who in 2004 started an organization called Roads to Reconciliation, drew up plans to apologize for the entire period from 1840 to 1900. But sensing that his elaborate apology was not welcome, he settled on a simple statement of repudiation.

"Some people said, 'Well, if you apologize, are we supposed to forgive you? Maybe that's an issue with the government.' Better to simplify things and use a strong word like repudiation because then it doesn't force anybody to have to do something other than to thank us," he says in a telephone interview.

When asked whether it made sense to apologize for something that happened a century before they were born, both men refer to a 2006 survey of 500 students at Peking University. Seventy percent of respondents said that foreign governments should apologize to China for events during the Opium Wars.

If the Chinese are angry, the two men argue, then we need to apologize. That the students might be simply regurgitating a line they had been taught since childhood and actually care little about does not seem to have occurred to them. Few Chinese are aware, for instance, that the destruction of the palace was intended as retaliation for the torture and murder of 18 foreign envoys, and was chosen as an attack on the property of the alien Manchu rulers of the Chinese in preference to one on the lives of innocent Chinese.

This doesn't impress Mr. Young. "You can't equate what happened in the pillage of that garden and all the artifacts that were there with the 18 people that died," he says. "Historical narrative is not really an issue for us," says Mr. Roy.

Mr. Young lavishes praise on Chinese President Hu Jintao and his campaign for "harmony"—oblivious to the fact that the word is now despised in China. It is code for the suppression of any opposition to Party rule using censorship, intimidation, imprisonment or violence. "I'm not about to say anything critical of the government," he stresses. "I respect [Hu] very highly, and I believe he's doing his best."

This single-minded support without reference to China's realities recalls the equally uncritical response of French literary giant Victor Hugo at the time of the Palace's demise. Hugo criticized the destruction, but let his imagination run amok. He described the complex as like something from the moon and the Chinese as supermen. He had never visited China, but unsurprisingly the authorities love to quote him rather than those who actually witnessed the events. A bust of Hugo was unveiled on the anniversary.

Apparently the word of foreigners carries extra weight, especially when it uncritically supports the official line. But Messrs. Roy and Young don't accept they might simply be minor players in propaganda efforts aimed at a domestic audience. Mr. Young wants to see the complex no longer used as a "center of hate," but as a place for peace and rest. Mr. Roy hopes to bring significant political, cultural, religious and military figures to China in 2011 or 2012 for further self-abasement, and symbolically to return a single looted item. He declines to name anyone involved, or the source of the item in question.

About a week before the anniversary neither man seemed clear as to what exactly would happen or where, and in the end most of their events were cancelled. Mr. Young stayed in the U.S., and Mr. Roy merely says that one representative of Roads to Reconciliation spoke at the site itself, although he did not provide information on who that was, whether an apology was made, and if there was any response.

Mr. Roy's stated aim had been to use the historic date to introduce his larger project to the media. But while the events were widely reported, and the usual antiforeign narrative supplied, mention of any apology, except a passing reference in one headline, was humiliatingly absent.

"People like yourself who've followed the events of the past weeks will understand," he remarks opaquely by email. Thoughts of "peace, cooperation, and harmony," supposedly the theme of the commemorations, have fallen by the wayside.

As Mr. Roy himself puts it, "The advantage of repudiation is that it's not like apologizing and apologizing again. You can always repudiate several times." He may find himself doing so on an annual basis. Yet as long as the Communist Party is in power, it's a safe bet he will be relegated to the usual role of "foreign friends," glimpsed in passing on the evening news but not heard.

Philadelphia

2010-09-29T21:22:00.002-07:00

'I'm off to Philadelphia next week,' I say.

'Again?' comes the puzzled response.

No one ever says that when I mention I'm off to Hong Kong or China, both of which I visit almost every year and sometimes twice a year. What do people have against Philadelphia?

This will be my third visit. The first was about three years ago on a group press trip with a number of Canadian and US journalists, intended to promote the just-opening Tutankhamun exhibition. While I tend to avoid these groups trips, this one was well organised, and privileged access to the exhibition before it opened, and to assorted experts involved in putting it together (including the entertainingly fatuous and tirelessly self-promoting Zahi Hawass) made it possible to put together an workmanlike piece. There were glimpses of other aspects of Philadelphia on the side, and a little time for us to pick and choose what else we'd like to see.

I returned last year to do a piece on BYOB restaurants there (some of them excellent and very good value for money) and another on the marvellous historic Penitentiary, and conversion of part of it into a giant haunted house around Hallowe'en. This is a major money-spinner for the site, and helps to ensure its upkeep. As a snooty European I usually have little good to say about the USA's rather jejune historic sites, but the Penitentiary by day is a labyrinth of oddly elegant architecture, heroic decay, and a hotch-potch of add-ons, well labelled and explained in a way that has much to say about the human condition, and with a superb audio tour full of interesting facts, narrated appropriately by Hollywood arch-creep, Steve Buscemi (Mr. Pink in 'Reservoir Dogs'). This is worth travelling to Philadelphia to see in its own right.

I loathe fairground sideshows, haunted houses, and the North American Hallowe'en in general, but I had no choice but to take a 30-minute-plus meander through an elborately constructed maze of ghouls and scares of many kinds, frequently being made to shriek and jump out of my skin in a way I thoroughly dislike (but was clearly very entertaining for many visitors). There were memorable moments of comedy, such as an apparently un-dead figure at one pause in the route asking the party in front of me how many members it had.

'Eight,' was the reply.

'Not for long,' intoned the ghoul.

The director was an entertaining interview, and I got to go back stage and into the hidden passages traversed by the very hard-working staff, and see how they managed to seem to pop up from nowhere and to disappear again. I even got to yell from behind a gauze panel in one wall and make people jump myself. That was fun, although a couple of glasses of wine with a few board members at a party for sponsors later were still welcome.

And why am I going yet again?

Simply because the editor of a glossy magazine with a set of photographs he wants to use asked if I happened to know anything about the city. I was able to tell him I'd been twice, but once I saw the photos I thought I needed to go back and fill in some gaps in my knowledge, as well as refresh various experiences. Compared to much of the travelling I do, Philadelphia, reachable in about ten or eleven hours altogether, is an easy trip: one day to get there, two days of work, and one day to get back. The overall level of support in Philadelphia is pretty good, so costs are kept down, and there's reasonable profit. Philadelphia wants to reach the markets this magazine offers, so is happy to bring me back.

The morals of this story are:

I don't get to go where I please for the most part, but only to destinations about which editors would like material.

If I already know about a place, I'm more likely to end up covering it again. This business is more repetitive than most imagine. I actually like this, as it tends to make for better-informed pieces.

It isn't necessarily the most exotic destinations that provide the best material.

I'll be staying at the Ritz-Carlton, which is an excellent conversion of a very grand former bank with a vast stone dome over what was the banking hall and is now the hotel lobby, and a find example of some of the stately and dignified architecture of the downtown core.

I'm quite looking forward to the trip back.

The romance of travel

2010-09-04T11:11:00.003-07:00

There was a time when the purpose of travel writing, and later of broadcast travel coverage, was not to tell us how to follow in the writer's or broadcaster's footsteps, but to tell us about something we would never do for ourselves. It seems fairly certain that in the foreseeable future, for reasons of vanishing non-renewable resources and the protection of the environment, long-distance travel will once again become unaffordable for all but the few. The link above is to an interview with a British television icon who started broadcasting about far-away places back before package holiday travel had been invented, and when most of us stayed where we were, other than making a trip to the seaside, or a channel crossing to France.

Anyone remember when travel was actually glamorous?

Who will be the Alan Whicker for the slower-moving, shorter-distance society when it returns?

Ramblings on Rio

2010-08-20T12:22:00.004-07:00

The longer I stay in Rio de Janeiro, the more I'm reminded of Hong Kong.

There's the same sense of being squeezed between mountains and sea, the same vast views from hilltops across dense housing to bays, and areas of 60s six-floor apartments (although these are gradually vanishing in Hong Kong) studded with air conditioners. There's the same small-scale shopping, the same arctic air-con to shop and taxi interiors that is a shock after the brilliance outside, and there's a tram system, although only one line remains.

Hong Kong's shopping is far superior, and a great deal cheaper than Rio's. Rio's beaches are superb (one is said to be 18km long), and considering their proximity to the city centre the cleanliness (of some at least) is remarkable. I dislike beaches in general, but I find these irresistible.

The taxis are as hit-and-miss as Hong Kong, and there's the same language gap. The food is better in Hong Kong. But there's a lot more of Rio--it's like Hong Kong writ very large.

Hong Kong is undoubtedly safer than Rio, although Rio is safe enough for those who use a little caution, and who select when, and where, and how they travel. I spend time in Hong Kong almost every year, and I lived there briefly, but I'd certainly like to spend more time here. Ten days hasn't been enough.

Breakfast

2010-08-19T12:26:00.001-07:00

The Sofitel Rio de Janeiro's breakfast is a generous one, and marked particularly by pastries of a high quality: credible croissants, and excellent pains au chocolat, brioches, and madeleines. Breakfast tends to be a long-drawn-out affair as a result, and there's plenty of time to notice stereotypical behaviour by assorted nationalities. We all think in stereotypes, but it's no longer fashionable to admit this.

Being a Sofitel, the hotel has plenty of French guests, and these are easily spotted: women with beautifully cut skirts more suitable for cocktail hour, or at least with evidence that they've given some thought to what they are wearing, even thought they would in some cases have done better to come to different conclusions (particularly about shoes). Elegance of manner unfortunately fails to match elegance of clothing, with attempts to jump the queue for the egg and waffle station (twice, by different individuals, on two different days), and one woman approaching the toaster at speed to claim the slightly warmed bread she had abandoned there five minutes before as if it was about to be stolen: 'Zat ees mine!'

As for the males: pale blue T-shirt, lemon shorts, and lilac espadrilles? Yes, French. Couldn't really be anything else.

The Brazilians aren't numerous, and in terms of big hair, an excess of frill, generous embonpoint, and general curvaceousness very tightly clad in denim are not hard to spot either. Many resemble the cast members of the soap operas that seem to run 24 hours a day on television, and which are inescapable in most restaurants, since these are liberally dotted with screens.

The Americans fall into two types: triangular torso'd surfer dudes, who wear T-shirt that mention surfing just in case you can't read all the other clues; and their cultural opposites, the inevitable supertankers manoeuvring ponderously in the narrow lanes between the buffet tables, overheard saying, 'I'm just looking for a second desert' (the whole room overheard this), and blocking all other traffic.

And the British? Just sitting in the corner being typically snide.

Easter Island

2010-08-06T14:23:00.001-07:00

One of the benefits of unplanned travel is the time spent talking to others about where they've been and passing on one's own experiences. Not so many of those making long treks around South America reach Easter Island due to the expense, and the most frequently asked question is, 'Is it worth it?' This is quite hard to answer.

Easter Island is one of those places that knows it has you over a barrel. It's not like a mainland town where you can turn up one day, decide it's not for you, and leave the next morning for somewhere else. You fly in with LAN (no other options) and you stay a few nights before flying back or onward (to Tahiti or Santiago). So the flight is expensive, the accommodation horribly overpriced, as is food and car rental. Many backpackers try to camp rather than stay in dorms that cost as much as an ordinary room elsewhere, and bring in as much food as they can to cook for themselves. A dated and battered cabin can easily cost US$120 per night off-season. Hotel rooms that would barely scrape three stars can be US$200.

So there's little in the way of value-for-money , and that's easy enough to assess, but whether the experience merits the expenditure is hard to say. If you're check-list minded, then there's something to be said for being able to claim you've visited the world's most remote inhabited settlement (although two British dependencies make the same claim, I've noted, so maybe not). But I'm not interested in check-lists, and as I've been almost everywhere I'm not easily thrilled, and I'm also far more likely than most visitors, especially those on a 'trip of a lifetime' or even just a very limited annual holiday, to admit that somewhere I visit is something of a dud.

Easter Island wasn't a dud, but it wasn't a thrill either. (To my surprise, as I usually prefer culturally rich destinations to natural beauties, the falls at Iguazú/Iguaçu were much more exciting.) I did enjoy driving round looking at the moai, and then driving round again to give them a second look. Favourites were the quarry where most were produced, and which is like a factory where the power was cut mid-production, and the row of 15 re-erected statues at one site. But the park entrance fee of US$60 took something away from the whole experience, and 'Is it worth it?' was also a common topic of conversation amongst those already on the island, whether they were considering entrance to the park or had already been there.

The response there was easier. If you've already invested so much in coming and staying here, and given that you'll almost certainly never be here again, you should pay the fee. The quarry, with its dozens of statues in various stages of completion, and often tilted at photogenic angles, is arguably the greatest sight on the island.

If you haven't yet bought an air ticket to the island, the answer is much less clear.

I find it's actually harder to become thrilled by artefacts that have been so heavily fingered and pawed over by photography and by the imagination, then by less well-known treasures. I thought the Sphinx was surprisingly small, and the pyramids underwhelming (although the various temples down the Nile and the Valley of the Kings I hope to visit again). Easter Island may be remote, but its total dedication to servicing tourists, who arrive by airplane in their hundreds daily, means that neither remoteness nor obscurity come as much to mind as they would on Heimay (just off Iceland), the Hebrides (Scotland), or Saint-Pierre et Miquelon (just off Canada)--all more or less in sight of assorted mainlands.

The local hoteliers are often described as largely indifferent to the comfort of their guests, and not always scrupulously honest in their charging practices, but we were lucky in the discovery of Lily of Residencial Tadeo y Lily, a charming Frenchwoman who paid attention to every detail, provided an ample continental breakfast, and who spoiled the children. Although the price of the accommodation was still high, we felt well looked-after.

If we must make comparisons (and it seems that people must), then I'd put Easter Island well below Egypt, slightly above Macchu Pichu, below the Great Wall of China, way below Angkor Wat (although there were reminders of the Bayon).

I don't regret the expenditure (and don't forget I'm someone who rarely pays for his travel--although equally don't forget that work and leisure travel are entirely different things). I'm glad I've been. I shan't be returning, unless by any chance en route to or from Tahiti, in which case I'd certainly take at least a day to sit and contemplate the key sites again.

On Holiday

2010-08-06T13:49:00.000-07:00

Well, sort of. A bit of work here and there, but otherwise a determination not to think, not to observe, not to measure, not to record, to go exactly where I please and not where I don't, and to have no plans at all. For me, this more or less defines what a holiday is, and even before I took up travelling professionally my view was that a holiday was not going through a check list of other people's ideas of 'must sees'. I am in charge of my holiday, and not the other way round. Whatever I feel like doing is the right thing to do, and if I happen to feel more like relaxing in the hotel than some World Heritage-listed site, then that's what I'll do.

Right now I'm in the middle of six weeks in South America, with a flight into Santiago de Chile, and a flight out of Sao Paolo, and a large gap in between with nothing planned except a side trip to Easter Island. Santiago was work; I'll probably write something about Easter Island; I liked Valparaíso enough to want to write about that; on the other hand I wasn't particularly impressed by the bus journey over the Andes, nor by Mendoza, so nothing there; Iguazu/Iguaçu was far better than I'd expected and I'll certainly write about that; a side trip to Paraguay's Ciudad del Este reminded me more of China than anywhere outside China I've ever been, but no thanks.

The only commitments are Santiago and Rio de Janeiro (I write this on board a dawn flight across Brazil) and the rest will get written simply because I find I want to, and will be sold on return. Even Rio, in which I'm planning to spend about ten days, out of which I only need about three for work, will be something of a holiday, as will some side trips to smaller towns.

I'm actually looking forward to travel for once.

Afternoon off

2010-04-24T17:05:00.002-07:00

I shouldn't be doing this.

There's a Canadian story to complete, some invoicing to do, some audio notes from a recent trip to Japan to transcribe, a lot of text on China to edit and rewrite, and no doubt (I can't bear to think about this) some story pitches to do. But I'm in a very comfortable resort (the Four Seasons Resort Scottsdale at Troon North) with a very comfortable room overlooking the Sonoran Desert and with my own private telescope, which I plan to put to use later this evening. The resort is yet another of those pretending to be a Mexican/Spanish/Middle Eastern hill village, but is the first I've stayed in actually to get it right. There's a number of buildings (casitas) scattered around, and I'm upstairs in a light, bright, spacious room with a private balcony, a dressing room, and a good-sized and well-equipped bathroom. Everything's very solidly built, and I'm entirely unaware of any neighbours. There's coffee brewing in a little coffee machine in the corner, my own choice of music is playing from my iPod on the iHome speaker station, and apparently an 'amenity' is on its way as a gift from the hotel GM (something edible, I'm told). In about 45 minutes someone is coming so set up my balcony for a 'moonlight massage' to take place about 30 mins later (part of a story--see my earlier postings on spas).

There doesn't really seem time to do very much, does there?

I did go walking in the desert earlier, admiring cacti four times my own height and with more personality.

And if it's any consolation, this untypically relaxed schedule will end tomorrow when I rise at 5am to go flying in the desert, and work late into the night on a star-gazing trip, before taking an early flight the next day. This is more how it should be.

The 'amenity' has arrived: multiple layers of guacamole and salsa in a cocktail glass, some chips for dipping, and two bottles of Corona beer on ice.

That's nice.

PR tip 3: Get a global strategy

2010-04-24T15:46:00.003-07:00

A little while ago now, someone invented something called the Internet, and indeed for more than a decade now one particular aspect of it, called email, has been fairly ubiquitous. It's really about time some of you discovered this, and many of the rest of you thought through the consequences.

The key one that exercises me is that I can live in place A and travel to place B for the purpose of writing for publication in place C. Yet all to often this simple fact seems to cause many of you monumental difficulties.

The only question you should be asking, wherever you're based, is whether publication place C is an important target market for your destination. If it is, and if you find that the medium through which I'll be reaching that market is a persuasive one, then you should presumably be doing your best to assist me within whatever limits your budget permits.

But instead all too often your response is that you're not interested because you (or your superiors) only measure success in term of the number of column centimetres published in place A, where you and I are based. So in concentrating solely on your home territory you often deprive your destination of a prime opportunity in a key market. This is a stupid accounting artefact, entirely unhelpful to the development of tourism to your destination, and thoroughly dunderheaded.

Unfortunately rates in place A are so pathetic that writing travel features for publication ought to be advertised on television along with all the other miracle diet plans. Nevertheless I have to try and place stories in media in place A just in order to be able to get on a plane and write for media in place C where they actually have money, and so I can put food on the table, even if only snacks. But sometimes that's not possible.

So, you overall strategists at Place B: if you want to develop more coverage, link your budgets to target markets, and not to points of departure. Give credit to your local representatives when they generate coverage for you in ANY of your target markets, not solely the one in which they are based.

A few of you are already doing this; a few others call colleagues in other countries of publication and agree to share costs. But really it's time to wake up and instead of simply fretting about the value of social media or other on-line comment, to realise that thanks largely to the Internet someone like me who has the ear of editors in Europe, Asia, and North America still lives on only one of those continents, and needs to leave from home wherever he's going and regardless of where he's being published.

How 2009 looked

2010-03-25T16:40:00.002-07:00

Travel by numbers

2010-03-13T23:32:00.002-08:00

When people dream of travel writing, probably they don't dream of any of the administrative part. I typically spend the first two hours of any day exchanging email with photographers, publishers, editors, and PR people; going over pitches, draft itineraries, text for editing, and so on. Today I spent the entire day on 2009 accounts.

It was a quiet year in some ways: Scotland, Jamaica, Mexico, England, South Africa, Ontario, Philadelphia, and Alberta, making 11 weeks away altogether, 4.6 days in the air, and flights equivalent to 2.18 circumnavigations of the planet.

From the accountant's point of view this is an easy year: no Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, or Japanese scripts to deal with, and perhaps the most astonishing thing is that I didn't go to China, although I was there very late in 2008, and I've already spent a month there this year. Trips to Japan, Spain, the US, Chile, Easter Island, and Brazil are already booked, and if I both take and survive them all I'll have beaten 2009's travel figures, to the detriment of the environment, by early August.

And if this posting is a little tedious, then there's a lesson to be learned from that. Most jobs have their bean counting aspects, even this one.

PR tip 2: Don't bargain with me

2010-03-10T15:51:00.002-08:00

The arrangement is quite simple. I'm proposing to review your hotel in a guide book, or to write a feature about your destination. You, confident in the desirable qualities of what you're offering, and seeking to have those qualities more widely known, are going to give me access to it/experience of it, so that I can write about it in a well-informed way.

I, for my part, guarantee you nothing at all.

I'm hoping that what you've got to offer is going to be worth writing about. I'm fairly confident that you've got something of interest or I wouldn't be spending time on it. Indeed, I'm only going to accept your offer if it I already have a commission of some kind in which your product/service/destination looks very likely to feature.

But sometimes what you have turns out to be poor, or not what you promised it would be. Sometimes it turns out it doesn't fit in the story. Sometimes it's in the story, but the editor demands a different angle. Sometime's it's in the original story, but someone else cuts it. There's a lot that's beyond my control. I promise not to waste your time and resources intentionally, but sometimes thing just go wrong. Publications vanish, or control of their contents switches, or their policies change, or their editors leave, in between commission and publication. You lose out, and I lose out. That, unfortunately, is the way of the publishing world.

Unless an editor has already given me a deadline, or unless I myself have control over publication date, I won't even say what that date is going to be. And it's not unheard of for me to rush to meet an editor-imposed short notice deadline only to see the piece finally appear over a year later.

Let's be entirely clear: The purpose of my piece is NOT to promote your business. The purpose is to give an engaging account with good advice for the reader, in which it is intended your business/destination will appear. Editors, and indeed readers, can smell a plug a mile off, and I'm not going to embarrass myself in front of any of them by pushing something that doesn't fit in the story, or using any form of words except my own, or any opinions except those I've come up with by myself.

So don't say to me, 'We'll give you a third free night as long as you guarantee to mention our new spa.' Don't say, 'We'll upgrade you on our airline as long as you guarantee to write a piece on our lie-flat beds in business class.' I'm not for sale, and although I have some sympathy for the pressures under which you find yourself, the effect will be entirely the opposite of the one you want to achieve.

PR tip 1: Look it up

2010-03-07T21:17:00.006-08:00

There's an increasing tendency to send out forms asking for an amazing amount of detail about both writer and publications. While I accept there's a lot of conning in this business (and I've certainly heard many a funny and outrageous story) and applaud your attempts to avoid pointlessly assisting con-men or those who are not genuinely writing for anyone of any significance, please remember that your fee is likely to be considerably more than mine. Leave the text and negotiations with editors to get the piece placed and published to me. Please deal with the commercial angles yourself.

In particular, questions about rates and circulations, such as attempts to quantify the cost equivalent of buying the same amount of advertising space as an article covers, should be something you have to hand in rate and data manuals. I'm a writer, and not involved in any way with the business of the ad rates of the publications for which I write, nor do editors want me to bother them with such questions.

So what do I do? I Google the name of the publication and "rates", and put down on your form what I discover. You do have Internet access in your office, I think? Do you check my figures? Well, shouldn't you be doing so? And if you are doing so, couldn't you quite simply look them up yourselves rather than asking someone who has less of a clue than you ought to do?

Of course, published rates don't tell you a great deal about what you can actually negotiate, or what your agency might be able to negotiate for you before adding artwork, concept, and copywriting costs to the bill. In short, what either of us look up on the Internet isn't really much of a guide to any real-world costs, nor does it say much about the relative persuasive value of an independently written piece versus a paid-for advertisement. I suppose I can only be glad you're not asking me to work all that out for you, too.

But if you must use this only faintly relevant measure to assess whether a project is worthwhile you really will earn some good will by simply looking up the figures yourselves.

What is 'Real Travel' Revisited

2010-03-03T17:53:00.002-08:00

As with the last post under this heading, this is a response to a comment of Lara Dunston's, made in response to that post, linked above, last year.

> In the context of this discussion, i.e. about famils/press trips, I consider 'real' travel to be travel that is going to as close to the experience of the average independent traveler who organizes everything themselves and has to face the hiccups that come with that, from bookings that haven't been held to missed connections for example.

This improved definition doesn't completely address the points made in the earlier post on which it comments.

In order to provide quality research for the independent traveller one has to behave actually quite differently from an independent traveller: staying in several different hotels rather than one; visiting many other hotels; visiting and assessing every sight; spending time asking many questions so that no independent traveller will have to ask them; eating at many different kinds of restaurants and trying many different kinds of transport. This, at least, is the minimum for any serious guidebook work, and it doesn't resemble holiday travel, or 'real' travel under this definition, in any way.

Travel features these days rarely come with as much comprehensive practical information as they should, although editors quite reasonably presume they need to offer a good read rather than fill their pages with technicalities that can also be garnered from web sites and guide books. Nor is it clear that taking a journey once, and finding that a connection is missed (in the example given) is of itself going to tell us very much about the normal experience. Perhaps on the other 364 days of the year the connection is made. Perhaps, in order to give useful advice, it's going to be necessary to enquire further as to whether the connection is usually made. Once that is admitted the case for having to do it exactly the way an independent traveller would do is rather weakened, at least for feature writing. If the trip is part of the story of course it has to be taken, but often the destination is the story, not the method of getting there, and picking up a rental car organised by someone else, or even being driven, will make no significant difference to the quality of the experience to be described, and may indeed provide opportunities for richer writing.

There's no particular merit in spending three days trying to find someone willing to be interviewed for background (and in many cultures simply being unable to do so because you do not have the requisite introduction) when there's an agency that can make the arrangements for you. At their best, these agencies fill out the agenda you set, and there seems no good reason, when you've asked for access to be provided to a certain castle for instance, to turn down the opportunity to interview the eighth-generation owner who now resides in a small part of it, and who can tell you stories about repairs, about quirky ancestors, about her plans for the future, and other information of interest to readers, even though they will never themselves encounter the individual in question (and so, by the definition offered, the visit isn't 'real').

But travel writing isn't after all a scientific experiment, nor typically objective, and while the results need to be similar when the travel-experiment is repeated, they do not need, and indeed can never be, exactly the same. Travel writing is frequently full of fortuitous one-off events that make it more interesting to read, and none the worse for the fact that no one else can repeat those events.

The argument also seems to want to ask me to put down the tools I have at my disposal and which I would usually use to help me winkle out the facts needed by the independent traveller. These would include far more experience of independent travel than the average traveller has, often repeated experience of a particular destination and knowledge of its particular quirks, and, to take China as one example, a knowledge of the local language which 99% of other independent 'real' travellers won't have. Yet this enables me to read bus station signboards, to make detailed enquiries of departure times, ticket regulations, directions to platforms, and a great deal of background information. which the 'real' traveller would be unable to get for himself. The point of the research is provide precisely the tools the independent traveller needs, and there's no merit in simply going up to the ticket window as any other traveller would, using my native language and sign language only, and struggling to achieve my aims, when I could instead find out precisely what the 'real' traveller needs to know in a few moments using the local language in a way the 'real' traveller almost certainly cannot. Then I can give him the characters for what he needs, so he can show them at the ticket window and have a good chance of getting what he wants fairly quickly.

To argue otherwise amounts to supporting the position sometimes taken in defence of the Lonely Planet method of sending people off to write guide books about countries they haven't previously experienced: "That's good, because they travel just like us." But I don't want a book that through pure ignorance leads me into pitfalls that the authors have been unable to detect, with information that is false, as is the case in many a shoddy LP guide. I want a book written by someone with long experience of the destination, familiar with the local culture, and with command of a local language, who will actually be able to find out what it going on.

Ignorance is never bliss, and avoiding the high prices that may be paid as a result of inexperience is precisely the reason people buy guide books.

> I see the experience of being chauffered everywhere by a driver with a PR person at the elbow as being sanitized, artificial and therefore 'unreal' because this isn't how the vast majority of people I'm writing for travel. It would be different of course if I was writing for people who primarily take organized tours, as the experiences are very similar.

The first point has been dealt with previously and above, and while there's every reason to be cautious of PR people, the agenda of many is no more than to enable writers to get the stories they want, which gives a richer and more informative account to those who will travel independently afterwards, not a less informative one.

I engineer and tweak itinerary contents to suit my own agenda, and turn down trips where it's clear that's not going to be possible. The lady who drove me from place to place around Jamaica was perfectly frank about the country's problems, while providing a lot of background into Jamaican culture simply through conversation about both our lives and about what we saw as we drove around. I didn't want her to start with, because this can sometimes turn out really badly, but if I return to Jamaica (as I hope to do) I'd be very happy to travel with her again. She enabled me to get a lot of good material, as the best guides with the best tourism bureaux, often do.

I'm not long back from possibly my 40th trip to Hong Kong and another excellent experience with a guide who took me round tiny back street areas for a story on lesser-known Hong Kong districts, constantly revising the itinerary as she grew to better understand my needs.

There's no dichotomy here: not all PR efforts are evil or deceptive, and very little travel undertaken to assemble travel stories directly resembles the experience of individual leisure travellers. Usually it cannot; and it certainly need not do.

The second point concerning organised tours is, I think, incorrect. Groups press trips, as already pointed out, bear no resemblance to organised tours as usually experienced as, once again, they are designed to make it possible for a group of journalists to get material usable for stories. They also take routes to combinations of destinations no organised tour would ever take, and often offer special access that make the stories richer. I usually avoid these, not least because there's often one idiot journalist (or 'journalist') who makes things difficult, everyone ends up taking home the same stories, and these stories are often rather obvious and predictable. But occasionally they are designed flexibly enough that individual writers can get different angles from each other, and provide access otherwise hard to get if travelling individually.

But I can't in general think of a good argument for turning down the offer of making arrangements for access to sumo training stables if those are the focus of a story; nor the provision of an interpreter who quickly scribbles down for me translations of what the stable master or trainer is saying to the trainees; nor the opportunity provided to talk directly to the trainees and staff (nor the provision of a taxi to get there). It's hopeless to think that in two weeks in Japan I'm going to be able to say very much that's meaningful (despite multiple visits I speak only a few phrases of Japanese) about a culture that's so complex and different, and I'd look pretty foolish if I tried. Concentrating on the detail of the stables' history and traditions, the experience of watching the training sessions at two of them, I'd still be foolish to turn down the assistance provided. (Thanks, Tokyo Convention and Visitors Bureau for making the arrangements, and apologies that appearance of the piece has been delayed.)

Finally, it needn't be (and in fact isn't) the purpose of all travel writing to provide instructions to others as to how they can follow the same route. Some travel writing intends merely to inspire readers to do their own research and make their own arrangements, and other travel writing, as was originally the case of most of it before the whole population of the developed world took to the skies, intends merely to describe, in an entertaining and vivid way, experiences that readers will probably not be having for themselves. In these cases whether the castle is reached by public transport, by self-drive in a rental car paid for by someone else, or by chauffeured limousine is neither here nor there, as long as the castle is reached.

Soft openings

2010-02-23T12:27:00.006-08:00

The link is to a Guardian piece on reviewing restaurants as soon as they open.

Although I do a lot of restaurant reviewing it's generally in the context either of guide book writing or of travel features where the stress tends to be on established restaurants typical of the place under discussion, rather than something that's brand new. I often turn down invitations to new openings at home simply because I rarely write about the city I live in (although I happen to be doing so right now) and so there's little conceivable benefit to the establishment in question. PR people often seem interested merely in fulfilling their quotas rather than calculating the worthwhile and persuasive column centimetres to be gained, and I like a good meal as much as anyone else. But fair's fair, and 'never accept a freebie just for the sake of it' is a motto more writers ought to be adopting.

For those not familiar with the jargon, a 'soft opening' is when a restaurant, entertainment venue, or hotel has only just opened and does not feel itself yet fully ready for the limelight. In the case of restaurants it tends to mean that the venue is still in dress rehearsals, and the team of staff still learning the peculiarities of the restaurant's physical form, of preparing and serving the newly-created menu in a timely way, and to work together efficiently. For hotels, however, it often simply means that the building's owner (very often a different entity from the company managing the property) is desperate to start earning revenue after spending astronomical sums on construction, and so the building opens with not all floors or facilities complete.

One suggestion in The Guardian piece is that where restaurants are advertising discounted menus during their soft openings (I've never encountered this, but still) then it's fair to give them credit for that, and leave a full review until it is clear from the full price menu on offer that they are fully operational. However, if a restaurant is charging full prices from the beginning then it deserves to be reviewed comprehensively. It can't have its cake at full price and eat it.

The same argument doesn't quite work for hotels. I very often review hotels during soft opening, particularly in China, and the experience is almost always one of profound incompetence due to the supply of well-trained staff falling short of the Chinese hotel industry's needs, and the tendency of staff to hop from job to job at short notice.

But guide book cycles being what they are, and getting longer in response to the global drop in tourism volumes, there's a choice between reviewing a new Chinese hotel before it's ready or not mentioning it until the following edition, which may be two or three (or more) years away. The opening months do tend to see heavy discounting but it's against a figure which expresses what the hotel thinks it would like to get for a room, not what it may actually ever achieve on a regular basis, and since even when a hotel is fully up-and-running no two neighbours may be paying the same rate anyway, and heavy discounting remain the norm, there's not the same argument for an easy ride from the critic.

And then there's the pressure to have something new, which both demonstrates that the research has been thoroughly done, helps to differentiate a guide from others in print not yet updating for new editions, and conversely prevents your guide from missing a major hotel that those updating slightly later may cover. Unreasonable though it may be to do so, people do say, "Your guide's no good/out of date. It doesn't even have hotel X in it."

I was turned down by one new Beijing hotel this year, but in general there's a recognition that guide book coverage is important to success, whether a hotel is targeting a leisure or business market, and that decision was probably unwise. I assured the hotel in question that I'm fully familiar with the chaos that is soft opening in China, and in fact the only way to review soft openings is to take into account the typical arc through which a Chinese hotel goes and expect an, at best, a disorganised experience and hardware that half works. Experience, talks with management about recruiting and training policies, added to direct experience of the design, comfort levels, and hardware in general enable something sensible to be said about how the hotel will be when it settles down. Technical problems will be fixed, staff will gain experience, and gradually it will all come together until another newly-opening hotel offers staff a little more money and entices them away. For some hotels, a soft-opening-like second-rate experience comes later, when all the staff have been poached.

An embarrassment

2010-02-11T18:50:00.005-08:00

It's embarrassing enough as it is to work in an industry where editorial policies often demand superficiality, ignorance, and vapidity, but every now and then I come across an article of such stupifying ignorance that a change of career, or at least the wearing of a paper bag over the head, seems unavoidable.

The author of the article for which a link is given above isn't quite so crass as to himself voice the claim that Vancouver has the best Chinese food in the world, but he does quote this jaw-dropping and criminally absurd view with approval in an opening that is otherwise a triumph of other silliness. My in-laws and their myriad friends and acquaintances, as well as their forefathers who built Vancouver's Chinatown, would be rather surprised (if their English were up to it) to read that 'it was 1997's repatriation of Hong Kong that began the mass influx of Chinese to British Columbia's lower mainland'. And who built the railroads a century ago, provided services to gold rush miners, and worked in the mines themselves?

'A migration which continues to this day, fueled in part by Canada's immigrant-friendly policies,' he continues, although it's mainland China that provides the largest source of immigrants now, not Hong Kong. 'Today, almost one in five of Vancouver's two million residents is ethnically Chinese.' Yes, but a large proportion of these were born here, can read, write, or even speak little Chinese of any variety, and are more comfortable with burgers or barbecue or all-you-can-eat pizza, than the subtleties of xiaolongbao broth. And while there are now enough mainland immigrants to ensure that authentic Sichuan food has started to appear, and even Yunnan and Hunan restaurants, the author's meager 38 meals in 12 restaurants hardly qualify him to make the sweeping recommendation that everyone should fly to Vancouver to eat Chinese, especially where the majority of Chinese restaurants are in fact low-cost, mass stodge outfits producing adulterated dishes that visitors from the mainland rightly regard as inedible. Dim sum is an exception, but there's a great deal more to Chinese food than Cantonese, as the author seems barely aware, recommending precisely one Shanghainese snack, and apparently unaware of the geographical and palatal disconnection between the Guizhou dish he recommends and the Sichuan restaurant in which he found it.

Perhaps I find all this particularly fatuous because I've just returned from 4.5 weeks of restaurant reviewing in Hong Kong and Beijing, but common sense ought to tell anyone that when your main source of migration until recently has been Hong Kong and southern China, the other major cooking schools are not going to be well represented, and minor ones will be completely invisible. It ought also to be obvious to all but the most dimwitted that a city/region with a population of two million, of whom only a fifth are of Chinese descent a large proportion of whom have not the slightest clue about the full range of Chinese cuisine themselves, are not exactly likely to beat a country of 1.5 billion in the range or quality of their restaurants. Much of what is made there is rare or simply cannot be found in a backwater like Vancouver, more's the pity.

But this is the problem: Whether a story is published depends on whether a splashy, easily-digested idea has been sold to an editor who probably still says 'Peking' and can't (like the author of this piece, I suspect) find China on a map. The story doesn't need to be true; its idea needs to be ear-catching and to be made persuasive regardless of any lack of evidence, and it isn't unusual for editors to insist on rewrites of a story simply to make it fit the initial proposition more closely. 'Truth in travel' doesn't actually exist, and certainly not in Condé Nast Traveler, with its absurd lists of fortune-cookie style descriptions, and its features on 'hidden' or 'secret' places.

However, if anything is likely to make a career change inevitable it is an accompanying video on Vancouver in general in which the author appears to demonstrate he has made being stupid, crass, and predictable into a profession. There's been a vast amount of drivel published in the run up to the winter Olympics, which open tomorrow here, but this beats anything else I've seen. Don't watch it on a full stomach:

Liveable City

Meanwhile, having just staggered off a plane from Beijing via Hong Kong, I'm hard at work on a Vancouver piece myself, rather against my will, and much to the chagrin of others here who know of my lack of enthusiasm for the place. Luckily it isn't due for publication until June, and no mention of the Olympics is required. On that topic I'm unprintable.

Travel PR tips

2009-07-12T16:25:00.002-07:00

I'd been thinking recently how common it is for journalist friends and colleagues to hold PR people in complete contempt.

On the one hand this may partly be because they don't always get what they want, and perhaps they aren't willing to recognise that they may sometimes simply not get what they want for very sound commercial reasons, such as that what they can offer is not what the destination (hotel, travel company, restaurant, etc.) actually needs. On the other hand PR incompetence is not rare.

Having sat on both sides of the desk (although I've never had anything to do with travel-related PR) perhaps I'm a little more sympathetic. I also remember many times that well-organised PRs have helped me put together trips that have resulted in stories that have been widely published, so all parties have benefited.

Needless to say, I also remember all the little slip-ups that have helped to make things unnecessarily difficult, simply because PR people have failed to do their jobs properly.

I then happened to come across the site 'Pro PR Tips', and the link above is to one tip that particularly caught my attention:

> It’s sad when a PR person makes me want to cover a company less. But it’s not my job to tell company execs when they’re getting screwed by their reps. Advice to CEOs and internal marketing people: Don’t cede your media relationships to your contractors.

The author writes about technology both in print and on-line, but what struck me is that there are individual hotels, hotel chains, and even whole countries that I won't deal with simply because their PR people are so bad.

One major Hong Kong hotel is disappearing from guide books I'm involved in simply because the PR person there tries to negotiate: 'I'll give you an extra night if you guarantee to say...'

'What?' you might cry. 'You mean you'd omit a brilliant hotel I might like simply because you don't like the PR person? I'm interested in the beds, the location, the price, the service, and I don't have to deal with the PR person. Why should you penalize me because the PR person is bad?'

And the answer is because anyway the problem in Hong Kong is never choosing what to put in, but what to leave out, because there are more excellent hotels than there is space. So no one's losing out here, but be assured that if there was little alternative, that hotel would be included anyway. The point I'm making is that here is an example of PR actually driving down a hotel's exposure to its prime target markets. Even if I were forced to include the property, it would never be mentioned in passing in articles, and I would be unlikely to recommend it on-line in other contexts. The PR person's behaviour is damaging that hotel's business. No names to be given here, but let's just say that fashion PR and travel PR are clearly quite different.

I will name the hotel chain I usually ignore, though. It's the Four Seasons. This is because in pursuit of guide book coverage for very widely distributed series indeed, I've twice dealt with properties in this chain and been treated in precisely the same way: My initial email request for access has been ignored until I was either already in the city in question or about to board the plane, and then I've received an invitation to lunch.

'So what,' perhaps you ask, 'is the problem?' Well perhaps, inspired by Pro PR Tips, I'll go on to explain in one of my own series of travel-PR-related tips. Watch this space.

The one country I ignore is because although I've visited it twice, and written about it extensively in Time, the National Post, and assorted local Canadian papers, and happen to like it very much both personally and professionally (entirely different things) my most recent encounters with its current PR people have involved considerable rudeness on their part.

Maybe the key person in question has moved on. But until the destination approaches me again, I'm never going to know. And it's a big world, with many destinations, and more invitations to travel than I can accept.

Since many of the PR people I deal with are in fact civil servants the situation is perhaps different from that of the tech industry, and it's that thought, plus the realisation that more than a decade of experience has left me with a cupboardful of (mostly) friendly advice to offer.

As I said above, watch this space.

Squeaking reaches deafening proportions

2009-06-27T11:03:00.003-07:00

Courtesy of Jon Azpiri, the link is to a blog with a piece on earning US$0.15 per word, except that apparently not all words count, regardless of their grammatical importance. Read it, as they say, and weep.

Several people on the Mexican trip from which I've just returned were writing for absolutely nothing except the subsidised travel itself. One, very courteously, apologised for contributing in this way to the general undermining of rates, although there's little new in this. But I was the only person travelling solely in the expectation of receiving a fee for material to be published, and that's a first.

Those dreaming of making a living from all this should note that US$0.15 per word is starting to look generous.

Everyone's pips are squeaking

2009-06-09T16:37:00.005-07:00

The link is to a Times article revealing that W H Smith, which although only partly a bookshop used to be (and may still be) the UK's largest bookseller, has done a deal with Penguin which means that only Penguin group travel guides will now be stocked.

Publishers I've written for have sometimes regarded persuading W H Smith to stock them as make-or-break for the titles, such was the volume of sales from limited shelf space. Smith's was therefore able to extract truly pip-squeaking discounts meaning that there was little profit if any at all from sales there, which seemed to make a presence there rather pointless. An appearance on the shelves of Smith's amounting to little more than very expensive advertising, but in a form that guarantee the publisher got the absolute minimum yield pre sale. For those (precious few) authors on a royalty, the result was only a few pence per sale.

To gain this exclusive hold on Smith's shelves, Penguin (whose travel guide stable includes Rough Guides and DK titles), has had both to pay cash up front, and to give W H Smith a whopping 72 % discount on the cover price. I can't speak for Rough Guides, but DK doesn't pay a royalty, but rather a flat fee for total rights, so although I've been co-author/editor/consultant on a number of titles this new deal doesn't affect me. But even had there been a royalty it wouldn't have amounted to much. If the book as a £10 cover price, only £2.80 gets to the publisher, and at the very best about £0.28 of that will reach the author. Writing travel guides is more about establishing expertise and credibility than it is about getting fat.

The author of the Times piece rather takes the partners in this deal to task, but there's not much enthusiasm in the way he does it, and he doesn't really have much of interest to say. The travel book market is in a terrible state, and it's up to Smith's, in the best interests of its business, to decide how to get the maximum yield from its shelf space, and the publisher to decide how to increase its market share.

Last year guide book sales in the UK fell between seven and thirteen per cent (according to a piece in The Bookseller), and that was before the recession began to bite. According to this Times piece, in the first four months of this year DK's sales fell by 16.5%, and Rough Guides' by fully 30%. There are probably mass redundancies underway even as I type.

No doubt Penguin sales through W H Smith will rise a little, as those making last-minute purchases at airports and railway stations (where the company is well-represented) will be faced with little alternative. But everyone else will surely quickly learn about the paucity of choice, and will shop elsewhere. Total travel sales at W H Smith outlets sharing high streets with Waterstone's, Borders, Books Etc., and other big chains may well drop however.

But this is all further indication, for those not yet driven away from the thought of travel writing by various postings below, that now is not the best time to be entering the business. In the last few weeks I've seen one travel section I write for regularly simply vanish, and had another frequent magazine client contact me to say that rates were being reduced by ten per cent including on work already commissioned, filed, but not yet actually printed (which is completely disgusting).

In the end, the purpose of travel writing for newspapers and magazines is to keep the advertisements from seeming too numerous, and bumping into one another. When there's less advertising, there are fewer pages, and less demand for text. Leisure travel is one of the first things to go in a recession, and when fewer people are buying travel, travel companies have less money with which to place advertising.

Right now you'd be better to write on living on a budget than on travel. At least until such times as editors realise that a well-written piece about somewhere the reader can only dream of visiting is just as attractive as a nuts and bolts piece about somewhere swamped with overseas visitors.

Personally I'm in the middle of writing a piece on lawn mower racing, and a series of China book reviews.

'Don't like Jamaica...'

2009-06-06T15:04:00.009-07:00

'...I love her.'

Partway through my Jamaican visit this 1970s 10cc tune came back to me, but my Jamaica Tourism Board minder had never heard of it, and even suggested (teasingly) that she thought I was making it up. But this is the 21st century, the small but comfortable hotel I was in (Sunset Resort, on Treasure Beach) had broadband, and by the next morning I'd downloaded a copy of the song, transferred it to my iPod, and gave it to her to listen to over breakfast.

She wasn't impressed, and indeed I hadn't remembered that the whole thing is slightly mocking.

I'm not particularly keen on these trips that introduce me to a country I've never visited before (and in this case a region previously unknown to me). It doesn't seem reasonable that after a week I'm going to come back with something intelligent to say. But of course this is wrongly conceived, since intelligence is about the last thing most (thankfully not all) editors and readers (ditto) want from their travel sections. But there are times when such trips become necessary either to assist the bank account or because editorial interest is turning in a particular direction and stories on a particular region is all that they want.

The whole thing was very poorly handled by Jamaica's New York-based agency, with long lacunae between email replies, a complete failure either to produce story ideas or promote Jamaica in any way despite being invited several times to do so, and final agreement on a trip only reached a week before it was taken, and long after one deadline had gone by.

I saw a draft itinerary only five days before departure, and was given merely 1.5 hours to comment (!) before the USA shut down for the long holiday weekend. It was only then that I discovered that my piece on driving round lesser-known corners of Jamaica was going to amount to no more than being driven around Jamaica with the permanent company of a minder. Had I been aware of this earlier I might well not have taken the trip.

But it's just as well I did, because no sooner had I arrived then things actually clicked into action. My guide, the amiable Claudia, was not of the 'minder' kind, was not in denial about Jamaica's reputation, and indeed would have been hard put to deny some of its problems since only a few minutes after leaving the airport when we stopped so I could use a bank machine, someone immediately offered me some dope. She was justifiably horrified, not that I was in the slightest bit bothered about it, and drove the man away. This was, however, the only time anything of this kind happened to me in a week.

It's always tricky when you have to have someone with an agenda at your elbow for a week, although some countries' tourism boards, and apparently Jamaica's is one, will only operate in this way. But Claudia's agenda was principally to make sure I got the stories I wanted, and it rapidly became clear that very little of my requests had been transmitted to Jamaica at all. As a result within two days we'd abandoned the existing skeletal itinerary and Claudia was spending large parts of the day on the phone to various people rearranging and reconfirming in general thoroughly sorting things out. If, en route from A to B, I spotted a turn-off to something that looked interesting, there would follow a rapid discussion about it, and an immediate change of plan if that's what I wanted. I very quickly forgot to be peeved that I wasn't driving myself and musing privately into my dictaphone. In terms of flexibility I might just as well have been driving, and while loneliness can sometimes be a problem on these trips, Claudia was very good company.

As I saw in the second half of the trip, the way most visitors treat Jamaica it might as well be the Costa del Sol, or parts of the Mexican coastline. They fly in, are collected from the airport and taken to an all-inclusive resort where they frolic on a palm-fringed beach, eat three largely foreign meals a day and drink all they want. The only Jamaicans they speak to are those working in the resort. Some take brief tours to what are inevitably the most self-consciously made-for-tourists sights on the island (although some of these are well-done). This is my idea of hell, and I simply cannot see the point (whether in Spain, Mexico, Jamaica, or anywhere else), but of course some people just want a one- or two-week break with reliable sun, sand, sea and sometimes something else beginning with 's'.

Fine, and in terms of travel writing there's nothing easier than spending three nights in each of, say, three resorts, do little more than lying around on the same all-inclusive package for a story that practically writes itself. But it's not for me.

Instead I used the excellent Sunset Resort on the south coast's Treasure Beach as a base from which to visit assorted better- and lesser-known sites in the surrounding hills, whose originally Idaho now gone-native owner volunteered to take me off in various directions, and when I came back one day feeling slack, bullied me into taking a half-hour boat ride out to a small bar on stilts. I was very glad he did, as both the trip out on a high-speed fishing boat, and the early evening spent looking down to rays and up to the sunset was a highlight.

Other high points included various roadside food stops, for jerk chicken, jerk fish, and goat curry; a day spent watching a local limited-overs cricket match (with a lively crowd of about forty), and Greenwood Great House, which I'm hoping may trigger a return to Jamaica for further work. Having seen two of the surviving great houses I'd certainly like to do something on them.

Due to someone's inability to notice that May has 31 days, it was discovered (including by me) partway through the trip, that there was a day with nothing scheduled. I was at the Hilton-run Rose Hall Resort and Spa and so ended up with a day of doing precisely what most other visitors to Jamaica do: absolutely nothing.

I rediscovered that I am now absolutely incapable of this. I put my trunks on, went and got towel, headed down to a less popular end of the beach, went for a three-minute swim, sat under a palm, and in under 15-minutes all-in was back in my room, sorting out some of my notes, doing admin email, etc. The hotel room was large, well-furnished, solid and pleasant, and lacked the self-consciously tropical motifs of others I saw (Jakes, Negril Escape). The tropics were easily visible from the balcony: white sand, turquoise water, and all

It seems to me that you can't lose with Jamaica. If it's beach time you want, there are plenty of beaches to choose from. If you want culture and history there's plenty of that, too. Possibly the ideal combination is a beach resort used as a base from which to reach the rum factories (e.g. Appleton), river trips, waterfalls, great houses, local seafood restaurants (esp. Little Ochie), small non-touristy towns with no pestering vendors, and local nightlife.

One of the most likable aspects of the country was being able, despite having a dramatically contrasting skin tone, simply to blend into the crowd, something that despite the relative lack of contrast in China, is practically impossible to achieve there. A more easygoing people more interested in simply exchanging views and making you feel comfortable you couldn't hope to meet.

Ah well. Enough rambling. I've a deadline, as usual.

To return to the title of this entry, although I did like Jamaica it really wouldn't matter if I didn't. That's not the point of this kind of travel, which is to come home with the material needed for the stories in question. Fortunately, I did that, too.

Better to arrive than to travel

2009-05-27T20:30:00.003-07:00

So if you're boarding an overnight flight of four or five hours, landing at a time your body considers to be 3am in order to wait four hours for another four-hour flight, what would you do?

Sleep? Watch VOD? Catch up with some reading?

I worked for most of the first flight and for a further two hours after landing, frantically revising a piece delayed by domestic difficulties and now overdue. Having filed it from the business lounge in Toronto, and then having found myself upgraded to business class, I thought on the flight south to Montego Bay (Jamaica for the geographically unlettered) I'd be able to sleep the sleep of if not the just, at least of the man who met his modified deadline by the skin of his teeth.

So, needless to say, no sooner had I nodded off than the Air Canada flight attendant woke me up to find out what I wanted for breakfast.

I'm hoping a rum punch with dinner and the sound of the surf outside the window will allow me my first extended sleep for more than a week, thus enabling me to be coherent when I interview an organic farmer early tomorrow morning.

Two weeks on the couch with no deadlines. That's what, ten years on, I still want.

What is 'real travel'?

2009-05-22T15:18:00.007-07:00

In comment on a post in April last year (yes, it's taken me a while to get around to this), Lara Dunston wrote:

> I'm glad your press trip went well, but I'm still not persuaded to venture on one myself, I'm afraid. I just can't see how they come close to anything like real travel.

This rather begs the question, 'What is "real travel"?' It also assumes that whatever 'real travel' may be, that's the kind of travel I'm trying to have, which might turn out to be precisely the kind of confusion between work and play this blog (such as it is) is partly dedicated to dispelling.

The phrase 'real travel' is mostly heard in the dormitories of backpackerdom, meant to differentiate between travellers ('real') and tourists (in some sense 'fake'). The idea is never thought through, but is intended to indicate that uncritically following the routes and recommendations of your Lonely Planet guide is somehow superior to being spoon-fed your information on an organised tour. In fact there's little to differentiate the two.

Here a press trip (or 'fam trip' as it's often called) is being contrasted with other travel (whether independent or fully escorted isn't clear, but it's a fairly safe bet that independent travel is going to be regarded here as the only 'real' travel).

But all travel is 'real' (or none of it is), and no one who prefers to be carted from A to B need feel obliged to work out how to do it by themselves and by public bus. No one who simply wants to be on a beach need feel obliged to steep themselves in local culture and no one who thinks that following guide book recommendations for a few days amounts to meaningful cultural immersion is to be taken seriously anyway. Indeed, it's almost impossible for something to appear in any popular guide book and still be authentic. That's one of those principles of tourism that might have been constructed by Heisenberg: the more widely something is known about the less likely it is to be original and authentic. This is Neville-Hadley's Quantum Theory of Travel.

But of course, my travel is anyway business travel, undertaken for the purpose of obtaining stories agreeable to editors, and has nothing whatsoever to do with my own travel preferences. A successful trip is one in which I come back with the material I need: observations, notes on experiences, interview recordings. I may not have seen globally famous 'must-sees' despite being within five minutes of them (and I speak as one who has twice been to Alice Springs without visiting Australia's most iconic Rock--it wasn't part of the story in either case). My itinerary is agreed in advance, and even when it involves driving myself, rarely has any flexibility. But it's shaped to the needs of the stories. It's not a holiday.

In general I restrict myself to travel that can be undertaken by anyone else, and write in order to describe the experience and explain how it can be done by those who follow. This sometimes means doing more rather then less than other visitors would do, in order to be able to make a selection of experiences to recommend. One benefit of press trips with groups of journalists, although I mostly avoid these, is that there's often access provided that the average traveller wouldn't get, but which when recounted is helpful to the reader. On the excellent trip to Scottsdale that spurred the original comment, for instance, I had the opportunity to talk directly to some of the architects and their followers in a way not available to the average visitor. The point was, of course, to get information, anecdotes, and quotable material that would enliven the story and explain the experience in the words of those best qualified to comment. If this was 'unreality' then more of it is needed.

There is almost no genuinely critical travel writing for newspapers or magazines or television. This is not what the editorial and production powers feel the readers/viewers want, and the material created for these publications and broadcasts is almost universally artificial in one way or another. But the general public idea of travel is of something so imbued with glamour, whether it's the 'heroism' of hard-seat train travel in China, or the wannabe-James Bond-ness of luxury Caribbean resorts, that even someone as weary of travel as I am (and so far I've managed to avoid a trip further than Fife in Scotland this year) would have a hard time breaking the spell even if permitted by editors to do so. Indeed, it's often noticeable on website travel discussions that the unsatisfactory nature of an experience is the very last thing that either those who haven't yet travelled want to hear about, or that those who may already have travelled want to admit to. They slave and save, look forward all year to what may be the 'trip of a lifetime', and nothing is going to make them admit afterwards, that in swallowing all the clichés about a destination they were involved in duping themselves.

The best thing I can do is to avoid contributing to the overall propaganda, and if there's any distinction to be made between 'real' and 'unreal' in this context then it's to do with writing about, for instance, the insect markets in Beijing, rather than the usual goo about 'ooh-ahh Forbidden City 5000 years of culture Confucius he say'. This, however, requires a considerable amount of study and effort when venturing out of English-language territory, and is best based at least on repeated visits to the same destination. It's a lot easier just to rattle off a brainless piece on first impressions of the top sites, and it's a lot easier to publish such a piece, too.

I'm off to Jamaica next week on a trip that so far has been very poorly handled, insofar as it's taken about two months to set up with final agreement achieved, after long lacunae and one missed deadline, less than a week before departure, and with an absolutely skeletal draft itinerary which appears to have me chauffered everywhere rather than driving myself. However, the trip does seem designed to help me get the three stories I finally proposed (the intermediate PR people in New York having contributed absolutely nothing--sometimes you really do wonder what these people do to earn their money) and I'm promised that everything will stop and start at my pleasure.

The excuse (from the New York PR people) that I can't drive myself because I might get lost seems particularly absurd, not least since the tourism authorities themselves are promoting self-drive to less-visited places, which is one of the topics I'm supposed to be covering. Seeing whether this is in fact practical, and actually getting lost, is potentially part of the story.

But some tourism authorities insist on having someone at your elbow for the whole visit (and there are certainly journalists who can't survive without this, too), but it can be claustrophobic, especially to someone who prefers to use a dictaphone for notes. With the right chauffeur/guide it can be very helpful (as I remember with one in Melbourne and the Yarra Valley, one in Tokyo, and another in Asti), and in others the opposite (one in Fiji, one in Vilnius). If the timing of all this, leaving me with little option but to go to Jamaica, had been different there would have been further discussion on all this.

Regardless, the purpose of the itinerary is to get the stories. Is this artificial, in the sense that no casual traveller would adopt the same itinerary? Yes. Is it 'real'? Certainly. Getting the stories is the only thing that counts. This is work, not play.

Business as usual

2009-05-11T08:29:00.006-07:00

There's an item on the BBC World Service this morning about how the contraction of economies globally is bringing about a rise in fraud, and this is apparently a particular growing problem in Japan, where the sums involved also tend to be large.

An expert being interviewed for the programme pinpointed three particular problems that increase the chances of money invested there going astray: that foreign investors don't understand the business culture, don't understand the language, and rely very heavily on local advisors.

Now where does that sound like?

It's a constant puzzle why in so many different ways China is treated differently from anywhere else. When talking about business in China, despite endless examples of investors leaving large sums in China and achieving either a great deal less than they might have achieved elsewhere or indeed nothing at all, and despite endless cases of breach of contract, fraud, and intellectual property theft, China doesn't get a mention here.

Maybe there's no 'growth in fraud' story to tell about China because fraud reached maximum levels a long time ago.

The interviewee went on to cite an example of foreigners allowing themselves to be intimidated by local culture, or persuaded that they shouldn't ask various questions for fear of giving cultural offence. In his example an important businessman went to Japan to check on his business, was introduced in English, but then the rest of the meeting was held in Japanese. He was asked at the end if he had any questions, but was too embarrassed to ask for the matters to be gone over again in a language he understood.

Businessmen looking to invest in China are this stupid on a daily basis, and arrive already persuaded that things must be done 'the Chinese way', often by foreign consultants with every interest in promoting the obscurity of business dealings there and the inscrutability of officialdom in order to line their own pockets with fees for steering the hapless foreign investor through it all.

The advice given in the interview was that as soon as it is suggested in Japan that you should not ask a question because of local peculiarities then alarm bells should ring. In China you should not only look a gift horse in the mouth, but you should be getting its teeth X-rayed on a daily basis in order to ensure they haven't been pulled and replaced with fakes.

The way in which China is treated differently from the rest of the world never comes out more clearly than when U.S. foreign policy is considered, not only with Clinton's recent disgusting downgrading of the importance of human rights there, a demoralising self-given black eye for the new administration, but also with recent discussions of U.S. policy towards Cuba.

Shortly after her appointment to the Obama administration, Clinton made a rousing speech about telling dictators their time was up, and there would be an end to suppression of free speech, right of assembly, of religion, etc., and put several countries on notice.

Did she mention the most extravagant offender of all? No, she did not, and made it clear before visiting China that such considerations were to get less prominence than was at least claimed for them even by the Bush administration.

While apparently embargoes are appropriate for bloody-handed regimes the U.S. government doesn't like, engagement is right for others, if they have sufficient economic clout. The rhetoric on being 'leader of the free world' and on being morally upright defenders of democracy and free speech has by now added staleness to its already rank odour.

But recently to hear a Republican official criticise Obama's possible engagement with Cuba while encouraging such engagement for China was enough almost to have me hurl my laptop across the room.

What has the European policy of engagement with Cuba achieved, he asked? Has it brought about democracy or a free press?

Well has the US's engagement with China brought those institutions there?

One reason why I rarely have time to write here...

2009-03-11T15:15:00.003-07:00

Link is to Wall Street Journal article of mine on the repeated foolishness of campaigns surrounding the bronze heads from Beijing's Summer Palace.

Gross stupidity

2008-08-18T21:16:00.004-07:00

I don't have time to dismantle yet another piece of drivel by Nicholas D. Kristof, but why the New York Times continues to publish his fatuous comments on China is beyond me. Kristof is a clown, but a dangerous one because what he says is published in a newspaper of some stature, whereas he should be working for CNN.

Luckily some other readers get stuck into him here:

http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/your-comments-on-my-china-column/#comments

Travelling can actually be fun

2008-08-13T17:28:00.004-07:00

I have to admit to having had something of a holiday. Not the much-desired two weeks on the couch with no deadlines (and no children), but two weeks driving around Bulgaria and Romania, both new to me, without having promised anyone I'd write anything.

I did barely any reading about Bulgaria before I boarded the plane. I had no route, no plan, and nothing booked except a rental car. We simply made it all up as we went along, stopped where we liked, had a look at two or three hotels or guesthouses before choosing one, and stayed an extra day in places we found we were enjoying. We drank large quantities of Bulgarian wine and Romanian beer, visited marvellous monasteries and churches, ventured as much into the countryside as possible, and ignored any 'must sees' we didn't feel like seeing.

It was wonderful. I could almost start to like travelling again.

I will in fact write two stories, but only because they are subjects I came across that appealed to me.

Paperwork

2008-05-06T10:59:00.004-07:00

There's recently been coverage, especially in the UK, of the one year anniversary of the disappearance of a little girl from a Portuguese sea-side resort, kidnapped as her parents dined with friends in line of sight of the room where she was sleeping with two siblings.

At the time the quiet village where the event took place was descended upon by hordes of reporters and camera crews from all over Europe. The girl has never been recovered, and few (except, at least in public, the parents) expect she ever will be.

Journalists have been back to the site with nothing new to say, and so have covered merely the effect on the village one year on, and accounts of what it was like suddenly to be under so much scrutiny for several months.

One expat (if I remember this correctly) running a pub, remarked that the worst thing about having so many journalists around was that they all wanted receipts for everything.

This was bound to make someone who had just been assembling his papers for his accountant so that the annual tax return could be compiled smile rather wryly. The staff journalists and stringers wanted the receipts to claim expenses from their employers. But for freelances proper retention of receipts can make the difference between an unprofitable and a profitable year in this business, and keeping and filing them form part of the great accounting exercise that travel writing represents.

Great mountains of mouldering paper, carefully sorted and annotated, go to the accountant each year. He's used to getting full-form and simplified Chinese characters (and occasionally pulls out receipts at random to ask me what they are and to test that I'm not attempting to mislead either him or the tax authorities. This year he had to deal with Arabic, too, and two currencies sufficiently obscure for the authorities not to provide official average exchange rates: those for the Jordanian and Libyan dinar.

191 nights were spent overseas last year (in Hong Kong, Macau, China, Libya, the UK, Jordan, the USA, and various corners of Canada) a figure I hope significantly to reduce this year, but with still no prospect of two weeks on the couch. Australia and Arizona already...

Some things go well

2008-04-26T12:28:00.005-07:00

I generally shy away from organised group press trips, but I've just returned from one to Scottsdale in Arizona that I'm rather glad I didn't refuse. It wasn't too large (although the largest they've done, apparently), the other writers were all real (this is by no means always the case), the people running the trip were very pleasant without being artificial about it, and the arrangements made delivered the story promised very effectively, which is far and away the most important thing.

I managed to slice one day off the trip, and one spa visit, although I couldn't avoid another. I must admit, though, that my face has responded well to being smeared with an entire dessert trolley's worth of fruity and chocolaty substances and is softer than a baby's bottom. Since I regularly have to get close up to a baby's bottom these days I'm in a position to make this rather predictable comparison.

Perhaps one thing that made this trip not just successful but enjoyable was that I had low expectations. It's a commonplace in North America for destinations to be over-promoted, and to be pretty thin on real attractions especially if the emphasis is historical, at least to a snotty European. But in this case, in addition to the tiny, slightly Disneyfied Wild West old part of Scottsdale, there was mid-20th century history well worth a look, particularly in the form of the oddly-named Hotel Valley Ho, a late-50s masterpiece recently renovated and partly rebuilt not with its rooms an exact copy of the period, but rather in homage to it, right down to a Viewmaster next to the bed. (It's impossible that such a device would be named today without an intercap.) The colour scheme contained hues I can seriously say haven't been seen since the 60s, and I fully expected a Dr. No-era Sean Connery to step out of the shower in nothing but a towel at any moment. It was truly enjoyable in a way most hotels aren't.

The other mid-century masterpiece was Frank Lloyd Wright's winter base, originally set up miles from anywhere, and now swallowed by Scottsdale's sprawl. Taliesin West was where Wright trained his apprentices in slave-like conditions, making them not only design shelters for their accommodation way out in the desert, but build them by hand, having first raised the funds themselves. In between this they built the combined studio and residence building, constantly tearing down and re-erecting sections on Wright's whim. Scottsdale is still home to many who studied with Wright in this way, none of them now young, and part of the purpose of the trip was to take a tour of the remarkable buildings in the company of one of them, and to talk to some others. This was something of a privilege, not least since all were remarkably quotable and founts of good stories about Wright the man, while in some cases displaying the kind of idolatry more usually connected with cults, especially those still living on the vast desert property in buildings that were largely invisible. This, Hotel Valley Ho, the anti-suburban planning ideas of the 88-year-old Soleri (another ex-Wright pupil), and some other unexpectedly excellent art-related experiences in Scottsdale form the core of a story that I'm actually looking forward to writing.

And its hard to dislike a place with relentlessly predictable sunny weather (Wimbledon should be rescheduled for spring and moved here), palm trees, and giant cactuses with real personalities.

Best of all, it only took four days to do. I'll take more fam trips like that, thank you.

All his own work

2008-04-15T20:12:00.006-07:00

I'm in a great hurry and shouldn't be doing this at all, but two events that would normally be fodder for this blog have taken place without comment appearing here: firstly the Tibetan riot/Olympic torch/poor reporting/reaction to same, and secondly a case of self-outed laziness and plagiarism by a guide book writer. I'm choosing here the more trivial topic for comment (indeed amongst the most trivial topics of which one could conceive) partly because the more important one has grown too large to deal with in fewer than several thousand words, and partly because much of the comment that has already appeared on the plagiarism question is so profoundly ill-informed it makes me want to gnash my teeth.

It's also appropriate to write on guide book plagiarism when I don't have time when the reason I don't have time is that I'm working on two guide books.

I believe the story may have begun with an interview given to the Melbourne Herald Sun by ex-Lonely Planet writer Thomas Kohnstamm. His purpose, apparently, was to gain advance publicity for an account of his misadventures working on various South American titles for LP, and tasters given included providing a good review to a restaurant following sex with a waitress, claims to have dealt drugs in order to supplement meagre fees from LP, failing even to visit one country he was paid to write about, and plagiarising or simply making up other information because LP wasn't paying enough. These, at least, were claims in the original story and in versions that appeared shortly afterwards in other media world-wide doing little more than rehash the original with comments from leaked LP internal memos, and later a public response from LP. There followed, inevitably, a lot of braying on the blogs of travellers (never 'tourists') and wannabe travel writers.

A very great deal of all this is utter humbug.

Firstly, there's nothing new under the sun, and most of all not in what passes for journalism today. This is far from the first time that an LP writer has been accused of plagiarism (although it may be the first time one has stood self-accused). Thinking only of my particular special interest, China, I seem to remember there was an issue involving one of the co-authors of the original LP China. Much of LP Beijing a few editions ago was clearly lifted and paraphrased by the author from an expat-produced (and now defunct) guide called The Beijing Guidebook, and I published an article about that at the time. I also recall one edition of LP's Pakistan guide about which many readers asserted the writer could not possibly have taken the trips since his descriptions were so wide of the mark. And in the 'nothing new' department it's also worth mentioning that it's only a few years since the last quick flash of articles about the world of the 'Shock! Horror! Probe! Guide book writers are so badly paid they don't do the work properly!' variety. People have very short memories.

Nor, of course, is Lonely Planet the only victim (although it has only itself to blame). As another guide book editor I know says, the first thing he does when he receives a submission is to start Googling sections of it. And it's not uncommon to find material simply pasted from web pages straight into submitted text. I know of three occasions on which my own work has been plagiarised, and in two cases I've found myself editing text clearly lifted from my own books. As I said to the company in question, as least I'm getting some income out of it as I'm being paid to edit it.

But no one surely needs to read an article about poor guide book research to suddenly discover Lonely Planet titles are fifth-rate. The statements by published media and bloggers alike that Lonely Planet's reputation is suddenly under threat had my jaw hitting the keyboard.

What reputation?

It's been a few years since I looked at a Lonely Planet guide but that's because of their obvious ignorance, cluelessness, and scant literacy. In the China titles there were not only howlers galore but self-confessed borrowing in the form of words of thanks to Fred or Joan who'd travelled the southern Taklamakan route, for instance, and whose notes the author had then used.

I've been told that Lonely Planet recruits a pool of writers (and you have in many cases to use the term 'writer' very loosely indeed) who then get assigned to various guides, rather than choosing specialists. Be that as it may, the mini-biographies of the contributors often go out of their way to stress the writer's complete lack of relevant experience. The biographies are the first place you should look when considering the purchase of a guide, especially for somewhere as complex and different as China. Reading those of many Lonely Planet contributors in the past it seemed the only quality required was that of being able to don a back-pack without falling over. From the text it was obvious that writing skills were not required, and since there was almost always no previous experience of China mentioned and no familiarity with the language, there was absolutely no chance right from the start that a work of any usefulness or intelligence would be produced even in the basic history and culture sections let alone hard research. Time after time LP books make only the vaguest gestures at useful directions or transport information. Time after time they say there's no public transport when there is. Time after time it's plain from the text that hearsay is being used. I once used to know one of the LP China authors who told me quite frankly that if he found he'd forgotten a phone number he'd just make it up. There wasn't time to go back and they weren't paying him enough to bother. And in effect, since he had not a word of Mandarin, he couldn't have used the telephone or printed references to find out even if he could have been bothered.

LP China, in addition to the edifying observation in its first edition that Chinese women must have the smallest breasts in the world, managed to go six editions with its history section stating that the Mongol Yuan dynasty was the only period when China was ruled by foreigners. What's more staggering: that the original writer could be so ignorant or that this could pass through the hands of six sets of editors (or the same editor six times) and still not be picked up?

The answer, to those of us who know the guide book industry, is that neither is terribly surprising at all. But Lonely Planet's reputation is only now in danger? Really? Has no one been paying any attention at all?

The single most important talent needed at a guide book company is the ability to select the right writer for the job. Only one or two I've ever spoken to (and I've worked for five of them, one of those under three different owners, and had discussions with three others) had the faintest idea of that. Very commonly once the decision is made to produce a title there's a scramble to find an author or authors in a very short space of time, and authors are hired on the most casual acquaintance and without any writing tests being undertaken or other hoops being jumped through. That something like this may have happened at Lonely Planet was acknowledged in a leaked internal memo from another LP author, quoted in several stories:

'"Why did you (management) not understand that when you hire a constant stream of new, unvetted people, pay them poorly and set them loose, that someone, somehow was going to screw you?" author Jeanne Oliver wrote.'

Many travel publishing companies are just factories, and if a writer is willing to get started right now, and do it for the pitiful sum on offer, then off they go. The main thing is to get the book done on time and get it on the shelves to start capitalising on an established brand name and make its production costs back. Accuracy is of no particular concern, and not even the most minimal fact-checking takes place. Note that Lonely Planet now claims to be fact-checking Kohnstamm's work in print. Isn't that a little late? The company has been claiming that Kohnstamm's methods are rare in guide book writing, but given the lack of any serious editing or fact-checking it's hardly in a position to know, is it? And implicit in this statement is a denial of earlier cases of the same thing, and the fact that taking short cuts is overtly acknowledged in some titles, and completely clear from the text of others.

Authors who insist on going over edits and checking maps become regarded as difficult, as happened to me at Frommer's, for instance. But then in most cases authors just sling crudely marked-up maps at editors and are happy not to look at them or anything else again. The editor is left to decipher everything, and it's no wonder that guide book maps tend to be so poor as a result. Both sides are to blame here.

I happen to think LP guides (unless they've improved very recently) are particularly poor, not least due to an almost anti-intellectual stance. But every series is in the situation described above: 'pay them poorly, set them loose' and of the five I've worked for only one pays a royalty--helping to keep the writer interested in the quality and sales of the title, and letting him retain the copyright. The rest pay flat fees for all rights for all media for all time and you're lucky if there's any author recognition at all. The quicker the work is done, the more of the fee you get to keep. The more diligent you are, the more you spend, and the less profit you make.

And that--diligence--is the quality guide book companies need to identify. As I've written here before, when I recruited writers to work on the first edition of Frommer's China, I looked for people who spoke the language, who had had periods of residence in China, and who seemed neither in love with the country nor hating it (both common), but engaged with it while being sceptical of it. If an author has had no residence in a country, and does not have at least a modest acquaintance with the local language, there is no chance of a realistic and well-informed portrayal of that country.

An attempt to gauge diligence was undertaken through long interviews and writing tests. The aim was to find people who cared desperately that what was going to appear under their names was accurate, and who understood how little information in China can be taken at face value. I think in three out of four cases I succeeded.

No previous experience with guide books was required--in fact it was regarded as a disadvantage. An ability to write came much further down the list. Naturally the ability to construct properly grammatical sentences was regarded as a minimum (it clearly isn't at Lonely Planet) but the ability to write in a bright and fresh manner was regarded as less important. For those who got the facts right the prose could always be polished a bit. Most guide book formats do not provide space for extended prose. As it was the problem turned out to be the technical one of writing in a sufficiently compressed style, and I had to spend a lot of time on editing it down. But bright, fresh, and often amusing, it turned out to be.

And I think several of the writers spent every penny of their fees on getting the research done. Then held down jobs or undertook other writing assignments to keep themselves fed while they composed the text. No cutting of corners here; no hearsay; just hard work. And there are other guide book authors like them.

But there are plenty more like Kronstamm, if simply lazy and ignorant rather than quite as self-professedly extravagant in their abuse. As I've edited others' contributions to several guide books I've often come across it. The author of the first editions of Frommer's Beijing and Shanghai guides had managed to spend some time in China and yet remain profoundly ignorant even of basic social courtesies and simple street names. The author of the Frommer's Hong Kong guide seemed to me to have only the most distant acquaintance with the destination when I was forced to look over some of her work, some really fundamental navigational information basic to getting round the territory being either wrong or missing altogether (not to mention the provision of tedious prose, bizarre observations such as dismissing a street for being full of Chinese shops, and the most uninspired and ill-informed selection of restaurants I've ever seen in a guide).

So shock and horror at the idea that LP guides might not be all that well researched is hogwash, as is Lonely Planet's position of fainting like a too tightly laced-up Victorian nanny at the mere suggestion. Many another series is just the same, and in the end it's the choice of author that matters, not the choice of brand (except insofar as certain kinds of information are needed--budget travel or cultural, for instance).

What else comes out of all this hoo-hah?

The absurd suggestion that LP writers don't accept free trips, and the equally absurd suggestion that to accept a free trip is to be corrupt. The copy in the front of every LP guide says that writers do not give good reviews in return for free access, not that they don't accept free access at all. If that little loophole wasn't left open it's hard to see how anything could be done at all, although it's also obvious from the text that LP writers do not eat in the best restaurants or stay at the best hotels being thereby forced to fudge their reviews, although this isn't difficult since those reviews are so brief anyway.

Larger guide book series appealing to deeper-pocketed readers rely on their reputations making sure that the writers get as much free travel, accommodation, entry, and meals as possible, and provide a letter for the writer to brandish. In Western Europe and North America this will go a very long way, and needs to, because it simply isn't financially viable to do it any other way. And there's nothing wrong with that so long as the writer doesn't allow himself to be bought. What's more of a challenge to honesty is the determination of some series (not LP in this case) to be relentlessly sunny, to the point where editors, who typically interfere in little else, will rewrite reviews to be more cheerful, or delete critical matter.

Guide books are in general as shoddy as they are not only because the wrong people are recruited and then paid too little, but because of various structural policies, that include:

Investing just about viable sums in producing the first issue of a guide, but then tiny sums in its updating

In some cases expecting only closed restaurants and hotels to be replaced, leading to ridiculously out-of-date selections in subsequent editions for fast-changing destinations such as China

In some cases being happy for the updating simply to be done from the desk, and only paying enough for that

Insisting on having every book for every destination work to the same formula with text being dropped in to a template, leading to silly distortions (since countries vary widely). This is partly done through ignorance of other cultures, and partly because using the template means the author is doing layout work and saving costs at the design end

Refusing to deal with non-Roman scripts because it's just too much bother although guide books to some countries are quite simply useless without them

Employing editors and sub-editors who are barely literate themselves (rare, but it happens), and rarely employing anyone who has been to China (for instance) on a guided tour, let alone having any deeper knowledge of the country.

So for heaven's sake, guide book readers: know from the start that what you're buying is more likely than not to be lazily put together and full of errors, and written by someone largely ignorant of their subject, with later errors added by equally ignorant editors. Look for biographical evidence of familiarity with the subject and long experience of it (but not too close--guide books written by people operating tour companies at the destination, as one Bradt guide I'm currently looking at, ought to be read with caution). Writers who've contributed to books on the Caribbean, Lesotho, the USA, and Cambodia should simply be avoided. Look over the text for signs of keen eyesight and sharp wits, and choose books with longer descriptions that force the writer to be expressive and informative--ignorance will tend to show up. Otherwise treat the writer as you would a film critic, and be prepared to learn over time whether you agree with his or her opinions. Learn principles of approach from your first encounters with your destination, and apply those when looking for accommodation rather than always picking from the list of choices given. It's just a guide.

The writers and wannabes currently screaming that the Kohnstamm revelations (good title for a spy thriller, although the comments attributed to him are about as revelatory as news that there's toast and coffee for breakfast) are damaging the reputation of travel writers in general should reflect that they have no reputations to lose, either. It's like becoming an estate agent, car mechanic, or lawyer: you may be as honest as can be, but you have to live with the fact that the reputation of your profession is not an attractive one.

Kohnstamm has turned out to be an unreliable source in every way. In more recent interviews he is back-pedalling, claiming he didn't invent or plagiarise after all.

Now that's a claim I really do find incredible.

Written in haste. For more on the vicissitudes of writing guides see this post:

Frommer's China

and this one Writing China guides.

Now to bed in the knowledge I'll have much catching up to do tomorrow.

Sinking feeling

2007-11-23T20:38:00.000-08:00

Sometime earlier today the MS Explorer sank just off the Antarctic Peninsula. A quick click on the posts for February 2005 will show that I sailed to that very area in the same ship two years ago, and I found the news pictures of the vessel lying on its side haunting and mournful.

The Explorer was a ship with a history. It was functional and cosy, and it took me on one of the most memorable trips of my life, but even I'm surprised at how saddening I find the thought of its loss. All the passengers and crew were saved after only a short time in lifeboats and Zodiacs, and the ship itself was only a hunk of metal after all.

I interviewed the owner Bruce Poon Tip while I was on the cruise. He was fretting a little about the cost of the ship's recent refit, and only half-jokingly asking people to take care of his brand new carpets. I wonder what he's thinking now.

After another full day as a filing clerk, moving data from voice recording to database, I'm off for a quick drink with a group of friends and acquaintances known as the Idle Journalists. But I'm going to raise a glass to the Explorer.

Back from Beijing

2007-10-31T12:30:00.000-07:00

In front of me a new computer--a giant 24-inch iMac with vast amounts of RAM, hard drive, and very rapid twin processors. To its right a brand new 500GB external hard drive to which the machine is set to back-up automatically every day.

And this is just as well because no sooner did I have this set up and two months' work copied across from my laptop then the track pad on the laptop suddenly stopped working. With only a month to start delivering sections of the entirely revised edition of 'Beijing', this would be a bit of a disaster. As it is, I'll hand the laptop in next time I'm passing, and won't be in any particular hurry to get it back.

Also in front of me: a GPS with an assortment of data, a mobile phone with a Beijing SIM card and a collection of important phone numbers, and a Palm device running the splendid PlecoDict software enabling me to write characters and swiftly check pronunciation and tone where necessarily.

Just behind these stands a stack of rail, air, and bus timetables, and Beijing maps and street atlases for cross-checking against each other, and a very well-thumbed copy of the previous edition, many of them heavily marked with notes of various varieties. No two maps of Beijing can be relied upon to agree, and none of them are accurate.

On the floor to my left sits a large suitcase full of press releases, brochures, business cards, tickets, menu notes, and receipts, and in case, just slightly more than one jet-lagged week after returning, I've forgotten Beijing, when I open the case that inimitable smell rises to catch the back of the throat. Unnoticeable when in the city perhaps because one swiftly becomes inured, this mix of dirt, pollution, and print will hang permanently about until I throw the paperwork out.

The job now, other than listening to and transcribing many hours of voice notes now stored on the hard drive, is to take each scrap of paper, copy English and Chinese notes from it, and transfer it to a box on the other side of me when complete.

If this sounds less than glamorous, it is. Nevertheless, I'm actually looking forward to it rather more than I do to writing articles. Luckily the Cadogan format requires entertaining prose and provides plenty of space for it, so that the books in the series are often genuinely worth reading in their own right, and often very funny. But in the end the point is to provide a useful tool for the visitor to China, and the addresses, telephone numbers, prices, and so on contained in the already mouldering pile of papers to my left are the essential skeleton on which the flesh of the prose will be hung. The few who do guide books well care very much about getting these details right, and there's much pleasure to be had from having put in the effort to winkle out the truth of how various kinds of arrangements can be made, just how much really should be paid, and now seeing it go into print as sound advice for those who care to use it. (Some don't, and I'll write about that on another occasion.)

Having spent almost all day almost every day on my feet for the last two months (no weekends off in this job), it's also a pleasure to look at the pile of paper as the physical record of work done, and to feel the fruits of that labour in the transference of notes to hard drive, and eventually into readable text.

So for the next couple of months I'll be sitting opposite this screen, trying hard to adopt a position of which my physiotherapist would approve (and whose remonstrations partly drove the purchase of new equipment) and transferring facts, item by item, from paper to database.

I'm going nowhere. Except possibly New Zealand.

Where am I?

2007-08-28T16:04:00.001-07:00

How to occupy yourself on a 14.5-hour flight to Beijing?

Finish writing a story on Libya, of course. Time flies nearly as fast as the plane does.

When you arrive deal with queries about one on Montreal, edit another on the Dead Sea, and deal with planning for a visit to Australia in April.

Eventually you'll notice you're in Beijing and remember what you're here for.

It's going to be a painful 12 months' wait for the Olympics

2007-08-11T13:03:00.000-07:00

I don't usually put Oriental-List (see link at side) postings here, but this was a response to the forwarding a blog entries by an Australian journalist at the link above,entry for August 7:

>I was expecting lots of people, but nothing prepared me for the endless streets of large tower blocks and huge skyscrapers.

Amongst many things that might have prepared the author of this piece for 'endless streets of large tower blocks and huge skyscrapers' would have been all the many articles published in recent times by other journalists flown in to Beijing or Shanghai for five minutes and that also begin with the same gormless observation: 'Wow! They've got tall buildings in China!'

You only have to think back to earlier this year (or late last?) when the BBC decided to have most of its programmes for a week come from China. It might also be noted that there have been large numbers of articles recently about multi-billion yuan projects by various "starchitects", of which Rem Koolhaas' striking CCTV building is only one (see Herzog and de Meuron's National Stadium, and PTW's National Aquatics Centre, Paul Adreu's National Theatre, etc. Although admittedly these aren't exactly towers they are amongst the most striking, expensive, large-scale and avant-garde pieces of architecture anywhere on the planet, and not exactly well-kept secrets.)

This is a foretaste of what we can expect during the Olympics when sport commentators may well be expected to file other material on China, or fill in longeurs with observations full of the blandest and most inaccurate generalities.

A few years ago, when some U.S. president or other was on a state visit to China there was a competition on the list as to who would be the first to hear a commentator say that the Great Wall could be seen from space. There was no shortage of entries. Perhaps during the Olympics we should have another, with a prize for whoever spots the first observation that Beijing has tall buildings, and perhaps members could suggest other platitudes to listen out for.

But despite a flurry of articles in the recent past about the fact that (surprise!) the Great Wall cannot be seen from space (next: 'Spiders don't in fact come out of the bath plug hole shock!'), based on the Baldock evidence we'd probably be safe in simply repeating the competition from last time. The Great Wall's visibility at astronomical distances is bound to be asserted by some other journalist who also apparently doesn't read.

To be fair it must be said that much of the utterly limp reporting on China is not due simply to the lack of talent of those parachuted in for a quick report, but due to the fact that the prevailing view amongst less well-informed editors overseas is the 'unstoppable China rising' story: that's the one they send reporters to get, and they will brook no other. Amongst all the mild hoo-hah about a recent Time report on the indifference of younger members of Beijing's miniscule middle class to matters political no one mentioned that the content of the story was certainly decided before the dinner conversation that formed much of its content actually took place. This is how much 'investigative' reporting is done even by supposedly respectable periodicals, and I'm sure I'm not alone on this list in having seen my material re-written by editors in London, New York, and even Hong Kong, to reflect their views when those are in opposition to what is actually found on the ground.

My favourite recent example of this was in the television documentary The Tank Man, shown widely in English-speaking markets in which the purpose of the documentary maker was to show that the events of Tian'an Men Square in June 1989 had been forgotten, and in particular that the authorities had been successful in suppressing all knowledge of 'the tank man'--the lone individual with his shopping bags who stood in front of a line of tanks to stop them, thus creating one of the most familiar news images of the 20th century.

In this film four hapless Bei Da (Peking University) students are handed a copy of the image and asked what it says to them. You can see this painful and embarrassing sequence here:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/view/

It's part six, whose text summary says, 'Beida University students don't recognize the photo of the tank man...'

Unfortunately for this thesis, one of the students whispers, ''89', to which another replies, 'Haoxiang shi!' ('It seems like it') while the commentary over the top nevertheless disingenuously states that she's baffled.

Out loud the students demur: 'I really don't know; I'm just guessing,' and ask whether the photo is a piece of artwork especially put together for the interviewer's 'experiment'.

It's not just that the English commentary lies about the content of the conversation, but that the whole situation is journalistically bankrupt. Of course the four students were carefully picked by the film-maker's minders, although we're led to suppose that the crew just wandered onto the campus (of Bei Da!) and sat down a few random students in front of the camera for a chat. Nothing is said about the fact that the minder is sitting somewhere behind the camera (a point later admitted by the film-maker in an interview for a different programme, apparently without the slightest embarrassment), and what Bei Da student is going to risk piping up enthusiastically with, 'Yes, yes, I know!' in front of a vast potential foreign television audience and at the cost of failing to graduate or being kicked out altogether. Their expressed bewilderment is almost pantomimic, except that it clearly seems to say, 'How could you put us on the spot like this?'

Later the hyper-intelligent Robin Munro, co-author of the best book on the events of June 89 (Black Hands of Beijing), is perhaps fist given this false picture of proceedings as he's co-opted into regretting on film that the Bei Da students know nothing of the those events, when surely he knows better.

The commentary says that the film of the 'tank man' was only shown once on China Television, and that no one under 20 in China is likely to have seen it. Anyone who knows students at Beijing universities will know what nonsense that last part is. Or it's wild coincidence that even I know several who've seen the clip more than once on the foreign English-language channels they are allowed in their dorm rooms. A quick search of Youtube using the terms 'tank' and 'Beijing' produces four options to watch the clip on the first page of results alone. Despite blockage of Youtube in China, there is no way that this clip hasn't been downloaded many times and passed around, and it's naive in the extreme to think otherwise.

This is not to deny that there's a largely successful attempt to suppress all public discussion of those events in China, but that's a good enough point in itself without distorting the facts to suit the thesis, which is nearly as shameful. It's obviously not considered a good enough point on which to hang an entire documentary.

The actual politics here and the detailed truth of what happened in the past are beside the point. These remarks are not about politics but about the problem of getting a reliable picture of China even for trivial tourism purposes. If we can't trust the Chinese media to do anything but lie it's not clear that we can take much of our own media seriously either, not because there's a propaganda agenda in the same way (although sometimes, depending on the owner or the desire for advertising income there clearly is one of some sort or other) but simply because many of our journalists are incompetent, and others are looking to tailor information to make it fit their idea of what appeals.

Getting true and accurate information on China from Western media is actually quite tricky, and if the Olympics turn out to be a propaganda success for the Beijing government, it will be as much due to the parroting of received 'wisdom' and utter laziness on the part of journalists, and the pre-disposition for the sunny or shocking by ill-informed editors, as to its own direct efforts.

>Beijing is full of contrasts ...

Good grief! This isn't a piece of reporting, it's a postcard home. Clearly either no one edits this blog, or 'city of contrasts' has somehow been purged so often it's been re-born as some kind of acceptabe neo-cliche.

And here's an example of the Western press doing the government's job for it, of which we can expect to see a lot more over the Olympic period:

The government went on the front foot to fight corruption last week by sacking 1,500 officials from around the country for failing to fulfill their duties appropriately.

If sacking a handful of officials, which happens all the time, was all it took to have an impact on corruption then the administration would be now be as pure enough to be a candidate for beatification.). This is window-dressing and nothing more, given dignity by being repeated uncritically in Western media, no doubt to be re-translated back in to Chinese, circulated in neibu commentaries as an example of Western reporting, and possibly to be commented on in the very same media from which it originated in the first place.

And the same will likely happen with increasing frequency on the subject of Olympic preparations, and by the time hundreds of reporters are there our screens will be almost entirely full of warm fuzzy images of a joy joy luck luck happy happy China, although at least Baldock occasionally hinted at a less fluffy China. Let's hope there's still room for the voices of some of the resident journalists with a few years in place and decent Mandarin who can sneak successfully around reporting restrictions and whose commentary may get beyond mentioning problems with the smog.

Speaking of which, are those million cars (four million according to Baldock) off the road yet? Can anyone tell? Has the haze cleared enough to reveal the (shock!) tall buildings?

Spaaaaaaargh!

2007-04-26T08:24:00.000-07:00

Last week, somewhere on the Jordan side of the Dead Sea, I was shut into a small room with a lithe Czech, who proceeded to smother me in an abrasive salty substance, and once I'd been allowed to wash that off to then smother me in thick black mud, wrap me up in a layer of polythene and a heated blanket, and leave me mummified for 15 minutes.

It's now a commonplace of travel that every up-market hotel will have a spa, wherever that hotel may be. And spas, almost universally, consist of dimly-lit rooms with pseudo-ethnic art on the walls, candles burning, and the most dimwitted of New Age music playing on an eternal loop. At the Dead Sea there's a very long history of touting the medicinal qualities of the soupy lake's mineral-rich waters, and people can be found on its shores, at least at the sections owned by the luxury hotels, covering themselves in black, gelatinous matter they dig up themselves.

But all over the world now spas and spa history are being invented, and the merits of rubbing whatever is locally available into your skin being touted. Hotels find in spas a profitable new income stream, keeping guests inside the building spending money.

I loathe spas, in a cordial sort of way, so it doesn't surprise me terribly much that work seems constantly to take me to them. I've had an Indonesian 'therapy' in Whistler BC (complete with gamelan), and had a Thai squeeze the stuffing out of every extremity in Macau (and although I dislike massages, I have to admit that she really was very good). I like immersing myself in hot water in places that have a true history of doing so, and where it also performs a social function, such as in Japan and Iceland. But being inside some windowless box and smeared with essence of bat fart to assorted bonging noises seems to me the height of farce, and to call this a kind of luxury is the height of delusion. When I hear people who plan to travel to China start to waffle on about what spas China might have (and to be sure, China will invent for you any kind of foolishness you're willing to pay for) I feel like drowning myself in a Jacuzzi. Why this obsession with making everywhere feel the same?

After 15 minutes of mummification I was unzipped and helped up to a sitting position still wrapped in the polythene and feeling like a piece of dry cleaning. After showering I felt I was a few millimetres smaller all over. I've had to do two spas so far this year, and with luck that will be it. There's only so much New Age music I can take.

Two new red bits

2007-04-26T00:29:00.000-07:00

Last month I tried to post from Tripoli, mainly for the pleasure of posting from somewhere unusual (at least unusual to me), but the Internet service at the hotel was down. These few words are posted from Petra, and those with a clue about geography will have noticed two new red splodges on the map above.

Time was when I had the desire to visit at least 100 countries before I died, but now I'd much rather know a few countries better. There are now only three trips left I really want to do, and then I think I'd be happy to stay at home with a pile of good books and a comfortable sofa on which to sit and read them. I'm becoming a more reluctant travel writer all the time.

And I've very much fallen back in love with the English countryside over the last few weeks, having spent time in Somerset, Cornwall, Warwickshire, Gloucestershire, and Shropshire, much of it not doing any work at all, but simply pleasing myself (and friends and family). Travel without taking a single note is bliss indeed.

But I rose early this morning and by 6.30am was on my way to Petra, to walk through the Siq unaccompanied by any creature except birds, their calls amplified by the narrow chasm. Yesterday afternoon the route was a sea of tourists returning from the key sights, and walking through the winding passage by myself felt like the cultural equivalent of royalty (or Hollywood star) visiting a department store that has been temporarily closed to all other shoppers. And, of course, I took the picture that everyone is supposed to take, or my version of it at least, cack-handed with a camera as I am.

Most visitors to Petra will only spend a single night here, whereas I have the leisure of three days, and can go where and when I choose, not feeling that I'm using up precious moments of my 14 days' holiday by dithering when I've all of Egypt to fit into the same trip.

But will diligence and a sense of duty to future readers of the articles that result from this visit force me to climb the thousand steps to one Petra high point for the purpose of giving a fair account of it? Given the afternoon temperatures here it's an unattractive prospect, especially both following and preceding a 4km walk, but I think it must be done. I'll just have to think of all the (rather more serious) Chinese mountains I've climbed, of trekking in Nepal, of going up and down Hokkaido volcanoes (only last year), and hope the flab acquired during a year of mostly being at the keyboard doesn't hold me back.

Priorities

2007-02-22T17:10:00.000-08:00

Here we are in late February. Already this year I've been in Hong Kong, Macau, Beijing, and Philadelphia, the last being by far the most exotic to me. Since I last posted here I've also been in England, in Alba and Asti (Italy), somewhere near Chambery (France), and on a train over the Rockies from Vancouver to Banff. I'm about to go to England, Libya, Egypt and Jordan (on a separate trip), and possibly to Poland. Later in the year I'll go to Montreal, and an extensive provincial park outside Toronto.

This is already starting to sound like Marco Polo with his endless dull lists in The Travels.

But with conflicting deadlines for contributions to three different books, and a constant stream of article deadlines, not to mention the endless administration involved in getting this year's trips set up, where would you put your priorities? Not forgetting time spent preparing tax materials for the accountant, although at least rather limited travel last year meant fewer different scripts and languages to deal with.

And surely you must have got the idea by now? Travel writing is an exhausting and frustrating way of making a living.

Still not convinced?

Well I'll do my best to give more examples this year then.

Quandary

2006-09-29T16:03:00.000-07:00

Today, a few hours before leaving for the airport (England, Italy, France, more England) I receive a request to contribute two brief sections to some new picture book on the best trips, which is clearly planning to surf on the success of the 'things to do before you die' titles--but I'm not allowed to say any more.

What often happens with books like these is that the publishing company, which may have the highest reputations, simply gets a book packager to do them. Packagers also dream up such projects and pitch them to big publishers.

Needless to say, inserting such middlemen generally reduces payments to authors yet further, and authors generally get little or no credit in these titles anyway. The pay for these two sections amounts to little more than pocket money, and, of course they have a submission date of merely two weeks from now, when I'll be in the middle of a European trip.

Worse, although I was originally asked to choose from a list of options, which included travel in Japan, Antarctica, Canada, and Hong Kong, too, I've only been assigned two pieces in China. And of these two trips, one is the Yangzi River cruise, which I'm supposed to praise to the (heavily polluted) skies, when I'm fairly well-known, to the point of being quoted in articles published by others, for scathing criticism of the hype surrounding this trip.

Small money; short notice; asked to praise something of which I disapprove. So why get involved?

Well, it's simply the case that there are very few places indeed to write honest and frank accounts of the difficulties with a trip as opposed to its merits. Take it as read that almost all travel writing for periodicals and for gift books of these kind is worthless as a real guide to what is good and what isn't. It's written with stars in the eyes, and saccharine on the tongue (not to mention clichés and vague and often wildly inaccurate generalisations), and with little reference to reality. If I don't do this, someone else will, and there's no shortage of people who neither care about this issue, nor know anything about China, who might well be selected.

The original email I received said I'd been referred by someone whose name I didn't recognise at all. Finally I used Spotlight to do a search of my hard drive and discovered this person in a cc: field on an email from one of my publishers; apparently someone who works in the accounts department.

And this brings us to the point. References for work come from the most surprising places. The publisher whose name will end up on this book is very prestigious. Likely the book packager will have other projects, or herself be asked for recommendations for reliable writers.

Sometimes it just pays to grin and bear it, and when considering what work to take on, a whole basked of actual and potential benefits have to be considered.

Right. I'm off to the airport. Meetings with publishers in London, a couple of stories to do in northern Italy, and little wandering in France, and, I hope time to see some friends in passing.

And I'll be writing these two sections on the plane.

The Monty Python song, "We love you Yangtze/Yangtze Kiang" is playing in my head.

Welcome back

2006-07-02T13:05:00.000-07:00

Got back four days ago from nearly six weeks away, and couldn't possibly be less interested in writing, whether that's the innumerable bread-and-butter emails, the pitches to editors, the articles themselves, letters to friends, or indeed postings here.

Over six weeks in Hong Kong, China, and Japan I became more and more convinced that this way of life is both silly and immoral.

In work terms the Hong Kong trip went smoothly (thanks HKTB) despite the intervention of a hurricane which delayed me for a day. Of course I spent part of the time locked up in a hotel room completing a story on Whistler. But I tramped up hills on Po Toi, visited a new fishing museum near where I used to live, spent a day hopping on and off trains around the New Territories, reviewed some new hotels for future guide book editions, tried out The Peninsula's new spa, and saw friends for dinners.

I was glad to keep my visit to Shanghai brief and mainly administrative, to do with work on the DK Beijing and Shanghai guide, before heading up the Yangzi into China's glum interior, hopping from one decaying and polluted former treaty port to another, and scarcely sight of the sun, which couldn't break through the murk. It finally came out when I headed north from Chongqing to Chengdu, where I had a couple of pleasant dinners with an Internet acquaintance.

After an overnight at a hostel near Shanghai's Pudong Airport I flew to Tokyo.

As I've found on direct China to Japan trips before, nothing makes China look worse than the quick transit to a country that for all its problems, actually works. Perhaps it's the superficial (micron-deep) similarity between the two places and two peoples that makes the contrast so shocking. Just getting into a lift is all that's necessary. In China people often reach for the close door button first, even if someone can be seen running for the lift, and then for the button for the floor. In Japan they reach for the button to hold the door open, and then shuffle apologetically around to make room for the newcomer.

And they are the world's pre-eminent queue-ers, too (step back, you British). Whereas even at Narita, being lined up by incompetent Northwest Airlines staff a family of Shanghainese tried to graft themselves surreptitiously onto a line stretching for many metres behind them. And of course no one in the line said anything, except the foreigner, who temporarily abandoned his bags to tap the paterfamilias on the shoulder and tell him in Mandarin to get to the back, at which point he said he was only standing there waiting for the line to go past him. This met with a sceptical response from me, and much giggling from the other Chinese in the line at his discomfiture.

I spent two nights at the new Mandarin Oriental in Ginza, another of these tower-top hotels, and with considerable style, not that I saw much of it due to a busy schedule (thank you TCVB) bustling around sumo beya (training stables) and kodo (appreciation of incense) meetings, and catching up with friends and acquaintances. Every time I'm in Tokyo I dine with former colleagues from my former life in arts marketing, and who worked on the UK Japan Festival 1991. On this occasion we were joined by someone from the cultural department of the Japanese Embassy in London at the time, but who is now one of Japan's most senior civil servants and an advisor to the Prime Minister, so I think everyone felt it was something of an honour that he gave up three hours for what turned out to be an excellent evening all round.

Then I flew north to Hokkaido for a trekking trip which turned out to be one of the least well-run organised tours I've ever been on--in fact the word 'organised' is hardly appropriate. I've experienced other tours this company runs, and I'm sure it's going to be knocked into shape (the other tours are excellent, and one is amongst my favourite travel experiences). But if this was my first time with them I'd be telling the editors who've commissioned the story that we shouldn't run it. (And that, incidentally, would make me a very rare freelance indeed.)

I was with a group of people some of whom had an annoying obsession with the idea that they were going to be written about, and one of whom threatened to sue if I did. This was despite the fact that the tour organisers had introduced me (I really wish they wouldn't do that--and they might have consulted me first) and mentioned that I was writing about the *tour* not the *tourists*. I often have to wonder in these cases what on earth is going on in people's minds in these cases. They turned out to be a well-read, well-travelled bunch with broad interests and in the end intrigued to know what I might have to say about the chaos they had just experienced, and which, while occasionally taking the organisers on one side to issue reproaches, they were determined to make the best of. I was decidedly glad that they were mainly Australians and not Americans or British, both of whom would have made the whole trip miserable by doing nothing but complain.

But there were some very good moments providing plenty of good material to work with, and the exercise was very welcome, although I was creaking by the end, and I didn't even do all the climbs.

I had a further day in Tokyo, picking up my latest Hiroshige ukiyo-e and doing a little shopping for stationery (my favourite notebooks come from Mujiroshi, although the best square, trouser-pocket-sized ones have been discontinued).

One final evening in Shanghai was used for a quick hotel review and bar update, during which I accepted too many glasses of champagne and too many cocktails, and as a consequence only got to sleep at 5am, and slept for a fitful few hours before having a tour of the hotel with a curiously reluctant PR, and then lunch before getting off to the airport. I slept on the flight, and have had much less difficulty than usual throwing off jet lag. So maybe this staying up all night before leaving Asia is a strategy I should adopt in future, although just at the moment I shudder to think of going back. This will probably wear off.

So I'm back, feeling alienated as usual, although oddly not as alienated as sometimes, possibly due to the same fairly continuous contact with home via Skype that may also have kept me more distant from China than usual while I was there. But Vancouver still seems as effortlessly fatuous as ever. Let's have a conversation about insulated coffee mugs.

Much following-up, tidying-up, planning for possible Europe in September and Middle East in February; a book to edit; two features to submit in July, but otherwise the commission book looking fairly empty, meetings with editors in HK and Tokyo not having produced much.

So no break here. No two weeks on the couch. I'd better get on with it.

Oh, and courtesy of the Internet I discovered while away that my second child, if all goes well between now and the due date in November, will be a girl. This brought a big smile to my face in Narita while waiting for the Shanghai flight.

Whistler

2006-05-08T21:37:00.000-07:00

In the last ten days or so I've filed six stories on everything from sheepdog trials in Adelaide to climbing the Rock of Gibraltar. At the same time I've been dealing with the HKTB, TCVB, Visit Britain, Tourism BC, Tourism Vancouver, Tourism Whistler, three different photographers, four different editors, innumerable hotels and PR agencies, and one publisher. In short I've been rather busy doing what I do more of than anything else--administration.

And the reason this entry is labelled 'Whistler'? Because at about ten day's notice, I was asked if I could run up here and do something for a magazine. To their credit the tourism people over here moved swiftly to accommodate me, and this is written from a suite in a boutique hotel right in Whistler village, after day spent first trying out something called a Sno-Limo (don't trust me on spelling here--I don't have the press kit in front of me), and then going out bear watching (two spotted--it's early in the season). My wife and child are with me for a change, and I've half a bottle of a half-decent merlot, compliments of the hotel, at my elbow.

Today was rather a good day. Both the Sno-Limo and the bear watching made good copy and the weather was balmy in Whistler village, but with three inches of new powder up on the mountain some of which my Sno Limo was the first to carve. Good for photography all round. Two days up here, one doing some follow-up in Vancouver, one day to write, and the next I'm on the plane to Hong Kong to get two more stories researched and have a few further meetings with editors.

And right now I must get to work on today's tape so that my day of writing won't begin with tedious hours of transcription.

Tomorrow a wander round the village, a treetop walk and zipline ride, a spa visit, and dinner at one of my favourite BC restaurants (the Bearfoot Bistro), although it's with someone from Tourism Whistler, so a lot of shop will be talked.

Now a couple of hours at the keyboard before bed.

Frommer's China

2006-05-06T22:50:00.000-07:00

Guidebook writing is a problematic business at the best of times, and not really an occupation suitable for adults. Nevertheless, when Frommer's approached me to put together the first edition of a single-volume China guide, I couldn't resist. It was something I'd always wanted to do, and although the Frommer's format was a something of a straitjacket, I accepted.

I selected the contents, chose and briefed the writers, wrote guidelines in addition to those provided by Frommer's and specifically related to the difficulties of covering China (see Writing China guides), and negotiated minor adaptations in Frommer's templates to fit the style of China. I wrote all the structural material and one of the gazetteer chapters myself, and edited all the other contributions.

Unfortunately we gradually added to the project by accepting the invitation to update two other overlapping titles, and in general the whole process was a complete nightmare. There was the editor who took it upon herself to rewrite the technical details of the hotel reviews using their websites for information. So when we'd left out the beauty salon because it actually functioned as a brothel, or the Jacuzzi because it had more rings than a sequoia, she added them back in. It had been a fight to get Frommer's to agree to having words in Romanized Chinese tone-marked (so readers could see how to pronounce them), as well as to add a limited number of Chinese characters, but accepted that for technical reasons they wouldn't appear on maps. This editor decided to add them herself, without any reference to the authors, and so, unsurprisingly, not being a Mandarin speaker, she missed out a lot of them and got others wrong. This then went to print without the proofs being seen by any of us.

Another editor imposed draconian deadlines for sections of her own title without reference to the fact that they clashed with those for the main China book. Two of these were at the beginning, it turned out, of ten-day periods spent out of the office--in each case ten days the authors could have used for vital improvements to the material. She also managed to lose all of the hand marked-up maps, so that they had to be done again, and when the book came out she'd extracted the wrong map of China from another title (twice the required size, so something else was cut), and full of errors, which she then published with place names full of Greek and mathematical symbols. Yes, it got right through the production process and into print in tens of thousands of copies (approx.--Frommer's regards the length of its print run as a trade secret it won't reveal to mere authors). As another editor remarked, 'Frommer's is a factory.' They just want to churn the books out on time and get them on the shelves.

The sub-editing process was truly astonishing. It seemed that the subs had not only never been to China, but had never even ventured over the county line. In between moving commas so as to make sentences mean exactly the opposite of what was intended, they would ask whether an Italian dish named in a restaurant review was French. Their ignorance of the outside world and of grammar was profound.

The editor on Frommer's China itself largely fought on our behalf to make the title what we wanted it to be. But it was only by accident that I got to see the text after its mauling by the subs, and few corrections were possible at that stage. Most of the maps I didn't see, but they were laden with the most absurd errors, most of which made it into print.

Nevertheless, despite these difficulties, and despite the dire Shanghai and Hong Kong chapters forced on me as cut downs from Frommer's existing titles, the book was something to be proud of. It was frank and accurate about China travel, and even at times witty. It was, in a sense, rather subversive--it didn't, like other Frommer's titles, pander to the American mind-set and typical ways of travelling, but instead told the truth about the country and set out to educate. It made it clear that other methods were better in China, explained in detail how and why, and just how much money and inconvenience might be saved, and how many scams avoided.

Frommer's doesn't want writers who rock the boat. Frommer's doesn't want the cosy beliefs of its older, American audience challenged with uncomfortable truths. It doesn't apparently want to serve its readership in that way. What it wants to do is to manufacture books on time and on budget and get them on the shelf earning money. The errors seem neither here nor there, and people who want to complain about them and put them right for the readers' sake are regarded as unhelpful.

In order to persuade me to take on this task, extravagant promises were made concerning updates. First refusal was always given to existing authors I was told. I was frequently referred to as 'our China guy', but nevertheless the promise was not kept, and as it was only a promise, not a contractual obligation, there was little to be done. Struggling to assign some sections for update, the company, with gritted teeth, reluctantly returned to me to offer just some sections of the China book, while having cut me dead on other China titles. But the money was derisory, and new contracts carried ridiculous penalty clauses. There were problems with scheduling payments. Wanting to preserve (and indeed improve on) the quality of what we'd done, and asked by some of the other original authors to do so, I looked at ways to accept the offer, but the terms and conditions offered bordered on abusive. Of the writers I chose only two had anything to do with the second edition, and then not with either of the two major sections each had tackled before.

While the question of tackling at least some parts of the second edition was still under discussion, I was forwarded a note from the publisher that while it included the remark, "never read a guide with more detailed, useful information. Our writers did an amazing job...." went on to say that some of the recommendations were 'silly', on the grounds that Americans wouldn't want to behave in the way we were suggesting was best. We'd given them the alternatives if they insisted on ignoring the advice, but he didn't seem to have read the book very thoroughly. But clearly what he felt to be the beliefs of his readers trumped the need for good advice these beliefs demonstrated they needed.

If I'd known such a clear view of China could be had from a comfy chair behind a desk in New York, I wouldn't have wasted time studying the language or spent a few years of my life there.

Frommer's works on a 'for hire' basis, which means that the authors sell their work for use in all media, for all time, in all parts of the known universe. That means that all the material appearing in the second edition, just published, even if it's word for word what went before (as much of it is), or with only minor changes (as most of the rest), the name of the updater is put down as the author of the chapter, and the name of the originator vanishes.

Looking at a copy in a bookshop the other day I was nevertheless angry to see so much of my own work with other people's names on, and not a word of credit. At the same time, as I saw how patchy the updating was, how lazy and cliche-ridden much of the new writing was, and how many of the changes I'd been back and seen for myself had been overlooked, I was glad to have no part of it. One map, full of errors first time round, now had even more, with several numbered dots on the map ludicrously failing to appear anywhere in the key.

The frame of the original material may support the book for a while, but it's clearly going to collapse to Frommer's usual levels within an edition or two (and don't get me started about earlier editions of other Frommer's China-related titles or we'll be here all night, with you not knowing whether to howl or weep at the stupidity of those books. One review of Frommer's Hong Kong on Amazon begins with the wish that if there's a hell for travel writers the author goes to it, a view with which I heartily agree.)

Here's a sample of what you have coming in the new edition of Frommer's China:

The Best of China

With a landmass of almost 10 million sq. km (4 million sq. miles), plus a further 5 million sq. km (2 million sq. miles) of water, no other single country can even come close to offering such a vast choice of destinations as the unimaginable vastness that is currently known as China.

Unimaginable vastness? The editing at Frommer's is getting worse and worse. Or perhaps the subs wrote this tripe. China is only about 260,000 square miles bigger than the USA, and dramatically smaller than Canada. I hope readers there are holding on tightly to their seats, or already having therapy to cope with living somewhere unimaginable. Fatuous.

The world’s foremost authority on China, Harvard professor John King Fairbank, declared that “our libraries are filled with writers who know all about China, but could not see how much they did not know.”

Isn't the foremost authority on China probably Chinese? Could you guess from this paragraph that Fairbank has been dead for 15 years? I wonder if the author knows that. Fatuous.

We concede that we have barely scratched the surface, especially when we consider that human history in this area stretches back almost two million years, much further than the much-vaunted “5,000 years of Chinese civilization,” yet even this is hardly a smudge on the far longer geologic record.

Setting aside the tortuous language of this almost unreadable sentence, and the soporific dullness of the '5000 years' cliche, what on earth are we supposed to take from it? Human history begins in Africa. The populating of what is now known as China was the result of two migrations from North Africa and Europe, one via Siberia, and one via a southerly route (incidentally making Northern Chinese genetically closer to Europeans than they are to Southern Chinese). So Europe has an even longer 'human history', and Africa longer still. What's the point?

And if by (ugh!) 'geologic record' we're referring to the physical structure, it does seem very likely that China was formed about the same time as the rest of the world. Surprise!

What utter tosh. How on earth does this kind of thing get into print? Are they all asleep at the wheel over there?

In many parts, the People’s Republic has only recently been opened to visitors, and so we have only had a few decades to unlock some of this enormous realm’s secrets. While we certainly do not claim to have uncovered everything, we have been truly inspired by this huge treasure house, and have included here what we have been able to find out so far, starting with what we think is some of China’s very best.

How unrelentingly pompous! What hubris! Who's the 'we' here? 'We' haven't had 'a few decades' in China but rather more like five minutes judging from some of the updating, so it's just as well 'we' aren't claiming 'have uncovered everything'.

God help us all. Where's my pith helmet and machete? I'm off to discover China, Carruthers.

If you've read Writing China guides then you'll know this kind of drivel couldn't have, and didn't, make it into the first edition.

The opinions of some of the other original contributors (as exchanged by private email) are fairly sulphurous, and one, Josh Chin, has already said his piece on his Ch-Infamous blog, here:

A tired collection of unimaginably tired cliches

Pulp non-fiction

2006-04-24T23:34:00.000-07:00

Mild palpitations today.

I was in a bookshop that specialises in flogging off remaindered stock at discount prices, but that also sells a limited selection of new and specialist books at a discount.

I was buying a stock of reading to leave as a surprise care package for my wife when I go away in a few weeks, when the spine of a book in the travel section caught my eye.

It was Beijing, my second book.

I've often wondered what it would feel like to see a title remaindered. After a few years the remaining copies of my first book China: The Silk Routes were actually pulped rather than remaindered, and the title now does a lively second-hand trade.

Beijing was the product of 18 months' work and a great deal of sweat, and remains far and away the most comprehensive guide to the city. But I've been wrangling with Cadogan for three or four years over whether a new edition will be produced or not. The company spent two or three years frequently insisting it was very interested in doing another edition when stock of the first edition ran low, but then suddenly reversed itself. However, the title is still selling well (very surprising given that it's six years old) and while a promise has been made to return the rights to me, no date has been set.

However, if a book is remaindered, it's out of print. And according to the contract if it's out of print then a formal letter requesting the return of the rights can be issued, and they must be returned within a limited period after that unless a contract for a new edition is issued.

So I asked the assistant, and he told me the book had indeed been remaindered. This came as something of a shock, although no surprise that Cadogan's right hand wouldn't even be aware than its left hand existed. (Much as I've enjoyed writing two titles for the company, planning and administration have never been its strong points.)

However, it turned out that this was no indication that the title itself had been remaindered, but merely this particular copy of the book. Distributors, I was told, often have a policy of treating all returned books as too damaged to re-issue for sale elsewhere, and so they are sold to stores such as the one I was in for a nominal remainder cost.

Cadogan knows I've been looking for another publisher to re-issue Beijing and Silk Routes in new, updated editions, but the results so far have been an illustration of the state of guide book publishing as a whole.

Cadogan doesn't want to do a new edition because it feels it has to become a niche publisher and its strength is Europe.

The MD of an American publisher had exchanged email over the years with me saying how wonderful he thought Beijing was, and had talked to me about doing China guides for his company, and sent me writing guidelines, etc. He professed to be delighted when I told him the rights were coming available, but in the end he simply said he'd changed his mind and if I'd call him he'd explain why. I thought having led me on for so long he should at least have the courtesy to make the effort to contact me himself. So I suppose I'll never know why. It was a complete waste of time.

One British publisher was enthusiastic enough to arrange a meeting, and I drove halfway across the UK for lengthy discussions at which it was said that the timing was excellent because the company also wanted to become a niche publisher, and was abanding European coverage for long-haul destinations, many of which, but not including China, it had already covered. The person I met brought a nice blank note pad to the meeting, and when he left some hours later it was equally blank. I was told by email a few weeks later that in fact the company would be issuing no new titles for the next few years. The meeting had been a complete waste of time.

Another British company was very enthusiastic by email, and had me send them copies of both books. When we spoke on the phone it seemed that my books overlapped with what they had covered of China already, but I was told that that wasn't an issue. So I sent in the books. A few weeks later I was told that the company wasn't interested because there was an overlap. Sending in the books had been a complete waste of time.

Right now I've given up, and sooner or later, unless Beijing also gets pulped, I'm really going to come across remaindered copies.

Any publishers out there want to take on guides to parts of China with excellent reviews? Just click on the Some of my books link on the right.

Xuanchuan Bu

2006-04-24T08:57:00.000-07:00

Last weekend the following AP story appeared here and there (including in the New York Times), and I've been too busy to say much about it. But it contained the following extraordinary sentence, one of the more ludicrous to appear in a Western media report on China for some time:

'The Beijing Daily, the authoritative newspaper of the city's Communist Party committee'

If the Beijing Daily publishes, it lies. It's hard to imagine anything less authoritative, except that it might be argued that the paper is a reliable guide to what whichever faction in government currently has the upper hand want you to believe. So why would a reputable news agency with bureaux in China, print such arrant nonsense?

We begin by noting that there was no by-line on the story, and that its content has entirely been derived from the Beijing Daily (and that is, in fact, the major point).

BEIJING (AP) -- Beijing's mayor has called for a speeding up of the demolition of impoverished neighborhoods in China's capital as part of preparations for the 2008 Olympics, the state-run Beijing Daily reported Saturday.

On a tour of one area in the process of being razed Friday, Mayor Wang Qishan told officials and construction workers that demolishing the dilapidated neighborhoods is an essential task this year and that the work must be accelerated, the newspaper said.

This is a stereotypical Party quote, and one that can be found attributed to dozens of officials around the country daily ("essential task", "work must be accelerated"). Only a long-term state-owned Party hack paper would print it. (A more "independent" paper would only do so if specifically instructed to do so by a Xuanchuan Bu (Propaganda Department) in "correction" of something it might have said that the Pary disagreed with.)

Beijing is undergoing a thorough makeover for the 2008 Games, spending an estimated $40 billion to put up sporting venues, lay down new roads and subway lines, build residential communities in the suburbs and beautify the often gray, polluted capital.

It's about now that you might hope this would turn into a story lamenting the destruction of historic neighbourhoods and recording the vile treatment meted out to long-standing residents, unceremoniously evicted with the scant remains of pilfered compensation to gimcrack, incomplete, satellite estates. But no.

Part of the effort targets poorer areas known as ''inner city villages'' -- where many homes were built illegally and many of whose residents are rural migrants.

This is starting to sound alarmingly sympathetic to the government's behaviour.

The Beijing Daily, the authoritative newspaper of the city's Communist Party committee, said about a third of these areas designated for destruction have been torn down, with the rest to be finished by year's end.

There you have it. There's very little in the way of a story here. All of it's come uncritically from Beijing Daily. So it had better be claimed that Beijing Daily is an important and authoritative source, even if nothing could be further from the truth.

''This work is full of significance in strengthening the environment, building a livable city and realizing the strategic plan of a 'New Beijing, Great Olympics,''' the newspaper quoted Wang as saying.

Another standard Party rent-a-quote (there's probably a manual of these the "journalists" copy from at random) that any paper struggling to have a little independent thought in China would be embarrassed to print. What are we to think of a foreign news agency, entirely independent of the Chinese government, that reprints such utter pap, and does so uncritically, effectively turning itself and its client papers, truly believed by their readers to be authoritative, into extensions of the Xuanchuan Bu.

This is embarrassing.

It's time for AP to change its initials to XCB.

PR people

2006-04-17T11:27:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to write something about the problems of working with PRs and I'm glad this story in The Independent has given me a hook.

Back in what now seems almost a former life, I used to do PR and Marketing for various theatres, dance companies, galleries, and so on in the UK. Of course, PR should come under marketing and there should be an entirely integrated strategy for all forms of communication. But directors, actors, choreographers, musicians, etc. are all far more in love with seeing their pictures in the papers than they are with the arcana of direct mail campaigns although those are the things that sell seats. So press offices in theatres tend to be separate and have more clout. Indeed, when I worked at the National Theatre in London as Sales and Marketing Manager once of the main purposes of the Press Office seemed to be to shaft the Marketing Department on every possible occasion.

But these days I spend a fair bit of time dealing with PRs, and they can be extremely helpful. On the other hand they can be extremely hopeless. I have a lot of sympathy for the pressures they come under, and about how crudely their success or failure will be judged by their superiors. It's the crudity of the latter that sees fam trips (which I rarely do) stuffed with absolute no hopers, and press launches and shindigs the same. The more 'journalists' the merrier, and never mind the quality.

But read on:

Inside Story: What annoys journalists about PRs?

Last week we asked PRs to tell us what most got up their noses about the journalists they have to deal with. Now it's our turn to list PRs' annoying traits

Published: 17 April 2006

David Aaronovitch,Times columnist

Like most journalists, if they do stuff for me then I like them; if I have to do stuff for them - like plug their book - then I don't. Our hatred or liking of them is purely instrumental and selfish. It's got nothing whatever to do with our function or our dignity; it's to do with what they're offering.

I try not to ask PRs to do too much. Having sat on the other side of the desk I feel some sympathy for them. Having sat alongside journalists who expect absolutely everything to be done for them, for free, and right now, and how about another bottle of wine, and felt disgusted, I never ask for anything beyond what's necessary to get the job done. With some PRs, however, it becomes almost impossible to speak because if you even show a slight interest in something, a free bottle of it (or whatever) appears in your hotel room. Last year the PR at the Ritz-Carlton in Shanghai did a lot of running around for me as a result of my own stupidity--replacing something lost, and couriering something I'd left behind to me. I didn't ask her to do any of these things, and in fact I insisted up front on paying. But I was never given the opportunity. Of course I appreciate the service (which only fit in with the hotel's general standards, I might add), but I would have been quite happy to pay.

The only thing I dislike doing for PRs is sending copies of clippings. A single story may have had input from travel bureaux, tour operators, and multiple hotels and restaurants, and each PR person who says to me, "Oh, and you will send a copy when it's published, won't you?" seems to me not to have been paying attention to the world, imagining instead that she is operating in isolation. If I followed up each of these requests, a life already spent more on administration than on writing would be yet further burdened. And the costs in time, photocopying, and postage, significant.

I wouldn't say I don't like PRs who do this, and when I know that it's a small operation (typically in fact too small to have a PR) then I do my best to follow-up. But I do get irritated with large countries that have large tourism bureaux that ought to be paying for a cuttings agency.

John Humphrys, Presenter, Today

It's a silly notion that we're in the same business. Because we're not. Good journalists are in the business of revealing, and PRs are in the business, frequently, of concealing.

And of concealing that they are concealing, if they have any sense. There's nothing more irritating than being openly lied to, especially when it's so rarely necessary with travel writing. Rare the story published in newspapers that has anything other than positive things to say about any particular travel experience. Most irritating is the broad statement of racial harmony, usually issued without the subject having been raised, which strikes a false note straight away, and is obviously false. I've had this happen in Fiji, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and, of course, China.

Lindsay Nicholson, Editorial director of NatMag (The National Magazine Company)

PRs who ring up "to see if you've got the press release". If I wanted to follow it up, I would have already done so, wouldn't I? And I don't go to launches on boats - or anywhere else where there is no escape!

I had a message on my answering machine last week from a tourism board checking that an email had come through, and I took it as a courtesy. Email often goes missing, and this was important. But during my own brief period as editor of a magazine I certainly tired quickly of all the people phoning with their own agendas, something I bear in mind when pitching stories by phone myself.

As for going to press launches where you can't escape--good advice. There's something wrong with PR when these things are viewed in advance as something to be endured, and rarely turn out to be anything else. As I've mentioned in earlier posts, I rarely go to these things, but last week I actually did attend one because I knew that two people I wanted to talk to would be there. I put up with a dull speech telling me nothing I could possibly use for a story, waded through the freeloaders, had several false conversations with people who seemed to think they knew me (although after about ten minutes one decided she didn't after all), finally got to have the two conversations I did want to have, and left. But in order to get journalists to these things these days there has to be an offer not only of food (rather good on this occasion) and drink (I don't indulge much), but a prize draw. I won a cook book that despite being West Coast Fusion (yawn) had a couple of things I might actually try to make if I ever get time for cooking again, and an insulated coffee mug. That means I now have something to talk about. I've heard people in cafés here have 20-minute conversations about insulated coffee mugs. Perhaps one of the reasons I'm a travel writer is to get away from this sort of conversation.

Anthony Noguera, Editor-in-chief, Emap East - Arena, Zoo and Arena Homme Plus

When they send me long, overexcited, exclusive pitches that get the name of the magazine confused with a direct competitor is always a good one- and it happens so much it's just not funny any more.

Back in my very early days when I was Publicity Manager for a touring dance company in the UK, there were two flagship arts programmes on limited number of television channels available. I wrote a long pitch letter to send to both. This was back in the days of electronic typewriters but before built-in memory, so the thing had to be typed out twice, with a different contact name and programme name inserted where appropriate. I'm pretty certain I then managed to put the letters in the wrong envelopes. We ended up on one of the programmes anyway, but I never dared to ask.

However, it does seem to me that PR attracts an awful lot of dim-witted people of the kind who still need their mothers to tie their shoelaces. Or perhaps its just that the budgets of those countries using agencies means the account ends up with the intern. I've written extensively on New Zealand for a number of publications with global reach, but I can't get the country's current agency to remember my name or to answer simple queries about another visit. One of the conversations I had at the PR event mentioned above, led to my being sent a press kit with important information about that company's services. Shame that whoever was responsible couldn't even copy my address from my business card to the envelope correctly, and it was a miracle (especially given that Canada Post was involved) that the package ever reached me. Such errors are fairly commonplace.

John Sootheran, Editor of Max Power

This is exceedingly shallow, but what my team hates about female PRs is that they all sound like a cross between Mariella Frostrup and Nigella Lawson on the phone, ie, super saucy, and of course they're being nice to you (and when women do that all men think they're in with a chance). Then, when you meet them, half of them have faces like gargoyles. It's that "Body Off Baywatch, Face Off Crimewatch" thing, but for voices. This misrepresentation needs legislating for under advertising standards or something as it's so misleading to young, testosterone-laden motoring journalists. By the way, we're no oil paintings!

The whole flirtation thing is an issue. I know journalists who just revel in it and spend the whole of fam trips doing nothing but flirt outrageously with PRs who are almost universally young, blonde, leggy, or mini-skirted, or all of these. Needless to say, the poor PR has no opportunity to say, "Eff off you fat, drunken, git," and many start the process in the first place. There are those who insist on kissing you on both cheeks like an old friend, until it gets to the point where you automatically expect to kiss PRs until suddenly catching a look of reluctance on a face as it slides by, and realise that you've inadvertently crossed the border to the slimy side, without having any intention of doing so. These days I try to keep a safe distance, although there are a few PRs of whom I've become fond both because if they are not genuinely friendly they are so good I'm utterly unable to tell, and because nevertheless they provide me with what I need to know, set out what else is available if it interests me, and then leave me to make my own decisions on what I need for my story.

The best people I've dealt with of late are Sian Griffiths, Lamey Chang and colleagues at The Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong, who have a large and sophisticated idea of PR management, and who are very helpful and generous with suggestions even on things that will take my attention away from the hotel itself. I should also mention one Tony Poletto of Melbourne, who had the benefit of being both male and down-to-earth, and entirely interested in the idea of what would be best for my story. He made sure I got absolutely everything I needed without a hitch. Anne Cousineau who acts for the Australian tourism people in Canada is excellent to deal with: efficient, quick to response, and always concentrated on getting the stories.

Jo Elvin, Editor of Glamour

When someone who has obviously never even looked at the magazine fails to check what it is we actually do. I had an e-mail not long ago (and I'm being totally honest with you when I say I can't remember which PR company it was) from a girl saying, "Hi Jo, just wanted to check that you're still the restaurant reviewer for Glamour." A) Erm ... No, I'm the editor and b), we have never ever featured one restaurant review in the magazine. It's the absolute gold standard of laziness.

I'm on the PR side of the desk here. There's no point in pitching stories to a magazine without seeing what departments and feature slots they have available and keeping up with what they've been publishing recently. Only irritates the editors if you don't, and nullifies any future chance of making a sale.

Simon Calder, Travel editor, The Independent

I don't bear any animosity towards them but you would think if they had seen my column - The Man Who Pays His Way - that they would realise that I don't want to go on an all-expenses paid trip to the Caribbean. Nevertheless, I get about 10 calls a week offering such things.

Calder's travel section is certainly one of the better ones. He's not an easy man to deal with, however, and the prohibition against accepting free hotel nights, etc., makes it hard to pitch there. It's many years since I have.

Giles Coren, Times columnist and restaurant critic

I hate gigantic emailed press releases - two megabyte mothers full of jpegs of rubbish bars that crash my laptop. PRs who send them deserve to be eaten by wild pigs.

Agreed. Especially when I'm travelling somewhere with slow dial-up for high prices and I need to get at mail that's behind these items in the queue. Massive press kits with reams of information on the hotel GM's golf handicap come a close second. Part of every trip is spent binning 75% of the contents. I sympathise with the PRs who have to keep their MD's egos happy, but the cardboard folder and most of the contents end up in the bin as I'm not going to carry them (along with a dozen others) half way around the world at the risk of excess baggage charges. I do hand them straight back whenever I can, having extracted the key information I need.

John Kampfner, Editor of the New Statesman

Asking for the most absurdly long plugs at the end of pieces.

Or, indeed any plug. Or any guarantee that something will be printed. Since it's something I have no control over, and since I'm not for sale, no such guarantee is ever going to be forthcoming. In fact as a general rule PRs should learn that if anyone agrees to such a thing they are not publishing in any medium that a reader is going to take seriously, and the person agreeing is not to be taken seriously. Spend your budget elsewhere. As I've already said, I make a point of accepting nothing for free unless I expect to be able to publish in manner worthwhile for all of us. But if your hotel or trip turns out to be hopeless, the best you can hope for is that I won't say anything at all about it.

The worst case I came across was when JAL was flying me from Hong Kong to Tokyo and on to Vancouver. I thought we had agreement until an email arrived setting out the text about JAL services and packages holidays the company expected to appear alongside the article. This was a 3500-word feature for the Sunday Times, and the airline was given short shrift. They flew me anyway.

Toby Young, Restaurant and theatre critic

Having sex with a PR person is a bit like a billionaire having sex with Anna Nicole Smith: however much they appear to enjoy it you can never be completely sure that they don't have an ulterior motive. It's quite easy to be lured to the dark side as a journalist by a gorgeous, pouting, 20-something PR girl offering you all kinds of inducements to write nice things about their client.

I've never gone that far (for obvious reasons) but a lot of female PRs behave in a manner which would indicate sex was on the menu in any other circumstances. Only the stupid would take that seriously, or, taking advantage of any offer, would see it as anything other than business. And what happens now if you don't publish?

But one of the least likeable things about PR, as about networking in general, is the way it undermines the institution of friendship, borrowing its motions and mode of speech for purposes nothing to do with friendship at all. It's very hard indeed to know just where you are with PR people.

In China it seems often to be taken as a normal part of a PR's duties (in Chinese-run operations), and I hope they feel happier to deal with foreign journalists who don't generally take the same view. A Japanese-run hotel once dropped large hints that some top-of-the-range professional company would be provided if I wished. I didn't wish, so I can't report further.

William Sitwell, Editor of Waitrose Food Illustrated

When they ring up and ask if I can send over our features list. "Can you just tell us what features you'll be running in your July issue?" As if they have no idea of exclusivity and how magazines like to keep their ideas to themselves. To be fair, it's often PR minions who have been made to put in these calls without knowing what they're doing.

It should be clear by now that many who answer here are simply putting down the latest irritation.

I once heard from someone who'd attended a training session on theatre PR that a journalist had quoted me as an example of how not to call her. Her objection was that I'd begun by telling her my name.

I still haven't understood that the basic courtesies need to be dropped. While there are some similarities to the popular image of having to pitch a movie to a producer in a single sentence, saying briefly who you are and who you work for seems unavoidable on the phone. I'm quite sure that had I not said who I was, the first question would have been to ask me precisely that. I wish I could remember the stupid woman's name.

Alex Thomson, Channel 4 News chief correspondent

You get these PRs so utterly wedded to their boss/firm/product/ army - you name it - that they can't accept any criticism or allegation without turning everything into a personal argument. You keep saying it's not Channel 4 News making the allegation but some punter and we're just following it up, but they just don't get it. However much you spell it out.

Sometime in the next few weeks I have to re-contact an NGO whose operations in China I took to task in a long feature about three years ago. I have to revisit the topic for another publication, and I'll be interested to see what kind of response I get.

David Parsley, Editor of London newpaper City AM

My personal pet hate is when a PR asks me what sort of stories I'm interested in. I've had it on every paper I've worked on. What do they expect me to say? "Oh, I really want the rubbish no one else will take - that'd be great." There are far too many PRs who don't attempt to get a newspaper in before trying to sell a story.

Again, travel writers pitching stories themselves need to be aware of what the paper uses. And, of course, first rights in the territory covered are needed. But for freelances, at least, the query "What kind of story?" is a valid one. The trouble is editors would rather you worked it out from looking at what's been published--not usually much of a strain in these days of the Internet.

Some do publish guidelines, but in most cases they only think of what should be in those because they are forced to do so. While some may never want to see a simple puff piece about a new luxury hotel (something I don't write anyway), many are simply in the market for good writing, or an unusual angle they haven't covered before, and will print things their guidelines say they should like at all.

One editor I work with regularly who runs a syndicate tells me that the receiving editors all want pictures with people in them. Yet when he reluctantly accepted a story on Japanese castles which had no people in its pictures at all, it turned out to be the most published story, with more space given to photos, that I'd ever given him before or since.

Ann Leslie, Daily Mail foreign correspondent

What enrages me are the e-mails that flood my inbox from silly women who address me chummily as "Ann" (usually misspelt with an E) although we've never met, and who - at semi-literate length - gush to me about some "new, exciting" face cream or other. Don't they do any research? I have never knowingly written about face cream in my life, don't intend to start, and would never, ever find the subject "exciting". They're wasting their - and my - time. Why does anyone pay money to these bimbos to spew out this wasteful rubbish?

Agreed. Poor targeting is a real irritation. But on the other hand why does anyone pay Ann Leslie to write the rubbish she does?

Gill Hudson, Editor of Radio Times

I love our PR on Radio Times because he really knows his stuff, uses his initiative, gives you straight answers, responds immediately, has an absolute respect for deadlines and always delivers what he promises. Which reveals, by default, what I can't stand about PRs, doesn't it?

George Pascoe-Watson, Political editor, The Sun

PR people who don't read every newspaper - it shows.

Conor McNicholas, Editor of NME

The problem with PRs is that they're always buying you beer. Endless alcohol. Just at the moment you try to leave a gig to get tucked up for an early night there'll suddenly be another pint in your hand, or a bourbon or a vodka Red Bull or flaming slippery nipple. And in the interests of good relations you just can't say no, can you? Next thing you know it's two in the morning and you're in a hotel room doing naked charades with Kasabian. It's their fault, I tell you, not mine.

Getting endless drinks poured down you happens to travel writers, too. I don't drink much, and I don't greatly care for it. I drink when wine is part of the story, but I don't want to arrive at my meal with more than one cocktail under my belt. I want to pay attention to what I'm eating, and what I'm saying about it.

Actually, the most irritating PRs (and most are not irritating at all) are those who insist on being at your elbow when you want the freedom to write (or discreetly dictate) what you think. Worse still are those who ask for your opinion to your face. Like the flirtation, when it happens, no conversation of this kind is likely to be real.

Kevin Maguire, Associate editor (politics), Daily Mirror

Government and party disinformation officers who ring up at 5.30pm to spin a pile of old cobblers that they are under the mistaken impression is worthy of the next day's paper. Ring them at 10.30pm with a legitimate question and you can't get past the secretary. Spin doctors with secretaries. What ridiculous self-aggrandisement.

Eva Simpson, One of the Daily Mirror's 3am Girls

Being lied to. When an interview you've been chasing ends up with another paper and they tell you they don't know how it got there, or when you're promised an hour with someone and it ends up being five minutes. I'd rather know the truth. PRs who are uncontactable and permanently on voicemail. There's only so many times that you can hear the line "I'm on the phone or away from my desk" without screaming.

Lorraine Candy, Editor of Elle

Like William Sitwell, I really really object when a PR I have never met and don't know of e-mails or rings me asking for a "future features list" - what a ridiculous question. I may as well fax the Elle list to Vogue instead or put it on the internet for all the glossy rivals to see. Why would anyone in their right mind ask such a stupid question? It's especially annoying from a food PR or interiors PR - who have obviously never read Elle and not clocked that we don't do food or interiors.

Nicholas Coleridge, Managing director of Condé Nast

Evening events that start later than 7pm, which means infuriatingly pointless hanging about after work, and presentations with more than two speeches maximum. These days there is a ghastly fad at cosmetics launches for having three, four or even more, with a succession of PRs, managers, international bosses and scientists all repeating variations on the same speech.

As I said, rare the press launch that anyone actually looks forward to. Should PR people be getting the message here?

Dylan Jones, Editor of GQ

When I put this to the features team they said it would be impossible to answer in a single sentence. They at first proposed a feature and then decided on a special issue. With a supplement. And a cover-mounted DVD. In fact, we think there's a book in it....

Rod Liddle, Columnist

It's very simple. Our job is to try to tell the truth. Their job is to try to prevent us from finding out what the truth is. They tell us lies and they mangle the language to disguise the truth, and the greatest example of it is Alastair Campbell. I have absolutely no interest or time for them whatsoever. I do accept that they do a job and that people want them to do that job, but as journalists it is our job to see through them.

A bit extreme, at least in my world. There are times when good PRs save the day.

As long as I remember that the job of the PR person is to show their hotel, tour, restaurant, attraction, in the best light, then I'm quite capable of nosing about myself, talking to third parties, coming to my own conclusions, and passing them on to the reader.

And no amount of free alcohol or flirtation is going to change that.

Shanghai as straight man

2006-04-14T14:11:00.000-07:00

It's possible to feel slightly sorry for Shanghai. Most travel writing on China is ignorant and trashy, but it seems that Shanghai stimulates more of that kind of thing than any other part of China these days, leaving even Beijing a distant second.

Of course, much of this is intended to happen. Shanghai is a sort of Sinoworld theme park, Shenzhen's 'Splendid China' writ large, and perhaps the government's most ambitious propaganda effort ever, although now under strong challenge from mutant pre-Olympic Beijing. Shanghai is advertisement by architectural mass, and its target is investors. "Look," it says, "Chinese standards of living soon to overtake those of foreigners! Come and market to One Billion Customers! If you don't give us your money you'll be shut out from the greatest opportunity in the history of commerce!"

Meanwhile the washing swings from the shells of incomplete and halted projects, and only a few hundred metres from The Bund the squalor begins, although it's nothing compared to that found in much of the rest of China. Somehow neither tourists nor commentators flown in for three-day trips nor dewy-eyed travel writers seem to see what's right in front of their eyes.

Last week The Observer carried a Shanghai travel story which seems almost intended to fit into a tradition of writing about China dating back to the books of Times correspondent Peter Fleming (brother of the James Bond creator).

Fleming's News from Tartary, first published in 1936 and still in print, is the account of a trip from Beijing to Kashmir in the midst of civil war, involving a variety of types of transport including horses and camels, and travel around the south side of the Taklamakan at a time when very few foreigners indeed had in modern times ventured that way. It's one of the funniest travel books ever written, not least because it rarely deigns to try very hard, and also because a dryness and lightness of touch with the humour is combined with deft and vivid descriptive material and a depth of knowledge about the political situation of the time. Fleming poses as the wildly amateur and slightly eccentric Englishman, but is nothing of the kind.

Unfortunately many a wannabe writer since then, and particularly but not exclusively those taking routes through Xinjiang, has read Fleming and completely missed the point, mistaking his sham amateurism for the real thing. They've thus felt themselves licensed to travel without knowledge or the slightest research, and indeed to parade their ignorance. Comedy is supposed to provide compensation, and indeed deliberate ignorance is helpful in generating the clumsily comic situations that cover for a lack of writing ability, too. No doubt in modern times Lonely Planet is also largely to blame for spreading the idea that any old tripe can pass as prose and still get into print, but as far as China goes, Fleming has unwittingly become the godfather of some of the worst writing ever to appear in public, such as the astonishingly dimwitted Night Train to Turkistan by Stuart Stevens.

At first it seems Phil Hogan, the author of The Observer's Shanghai story falls into precisely the same trap:

Like most frequent flyers and citizens of the world, the one thing I know about Shanghai is that it is teeming with opium dens, rickshaws, brothels and assassins. Oh, and laundries. Admittedly I have been swayed in my thinking by the 1967 Julie Andrews sex-trafficking classic Thoroughly Modern Millie, not to mention The White Countess starring Natasha Richardson as an impoverished Russian émigré reduced to making a living swallowing her vowels as an enigmatic escort girl and stopping visually impaired nightclub frequenter Ralph Fiennes from bumping into the tables. And what about that cheesy old song 'Shanghai Lil' from the vintage musical with James Cagney, who if memory serves played a short American with an aggressive manner and a loud barking voice? Ah, old Shanghai! Could it have changed so very much since the days when this lawless idler's paradise ('Whore of the Orient'!) was run by swaggering Brits and Yanks and no one paid tax or gave a damn whether a man's car had an MOT or not?

Actually, it has changed a bit, says my guide book, pointing out that there has been a war since then, not to mention the rise of Communism, which banned public expressions of fun and sent all the foreign parasites fleeing to Hong Kong, making it all but impossible to get a drink after hours.

Ignorance paraded for the purposes of clumsy comedy. Does it get more dull and predictable than this?

It turns out that Hogan has a regular column, dealing with such fascinating issues as his inability to use the dishwasher in the absence of his wife. In short, this sort of thing is his schtick.

At least because his purpose is to apply his technique to an exotic location he doesn't feel the need to go all misty-eyed on Shanghai, and for once in travel pages we get a glimpse of something real:

But no, even that's history now, what with the government turning the place into a Big Rock Candy Mountain for hyperactive property developers and a glittery new playground for tourists who want to go to China but not see any culture.

But this information is provided, he claims, by his guide book.

Later his own observations do make it clear he's noticed that not everything is entirely well, although it may be that it's the opportunity to get in a quick joke that leads to that observation.

Agents of forbidden goods and services surface around us like U-boats.

'Rolex?'

'No thanks.'

'You like Chinese lady?'

'Not right now, thank you.'

'Massage?'

'Perhaps later.'

Mild, but at least it's there, and we go on to get away from the numbingly dull list of obvious tourists sites encountered so far (but cut here--see link above for full story):

A leisurely detour beckons through the interesting shambles of sidestreets where the real people live, criss-crossed with clothes lines and jammed with little food shops and barber's kiosks and steamed-up cafes so small they do the washing-up in a bowl outside. A man in a chef's hat smokes a fag and watches the lady of the house empty a chamberpot in the drain.

And although this overstates the case, there's a note of familiarity likely to bring a smile to the face of even the most hardened expat:

Moving through the crowd I practise my 'dui bu qi' ('excuse me') to the surprise of the locals, who could hardly have been more delighted to hear a dog talk.

But isn't anyone tired of this kind of lightweight and largely self-interested drivel, although this is better written than most? What do we read travel articles in newspapers for? Wouldn't anyone actually like a vivid description of Shanghai, with the writer's ego carefully out of sight, giving both the good and the bad, the expensive and the cheap, and in short all the detail needed to help us decide whether we want to go there or not?

And if it happens to be funny, too, that's fine. But let's get our priorities sorted out.

An earlier post on misrepresenting Shanghai here: Blind leading the blind

Nightmare in Taiyuan

2006-04-06T23:40:00.000-07:00

I don't usually put Oriental-List postings here, but given my low opinion of reporting on China in general, on which I've posted at length in the past, this is entirely germane.

Many reading the following story will no doubt assume it's a hoax. So I'll post the entire URL at the end, and after reading the text, you can go and check. If it is a hoax, then AP and USA Today are both victims, and there could potentially be quite some fall-out.

The basic premise is that a US citizen intending to travel from Hong Kong to Taiwan ended up in Taiyuan, entering a nightmare and terrifying world. [Cue scary music, and read on if you dare...]

Business flight across China leaves man stranded
By Curt Woodward, Associated Press
SEATAC, Wash. — As the sun dipped low in the sky last Sunday and his plane began its descent, Eugene Nelson had a sinking feeling that something was wrong.

He'd been in the air for hours, much longer than his business flight from Hong Kong to Taiwan should have taken. Then the airliner flashed a map of his flight's path on a video screen, and it hit him.

Instead of descending toward the island off China's eastern coast, the next stop on the Intel Corp. engineer's itinerary would be the remote city of Taiyuan, an industrial center deep within China.

Similar spellings and pronunciations. But a much different place, as Nelson would soon find out.

Something odd here. You don't walk into a travel agent (or anywhere else) and buy a ticket to France. The first thing you'll be asked is where in France you want to go. This is true of Taiwan. Most people would be flying to Taibei (Taipei) which doesn't sound much like Taiyuan even in the most mangled pronunciation. Tainan (another Taiwanese city) might barely be the culprit, but this is highly unlikely. If he's on a tour for Intel, wouldn't company travel agents have made all the arrangements?

There's a further problem. My timetable shows no direct flight from Hong Kong to Taiyuan. A quick check with a contact in China confirmed that a change of plane in Guangzhou (or Shanghai) is necessary. Did he overlook this?

Either the direct flight has started in the last few days, or this story is looking increasingly flimsy.

"Oh my God, it felt like someone poured a bucket of hot water on me. I realized I was literally 200 miles south of the Mongolian border,"

Such ignorance. He was "literally" 350 miles from the Mongolian border. (He was only about 130 miles from the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia.) Don't they do even the simplest fact check any more?

Nelson said Wednesday, after a tearful reunion with his wife and three young children at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

"That's when dread just came over me," he added. "I don't know how else to explain it."

Paranoia? Xenophobia?

Nelson, 39, of Littlerock, works for Intel's facility in the Pierce County town of DuPont. He was in the middle of a swing through about a half-dozen Chinese cities, checking in with business partners, when he said an apparent booking mistake left him stranded in the Chinese interior.

Let's be clear here. Shanxi is one of China's poorer provinces, but its capital city, Taiyuan, has a population of around 2 million, plenty of towers and the usual hideous modernization. You wouldn't mistake it for Beijing or Shanghai, but you might well mistake it for dozens of other cities. And if you're "in the middle of a swing through about a half-dozen Chinese cities" you'd certainly already have seen much the same even in the major metropolises.

His first night was spent trying to find out where he was and how to get to a hotel, Nelson said during an interview Wednesday at the airport, with his wife, Michelle Chewerda, and the couple's two sons and young daughter looking on.

Another puzzle. What kind of visa does he have? It would need to be multi-entry, or he'd have been held at the airport and sent back on the next flight to Hong Kong. Or his "halfway" point hadn't included a mainland city yet.

His first attempts at finding lodgings revealed the problems of the language barrier — Nelson said he ended up at a brothel, and had to "damn near fight my way out."

Just how stupid can this man be? The airport is a mere nine miles from town, and obviously he got into town somehow. The airport, unless it's unique in China, would have had large adverts for hotels with phone numbers, and names in English/pinyin as well as characters.

He returned to the small airport in the city of about 1.5 million,

Actually, it claims 1.83 million urban, and 2.93 million altogether.

but found it was about to close and officials would not let him sleep inside.

How very unreasonable of them. I wonder why they thought he should stay in a hotel.

Nelson said he might never have found his way if not for a helpful young woman who spoke a bit of English and arranged for friends to loan the obviously distressed American money and give him a safe ride to a hotel.

As we find later, he has an American Express card. Unsurprisingly, the top hotels take this. The CITS Mansion, the Shanxi Grand Hotel, and the Yingze Binguan, for instance.

"She probably saved my fricking life," he said, nearly breaking into sobs.

Oscar! Oscar! I can sense a movie on the way. "Stranded in Darkest China." Those of us who know both Seattle and Taiyuan would probably feel safer walking down the streets of the latter at night. This man was only at danger from his own stupidity.

After using the hotel's rare international dialing capacity to make some calls,

This is absurd. Even the roughest dorm has international dialling these days. There's nothing rare about it.

Nelson said he spent the next few days attempting to collect a wire transfer of cash

He could simply have drawn cash over the counter at the largest branch of the Bank of China using his Amex card.

and arrange a flight out of Taiyuan.

Back to Hong Kong? Would that be via Guangzhou or Shanghai? It turns out he went to Beijing, and his terrifying ordeal caused him to go straight home from there, amazed to be safely back in the bosom of his family. Three flights a day to Beijing from Taiyuan, so it shouldn't have been hard.

After nearly endless hours of searching, Nelson said he found a bank that would allow him to draw the cash that American Express had wired him.

Found "a" bank? Wouldn't he have had to provided full details of a particular branch to get the money wired in the first place?

Then he spent hours figuring out how to get his account information translated into Mandarin so that he could access the money.

In between, Nelson said he faced danger and indignity, injuring his legs and back leaping out of the way of a reckless car and enduring the spit that some Chinese hurled his way.

These is getting beyond believable and beyond a joke. It's increasingly difficult to believe that this story isn't a hoax. But a contact at AP now assures me that there it is on their database.

People do drive with complete insanity in China. And people spit on the street rather a lot (although a lot less than they used to). They don't spit at anyone else: they just spit at the floor. They don't deliberately drive at foreigners. They deliberately drive at everybody. If the presence of "reckless cars" (presumably the writer means "reckless drivers", cars not having yet been demonstrated to have volition) is enough to make a Chinese city "dangerous" then the whole country is out of bounds.

Back at home, Chewerda was dumping money into her husband's debit account and working with the travel company, which she said was less than helpful at times.

"When I was talking to the guy from American Express, (he said) 'It says right here on my paper that they take American Express right out there at the airport,'" Chewerda said. But if that were the case, she noted, her husband "wouldn't have been there for four days."

There's absolutely no reason whatsoever that he had to be out there that long. He could have drawn cash directly over the counter on his Amex card at any time at the largest branch of the Bank of China. Had he gone into any of the big hotels he would almost certainly have been able to pay for a ticket with his card.

"It seems odd, but they'd end every conversation with 'Have a nice day,'" Nelson said.

American Express officials contacted Wednesday by The Associated Press either declined immediate comment or did not return calls seeking comment on Nelson's journey.

So do we understand, although the untidy reporting doesn't tell us, that the ticket was bought from American Express? If not, then how is Amex (admittedly a remarkably stupid and unhelpful company usually) at fault in this case? Perhaps for not telling him how and where he could use his card.

After getting his hands on the money the company wired to him, Nelson said he finally had enough cash to begin arranging flights out of Taiyuan.

This is ludicrous. There are more than 50 locations in Taiyuan where he could have picked up a Western Union transfer.

He met up with his acquaintances again at the airport, repaying their loans and trying to express his thanks, he said.

"Honestly, everyone who helped me, I'll never forget them," Nelson said.

He then hopped a flight, traveling through Beijing to Vancouver, British Columbia, and eventually to Sea-Tac, where he stood clutching his wife and children, mopping his own tears with the bright pink hood of his 16-month-old daughter Jodie's cartoon-character sweat shirt.

Interesting. Some of us spend hundreds of dollars deliberately to get to Taiyuan, typically on our way to Wutai Shan or Pingyao.

So how did it feel to be home?

"My God," Nelson said. "Better than I could possibly explain."

Let's hope he stays there.

Who is more stupid: the man telling the story, the AP 'reporter' who wrote this up, or the paper that published it? Note that AP has bureaux in Shanghai and Beijing (both with bad traffic and spitting) with reporters of good reputation who could have ascertained within seconds that this should either have been spiked, or re-written as a story about prejudice and timidity. It belongs at the dinner table, and not on the news pages.

A few years ago a singularly dopey English couple were briefly in the headlines after they booked tickets to Sydney on-line, and were surprised at how cold it was when they arrived: in Sydney, Nova Scotia (Canada). They were the laughing stock of the UK and Canadian media, and probably wider. This man's story is of the same calibre, except that his xenophobic reaction leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

Just how embarrassed is Intel going to be about being connected with this? There's a reasonable chance that the Chinese media will pick it up, and reprint it in Chinese happily bashing away at American ignorance and racism: it's an absolute gift to their own xenophobia and patronises them in a way most likely to cause a backlash.

There may well be considerable mockery of Americans by Europeans and others, and in addition, if the story blows up in China, there'll be further coverage of that.

Certainly someone should fire Curt Woodward. If he's a master of irony, then he's chosen the wrong medium.

Oh, and Taiyuan isn't marvellous, but it's well connected by luxury bus to Beijing, and express minibus to many other neighbouring cities. It doesn't have a lot to see, but the Jin Ci, a temple complex just outside town, is well worth a view.

http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2006-04-06-strange-trip_x.htm

You'll note the date is April 6, not April 1. But it must be a made-up story, surely?

Should we believe anything the Western press reports about China?

Bad travel writing

2006-04-05T21:30:00.000-07:00

There's plenty of this about, and in preparation for some other points I'd like to make on more recent examples, here are two book reviews published earlier (in Canadian papers) from both of which lessons may be learned. I also post these in the general freelance travel writer spirit. As any will tell you, the only route to making a living is to recycle as often as possible.

Grand Centaur Station by Larry Frolick (McClelland & Stewart Ltd., $26.99) is a combination mystery and travel book. Its subtitle is Unruly Living With the New Nomads of Central Asia, but as common sense should have told Frolick, and as he discovers, there are no such people. The mystery is “What is this book actually about?”

According to the back cover, the subject is “Who--or what--gives birth to history?”, and according to the author there’s only one way to find out: “To go straight into the rude, throbbing heart of the Asian steppe, and enter the infamous torch-city, which these civicidal passions claimed as their font, inspiration, and sanctuary from the beginning of recorded time. History’s volcanic maw itself: Outer Mongolia.”

Despite this barely comprehensible flourish, Frolick then spends most of the book in Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, and China.

By page 193 (in Bokhara) the book’s subject is the “ancient war between the forces of good and evil”, but three pages later “my book is secretly about them, now, the Russians,” although that secret is subsequently well kept.

The book is actually about Frolick’s consciousness of himself as a writer, and he continually makes the mistake of assuming that everything he does is therefore interesting. His fascination with his long-drawn-out bronchial and bowel discomforts, and with the contents of his dreams, is unlikely to be shared by readers, who will leave 82 pages of Kiev and environs behind still wondering what the city was like.

The prose itself has a slangy propping-up-the-bar matey-ness while intermittently offering, flasher-like, glimpses of a larger vocabulary (dysphasias, endogamous, epiphenomenon).

There’s also a hint of the raincoat in frequent references to heels, makeup, and miniskirts, until the book sometimes seems about to reinvent itself as a slightly incoherent bodice-ripper: “tight black skirts barely restrained their innate carnality”; “her nylons played smoky zithers of paradise”.

Such bungled demonstrations of literary ardour are further undermined by a text otherwise littered with sentence fragments, misspellings, mistranslations, and dodgy history, badly in need of an editor.

“I ventured to declare,” says Frolick in Kiev, “that I was getting interesting material out of my trip.”

He should have put some of it in this book.

One merit that bad travel writing does have is that it's vastly more enjoyable to review. But here's something a bit better, but with some observations on structural problems with travel writing.

Comic travel writing not only permits the subtle rearrangement of events to improve their comic timing and the slight adjustment of focus to sharpen a caricature, but can relieve the author from the struggle to find vivid language or the need for research. When humorous situations fail to emerge, the writer can fall back on reporting internal sensations--typically of the feet and bowels--and personal social solecisms. It's lazy, but easy, to play the buffoon.

Tim Moore's Continental Drifter (Abacus, $18.95) has made him "A contender for Bill Bryson's crown as king of comic travels" according to the Sunday Times. Bryson, whose favourite adjective is "lovely", has made an art form of being ordinary and of reporting endless friendless evenings drinking beer.

A large readership will nevertheless follow him anywhere. But other authors who've yet to acquire the same level of public indulgence must find more than whimsy to excuse a book. Moore has opted for that road most travelled, the format labelled "in the footsteps of" .

This is the popular travel writing version of knight-errantry, the Quest Silly, which requires the use of comic props. The most common of these is the Dubious Vehicle, and Moore's choice is a dilapidated Rolls-Royce, to which he adds foolish clothing in the form of a purple velvet suit--he's willing to set out bait for comedy, rather than simply waiting Bryson-like for it to peek of its own accord from the baseboard of the everyday.

The props match the quest, however. Moore roughly follows the route around Europe of a 17th-century social climber of limited resources called Thomas Coryate, who travelled from London to Venice and back in 1608. Moore suggests that Coryate's trip was the first time that travel had been undertaken specifically for the purpose of writing a book--"a sort of Ruff Guide to Europe," the progenitor of many a pointless journey undertaken solely for publication.

But the result, Coryate's Crudities, was crass, and widely lampooned in its day."As well as sounding really very mad," says Moore, "the whole thing was clearly an extended fart anology." This is not a bad description of Continental Drifter, although the whoopee cushions are added deliberately.

As with Bryson's European ramblings (in two senses), an acquaintance with UK vernacular--"bollocks," "couldn't be arsed," "awful wankers," "knockers"--helps comprehension. This is the Benny Hill end of British comedy, although occasionally signs of an expensive education (vague acquaintance with Latin, for instance) peep out from behind a self-conscious blokeishness made suspect by occasional references to soccer-always the over-educated Briton's short cut to street cred.

If Moore can't find a cheap joke in a particular situation he delves into memory or lumbers circuitously round to set pieces: "God knows how you'd go about chatting up someone in Latin. Mind you, the morning-after banter wouldn't have been so tough: I saw, I conquered, I came."

He has the very British mixture of casual contempt for the garlic-reeking hordes across the Channel but fear of their casual and inimitable stylishness: "English people have more in common with a whole host of inanimate objects than they do with Italian people."

The sympathetic account of Thomas Coryate's rather sorry life will make you smile, and Moore is enlightening on the less savoury aspects of the Grand Tour. He's funny, if in a sometimes rather laboured way.

If you like Bryson, you'll probably like Moore more.

Tied up

2006-04-05T20:48:00.000-07:00

Someone remarked to me the other day that without regular posts this blog won't get any traffic. This may be well be true, but if I don't have anything to say, or no time to post, then posts won't appear just for the sake of it. I've no idea why I'm doing this (when I do do it), because since I spend so much time writing anyway, I'm not that keen to spend my spare time doing the same thing.

The volume of traffic isn't important. If people stumble upon these ramblings and want to read them, then hello and welcome, and I'll try not to do anything to embarrass myself. But I'm not about to start including advertising or counting the number of page views, or constantly referring to other blogs in the hope they'll link to me.

As earlier, and equally tedious postings have mentioned (look back a month or two to find something actually interesting, or right back to the beginning) I'm swamped with work, and in particular with the construction of a new Beijing and Shanghai guide. Now I only have small sections on food to finish, and I have to hack back a language sections someone else wrote, and that will be it.

But there's a backlog of features only delayed because I begged for mercy from their editors, and between now and May 13 when I next leave the country, I've a sizeable number to complete. I'll rarely leave the keyboard, and I'll end up carrying the background reading for the next trip with me, and only start it on the plane.

It's often like this. It never seems to stop, in fact. This isn't one of those whining 'Sorry I haven't blogged' posts found on the sites of teenagers with riveting life stories to do with surfing and dating, although no doubt it looks much the same. It's really yet another message on what a slog this glamorous life can be. Actually, 'This Glamorous Life' would have been a far better title for the blog, now I think of it. Or 'My Brilliant Career', if that hadn't already been taken.

So it's too much to do, not a shortage of things to say that's the problem. In fact there are several half-written posts on hold. So look for something on further bad writing on Shanghai, on just how much extra work second-rate PR people create for writers, about a trip to another one of the kinds of PR event I usually avoid, and on what can and cannot be known about China. Oh, and I will be posting from on the road over six weeks in May and June. I promise.

All coming soon to a blog near you.

Doing chores

2006-03-24T20:31:00.000-08:00

One more solid weekend of work and a couple more days after that and this book, or at least this stage of it, should be done.

Next the accumulated backlog of features to finish, and since a flurry of email has just established I'll be away from mid-May to late-June, there'll be all the May and June features to finish, too. I've just realised that the very long feature, which will involve long phone calls to Paris and London and whose deadline was set a year ago, will be due while I'm away. So there's that to tackle, too. And it's not even paid (what was I thinking of?)

Then, of course, there's the backlog of pitches. And pitches related to the new trip. The narrow window of opportunity to speak to editors of some monthly magazines is coming up.

And all the logistics related to the new trip, although much of that has also already been arranged in further flurries of on-line work, quick trips to travel agents, and telephone calls. There's still much to do, however. Tourism bureaux and tour operators to chase, and so on.

I'll be in Hong Kong part of the time, so there's all the arrangements to be made to meet up with editors there, too.

At least the taxes are out of the way (except for signing the paperwork, which is in preparation).

And then there's the mountain of background reading to be done before leaving (otherwise it has to be carried).

Is this starting to sound less like fun and more like an infinite series of chores yet?

It's a family joke that I only go away in order to get a good night's sleep (almost impossible at home, especially recently). But in this case the first peace and quiet I'll get for several months will be when I step on the airplane. I just pray I don't end up locked up in a hotel room finishing up stories or edits on stories several months old and about places thousands of kilometres away.

Two weeks on the couch with no deadlines. I've been dreaming of this for years.

Grounded

2006-03-15T18:56:00.000-08:00

Doing tax calculations reveals not only how increasingly ill-paid this business can be, but just how much travel is necessary even to earn a modest income.

In 2005 I spent the following numbers of nights away from home:

Antarctica and Argentina 16
Australia 16
Canada and Canadian Arctic 13
China 42
Hong Kong 10
Saint-Pierre et Miquelon 3
Spain 10
UK 37

Plus 6 nights in flight (out of 42 flights taken).

That's 153 nights away from home on business. Five months on the road.

And right now I'm looking at piles of mouldering receipts in ten different currencies and three different scripts, all of which have to be made into some kind of presentable order, translated into English, and converted into local currency for my accountant by Friday.

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

An evening off

2006-03-13T19:27:00.000-08:00

For the last month, for reasons too complicated to go in here, I've been, Monday to Friday each week, a full-time father, getting frantically to work at about 8pm, and carrying on until very late, only to be woken shortly after dawn by an enthusiastic small boy wanting some attention. Weekends, when I've managed to get some relief, have been 16-hour days of solid work. I'm just about managing to keep up with the schedule required to get everything complete, but lack of sleep makes producing lively prose a real struggle.

Tonight I think I've finally run out of steam, and for a couple of hours before I fall asleep, instead of writing an account of visiting arts venues around central Shanghai, I'm going to have a change of pace. I should be writing to the PR agency employed by one tourist authority to prise out of its reluctant grasp some information I need--something that's astonishingly hard to do given than they are supposedly employed to give journalists what they need to publish stories. I should be writing to another to point out that it's weeks since I asked for some information, and that in less than two months I'll be in its territory so it's time to get things planned. I should be making further arrangements for that proposed six-week trip. I should be writing to yet another tourist authority with an enquiry to do with reviving a story that was postponed from last year due to lack of time. I have a mountain of personal correspondence to deal with (even I like to think I have some kind of a life outside child care and work). I should be tackling my tax affairs as I have a meeting with my accountant on Friday. I should be pitching more stories to editors--some pitches are long overdue. I should call an editor in Hong Kong.

Actually, I'm going to do that.

But after that I'm just going to sit and read for a while. My brain has truly come to a halt.

Not just any old thing of course, but either an account of the life of Feng Yuxiang, the so-called Christian General, or an account by a missionary of the Boxer Rebellion and Siege of the Legations, or an account of travelling up the Yangzi in the 1880s, all of which are relevant to future projects.

For more than six years now I've been dreaming of two weeks on the couch with no deadlines.

And my editor in London, if you're reading this, please forgive me. I'll be back in the saddle tomorrow night, I promise.

More fish wrap

2006-03-05T20:55:00.000-08:00

A magazine calls out of the blue as a result of a recommendation, and after considerable questioning commissions a story on Beijing. The story is delivered at an optimistic length, cut on request, and then no more is heard, although a copy of the magazine eventually shows up.

Every single paragraph has been rewritten. Indeed the elements in most sentences have been switched round.

Does this matter? No, but it's immensely irritating. I'm not exactly new to this business.

This is a minor publication, with a limited circulation, in a backwater (although it pays a pretty decent word rate). I write for far more major publications that change not a single word. Of course, every magazine is entitled to its house style (and this is where the pleasure of writing, or the sense of doing something resembling art if you're naive enough to believe in such a thing, is lost in the reality of the jobbing craft of fitting in with an editor's wishes). So live with it. Time tends to do the same thing. But then Time pays rather more, and although the magazine's a comic disguised as a vehicle for news, it does pay rather more and carry a great deal more prestige. On the other hand any errors introduced are seen by rather more people.

So it's time to chant 'Fish wrap! Fish wrap! Fish wrap!' Here today, the outer covering of your take-away meal tomorrow.

It's not in this case as if the juggling has produced smoother, more readable text. It's not as if errors of grammar have been corrected. The overall tone is the same, the sentence lengths the same, the readibility just slightly lowered as some of the sentences have been made rather clumsy, and muddied by pointless paraphrasing. Someone clearly just has too much time on her hands.

But what I dislike most is the random introduction of factual errors.

I refer to a dish with wasabi as being Hong Kong-style, which is precisely what it is. Wasabi is one of those fashionable ingredients some Hong Kong chefs have adopted, and wasabi with prawns seems to crop up fairly frequently there. The new version says Cantonese-style. Cantonese is a cooking school which knows nothing of the Japanese ingredient, and there are no Cantonese dishes that use it. You may think this a small matter, but it's a pointless change, born of ignorance, and if you know anything about the matter, then it makes me look silly and ignorant, too.

The name of one restaurant has been misspelled during the rewrite, which adds to the feeling of ignorance, and makes my attitude to what is a first-class establishment seem rather casual. I'll have to make a little apology next time I'm talking to the PR manager, although she'll fully appreciate it's not my fault. The interior description has been rewritten to include an element I didn't mention and I'm fairly sure isn't even there.

Then there's a mangling of a description of Beijing's hutong:

The city's intricate grid of boulevards has changed over the centuries. It used to be filled in by siheyuan--cozy dwelling for Chinese nobility built around central courtyards--threaded by narrow, winding alleys, called hutong.

I certainly didn't write that the houses were all for the nobility (which they most certain were not), and this mangled version now suggests that the hutong ran straight through the houses, which is plain daft.

Here, just for reference, is the original:

Beijing once filled the space between a grid of boulevards with cosy courtyard houses called siheyuan that lined thread-like alleys called hutong, traditionally ‘as numberless as the hairs on an ox’.

I'm not claiming this is great art, but it is at least an accurate description.

The lesson here is not only what a miserable business this is, but that when, as is usual when you read a newspaper or magazine story on a topic you know something about you find it full of errors and misunderstandings, it isn't always right to curse or mock the author. You should often be cursing the editor or the subs.

In this case the editor, who clearly knows nothing about China at all, could simply have sent me the text for a quick read-through. This would have taken moments, and saved the magazine looking silly, too.

So here's a multiple choice question. What to do about it?

a) Send a scathing note to the editor.

b) Refuse to work for the magazine ever again.

c) Get on with life (and say 'fish wrap').

Answer:

a) is always tempting for a few minutes at least, but what separates the professionals from those wet behind the ears is just letting it go. You can do this when you're a famous name whose appearance in a magazine helps sell copies; otherwise, forget it. And who knows what this editor might go on to edit next? Lack of talent is no barrier to progress in this business, and anyway the complete circumstances of this mess are unknown. The mess wasn't made out of ill-will, for sure.

b) is called 'cutting off the nose to spite the face'. I've taken Murdoch's money enough times, I'll take these people's. (Where is the cheque, by the way?)

c) You guessed right. It's that or find something else to do.

But I do object to being made to look like an idiot. If I want to look like an idiot I can easily arrange it myself, and often do it involuntarily, so I'm in no need of further assistance.

Serial polluter

2006-02-28T10:39:00.000-08:00

Here you are. Travel writing is not only a trivial occupation, it's a deeply immoral one, too, apparently, at least if you assume that what I do encourages people to undertake travel they wouldn't otherwise have taken, rather than simply make one destination rather than another their choice for that trip, which is arguable.

It's odd that someone who chooses not to keep a car for environmental reasons, who recycles most of his household waste, turns off lights, doesn't let his taps run, and generally has the environment in the back of his mind when making decisions, should turn out to be not only a serious contributor to global warming himself (even more serious than he thought) but the environmental equivalent of a holocaust denier--knowing the facts, but encouraging others to fly anyway.

I had some hint of this late last year when I smugly took an on-line quiz designed to assess each respondent's environmental footprint, sure of doing quite well. In fact if everybody lived as I do we'd need eight times the current resources of the planet to sustain us. It's the flying that did it, although last year was excessive, and this year, as I've hardly stepped out of my front door I'd probably do rather better. I later read that a translatlantic trip (I've forgotten it it was single or return) produces as much carbon as using a family car for a year, which was horrifying until reading further it seemed not to mean per person but per flight, which might easily have 300 people in it. So even with all my travelling I'm nowhere near producing a family car's worth. Still, no cause for complacency, especially when Monbiot's comments on the higher impact of plane emissions on global warming are taken into account.

Of course, I many not have been out, but I've been frenziedly writing material that may encourage others to get out rather a lot, so I should expect environmentalists to be banging on my door while clutching blazing torches or pitchforks. It would only be just, I expect. I've been saying for some time that all this rushing around the planet for a few pence a ticket can't go on much longer, and that travel writers will revert to being the very few who manage to travel long distances and who write for the rest of us who will never see what they see. Actually, given the bilge that most of them produce, a kind of literary pollution itself, a drop in the number of travel writers could only be a good thing.

Aiya! Time for another career.

Monbiot's story is mainly about the UK, and he omits the rather important China angle, where a large number of those who we currently consider the world's poor, albeit the wealthier bit of it, will suddenly be taking to the skies like flocks of city pigeons disturbed by a back-firing car. A BBC story dealing with the rather frightening forecast growth in air travel in China follows The Guardian one.

For the sake of the world's poor, we must keep the wealthy at home

We all know the damage aviation does, but the government and the airlines want to turn the country into Airstrip One

George Monbiot
Tuesday February 28, 2006
The Guardian

At last the battlelines have been drawn, and the first major fight over climate change is about to begin. All over the country, a coalition of homeowners and anarchists, of Nimbys and internationalists, is mustering to fight the greatest future cause of global warming: the growth of aviation.

Not all these people care about the biosphere. Some are concerned merely that their homes are due to be bulldozed, or that, living under the new flight paths, they will never get a good night's sleep again. But anyone who has joined a broad-based coalition understands the power of this compound of idealism and dogged self-interest.

The industry has seen it, and is getting its revenge in first. Last week the Guardian obtained a leaked copy of a draft treaty between the European Union and the US that would prevent us from taking any measure to reduce the environmental impact of airlines without the approval of the US government. This, though it might be the widest ranging, is not the first such agreement; the 1944 Chicago convention, now supported by 4,000 bilateral treaties, rules that no government may levy tax on aviation fuel. The airlines have been bottlefed throughout their lives.

The British government admits that the only area in which it is "free to make policy in isolation from other countries" is airport development; it could contain or reverse the growth of flights by restricting airport capacity. Instead, it is softening us up for a third runway at Heathrow, and similar extensions at Stansted, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Twelve other airports have already announced expansion plans. According to the Commons environmental audit committee, the growth the government foresees will require "the equivalent of another Heathrow every five years". Orwell's most accurate prediction in 1984 was the mutation of Britain into Airstrip One.

Already, one fifth of all international air passengers fly to or from an airport in the UK. The numbers have risen fivefold in the past 30 years, and the government envisages that they will more than double by 2030, to 476 million a year. Perhaps "envisages" is the wrong word. By providing the capacity, the government ensures that the growth takes place.

As far as climate change is concerned, this is an utter, unparalleled disaster. It's not just that aviation represents the world's fastest growing source of carbon dioxide emissions. The burning of aircraft fuel has a "radiative forcing ratio" of around 2.7; what this means is that the total warming effect of aircraft emissions is 2.7 times as great as the effect of the carbon dioxide alone. The water vapour they produce forms ice crystals in the upper troposphere (vapour trails and cirrus clouds) that trap the earth's heat. According to calculations by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, if you added the two effects together (it urges some caution as they are not directly comparable), aviation emissions alone would exceed the government's target for the country's entire output of greenhouse gases in 2050 by around 134%. The government has an effective means of dealing with this. It excludes international aircraft emissions from the target.

It won't engage in honest debate because there is no means of reconciling its plans with its claims about sustainability. In researching my book about how we might achieve a 90% cut in carbon emissions by 2030, I have been discovering, greatly to my surprise, that every other source of global warming can be reduced or replaced to that degree without a serious reduction in our freedoms. But there is no means of sustaining long-distance, high-speed travel.

The industry claims it can reduce its emissions by means of technological developments. But, as the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution points out, its targets "are clearly aspirations rather than projections". There are some basic technological constraints that make major improvements impossible to envisage.

The first problem is that our planes have a remarkably long design life. The Boeing 747 is still in the air 36 years after it left the drawing board. The Tyndall Centre predicts that the new Airbus A380 will still be flying, "in gradually modified form", in 2070. Switching to more efficient models would mean scrapping the existing fleet.

Some designers have been playing with the idea of "blended wing bodies": planes with hollow wings in which the passengers sit. In principle they could reduce the use of fuel by up to 30%. But the idea, and its safety and stability, is far from proven. Yet this is as good as it gets. As the Advisory Council for Aeronautics Research in Europe says: "The consensus view is that the rate of progress for conventional engines will slow down significantly in the next 10 years." And if the efficiency of engines does improve, this doesn't necessarily solve the problem. More efficient engines tend to be noisier (so even less acceptable to local people), and to produce more water vapour (which means that their total climate impact could in fact be higher). Even if the outermost promise of a 30% cut could be met, it would offset only a fraction of the extra fuel use caused by rising demand.

The airline companies keep talking about hydrogen planes, but if ever the technological problems were overcome they would be an even bigger disaster than current models. "Switching from kerosene to hydrogen," the royal commission says, "would replace carbon dioxide from aircraft with a threefold increase in emissions of water vapour." Biofuels would need more arable land than the planet possesses. The British government admits that "there is no viable alternative currently visible to kerosene as an aviation fuel."

New fuel consumption figures for both fast passenger ships and ultra-high-speed trains suggest that their carbon emissions are comparable to those of planes. What all this means is that if we want to stop the planet from cooking, we will simply have to stop travelling at the kind of speeds that planes permit.

This is now broadly understood by almost everyone I meet. But it has had no impact whatever on their behaviour. When I challenge my friends about their planned weekend in Rome or their holiday in Florida, they respond with a strange, distant smile and avert their eyes. They just want to enjoy themselves. Who am I to spoil their fun? The moral dissonance is deafening.

Despite the claims made for the democratising effects of cheap travel, 75% of those who use budget airlines are in social classes A, B and C. People with second homes abroad average six return flights a year, while people in classes D and E hardly fly; they can't afford the holidays, so are responsible for just 6% of flights. Most of the growth, the government envisages, will take place among the wealthiest 10%. But the people who are being hit first and will be hit hardest by climate change are among the poorest on earth. Already the droughts in Ethiopia, putting millions at risk of starvation, are being linked to the warming of the Indian Ocean. Some 92 million Bangladeshis could be driven out of their homes this century in order that we can still go shopping in New York.

Flying kills. We all know it, and we all do it. And we won't stop doing it until the government reverses its policy and starts closing the runways.

There's more from George Monbiot at www.monbiot.com.

The following BBC story is here.

China airports clear for take-off

China's airport building boom is set to accelerate

China plans to spend 140 billion yuan ($17.4bn; £9.96bn) over the next five years on its airports as its expanding economy fuels demand for air travel.

The country predicts its fleet of airliners will reach 1,580 by 2010, up from the 863 flying currently.

This is expected to accelerate to 4,000 commercial jets by 2020.

Airports at Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou will be expanded to continue their roles as China's main hubs for passengers and cargo, China says.

Other airports earmarked for expansion include those in Shenzhen, Chengdu, Haikou and Xian.

"By 2010, the mainland will have about 186 airports, up from 142 currently," said Gao Hongfeng, vice-minister of the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC).

Chinese airlines carried 138 million passengers last year, up 15.5% on the year, while the amount of air cargo carried grew by 13.8%.

According to the CAAC, passenger and cargo traffic will grow at an average of 14% each year until 2010, before slowing to an annual rate of 11% in the years running up to 2020.

No doubt some will now throw up their hands and say, "Well what's the point of us taking any action since there's no chance whatsoever that the Chinese will do anything except go their own merry way negating anything we try to do." While that analysis of the Chinese is almost certainly correct, simply abandoning all hope won't do. The way in which world trade is thought of needs to change dramatically, and it simply needs to get more expensive to dump carbon in the atmosphere, whether using an SUV or an Airbus. A change in the White House would be a good start, and we can work on change in Beijing from there.

Meanwhile, the rest of us can start changing ourselves. I know; fat chance.

A travel writer's nightmares

2006-02-25T09:31:00.000-08:00

Last night I dreamt:

1. I urgently needed to board a train to get to an appointment in London. The train was very long but a vast crowd of others were also trying to board. It was halted on a vast loop of track and we hurried alongside it towards the rear looking through the windows and trying to find a door that wan't already like a rugby scrum. As I got near the end the train moved off and rapidly pulled out of the station, the guard at the rear smiling and waving.

2. I was in a hotel (that looked like a composite of various Shangri-La properties I've stayed in) and I needed to get back to my room from the lobby in a hurry to get ready to meet someone. The left took a very long time to come. When it did I rushed in, and while I turned to look for the button for my floor it moved off. I couldn't remember if I was on 7 or 8 and the card-key had no number on it so I decided (why?) to try 8, but this was an express lift with its first stop at 10. I got out there, and waited a long time and with increasing anxiety for a descending lift. This dropped me at 8, which turned out to be a large restaurant area where the staff were clearing up after breakfast. I looked for stairs to travel one floor down and became lost in the labyrinth of the 8th.

3. I was in a line-up to buy a ticket to enter a museum in Bangkok (I felt it to be Bangkok, but this was some ultra-modern place) where I needed to do a quick tour in a hurry for a guide book to check if anything had changed since my last visit. There were large numbers of Hong Kongers who were behaving like mainland Chinese and constantly pushing their way to the front. Finally I fought my own way there, and asked for one ticket, and handed over a green note which seemed to give the woman who took it some surprise. She asked me to wait, and disappeared for a long time. When she finally came back she gave me change and the ticket, and I pushed my way out of the surrounding mob, only to notice that the change was not in Thai baht, but in Hong Kong dollars. When I looked in my wallet I found that all my money was in Hong Kong dollars, and I began to think I'd been short-changed. I didn't have any other green notes and I was trying to work out what value the green-coloured note has in Hong Kong, and then starting to think I'd actually given her a brown note (which would be HK$500 I remembered) and which would mean I definitely had been short-changed by HK$400. The mob around the counter was thick, the clock was ticking, and I stood in frustration and indecision...

4. I ran out of the museum and jumped on a London-style bus at random, while asking myself what the hell I was doing. I wanted to get to the main railway station (I had Beijing West in mind rather than Hualamphong, although I thought I was still in Bangkok). I sat for several stops fretting about whether it was going where I wanted to go and realising that I'd absolutely no idea where I was. Suddenly some stranger started to tell me his life story, and when after a long time I managed to interrupt him, he didn't know where he was either. The bus began to wind up through rather English-looking narrow lanes and on a road that looked like the one that runs across the top of Hampstead Heath while I became more and more worried that I was going to miss my train.

This is what having too many deadlines at one time can apparently do to you. My back, knee, and shoulders ache from too much sitting, and I can't sleep.

On hold

2006-02-21T11:02:00.000-08:00

I complained to a friend recently that he rarely communicated any more, and he responded that it was all right for me because as a professional writer communication comes easily to me. But as I said to him (at greater length), since I spend most of my working hours writing (whether that's text for publication or endless administrative emails), and since my working hours are every hour at any time of the day on any day of the week when I'm not doing something else specific, the last thing I want to do when I have any spare time is write. And as with this blog, which is dashed off when I have a moment (and I have something to say), no one had better expect anything polished.

I want to grouse about stupid PR agencies that don't deserve the title, and about the single worst butchery of a piece of mine I've seen for years including some of the mostly utterly pointless, ignorant, and error-introducing editing I've seen since Frommer's sub-eds got hold of Frommer's China, or, worse, the revised edition of Frommer's China The 50 Most Memorable Trips which I still shudder to think about.

But right now, in between potty-training a three-year-old, reading stories and otherwise entertaining him, staying up until the early hours of the morning each day working on everything from a brief biography of Yuan Shikai to a review of the China Railway Museum, and with three feature deadlines on the horizon, all this will have to wait. I've just put my fitness club membership on hold for a month, and I'm cancelling my Chinese lesson.

Life is on hold. But watch this space.

Maps and editing headaches

2006-02-16T18:37:00.000-08:00

I spent much of one day this week poring over photocopies of maps of Beijing and Shanghai, preforming the thrilling task of marking them up with the routes of suggested walks. I'd sent in source maps, but the cartographers were having trouble following the routes from the descriptions supplied. That was probably because they were original source maps from the two cities, and all in Chinese characters, but probably also because although Chinese-only source maps are much better than any bi-lingual map for tourists produced there, and far better than any foreign-made map, they are still hopeless. China doesn't make any accurate maps, it doesn't update its few foreign-language tourist maps very often (and these are always simplified anyway to feature only the sites the tourist industry wants to lead users to), and the foreign ones are based on the original poor Chinese sources, with added errors as these are converted to house style by bored, somnambulant Mac operators.

So putting in the routes of walks about Beijing hutong and Shanghai back streets often involves drawing in the streets themselves, which have either been ignored altogether by the map-makers, or whose representation is completely inaccurate.

It must be understood that no guide book company undertakes the massive cost of producing new maps, something technically well beyond the ability of its contributors. A very few buy maps from cartographic companies, but these, too, are very expensive, and not always accurate either. A company was paid a large sum for the rights to use its Beijing metro map in my Beijing guide for Cadogan—a relatively simple sketch map with few elements that anyone with half an understanding of Adobe Illustrator should have been able to put together pretty quickly. And indeed that seems to be what had happened, but the map bore little resemblence to the Beijing metro system, had included largely irrelevant trolley bus routes as if they were trams or trains, and had no Chinese. So I had to make extensive corrections, and add in all the Chinese characters. Still the map came back completely hopeless, and we had to to and fro a couple more times before the thing was satisfactory. The company got paid, and its copyright notice appeared with the map. I, who made it actually appear correct, got nothing.

And that's another reason why guide book maps are so hopeless. They are few because they are expensive to produce, even when the usual method is to scan in an existing map, then alter it to house style, then tweak it a bit to avoid copyright issues. They are often full of errors because authors don't proof them and correct them. Your average jobbing guide book author, only in it for the money and finding there's precious little of that, simply flings the required maps at the editor and doesn't want to know any more about it. In many cases the editor is the one who ends up putting on the dots. This is unsatisfactory enough for a city like Paris, for example, where the editor can actually read both the map supplied and other existing maps to check on dot locations. For China, it's hopeless.

When I came to update Frommer's Beijing (for 'update', read 'throw out everything in the existing Godawful book except the word 'Beijing' and start again), I discovered that the existing map was missing an important inner city ring road that had been constructed ten years before, as well as Beijing West Station, also open several years, and which carries more than half of Beijing's rail traffic.

Perhaps the author was keen to see and proof the maps, but I doubt it. I demanded that a brand new map be produced (it was needed, rather more importantly, for Frommer's China anyway), and that I get to proof it. I supplied a new Chinese source map and spent hours marking up photocopies with Romanized versions of street names, the dots for sights, etc. There are a lot of street names, and a lot of sights to mark in Beijing. The first proof came back with fully 50% of all the names wrong, such is the attention to detail. After I'd corrected all those errors I didn't see another proof. And indeed, I was never able to extract a guarantee from Frommer's that I'd see other maps. I saw some, riddled with errors, and the others I didn't see took those errors into print. My other favourite Frommer's errors were a map of Guangzhou that failed to show the area of most interest, and a colour map of Beijing that appeared in print full of mathematical symbols in the place names. But then that was the editor who, while constantly pressuring contributors over deadlines, would take week-long breaks beginning from the deadline dates, thus depriving contributors of an extra vital week, and who, despite the pressure, managed to lose the entire supply of marked-up photocopies so that all the maps had to be done all over again.

But then in the opinion of a Shanghai friend of mine, all editors eventually run mad, partly because writers submit to them sentences such as this one:

Serving authentic but stylish Yunnanese food, diners can sample all manner of flowers, insects and mysterious animal parts, as well as more conventional dishes such as bacon and herb rolls.

I spend another half-day picking over submitted text full of structural errors like this, and other more technical errors such as:

Qianhai Lake.

If you can't see what's wrong with the first one, then forget a career in writing (although an editing job with a major guide book series may still be open to you, or indeed with an expat magazine, since the author of that sentence is on the staff of one of them). For those who don't speak Chinese, the second one, which occurred repeatedly, is a tautology. Qian Hai means 'Front Lake'.

But there was a moment this week when despite the utter triviality of my occupation, I did feel glad to be doing it. After marking up the maps I headed for the post office in the second half of the afternoon, and met the crowds coming home from the office, all identikit people in their anonymous business attire, the women wearing comfortable shoes and carrying their high heels in bags, all fresh from a day of boredom, intrigue, gossip, petty rivalries and power struggles. Once upon a time I used to face London's sclerotic traffic every morning, wear a suit every day, and spend much of my time trying to achieve things against general office inertia, and a sharp pricking sensation between the shoulder blades.

I'm not sorry to avoid all that. And after two months at home, the longest period for some considerable time, I'm about ready to go again. But guide book working, planning a section of a major new China reference work, and various feature deadlines will keep me here until at least May. I've been editing other short pieces on the fly, I've a story on Saint-Pierre et Miquelon to do next week and one on Australia the week after, and there's a fair bit of email coming and going on arrangements for a Japan and Hong Kong trip in May and June. As usual, most of life is admin. Not that much different from being in an office.

Writing China guides

2006-02-12T11:41:00.000-08:00

Guide book publishing companies seem to think that the most important expertise they have is something to do with manufacturing and arranging for the distribution of books. But in fact the most important skill is that of identifying and recruiting the right writers and researchers. Unfortunately none I've ever spoken to seem to realise that.

Although there's a lot of idle chatter about which is the best series, and to be sure there are preferences to be held for one kind of content over another and for presentation of the information, the single most important factor in the usefulness of an individual title is whether the writer-researcher is actually steeped in local knowledge or not, is diligent enough to triple-check information, and cares deeply about having errors in material which has his or her name attached. Many a series uses any old jobbing writer to tackle new destinations, and some even revel in their contributors' lack of experience in anything except strapping on a backpack. The results are usually profoundly ignorant and misleading.

Although I write guides, there are also occasions on which I hire others to contribute to guides. In general contributors are made to jump through numerous hoops to ensure they have both knowledge and attitude. An ability to write entertaining prose is a plus, but submissions can always be polished if the basic information is there. Certainly those researching in China must be current or former residents, and native English speakers but competent in Mandarin, too. No one without Mandarin can be a credible contributor to a China guide.

But on some occasions what's needed is technical data best supplied by current residents already in the business of compiling that data, particularly reviews and practical details of restaurants, hotels, bars, etc,. needed in volume, at short notice (things are always short notice with publishers,) and on tiny budgets. Unfortunately haste here often makes selecting contributors a problem, as I found last year with someone previously unknown to me, and whose efforts were shoddy enough to require a lot of supplementary checking and rewriting.

Over these last few days I've spent some time polishing and reworking contributions to another guide by people who hadn't adequately absorbed the (quite small) brief, and who seemed to lack the technical mastery needed to get a vivid description into a mere 40 words. While some of us can knock off something adequate in five to ten minutes, it's undoubtedly a tricky job for others, although a bit of prodding finally produced rewrites that came nearer to fitting the bill. I still had to spend quite some time tidying and polishing, muttering to myself as I did so.

Just in case you should ever have the misfortune to work for me on a guide, here is an extract from guidelines I wrote to brief the contributors to the first edition of Frommer's China, which I had the misfortune to mastermind. I should add that none of what's below is part of Frommer's rather voluminous official brief to authors, but merely the standards I applied for writing and research, some China-specific, some not.

As far as I can gather, and particularly from viewing past guides to Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, Frommer's authors are a jobbing bunch who might be doing just about any other kind of writing as well, and who are not required to have knowledge of local languages (or, indeed, knowledge of anything much at all, as far as I can tell, especially in the case of the execrable Hong Kong guide). Frommer's China first edition was rather subversive in several different ways in its insistency on at least a hint at polished writing, and that its writers should know what they were talking about.

On style, let’s be clear that our main problem here is to produce lively and readable text in extremely limited space. We want to impress readers with our comprehensiveness (while being, as I’ve said above, selective), so crisp writing is essential.

Do not allow yourself rhetorical flourishes such as ‘taking one thing with another’, ‘on the one hand’, etc., or ‘X is a great place to’—cut straight to why it’s a ‘great place to’. You don’t have space for such ramblings. Avoid meaningless, modish, and soon-to-be-tired descriptions such as ‘cool’ (only for weather and air-conditioning), ‘funky’, ‘awesome’, and ‘worth checking out’, and slangy contractions (‘kinda’, ‘gonna’ etc.). We don’t ‘nosh’, or ‘chow down’, and we don’t ‘boogie’. People are not ‘dudes’, ‘like’ is only used to compare two things, and ‘Not!’ does not appear by itself after a sentence we wish to negate.

Keep it literate, and use adjectives which actually assist the reader to conjure up a place or experience in his or her mind’s eye. In general sentences will contain a subject, verb, and object. ‘Frommer’s. Your guide to a world of travel experience,’ is wince-inducing but in a style commonplace in advertising, which often mistakes the spoken word (and especially the broadcast spoken word) for something which can be written down, and doesn’t care anyway as long as the sales message is successfully put across. While much of the readership also couldn’t care less about such matters, we won’t be driving away those who do by introducing this kind of sloppiness to our prose. Be readable, and be amusing; but be grammatically correct, too.

Don’t try to imitate the spoken word in other ways; all our words ending in ‘-ing’ keep their final ‘g’, and we never drop our ‘h’s.

Avoid self-conscious infantilism. We don’t ‘get the munchies’, or carry ‘veggies’ in our ‘baggies’. Avoid recent ghastly mutations of nouns into verbs wherever you can. Acceptable as these are in the US, I only have so many teeth to grind.

Avoid slang in general (unless you’re explaining some entertaining piece of Chinese slang—hou men piao, da kuan, xiao mi), and (non-US authors) turns of phrase likely to be confusing or very obviously foreign to Americans (‘guy’ if you must, not ‘bloke’ or ‘chap’—‘man’ better, something more descriptive better still).

American authors, please remember that while the rest of us are more familiar with your culture than you are with ours, we’re a bit alienated by references which imply that it’s the norm and that we must know what you’re talking about. Usually we do, but a casual reference to ‘spring training’ might confuse us as much as cricketing metaphors would you.

We couldn’t care less who David Letterman is (and when we know who he is don’t find him funny), or what he’s paid, or by whom. Non-American authors please note that although this document is written with UK English spelling and punctuation standards it doesn’t avoid the necessity of using US standards of both in the book itself. Note, for instance, ‘accommodations’, ‘elevator’ rather than ‘lift’ and all the other usual substitutions, and the preference for double over single quotation marks. But you are at liberty to ‘write to me’ rather than ‘write me’, and if you find Apple Computer’s ‘Think different’ campaign an abomination I won’t ask you to think differently.

Do use your knowledge of Mandarin to brighten up your descriptions. Don’t overdo the inserted phrases, but do throw them in where they are particularly relevant, colourful, amusing in translation, revealing of the Chinese mind-set, or are something that people are likely often to hear in a particular situation. Don’t be afraid to include a hint of your personal experience or a particular conversation you may have had with staff at one sight, say. Frommer’s style allows this, and it gives the reader the feeling that you really have been there and done the work, and that they are travelling with a friendly and helpful companion.

We do not subscribe to the ‘5000 years of culture’ hokum, and we are not about to blindfold ourselves with beliefs in the impenetrable mysteriousness of the East, or swallow everything we are told. We give credit where credit is due to China’s remarkable cultural achievements and the grubby vibrancy of modern life there. But we are sceptical about claims as to the infinite charm of every corner of the country, very sceptical about historical claims, and sceptical beyond words about political claims. We will be delighted to give readers the facts to compare with what the limited English signs at sights tell them, and to point out where the Chinese and English signs differ from each other, as often happens.

We do not recommend Chinese medicine, moxibustion, chiropractors, acupuncture, weige or other snake oils with potential for damage to our readers. We are neutral on Falungong and other weird alien religions such as Christianity, merely commenting on religious buildings with architectural merit, the battles between various sects or the role of missionaries where these have shaped the history of a place.

We do not believe what we read in China Daily or other sources published in China, particularly materials sold or handed out at sights and dealing with their histories. We never quote statistics without caveats.

We do not believe word of mouth. We go and look for ourselves and we cross-check with published sources overseas wherever possible. We assume that everything we are told is at best mistaken until we’ve seen it for our own eyes. We recognise that almost no one in China knows what’s going on in the next street from where he or she lives, and we never believe flat denials that a place exists, or that something can’t be done. We do not believe there is no public transport—there always is.

We see the pollution, the spitting, the insane driving, the push-and-shove, the inept service, the overcharging, the discourtesy, and the fakes, and issue warnings. We question whether the Yangtze Cruise is all it’s supposed to be, and we note the filthiness of the water and the narrow strip of blue in the grey sky overhead. We do not dwell on these things unless we particularly want to warn our readers off something (food markets in Guangzhou, for instance?), but we do not overlook them.

We want to stress China’s many strengths as a destination, while preparing our readers for what to expect. To a certain degree visitors are self-blindfolded by their desire to find everything immensely charming and Fu Manchu-ish, and to a certain degree Frommer’s structure forces an American view of the world onto the places it covers. For some developed nations this metaphor isn’t so far-fetched, but it doesn’t work too well in China. By slightly adapting the Frommer’s structure, as above, and by choosing our words carefully we can give our readers better service.

The key to enjoying the country is to arrive with the right set of expectations, and our job is to make sure readers have them, and to offer them a tool which enables them to get themselves around the country making the best of it as they go. We give them the information on the best feather beds, but we also lure them into the real China wherever we can, and share our own fascination with it.

Tosh

2006-02-06T17:23:00.000-08:00

Perhaps one encouragement that ought to be offered to those who want to get into this business is that no real talent for writing is required. Indeed, it's often a disadvantage (see this earlier post Fish wrap), and some of the most tiresome nonsense makes it not only into into newspapers or magazines but into book form.

I've just stumbled across the text of a book review I wrote a couple of years ago, which when printed in a paper in the author's home town resulted in more letters to the editor than anyone could remember such a review ever generating before. Some were from colleagues and in one case even an ex-girlfriend writing to say how I'd made their day. Sadly they all refused permission for publication.

So remember if you insist on publishing tosh in book form you may be unfortunate enough to fall prey to a reviewer who knows tosh when he sees it, and knows that really bad books make the best review material. And while today's paper is tomorrow's fish wrap, interested parties may cut out your reviews and stick them to their fridges.

On the Trail of Marco Polo review

Once it seemed that every arts graduate believed him- or herself pregnant with a great novel, only the need to make a living preventing it from coming to term. Most never found time to discover just how difficult even the first paragraph would be, luckily allowing them to keep intact their image of themselves as Hemingways manqué.

Then, extended trips around Asia were still alternative. Now it’s those who haven’t pogoed across the Gobi who are the unconventional ones, and the travelogue has replaced the novel as the daydream magnum opus-that-might-have-been. The banana pancake paradises of Asia are full of the footsore catching up with their diaries. Brady Fotheringham’s On the Trail of Marco Polo (McArthur & Co., Toronto, $24.95) seems to be one of these.

The title, at once populist and meaningless, sets the tone for the whole book. Polo has been dead since 1324 which makes him a little hard to pursue, and Fotheringham doesn’t follow any route usually attributed to the merchant, although he travels by air, bus, and bicycle from Beijing to Islamabad, and briefly into Afghanistan.

The cover ill-prepares you for the contents. Fotheringham was “determined to cycle the desolate Chinese desert”, but not determined enough, apparently—he skirted most of it by bus. He “cycled over the world’s highest pass.” The Khunjerab is in fact merely the world’s highest paved-road border crossing.

But getting through the book is itself a dangerous journey, as it swerves from cliché (“The journey is the destination”) to tautology (“who navel-gaze at themselves”), and from freewheeling grammar (The Romans “wondered where this ‘wool of the forests’ was arriving”) to the completely incomprehensible (The Silk Road’s “brutal history is an indelible stamp on the annals of Central Asia”). Much of the historical material is inaccurate filler between thin narrative, and even simple place names are misspelled.

Fotheringham knows no Mandarin, and can narrate little but his own bewilderment in China, even failing to record accurately what he sees, placing the Great Hall of the People inside the Forbidden City (built centuries earlier), and failing to notice that the common “dog-lion” of his photo-caption is a completely different and rarer beast, the Chinese unicorn. He makes unwise detours into other foreign languages, getting both the German name of the Silk Road and the Kyrgyz word for their white hats wrong.

He plans to survive by using his “street smarts”, but apparently has none. On arrival he is immediately cheated by a taxi driver, and then loses his credit card. He grossly overloads his bike but takes inadequate provisions, photographs border installations and has his film forcibly exposed, and suffers a series of thefts through his own carelessness. He spends anxious hours detained in police stations. Regrettably, they let him go.

In amongst sanctimonious pro-traveller, anti-tourist bleating (from a man who makes straight for McDonald’s and the Hard Rock Café, and plays rock music through handlebar-mounted speakers) there are enough howlers to confirm Fotheringham as the William McGonagall of travel writing.

The Chinese were “no different from us than we were from them.” “Canada is big, but you never get close enough to see it except from an airplane.” “If you’ve never seen a camel in person, you’ll never forget one.” “It would be about as inconceivable for Tibet and Xinjiang to secede...as it would be for Liechtenstein to successfully invade Europe.”

The book does raise one interesting question, however. How on earth did it get into print?

The answer to this last question, by the way, at least as volunteered by several who wrote in to the paper publishing the review, was, "His father is a famous political journalist." And perhaps the worst footnote to all this is that presumably as a result of this connection The Globe and Mail, once Canada's only nationally distributed broadsheet and a paper that takes itself far too seriously, dubbed the title one of its 'notable books' for that year, and without the slightest irony.

Freeloaders

2006-02-05T18:05:00.000-08:00

One side-effect of being in this business is the number of invitations received to events of staggering tedium, usually held in hotels, in which there's a trade-off between free drinks and dinner and listening to speeches. Most invitations I receive are from tourism boards and hotel groups, and I say 'no' to almost all of them. The exceptions are those hosted by destinations I've visited and with which I want to build up a long-term relationship, those that give me a chance to meet people I only know by email.

In recent years I've only said 'yes' to Shangri-La hotels, to Korea, to Taiwan, to Hong Kong, to Quebec, to New Zealand, and to British Columbia, because since I frequently review restaurants that are amongst the best in Asia, I don't drink much, my waistline could do with a break, and I couldn't care less about schmoozing with other journalists or editors, I don't see a point unless there's going to be progress towards getting some stories researched and written, or, at least, I can get to put some faces to email addresses. Occasionally I'll attend if I've had some help from a tourism board and I know that the PR person will gain from being able to add another successfully netted journalist to her list. Having spend ten years on the other side of this relationship, I have some sympathy for them (or, at least, for the few good ones).

Therein lies part of the problem with some of these events, and when one is coming up that I actually am going to attend I've often sat round with other journalists I know and we've predicted who will show up. There's a small group of professional freeloaders you'd probably be able to join if you wanted to, who can be found at almost any event of this kind without actually ever delivering any column inches or any air time to the inviting organisation, or indeed every likely to. In many cases tourism bureaux are deeply entrenched parts of civil service bureaucracies with little entrepreneurial imagination, bringing a bean-counting mentality to the whole procedure. The larger the number of attending journalists, the better, and the quality of the outlet, the reach, the actual chances of a story ever being published on the destination in question, is not to the point.

So there's a species of interstitial parasite that gets into this crack, and who can be found at almost all of these events without exception, giving yet another reason not to attend. One woman in particular once cornered me at a Korean event (I had my back pressed against the wall at the end) demanding to know who I wrote for and complaining bitterly that the Koreans never seemed to take anyone overseas. She claimed to write for a local paper, but when more details came out it turned out that it was for the section that any reader can contribute to. There was mention of a website somewhere. In short, nothing.

One night this week I went to an event jointly hosted by the HKTB and HKETO, and to my great surprise she wasn't there, but then the HKTB is certainly a bit smarter than average at this kind of thing. The event was an 'appreciation' dinner for journalists and others who had given coverage or other support during the year. I typically pass through Hong Kong twice a year, and rarely fail to write a story or two as a result, and as I like and appreciate the efforts of my contact in the HKTB Toronto office who is as helpful as can be, I have to be out of the country to refuse an invitation. There was one appalling freeloader there, however, heard telling someone from the Cantonese opera troupe that briefly performed during dinner that she had a travel website.

Go on! Put one up right now and you can get some free dinners.

Sometimes there are editors working for local media who are well worth avoiding, too, and one of the pitfalls is never knowing whether you'll be sat next to one of them or not. I wasn't, but one tracked me down, all gushing about what a delight it was to see me. Such are the times we live in.

I managed to find a table with some more interesting people from local radio, but who were grumbling a bit because the pre-dinner presentations went on just a bit too long. There were statistics about how Hong Kong arrival numbers have reached new heights, but without mentioning that this is due to more than four million arrivals from mainland China (although apparently Canadian numbers are at an all time high, too). The total revenue from mainland visitors was also given, and a quick bit of mental arithmetic suggested their average total spend was only about US$200 per head, which won't get the economy very far, and may be part of the reason that there's a big tourism promotion happening in 2006. I've been to Hong Kong about 50 times, I think, and I'm still very fond of the place, so I wish it well.

Another essential aspect of these events is the prize draw and/or the 'goody' bags, designed to increase the attendance of journalists and travel agents (who are often also present at these things) and this is another reason the freeloaders rush in. At the Quebec event I won a pair of woolly socks and a jumper that didn't fit me. But the goody bags almost always include a logo-laden shoulder bag or briefcase, very useful for keeping stocks of the brochures, maps, background reading, press kits, etc., from each destination visited, and the HKTB goody bag was no exception. Actually it can replace the New Zealand one I currently use to carry my books to Chinese lessons.

I did have a two-minute chat about possible future stories, and I did sit next to some pleasant radio people. So that for me, was the benefit of four hours spent away from the keyboard.

Anniversary

2006-01-29T16:04:00.000-08:00

Today is my birthday, a Sunday, and coincidentally, Chinese New Year.

So what am I doing?

Working, of course.

I'm still trudging though the same 2000 words of introduction to a new guide book on Beijing and Shanghai I've been looking at for weeks. It's a long time since I made such heavy going of something. The three local journalists I know best are all equally in a slump, and one of them puts it down to the dismal January weather. But then all three want to get out of journalism.

One gift was Robert Fisk's new book, 'The Great War for Civilisation'. I don't know why I ask for books as gifts, since it will join great towers of others on already overburdened shelves, and remain equally unread for a long time to come, as all I'll have time to read (in brief pre-slumber half hour bursts) will be books related to subjects I'm writing on. Just looking at the piles of unread material depresses me.

But I did quickly read Fisk's introduction, and catch that whiff of saltpetre that's always to be found in his writings, whether because he has spent so much time looking over the edge into the pit of hell or from his own sulphurous anger at what he's seen, isn't clear. Fisk is one of the very few people who represents in reality what we'd like to think foreign correspondents are really like: a man not floating on the surface, not flown in for a five-minute star reporter overview and then off to the next story, not forced by his medium to reduce complicated issues to the news-as-entertainment video clips of shallow and self-indulgent children's television such as CNN, and not someone too busy posing as a star reporter to get any real understanding at all. Probably equally disliked by editors, interview subjects, certainly politicians, and at least half of his readership, for the clarity and forceful expression of strongly held views on matters that may mean life or death to hundreds of thousands of people. His articles change people's minds.

I have no ambition to be any such kind of person, but if there were more like him then I'd become someone who buys and reads newspapers regularly. And if I find time, amidst all the trivia of what I do for a living, to read any books not relevant to what I'm writing, his will be first.

But right now it's back to work. And happy birthday to me.

Oh, and Chinese New Year is really catching on. My wife went out to throw something in the dumpster (skip) behind our apartment building, and some down-and-out rooting through there for items to sell (white Caucasian, of course) said "Gong hei fat choi" to her.

Postscript: In my continuing desperation to avoid work I went over to the EastSouthWestNorth blog, which I really must add to the list of links on the side of this page as it's become regular reading for me, and is a rare, truly worthwhile Chinese blog, offering translations of mainland media and links to the best of other China-related blogging:

EastSouthWestNorth

There was a link to a CounterPunch story about the opposite kind of foreign correspondent, that brainless strutting cockerel Nicholas Kristof, whose articles on China are typical of the worst pabulum produced on the country, and whose China Wakes! might be the most airheaded book on China ever, were there not so much competition; every page an embarrassment. Read on, laugh, and write a letter of complaint to the editor of the New York Times (as I've done in the past):

Nicholas Kristof's Brothel Problem

Accuracy

2006-01-26T13:47:00.000-08:00

I've had a copy of Harriet Sargeant's Shanghai for some years without getting round to reading it. Buying it was part of a general policy of picking up most of what comes out on Beijing and Shanghai, but a quick glance at the author's opening remarks made the book seem already dated (it was originally published in 1991), her perceptions rather shallow, and her qualifications for tackling her subject rather limited. It seemed the title would probably be little more than a jobbing author's survey of the plentiful English-language materials of the 1920s and 30s.

I still haven't read enough to decide if that snap judgement was correct, but being in the middle of writing a 2000-word general introduction to Beijing and Shanghai for a forthcoming guide book, I took it down from the shelf, blew off the dust, opened it at random, and my eyes lit immediately upon a reference to 'Thomas' sub-machine guns.

I can't claim to know much about machine guns of the first part of the last century, and it's perfectly possible there was a Thomas machine gun of that era, but it seems to me very likely (as it probably will to you) that it was the famous Thompson sub-machine gun that was intended here.

I noted with some interest that I immediately felt disinclined to read any further. I had expectedly quickly to trip Sergeant up over some Sino-technicality, some commonplace of the multiple misunderstandings that creep into most China commentaries of the 'May you live in interesting times' or '5000 years of culture' type, but instead this seemed to be a commonplace of general knowledge. So what chance that the rest of the book would be accurate?

However, I remember once seeing a comment on my Beijing in which I'd gone to the effort to research and set out the addresses of Chinese embassies and consulates in major English-speaking countries and multiple other European ones, saying that I'd made an error in either the postal code or telephone area code (I forget which) of the embassy (as it then was) in Bonn. If I couldn't get such a simple thing right, the comment argued, what chance for the rest of the book?

Of course my knowledge of Beijing was rather more extensive than my knowledge of Bonn, and the information I gave was supplied by the Chinese embassy itself, which, if it was just about any other country under discussion, ought to be regarded as about an authoritative source as it would be possible to find. These days double-checking such information is far easier, but then I was scrambling to put the book to bed, and had to take the chance that the Chinese knew their own contact information.

But it's true that even tiny errors almost irrelevant to the main topic can have that deflationary effect on the reader, and this is why it is the least comprehensive and detailed guide books that are often regarded as the most authoritative--remarkably frustrating to those of us who try to dig up as much as possible, and instead of saying, 'Take a bus out of town east to the village of X' (enough, it appears, to support claims of authority) name the right bus station to start from, and give frequencies, journey times, prices, and a description of the route, in the full knowledge that it will only take a small change in price, something over which we have no control, to stimulate accusations of inaccuracy (often disingenuously by competitors incognito in public places such as Amazon reviews).

Undoubtedly I should give Sergeant a second chance.

False melancholia

2006-01-23T11:45:00.000-08:00

It is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness.

This is Jaques, from Act IV Scene I of As You Like It (which I was watching last night when I should have been getting on with something more important to meet an imminent deadline), and it suddenly struck me that this is something of the attitude of the coffee-house wannabe travel writer, and indeed many a published one.

There's nothing fake about Jaques, who proves his wit and general despair at the state of things in many a comically depressing speech. But it's his manner that appeals so much to the wannabes, so many of whom think that striking the attitude of being a travel writer makes them by definition both thoughtful and interesting, and apparently makes it unnecessary to demonstrate that by writing in an interesting and thoughtful manner. 'I sat in the café and pondered China's long history,' and other dimwitted dross is supposedly interesting simply by virtue of who I am. It's no different from thinking that adopting a tragic manner and wearing a baggy shirt makes you a poet, or from thinking that the belief that there's a great novel inside you makes you a novelist. In all cases you have to deliver the goods to merit the reader's attention.

In times past readers might tolerate your tedious personality and lack of perception for want of being able to have your experiences themselves. But these days it's the non-travellers who are the exception and most travel writing is done for those who might like to have the same experiences, not for those who never will. So you'd better be offering something vivid about the destination, and not some teenage moody diary (or blog) entry.

Not that Jacques is clearly saying (although a later speech seems to suggest he may be, and I quite like to read it that way) that it's his travels that make him melancholy, but that his melancholy, compounded from many simples, is the Elizabethan equivalent of an iPod, and gives him something to think about while he's travelling. I often fall into a brown study on long Chinese bus and train journeys, but in general travel is an irritating process, full of tedious practicalities that tend to get in the way of a decent bit of melancholy, except in anticipation of the trip to the airport and all the rushing around. There's no time for sitting around in cafés pretending to be interesting.

Rosalind's retort offers a more down-to-earth reason for melancholy: A traveller! By my faith, you have great reason to be sad; I fear you have sold your own lands to see other men's; then, to have seen much and so have nothing, is to have rich eyes and poor hands.

Rich eyes and poor hands: now that describes travel writing pretty well.

Sadly those who can actually deliver Shakespeare-quality material as opposed to just posing in cafés (or in print) should be looking for employment elsewhere. Rare the editor who has any interest in printing anything thoughtful, and the reduction of all travel writing to simpering directory pieces of the Ten Places to go Dwarf-Tossing kind continues apace.

Collaborators

2006-01-20T13:59:00.000-08:00

This morning I came in part-way through a BBC World Service radio interview with someone from Arup, the engineering firm, concerning the development of a new city for 250,000 people (500,000 in other accounts) on an island near Shanghai and the mouth of the Yangzi River. I haven't had time to listen and see if the story came round again, and the BBC World Service Web page has nothing on it, although the Observer has a story on the link given above.

But the point of this is not the construction of the so-called eco-city, but what the Arup interviewee had to say. He may have been company director Peter Head, widely quoted elsewhere as the genius of the plan, and whose company has just been 'given the go ahead' on the project, according to The Observer.

Whoever he was, he was determined put across a picture of an improving ecological situation in China, and indeed claimed to have seen improvement over 30 years of visits, to the point where Beijing's sky was now blue.

The willingness of foreign businessmen to roll over to please the Chinese government is a constant source of nausea not to mention incredulity not only at their cupidity but their naivety. But this is only technically short of as blatent a lie as any you will find in China Daily itself.

The interviewer was rightly sceptical, pointing out the constant reports of major pollution issues, and the chump from Arup remarked that he was happy to bring good news.

People like this, who parrot completely false views of the government's 'progress', are collaborators in the suppression of ordinary people in China and contributors to the pollution that is shortening the lives of so many. Stating that things are fine and improving in a way that gets broadcast worldwide simply allows this truly appalling state of affairs to continue for longer.

And by an entertaining coincidence even China Daily published an article today throwing the lie back into the Arup's teeth, and part of the lesson Arup needs to learn that collaborating with the Chinese government is guaranteed to leave you with egg on face.

Full story here, but the salient bits are:

The skies in Beijing yesterday may have been blue, but still the air quality was the second-worst out of 84 major cities across China.

Beijing's air pollution index (API) was 139, with only Lanzhou, capital of Northwest China's Gansu Province, worse, at 142. On the list, which is released daily, 15 major cities including Shanghai had APIs higher than 100, which means the air is "slightly polluted."

Experts said that in such an environment, patients with heart and respiratory diseases should reduce outdoor activities.

...

According to Zhang Lijun, vice-minister of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), about one-fifth of urban citizens are living in seriously polluted environments.

If the API can be kept under 100, about 178,000 Chinese lives could be saved every year, he said, during the Forum of Strategic Approaches to Regional Air Quality Management in China, held yesterday in Beijing.

Although China has made some progress in air pollution control and the air quality has improved, the country still has tough tasks ahead, especially in the control of sulphur dioxide discharge.

It is expected that in 2020, the country's release of sulphur dioxide will reach 280 million tons, 160 million tons more than the environment can handle, according to SEPA statistics.

In fact these cities frequently have great rolling banks of grey air, reducing visibility and making the eyes smart and the nose run. I'd like to take the smug Arup man's British passport, burn it, and make him take a People's Republic of China one, and let him have to live in the cesspool he's helping to create.

Note that the island being singled out for mass redevelopment is currently agricultural land and also a sanctuary for wildfowl, as The Observer mentions, so it's no much of an eco-project to cover it in concrete. It's also one of the locations that people forcibly relocated from land flooded by the Three Gorges Dam were dumped. For them it's out of the frying pan into the fire.

In a recent editorial the Washington Post was discussing Cisco Systems' supply of Internet censorship software to the Chinese goverment, Microsoft's censoring of blog pages and withdrawal of Michael Anti's blog page (although no one seems to have remarked that either that's up again or someone's hijacked it), and Yahoo!'s handing over of the name of a blogger who is now spending ten years in prison. It labelled businessmen who suck up to the Chinese government 'moral dunces'.

In what initially looked this week as though it might be a bright spot in the darkness of general collaboration and caving in, Reuters was reported as standing up to the Chinese Ambassador in London's attempt to have them deny two reporters entry to an event at Reuters' London headquarters at which he was going to speak. The story I initially read in The Independent contained the following statement from the news agency: "Reuters has never kept any diplomats or journalists from attending one of these events."

The story mentioned a claim from Reuters to have been in China since the 1800s, which helped to make it look even more heroic to stand up to the ambassador's demands and risk so much, at least compared to the general spinelessness of other businesses, although surely in a normal world we ought to regard standing up for press freedom against the threats of a bully as a sine qua non of the very existence of a news agency. But these are not normal times, and a Dow Jones report, while using the same quote, anyway comes out rather differently:

Dow Jones report

One of the journalists from The Epoch Times, John Smithies, told Dow Jones Newswires that Reuters had told him on Monday afternoon of the Chinese embassy's threat to cancel the ambassador's speech. He said that he had been put "under a lot of pressure" by Reuters not to attend the event, but had decided that it was "a question of press freedom."

A spokeswoman for Reuters said that the company had contacted The Epoch Times journalists on Monday afternoon, but had simply reiterated the concerns expressed by the Chinese embassy. The spokeswoman said Reuters had made it clear to the journalists that they wouldn't be turned away if they still wanted to attend the event.

Dow Jones is a competitor of Reuters, so a little schadenfreude might reasonably be expected. But if the Epoch Times reporter is speaking the truth, then so much for the bright spot, as apparently Reuters was craven and only put on a brave face when left with no option.

To call anyone working for The Epoch Times a 'reporter' is to stretch the meaning of the word, it might be added. The paper is presumably Falun Gong owned or funded, and is about as dispassionate about the movement as China Daily is, but in the opposite direction. The ambassador would be right in assuming that he would be asked embarrassing questions, and right to assume that his of necessity evasive answers or refusals to answer (perhaps on the matter of torture of Falun Gong members) would be reported negatively in The Epoch Times.

The paper's print edition, which makes the incident a front page story, does not use the word 'pressure' with reference to Reuters but the ambassador, and has one of the journalists saying 'Reuters offered for a similar event with the same guest list to be organized which The Epoch Times could attend at a later date, but without the Ambassador. The two journalists decided not to succumb to the embassy's pressure and to go ahead with their plan to cover the talk.'

The Epoch Times piece gives credit to Reuters for not cancelling the event, raising the question of whether Dow Jones misquoted the 'journalist', the same person who says in that paper's piece, '"Reuter's decision upheld press freedom in this country," said Smithies [one of the 'journalists' in question]. "I fell grateful to them for this; it took great strength on their part [to cancel the event]."

With typical Chinese government disregard for anyone's welfare but its own, the cancellation was only confirmed 1.5 hours before the event itself, which left those who had travelled long distances and the Epoch Times journalists having a drink instead.

And there's the rub. The Epoch Times can't afford to criticise Reuters in its own pages (although it's true Reuters did cancel the event, if it did bring pressure it is shameful to have done so) because it wants to go on in the rest of the story to bang the drum about the importance of its own role as a speaker of truth about the Chinese government and thorn in Beijing's flesh, now given credibility by the ambassador's cancellation of his speech.

Blind leading the blind

2006-01-13T10:23:00.000-08:00

I don't generally quote Oriental-List postings here, but I found the other day that some of my observations, now labelled a 'rant' had appeared on other websites/blogs. (See link on right for Oriental-List details.) This was inspired by a query concerning Xin Tiandi, the tarted-up Shanghai shopping centre, which led me to read the article from The Economist mentioned, and to comment on it in detail. Entertainingly, a Chinese academic has just been quoted making much the same general point as I did about the utter hopelessness of most Western commentary on China. Here's the original posting:

Susan forwarded an article from The Economist, and said:

>I haven't been to Shanghai and I am curious if any list members have
>been to the Xintiandi complex and what their impressions are. I don't
>recall ever even hearing it mentioned, despite it being described
>below as both "a haven for expatriates" and "Shanghai's number one
>tourist attraction for Chinese visitors."

Shanghai is a kind of theme park maintained by the government especially to mislead stupid foreigners, and particularly lazy journalists and legions of lemming-like investors, and distract them from reality. And it works very well.

Nearly all the programmes and articles on China come from Shanghai these days, and fall into the 'Oooh!', 'Aaaah!' category, but few of the commentators, and none of those parachuted in for five minute visits (such as many involved in the BBC series of programmes on China last week) seem to have their eyes open. It's all, 'amazing', 'fast-growing', 'unstoppable', and then a repeat of some version of the usual canard that it's inevitable that China will be the world's dominant superpower or the largest economy by next Tuesday or 2020 or whenever. No one seems able to see just how many of the shiny towers are incomplete or complete but unoccupied, nor to venture, oh, 1km away from The Bund to see what a ramshackle mess the overwhelming majority of the city is, let alone to venture into the countryside for a dose of reality.

Really Shanghai is not the place to look for much hope of sensitivity towards architectural heritage, and Xin Tiandi is as much a sham as the rest. The Economist's article is shallow and at times fatuous.

The Economist said:

>THESE days, the Chinese like to joke, their national bird is the crane.

Oh, definitely haven't read this one in several other places recently. Has anyone in China actually ever heard this said by a Chinese? Given that the Chinese for crane (the bird) and crane (the construction machine) are completely different it doesn't seem too likely. Or does it fall into the 'May you live in interesting times, as the Chinese say' category, when in fact there seems to be no evidence that they've ever said anything of the kind (Chris Patten, who used this on a radio programme broadcast from Shanghai last week, please note).

>The results have been largely disastrous, reckons Benjamin Wood, of
>Wood + Zapata, a Boston-based architectural firm, who has worked in
>China since 1998 and blames foreign architects for much of what has
>transpired.

All those tens of thousands of square miles of shoddy, white-tiled, gimcrack buildings? Obviously foreigners' fault. Nothing to do with Chinese urban planning, bubble economy building, greed, lack of aesthetics, making do, or plain corruption on the part of the Chinese. I happened to sit next to a man on an airplane a while ago who was part of Shenzhen's town planning department, and who claimed that Shenzhen was now more beautiful than Paris or Rome. I assumed they must have
pulled it down completely and started again, but no, when I woke up then next morning and looked out of the window it was as hideous and tawdry as ever. He wasn't handing out any credit to foreigners, luckily.

>China's commercial capital is starting to take on the chic of Paris,
>the sophistication of New York and the futuristic vibes of Tokyo.

If there was any sentence likely to reinforce my view that The Economist is essentially the economic and political equivalent of a fashion magazine, this might be it. Apparently written entirely for its rhythm, this sentence contains barely a speck of truth.

> It already boasts the world's fastest train (the Maglev that takes
>eight minutes to run the 30 km from Pudong airport into the city),

It doesn't run into the city. It stops on the edge, and is a white elephant which will never recoup its costs.

>the longest underwater pedestrian tunnel (under the Huangpu river)

Unless something new has recently been built, it's not pedestrian. Passengers are carried across in little computer-controlled cars past a laser and neon light show which makes the average fairground haunted house look like something of Star Wars sophistication.

>and the world's tallest hotel-the 88-storey Grand Hyatt, complete with
>the world's highest swimming pool and longest laundry chute.

It's the world's highest hotel, not the tallest, not least since the hotel only occupies the upper floors.

But who cares about accuracy. There's much else to complain about (or laugh at) in the article, but let's get back to Xin Tiandi and the saving of architectural heritage:

>Most interesting, it has Xintiandi, a two-hectare (nine-acre) complex
>of hip restaurants, bars and shops in an open, elegant, low-rise style
>that cost $170m to develop and is one of the first examples of China
>preserving its own architecture.

Anyone else care to start the long list of all the 'preservation' projects in China which have preceded this?

Wandering around there reviewing restaurants in October last year, I wondered if there was a single original brick. Xin Tiandi is 'preserved' in the sense of taking everything down and putting it up again. It's less 'preserved' than even the Old Railway Station building in Beijing, which has become a shopping mall. The perfectly mortared exteriors carry signs for familiar brands such as Starbucks, and the interiors entirely remodeled with the removal of most internal walls in order to make spaces large enough to function as shops as restaurants, and there are other structural adjustments wherever it's convenient to make them. It doesn't cost the quote $170 million just to tidy up some old buildings. It costs that to more-or-less rebuild them from scratch. Little of it is now the housing it originally was, but if you want a sophisticated foreign meal at New York prices, it's the place to go. It's Disneyfied China, with the stress on souvenirs and sake-based cocktails (or whatever the latest fad is). It's a pleasant, safe, and utterly sanitized. And in a move which ought to make anyone cackle, in what is effectively a vast temple to consumerism affordably only by a tiny percentage of China's population, there's a museum to the founding
of the Communist Party of China, the soi-disant party of the people, which took place here.

>Shui On, the Hong Kong developer behind the project, and Mr Wood,
>hired as its architect, have spent the past seven years painstakingly
>preserving original materials like Shanghai's unique grey bricks and
>art deco features such as 1920s lintels and columns.

I have to wonder what makes Shanghai's 'unique' grey bricks different from all the grey bricks one sees in old buildings across the country. I also have to wonder what 'art deco features' are doing in 'one of the first examples of China preserving its own architecture' unless art deco was another one of those things that the Chinese actually invented when we thought it was us. There may be 1920s material in Xin Tiandi, but that doesn't make it art deco, of course.

>The group also hunted down the original drawings to replicate
>structures that had decayed beyond repair. Nothing like it had been
>attempted before.

Pure nonsense. The Chinese regularly rebuild ancient buildings from scratch and have been doing so for a long time, sometimes claiming to be working from original plans, sometimes just making it up. I think the writer has merely read the press release and taken his research no further than a comfy chair, possibly in a different country.

>Xintiandi, originally a haven for expatriates, is now Shanghai's
>number one tourist attraction for Chinese visitors, says Vincent Lo,
>chairman of Shui On.

It's still a haven for expatriates and a number of sufficiently wealthy Chinese. As at foreigner hang-outs elsewhere in China, everyone else is coming to gawp at foreign behaviour and the gentrification and airbrushing of their own heritage in pursuit of the tourist dollar. But it's look, don't touch.

>While the preservation costs mean Xintiandi itself is not making
>money, it has had a halo effect, pushing property prices in the
>surrounding area to the highest in Shanghai-and hence mainland China.

And, of course, much of the surrounding property has been developed by Shui On or its partners. Hong Kong development companies are not noted for their philanthropy.

>"Xintiandi shows that Chinese architecture can be fashionable. It
>shows old buildings can have both economic and social value," says Mr
>Lo.

But apparently you must kick out the residents, and transform their homes almost out of all recognition into trendy shops. Presumably they had an 'economic and social value' to their residents before probably (as happens all the time in China) an unholy alliance of bribed local government officials and property developers likely kicked them out against their will for compensation completely inadequate either to the costs of finding somewhere else or the vast profits to be made from
redevelopment, directly or indirectly. No mention of this aspect of redevelopment in the generally joy joy luck luck happy happy article.

>Indeed Xintiandi is being replicated in cities throughout China, both
>by Shui On, which has a similar project in Hangzhou, south-west of
>Shanghai, and by copycats, who have been caught photographing the
>original's features, down to the carvings above the lintels.

I'll admit to having missed the carvings. Perhaps these were art deco after all, and borrowed from the West, or added in the 'preservation'. I've also visited the Shui On development in Hangzhou. It's on a much smaller scale and about as authentic as Xin Tiandi.

>Chinese architecture has rarely been this confident.

Um... So if we're really talking about 'preservation' what's that got to do with how Chinese architecture feels about itself now?

Pleasant as Xin Tiandi is, in an air-con, air-brushed kind of way, there's only one word for all of this:

Humbug.

The 'glimmer of hope' is someone striking a match to blow architectural heritage sky high.

[One final thought in the defence of the author. Stories have their own momentum, that momentum is currently of seeing Shanghai as representing China's shining future however blind this may be, that's the story that editors who've never been there want to see, and there's little market for anything else.]

End quote.

It was a pleasure therefore to come across a translation of a Southern Weekend report by one Zhang Jiehai (Shanghai Academy of Science, Social Sciences Academy), making much the similar point about Western research and reporting, and ridiculing Western conclusions about China's economic power and massive progress based solely on two-day visits to major cities. The whole article is available in translation on the EastSouthWestNorth blog:

http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20060107_1.htm

and the Chinese version at

http://www.nanfangdaily.com.cn/southnews/zmzg/200601050853.asp

but here are Zhang's conclusions:

'Here, I wish to solemnly tell everybody -- for any research done by a foreigner on China, you can put up a question mark first. Especially, those foreigners who come to make some short trips in several major cities in China and are greeted and shown around by Chinese people. You might as well as not listen to what they say. That is not because they are stupid, but because the situation of our nation is too special.'

Zhang is being kind here. Undoubtedly some of the reports are simply stupid, some gullible, and some at best lazy. You can make our own minds up as to in which box the Economist piece on Xin Tiandi belongs.

'Generally speaking, their error was this -- they only paid attention to the development and prosperity of Beijing and Shanghai and they don't know about the poverty and under-development of the rural villages in the central and western parts; they only pay attention to the styles of the hotel lobbies in China and they do not know how many elementary school students did not even have desks; they only pay attention to the super-purchasing power of Chinese tourists, and they do not know that Chinese tourists seldom get to go out of the country and when they do, all the relatives will ask them to buy things -- thus, they are not only spending their savings of many years but they are also spending the savings of many years of other people; they only note the trade imbalance between China and the United States, but they do not know that if we ship a planeload of clothing, we will not get an airplane back; they notice that they see stuff everywhere that is made in China, but they not know that there isn't much that is invented in China.

'I am saying all this because while looking at the mainstream of rapid development in our country, it is also necessary the grim side of the problem too. As for the comments by foreigners on China, we do not have to feel humbled and we do not have to be complacent. After all, we are the ones who understand Chinese matters best and we must rely on ourselves to solve China's problems.'

The last sentence shows interesting doublethink. There are no more unreliable sources than Chinese ones, and Zhang began by admitting that the least reliable reports came from people 'greeted and shown around by Chinese people'. The Chinese will not only mislead foreigners wherever possible, but almost their entire media output, and their education system, is entirely dedicated to misleading themselves.

Accurate information about China is almost impossible to come by, but since this is known to be the case, it only seems reasonable to expect Western media to be a little more sceptical and investigative, and not to feed us bland reproductions of Xinhua production-is-up, the-minorities-are-happy media reports, or indeed equally bland reproductions of Hong Kong property developer press releases.

On misreporting also see this earlier post:

Misrepresentation

And this:

Luckily someone else said it first

Best of 2005

2006-01-08T16:41:00.001-08:00

As we relaxed over a coffee and began to feel the pangs resulting from our first game of squash in five months, I was talking about 2005 to my partner, who was grumbling that he'd got fat while going nowhere, and at least I'd got fat (although I'm not in his league) while travelling the world, and began to think about the highlights of last year's travelling.

Antarctica

For many on my cruise (and even a little for me) visiting Antarctica had a certain trival 'complete the set' quality--the last continent remaining unvisited. I generally prefer destinations with some cultural content and some human resonance, and I'm interested in the interaction between people and their environments and the impact those environments have on their culture. Orderly farms speak to me in a way wildernesses generally don't. But the white silences of Antarctica, even if unavoidably shared with a hundred other people, and the experience of weaving over partly-frozen seas inches above waters at death-dealingly low temperatures to land on beaches occupied by thousands of penguins was memorable even to my overloaded brain, and I would happily go again. A photograph I took of abandoned water boats in heavy sleet has a memorably gloomy appeal. Anyone wanting to see for themselves should get aboard The M/S Explorer:

http://www.gapadventures.com

Something's already appeared in Canada, and there's a major in-flight feature with Rob Stimpson's photography appearing later this year. (Note, in passing, that the income for this won't actually arrive until about two years after the trip was taken.)

Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires lacks inspiring monuments or wonders of the world, but I took to this huddle of villages, to the variety of its European architecture, to its articulate and cosmopolitan people, to the huge variety of its restaurants, and to shopping for locally designed and made clothing and shoes for ridiculously cheap prices. I've something to do on this for a Canadian paper this week.

Australian sheep dog trials

Actually walking the course at the Royal Adelaide Show with the judge as he gave scores to dogs and their handlers was definitely a highlight. The competitors were clearly very pleased that someone was taking an interest in their sport, whose importance at the show has rather decreased over the years in the face of competition from the human cannon, monster trucks, and so on. I would rather have attended a small country meeting but the charm of the traditions overcame the artificiality of the environment, and the sheep dog people couldn't have been more friendly and helpful. This was also true of the owners and staff of the sheep station north of Adelaide I subsequently visited to see real sheep dogs do real work, and particularly 'backing', where the dog actually runs across the backs of the closely penned sheep, helping to separate out one at a time for shearing. Peter Fisher was good company and his photography was also brilliant, and I look forward to seeing this story run as a six or eight page feature in an airline magazine later this year.

Saint-Pierre et Miquelon

It's always a pleasure working with photographer Rob Stimpson, and although this tiny French archipelago, a mere 15km from Canada's Newfoundland, has little in the way of spectacular attractions, its sheer unlikeliness and the friendliness of its people, made it an excellent long weekend (although we spent more on food and drink than really made the visit viable in economic terms). And let's be clear, this isn't an offshoot of Francophone Canada. It's a French department, with its government appointed by Paris, using the euro, and whose residents beautiful Parisian French (and precious little English). A story about this is in Cathay Pacific's in-flight magazine this month, I believe.

Misrepresentation

2006-01-04T04:17:00.001-08:00

A few years ago I spent a brief period as Editor-in-Chief (at least, that's what my contract said, but my business cards were only allowed to say 'Chief Editor') of the English language free magazine City Weekend. This was formerly City Edition, a Beijing 'what's on' magazine, and a relatively early arrival at the time when the only other English expat-run magazine was the scurrilous (but entertaining) Beijing Scene, shortly to be closed down. It had built up a decent distribution and advertising base, and secured itself a national publishing licence, and its incompetent management was under the impression it had found itself a generous buyer in the form of the Hong Kong-based tom.com empire. In anticipation of large injections of cash, it acquired swanky new offices, state-of-the-art furniture, and several new members of staff, including me.

The ink was barely dry on my contract when the plug was pulled on the investment, which the idiots had failed to secure formally before contracting to spend vast sums themselves, suddenly throwing the whole organisation into a frantic scrabble for alternative funding. Meanwhile I put together the first edition of the nationally distributed title under its new name, its distribution now limited to Beijing and Shanghai--plans for a Guangzhou office rapidly suspended.

What brought all this back to mind was a posting on Danwei, a blog discussing Chinese media.

Danwei says of itself: 'we publish fresh information about China that you won't find anywhere else.'

But on Dec 27 the site published a piece called 'People: Jo Lusby of the Penguin Group', contributed by one Jenny Niven.

This jolly little introduction to someone who worked at City Weekend when I was there contained some surprising information:

'She arrived in China in Nanjing in 1997, where she spent her first year teaching English to ‘surprisingly well-informed’ PLA students in the southern capital. A stint as an editor on a Financial Times-backed economic database followed, opening doors to the prospects of publishing in China. Unwilling to do things by halves, Jo set up her own English language magazine in Nanjing, which although had a relatively short print run, suffered no financial losses and alerted Beijing magazine City Edition to what Jo was up to. A few weeks later, she found herself being introduced to the Beijing staff as their new editor.

'Jo stayed at the magazine for five years, overseeing its transition from City Edition to City Weekend, watching as the city’s English language publications gradually transformed from local village rags to major city listings and entertainment magazines.'

As far as I recall from descriptions at the time, the Nanjing magazine only ran to two or three editions and was completely unviable. Be that as it may, Lusby did indeed join City Weekend a short time before I did, but as a junior member of the editorial staff under an editor who had been there for quite some time. He stayed on the editorial staff when I took over (which was at times a little uncomfortable, and not a situation I handled well), but I was in charge for the first issue under the new name, and thus responsible for 'overseeing its transition from City Edition to City Weekend', not Lusby.

This first Beijing and Shanghai edition carried a cover story I wrote on the return of three bronze heads of animals, originally looted from the 'Old' Summer Palace in 1860, in which I attempted to fill out some of the history of the heads which was being ignored in the nationalistic rantings the government was causing to be printed in the Chinese press, and to mock the supine repetition of some of that nonsense in the Western press which should have known better.

The then CEO and founder of the magazine was delighted with the story, and declared that the magazine was now far and away the best written of anything published in Beijing (not exactly a highly competitive field, however, so no particular credit here).

Unfortunately, a Chinese 'journalist' (lickspittle) picked up on the story, and decided to further his career with it. To cut a long one short, the Beijing Youth Daily, a popular Beijing newspaper, published a personal attack on me, beginning on its front cover. Four further stories in a similar tone were published, and things became rather hot for City Weekend, which utterly failed to support the story it had approved, and instead volunteered to publish one of these attack pieces in translation. So I found myself going up to Yuanming Yuan to direct the photography for a cover story in which the magazine attacked its own editor. Even before this blew up I'd decided that City Weekend was not something I wanted to continue with, and not to renew my initial short-term contract, although a newly-appointed CEO, a remarkably untrustworthy individual, swore he'd 'make me an offer I couldn't refuse', whose Godfather-like overtones seemed lost on him. But after all this the offer was quietly dropped, and so was I.

The previous editor returned to the helm and behaved rather tactlessly. Following him I believe there was yet another editor still. So, to return to the Danwei story, which seems to have Lusby sliding seamlessly from obscurity in Nanjing to supervising the transition from City Edition to City Weekend 'a few weeks later', she did nothing of the kind. In fact it was months later, when she was already well-known to staff, that she even became editor, when the weak and vacillating CEO, unable to keep his word or make his mind up on anything, chose someone he no doubt perceived as weaker and less threatening than himself, and who would be unable to prevent him from interfering with editorial content (in a way he'd promised not to do, of course).

Scanning notes and copies of email from the period I'm forcefully reminded of how weak Lusby's performance at City Weekend was, and although my own failings at leadership may have contributed to that, she would slide out of any task she could, was unable to meet deadlines, had no journalistic nous whatsoever, and was completely disorganised. Had I remained at the magazine, disciplinary action would not have been far in the future.

I wrote to Danwei off the record to point out the errors in the report, and expressed surprise that such an inaccurate puff piece was being posted on the site. And now we begin to see the difference between blogs and serious media, since the reply from the person who appears to be the site's main organiser was the brush-off "Perhaps that is so. I didn't write piece." I was however invited to contribute something to the site on this topic, but I declined. I suppose I thought that the site editors might themselves want to ask some questions of their contributor, and more generally:

1. Did Jenny Niven actually do any research for the piece?

2. Is the relationship between Niven and Lusby as distant as it should be?

3. Did Niven report Lusby's biography accurately from information she was given, and if so what exactly was the source?

4. Is there evidence here that Lusby in fact distorted her biography in presenting herself to Penguin?

My reply to Danwei's offer of space to comment was:

"I don't have any particular interest in sabotaging Lusby, but I'm
disappointed to see this kind of thing in print, even if only on a
blog/website. Isn't the point (or at least one off the points) of
Danwei to bring a little clarity to the muddy world of Chinese
'journalism'? But this is just more of the same, and hardly 'fresh
information about China that you won't find anywhere else'. And
that's a shame."

A subsequent quick search of Google shows that Niven was a contributor to City Weekend's pages during Lusby's time there, and so certainly someone who should not have been writing such a laudatory piece, as Danwei should surely have checked and questioned. This is like the worst of Chinese media, and Danwei should be ashamed of itself.

I forwarded the Danwei piece to someone who had been a City Weekend insider while Lusby was editor, and received the following reply:

'I haven't believed in a just God since I was 10.'

It's sometimes joked of the Chinese media that there's nothing true except the date. In fact all commentary on China, however trivial, needs to be read with great caution. Laziness and self-interest frequently cause the contagion to spread. When it comes to China misrepresention is the norm.

Happy new still at work

2005-12-31T23:53:00.000-08:00

New Year's Eve, 11.55pm as I start to write this, and I'm still at work.

Yesterday I filed a story on visiting the sets of Sergio Leone's 'spaghetti' Westerns in the Tabernas desert of Andalucia (a little inland from Almeria). Tonight I'm working on a longer piece on touring round the vineyards of the Yarra Valley outside Melbourne. Tomorrow it will be something on Gibraltar, and on Ushuaia in Argentina. Then I have to work rapidly on the DK Beijing and Shanghai title before filing something on Quanzhou (China) on the 10th, and on Buenos Aires on the 11th.

A couple of weeks ago I was being ferried round Beijing in a Rolls-Royce, staying in suites at some of the city's very best hotels. Had I written about that at the time you would have started on about 'perfect job' again, wouldn't you?

Presently I'll have to produce articles and gazetteer entries for guide books to justify all that. And now fireworks are going off to mark the New Year. I'll spend the first two hours of it finishing the first draft of this story so I can file it tomorrow morning before starting on the other two.

Arrival-Angst

2005-12-25T10:33:00.000-08:00

One of the things I hate most about travel is the getting home, and the more I travel (the equivalent of more than four times round the world this year) the worse it gets.

Cyril Connelly had something to say about this (in The Unquiet Grave): 'Arrival-Angst is closely connected with guilt, with the dread of something terrible having happened during our absence. Death of parents. Entry of bailiffs. Flight of loved one. Sensations worse at arriving in the evening than in the morning, and much worse at Victoria or Waterloo, than at Paddington.'

I prefer Paddington, too, but I never feel Connolly's angst. Instead the sight of my current home city effortlessly produces feelings of ennui, slightly relieved by actually getting within my own four walls. The real problem comes the night of arrival, and for the next seven as I battle to readjust to local time (I'm convinced my body clock permanently fixed itself on Beijing time a few years ago.)

I wake about 1am and lie for hours hoping to fall asleep again, but with my mind too alert. I calculate that unless I get my body back into the habit of lying down at this time, the adjustment will continue to be difficult. But not only do I remain awake, but just about everything stupid I ever said or did comes back to me in full 3-D and high definition detail and wince-enducing emotion, from childhood social solecisms to embarrassing moments with girlfriends and stressful business disputes. And as I lie twitching I become more and more depressed about the pointless and trivial business of travel writing.

Eventually there seems nothing to do but get up and put this unwanted alertness to constructive use by doing some work, until as dawn finally comes I begin to wilt, and fall asleep on the living room sofa, to awake late, stiff, and muddled, and begin the cycle again, until it burns itself out after about a week.

Travel is such fun.

Vanishing Beijing

2005-12-23T13:30:00.000-08:00

At the fag end of the year, with a flurry of minor deadlines and almost no enthusiasm for meeting them, and a couple of longer pieces written in lacklustre fashion, I was waiting for publishers to come back with answers, unable to organise next year until they did, and really just not caring. I've really been wondering what I want to do. Surely there must be some less trivial and more rewarding way of spending the time.

Then at the beginning of December there came an unexpected request to take the Beijing and Shanghai sections of DK China and update and expand them into a new two-city title, and to do it very swiftly. I was rather disinterestedly mulling this over when the phone rang with an offer to write a story on Beijing nightlife for a Toronto business magazine with a very good word rate by Canadian standards. I could have written that story without leaving home, but it struck me that there was a certain synergy here, and when DK threw in an air ticket, I got moving. Ten days later I was on a plane to Beijing.

As I said to a friend in an email once I knew I was going: I'm feeling rather disconnected from Beijing. It's as if it's grown up and left home or something. Never writes, never calls.

The Peninsula Palace kindly sent a car to fetch me from the airport, and from leaving the airport the rate of change over the last three years became immediately apparant, beginning with a traffic jam on the Airport Expressway on an early Saturday evening, continuing with the complete disappearance of entire and once familiar blocks, and ending with an arrival at the hotel long before it was expected because a completely new road had been smashed through to join with Jinyu Hutong.

Temperatures were sub-zero, with a refrigerating wind from the north turning skies bright blue, and exposed facial skin bright red. Nevertheless all day every day was spent on foot updating sights, shopping, and entertainment, and creating new walking routes, or checking on the viability of others. The first day was typical: the flower market inside the northeast corner of Tian Tan was gone, the Yuting Bird and Flower Market opposite the south entrance had also gone, the Duyichu shaomai restaurant, and much more. There are always days like this with guide books, where effort leads to accuracy, but not to useful material: in this case it just led to material that should be cut--a loss of space rather than space filled.

Rush hour is now an all-day event, and having to get to dozens of scattered destinations in just a few days proved difficult, and was managed on very little sleep and a great deal of shoe leather.

An unexpected bonus was that several friends from quite separate backgrounds were in town. Firstly I had dinner at Jing with GXL, a native Beijinger who had just arrived in England in 1985 when she began to teach Mandarin privately to my then girlfriend and myself. I haven't seen or heard from her for at least 15 years, and never seen her on home territory. I also caught up with SA who had moved up from Hong Kong, with GF who had moved back from Singapore, and with the JC who had worked with me on the demented Frommer's China and Frommer's Beijing books (three enjoyably drunken nights incorporating an excellent evening re-reviewing one of my favourite Beijing restaurants). AF had also returned to Beijing, and dropped in to complain about all kinds of things for 20 minutes, and to make it clear she was more interested in seing JC than me. Then she said one quite intriguing thing, and quickly vanished before she could be asked to elaborate. In short she hasn't changed in the two years or so since I last saw her, and I really wondered why I bothered. There was also an excellent evening with GXL and her Swedish husband MS, another Sinologist, at a fifty-year-old Shanxi restaurant I really should have known about before.

For the whole week there was a continuous sense of revival of contact and complete detachment from the city.

This is actually written on the flight back from Shanghai via San Francisco, and I've twice fallen asleep at the keyboard. So more of this later.

The problems of publishing

2005-11-24T12:09:00.000-08:00

I'm feeling a little contrite. I'd decided to abandon this blog because my heart was never really in it, and without very regular contributions no blog is going to gain a readership. Was I even trying to gain a readership? I don't think so. But if no one else is going to read the blog, then what's the point? Did I perhaps think I'd give the URL to friends who from time to time wonder what corner of the planet I might be in? Somehow I never got around to that. Actually, it seems vain and pushy to suggest to anyone that they should read one's own blog.

But this year should have provided more material than any other. I've been to Argentina, Antarctica, and Uruguay; Hong Kong and China; England; Nova Scotia and Saint-Pierre et Miquelon; the Arctic (yes, top to bottom of the planet in one year, as well as round and round it); Australia; England, Spain, and Gibraltar. Not much material for all that travelling, or not here at least; but plenty in print or on its way.

Next year is a bit of a puzzle. Usually I plan six months to one year ahead, but I've been discussing with various publishers whether they might take over 'China: The Silk Routes', the first guide I ever wrote, and 'Beijing', both of which are being relinquished by Cadogan, which is largely contracting to cover solely Europe.

For years I'd been talking a US publisher, where a senior figure who had taken 'Beijing' to Beijing and raved about it, and we'd been in discussion on-and-off for some time about tackling China, with several expensive long-distance phone calls. Now I learned the rights to 'Beijing' were being returned to me, I hasted to let them know. Exchanges were slow, and replies never came when they were promised, but than that's standard for publishing. Eventually I received the following startling reply:

'I'm sorry to say that, after much discussion, we've concluded that your excellent research and writing and our particular vision and requirements for the XXXX series are not a perfect match, and that we would therefore encourage you to seek a partnership with another publisher.

'I expect you'll want to know more about this decision (or perhaps not), but in any event I really do have to run to catch my plane. I'll be back in the office on Monday the 24th, and would be happy to speak with you by telephone later that week, if you like.'

Oddly enough I feel the publisher to be fully entitled to make its own business decisions. But there was no surprise about the content of the book, which had been to hand for a couple of years. So having had my time wasted I do tend to think that someone ought out of simple courtesy to make the effort to apologise and explain why.

Meanwhile the titles are under consideration by two UK publishers. A two-hour meeting with one seemed promising, as the editor I met stressed the company's keenness to enter the China market, and having two guides brought in that would allow them to do that pretty cheaply and easily to begin with seemed to work well. A swift decision was promised. I ignored this, since no publisher makes swift decisions about anything, and with the deadline given for a response long in the past, I'll wait a few more weeks before enquiring further. But according to other rumours heard, the company has no money and despite the enthusiasm expressed, there's little or no chance of going ahead.

The other, meanwhile, is also weeks late with a response on copies mailed in. This company (whose titles are seen on shelves about as rarely as those of Cadogan) is also a few weeks late with a promised response. It is known for picking up titles abandoned by other imprints, but of course one of the reasons for this is probably that it has very little money either.

I also had a meeting with Cadogan (this is all on my most recent trip to England) since while abandoning Asia, the company had expressed a desire for a different book on China, and I went in to discuss what that might be, with three different kinds of title emerging, all of which I'd be happy to tackle. But once again we seem to be in the kind of black hole that is common with publishers: They express strong interest in a project. All further communication disappears into a black hole. I liked the new Managing Director there, though. So we'll wait and see what happens.

This is Neville-Hadley's law of publishing: A publisher's expressed interest in a project is in inverse proportion to its actual willingness or ability to carry it out.

Dorling Kindersley would be the exception. A meeting there confirmed a request for me to contribute a substantial section of a new family reference work on China, and assistance with other sections. I'd already assisted with a critical look at the contents list, and written sample sections for spreads that were taken to Frankfurt. The result from test-marketing the title with buyers there was positive, so I'm now just waiting for a firm offer with a figure attached, due sometime next month. I've worked on the recently published China guide, and this year (rather more painfully) on an update of the Top Ten Hong Kong guide, and I've found that once DK makes a decision to go with a project there's a very strict and rather frightening short-term timetable. Submission will be by April, it seems, and there'll be a great deal of work to do.

And then there were discussions with the photographer John Ferro Sims, the husband of a friend from my theatre days, who wants to contribute a China title to a series on beautiful villages and towns for a noted art book publisher. He's in negotiations with them; I supply the text and logistical planning. The publisher seems quite enthusiastic, so neither of us expects anything to happen very soon.

So very little is fixed for next year, although I've a series of submission deadlines for articles stretching right through until the autumn. I'm waiting to see which other publishing projects might actually take place. In the meantime I'm working on my own Treaty Ports book, and synopsis of which is now two years late for a New York agent. Damn all the other things that interfere.

Another glamorous night

2005-04-04T13:12:00.000-07:00

Originally I suppose I thought that this was how it would work, and I'd mainly post here while actually on the road. In fact, when I'm away I'm either too busy or I don't have decent Internet access. In China broadband is now widely available even down to three-star level, and usually free, so it's a matter of time, and disinclination to write here when I have so much else to do, which is the problem.

So why now? It's just gone 4am, and it's been a not untypical night in this small Quanzhou hotel, where a shouting match between a couple (actually, I think, a prostitute and her client, but I won't quote the language here) in the room next door erupted into the corridor several times with the room door slammed 16 times or so before I gave up counting. There were also two attempts to open the connecting door to this room, and once whatever the dispute was had been worked out, a noisy female (dragging, clattering heels) departure down a neighbouring staircase.

For the last half-hour or so, a noisy diesel engine has been running just below the window, and there's the odd bang and thud of some maintenance, or possibly loading. At what is now 4.10am the cacophony of the everyday will be starting up soon.

Just a typical night in a Chinese hotel, with the typical complete indifference to the existence of other people which characterises the daytime, too.

Ah! Finally the engine has been turned off. What next, I wonder?

Here we go again

2005-03-21T11:31:00.000-08:00

Another trip, another business lounge, another pile of things left undone that ought to have been done.

I managed to file a few stories over the last few weeks but was severely held back by the need to sort out tax matters, the paperwork for which was finally signed on Saturday afternoon. On Sunday evening I was still handing over pictures to an editor to go with a set of brief stories for syndication across Canada. On the flight I'm about to board (to Hong Kong) I'll be writing a story about Belgium, which I'll need to file as soon as I arrive.

I haven't done all the preparatory reading I need to do for the trip I'm just starting, so I'm carrying it with me, significantly adding to the weight of my luggage. Air Canada (one of the world's worst airlines but then most in North America are in line for that title) promises electrical power in each business class seat. I doubt it will deliver on this, but I must admit half of me hopes that it doesn't so that I can just sit back and relax for a change. But then, of course, I'll have to do the story when I arrive in Hong Kong when I should be running around doing Hong Kong things.

Nothing has been written, of course, on Antarctica or Argentina. Needless to say, I'll have to do that when I get back from this trip, and should be writing that up.

In short, the fun of the perfect job continues.

Aaargh!

2005-03-16T10:22:00.000-08:00

I want to write about Buenos Aires and Antarctica, but I have a backlog of other things to do, and instead since I got back I've completed stories about castles in the Ardennes, and about eating at izakaya restaurants in Tokyo, both rather rushed and uninspired in my opinion. I'd wanted to file a backlog of other stories with several different papers, not least because the other thing I've been doing over the last couple of weeks is to work out that I'm faced with a large tax bill. But there simply isn't time before I leave again next week (for Hong Kong) although there's one feature I must complete in the next few days somehow, although I only have the evenings in which to work, and sleep is rather minimal at the moment.

I've also been having exchanges with the Australian, Korean, Hong Kong, and Baltic tourism people about trips and stories, as well as completing the checking of the last set of proofs of Eyewitness China, due out later this year. Oh, and I've rattled off (which mostly means simply cutting back) a number of stories for syndication on disk to minor papers across Canada, and at least I've written briefs on Buenos Aires and Antarctica stories for one publication which wants them, but hasn't yet come back to me on what it wants exactly.

Having learned the lesson just over a year ago that despite a general lack of interest in writing on Canada I really should do more of it because it's convenient and profitable, I did accept an invitation to a launch one evening of a local tourism promotion at which I hoped to pick up some story ideas, but found almost nothing of use. Except for a pause to hear one of the dullest of speeches it was just an event for local journalists to drink for free (no stereotyping here) and gossip. Since I prefer to get on with it rather than mix there were only three people I recognised. The description of the even was very vague, but promised to be 'interactive'. The only usual conversation I had with any of the tiny number of exhibitors was with a man who does bear-watching tours in Whistler. Otherwise the whole event was a disorganised waste of tay-payers' dollars (including mine), and of the efforts of the few exhibitors, come to that.

The HKTB is irritating me a little. I've been trying to talk about stories since November or December last year, and getting very little response, although I've published stories on Hong Kong every year for the last few, and in a wide variety of different media. Now they hear I'm going to be in Hong Kong anyway, it's 'Can we have a meeting?' and 'How about doing something on ecotourism?' But I've allocated no time to Hong Kong and I'll just be passing through.

I had another of those 'you're not from the same planet of me conversations' the other day. Again, who needs to leave home to feel alienated. This was with a representative of Qantas in the U.S., and from the sound of his accent, somewhere in the deep south. Qantas web site was refusing to let me in to check points accumulated, and when I asked to be reminded of my password, refused to recognise that it even knew who I was, and advised me to call.

The first thing I was told on the phone (after layers of automation, of course) was that nothing could be done to help me over the phone if I couldn't provide the password. I wondered, since the web site wouldn't give me any help with retrieving it, what could be done about that, and I was told to write to a certain email address and explain the situation.

'Tell them the dog ate my password, for instance.'

There was a long pause before it was decided that this was funny, and I was put on hold. After a minute or two, the voice came back on the line and after asking me a few questions, told me my password.

'Not that I'm complaining,' I said, 'but why the change of heart?'

'Well; it sounded like you were getting a mite irritated.'

'I'm not irritated. I'm just European.'

Long silence.

Me: 'Well, thank you for your help. I'll go on-line now.'

'Thank you for calling Qantas. You have a nice day.'

At home, I am a tourist

2005-03-07T14:17:00.000-08:00

Link to Guardian Unlimited Travel: At home, I am a tourist

As Gwyn Topham, The Guardian's travel editor, says:

"Because the job of the travel industry is to arm visitors with preconceptions of elsewhere, so that they are transported by illusions as much as the plane."

I think there are a couple of other angles to be explored, but this brief and entertaining piece satisfactorily skewers the utter fatuity with which most leisure travel is approached.

"Tourism brooks no objective facts: the key to a successful break is to preserve and export your selective holiday view of the world, as developed by Holiday 2005 et al. What the travel industry declares a heritage centre, a must-see, a natural wonder, may well perplex those who live there. But taking different roles lets us see places in radically different ways. Me tourist, you quaint."

And if you think this is misled, try reading the LP or Frommer's guide to your home town.

Chaos

2005-03-01T08:25:00.000-08:00

I'm keen to get the Antarctic and Argentinian material down on paper (metaphorically speaking in these digital days) but I have to deal with a lot of admin instead: looking at flights to China and dealing with invitations to the Baltics and to Australia neither of which seem to be at times I have free and which also seem to clash with each other. Then I have to produce a piece on eating izakaya-style in Tokyo, and another on bande desinnée in Brussels--the comics, the murals, the museum, the statuary, the shops. So by the time I get back to the Antarctic material I'll be also trying to sort out the next trip and everything will be rushed as usual. Once again I'll arrive at my destination flustered and ill-prepared.

Back

2005-02-27T11:40:00.000-08:00

That didn't work too well.

While there was an intermittent Internet connection (for email only) from the ship, it was highly expensive, and when back in Ushuaia and Buenos Aires I had too much to do to sit in an Internet café and type.

But I've come back fizzing with energy and eager to write for the first time in a very long time. The combination of the white silences of the Antarctic and the buzzing of Buenos Aires (where I did far too much shopping) has left me full to the brim with information, impressions, and images and I want to get them down on paper before they spill. I have a backlog of other pieces to write, and I should be back in China in a few weeks, so I'll have to work fast.

At first the tour group on the ship seemed to constitute the usual argument for eugenics, but as knowledge grew there turned out to be the typical division between the dull but tolerable, the surprisingly quirky, and the entertaining, with a short list of those to be avoided at all costs: the American ladies with the completely two-dimensional world picture who thought everywhere in Europe was like anywhere else; the twenty-somethings who thought getting off with each other was something which should interest every one else; the elderly American who thought she had arrived socially when invited to a private dinner by one of the officers, and who was sure the two younger people, also invited, must be at the wrong table; the Canadian dullards who had travelled with one particular company every year for the last ten (as they would repeatedly tell anyone who would listen and indeed anyone who wouldn't) and who wouldn't accept that the ship belonged to a different company altogether; the stylish but recently divorced Canadian woman, greying yet glamorous, who wanted to make sure everyone knew how large her property on a British Columbian island was (although her husband was living there now), who seemed to think everyone else was there to dance attendance on her, and for whom it was nevertheless possible to feel sorry as she clearly no longer had a purpose in life, and was having difficulty coming to terms with no longer being in a suite but sharing a triple cabin on the lowest deck; and finally the British woman resident in Canada whose nasal accents penetrated even the thickest crowd guaranteeing that everyone knew of her narrow-mindedness (the remark "We travelled overland to BC with our children, just for one week--all the time they allowed us" spoke volumes. It was easy to imagine the children in question wishing the days to fly by.)

But this nonsense was easily swallowed up in the vast beauty of the Antarctic, and the novelty of zooming around in zodiacs and in sub-zero temperatures, skirting icebergs to land on beaches packed with penguins and their chicks.

On this I hope I'll have more to say when I've said it for publication. Note the extra smudge of red on the map above: Argentina and Uruguay (a quick day trip across the Rio del Plata). Antarctica, despite being the planet's third largest continent, doesn't appear.

Stuck in Dallas

2005-02-06T16:34:00.000-08:00

Across the USA, supposedly the most service-centred nation in the world, the concentration is entirely on the trivia of communication--the language rather than the action--but the airlines don't even seem to manage much of that. The business lounge here lacks the facilities such as free drinks of all kinds, and a decent supply of tasty food counted as standard across Europe and Asia.

A six-hour wait hasn't been too joyful. In amongst all the deep-fried stodge thinly disguised as food, I finally managed to find a piece of fish on one menu, which even came with vegetables, although those had been boiled to near liquidity.

Back in the lounge, the Superbowl (or is that two words?) spent two hours threatening to start, during which there were endless scenes of the most maudlin and grotesquely self-serving patriotism. The remarkable language of the Declaration of Independence was read out, half a sentence at a time, by a long string of people, 95% of whom were black. If one's information on the USA only came from television, one would have a completely different idea of the country than the reality. There isn't a single black person in the (well-populated) business lounge here, and only a handful in the main concourse, whether passengers or staff.

The introduction to the 'game' was heavily larded with references to military personel serving overseas (shown live from various bases, all stiff-jawed and resolute for the camera), and veterans of previous battles were trotted out (or almost carried along in some cases) for a moment of glory while the players fretted to get started. In the glorification of its military, its incorporation into everyday programming, and the constant drip drip drip of 'love our motherland' messages amounts to a manipulation of public feeling as crude as any in China. I asked out loud what all this militarism had to do with sport (not that American football has much to do with sportsmanship either) and the only reply I received was, "You're not from the U.S., are you?" When I pointed out that geographical origin didn't have much to do with the question, I was just ignored. I'm just one of the envious millions unfortunate enough not to be born in the greatest country in the world, I suppose.

When the game started, nothing happened either--I think there was something going on between the advertisements, but it was too brief to tell.

But the good side of all this is that I can't wait to get on a 12-hour flight. And that is a rarity.