Image: Gumster1

BE CONCISE

Brevity is indeed the soul of wit, especially when you are hosting your travel video.

Your online viewers have short attention spans so be concise.

Fight the compulsion to ramble on. Honestly, nobody finds you as interesting as you do. Remember that and you will do well. When filming your intro keep it at two short sentences or less.

Or if you want, cut away from the shot of you and use your speech as voice over, giving your audience something fresh to look at.

SPEAK UP

Square your shoulders, take a breathe and speak up. Deliver your lines with clarity and confidence. Even the most amateur, humble travel video host can command due attention by speaking like a seasoned pro.

ADD TO YOUR VISUAL EVIDENCE

As a host your job is to not only interact with the camera and the subject of your video but to explain the context of the visual evidence you are presenting. What don’t we see that is important or interesting? Enlighten us.

As the host we expect you to be the authority on the subject of your video. We can’t be there so we rely on you to supplement the visual evidence with your commentary.

LOOK GOOD

Frame yourself with an interesting background, but not distracting. If possible, your background should relate to the subject of your video. If you are shooting your host elements after the fact, resist the urge to film in your living room with your half folded laundry in the back ground.

Light yourself well. You probably aren’t packing lighting with you so search out a location that has great natural light. Too bright and you will be washed out, too dark and we loose you to shadows. Too dark / light screams “amateur” and is easily prevented, so double check your lighting.

Part of looking good is sounding good. Be sensitive to wind, music and crowd noise, these cacophonous distractions can ruin your on-camera presence. If you can, use a mic (starting at $20, they are cheap). If you suspect sound pollution, review your footage before you move on. Taking a few moments to watch what you just filmed marks the difference between a host who is invested in the final result and a n00b with shitty sound.

KNOW YOUR VIDEO

Knowing your video means you not only know what you want to say and capture on film, you know the story structure of your vid and where you need to add your two cents as a host.

Shooting your hosting elements during the action of your story may make sense but often you will have already shot the rest of your footage before you go to film your shots as a host. If you have already filmed, review your footage and create a rough outline for your video, penciling in shots of you hosting that add to the story and our enjoyment of your travel video.

Don’t just blindly turn on the camera and start blathering, no matter how interesting your environment is you can hardly sustain your audience without a little pre planning.

BE INTERESTING

This is a tough one. You don’t have to be stunningly gorgeous or have a massive facial scar to be interesting. The key to being interesting is being interested. Even if you are interested, if you don’t present with palpable, interested energy, your enthusiasm may not shine through. So bring your energy up two levels, slap a smile on your face and speak like you are compelled if not thrilled. Also, engage in interesting behaviors that takes you out of your comfort zone and lets the audience live vicariously through you.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

What do you think makes a good travel video host? Good looks? A sense of adventure? Willingness to try anything? Who is your favorite travel host? Describe your perfect travel host in the comments.

Altemark

It’s always been a bastard genre, of dubious utility, of uncertain reliability, generally unpleasant to sift through, practiced in a great percentage of cases by amateurs and hacks — or worse: boosters and opportunists —, and inherently quick to obsolescence. Now, finally, in the age of GPS, Wi-Fi, googlemaps and lithium-ion batteries, maybe it’s time we let it go.

Here’s the thing: my publisher wants to put together a second edition of my book. The thing has earned a certain amount of acclaim, for what it is, but has not yet made it into the hands of all four million people who each year travel through the region in question, gleaning information (or not) from who knows what combination of other sources. And so the question arises: how different should the second edition be from the first?

Is it just a matter of updating phone numbers, noting changes in ownership and menu and the like, changing marketing strategies, getting the word out more effectively, or… what?

What do travelers want these days? Is Google enough? Or some combo of Google, Wikitravel, perhaps an authoritative iPhone guide app, available for download at the eminently reasonable price of $1.99, a couple of printouts from MatadorTrips, and/or whatever interpretive signage might be happened upon along the way? Plus — what the hell — a good spy thriller or a collection of Dr. Seuss stories to listen to in the car. Why bother buying a guidebook?

If it’s just for setting hot drinks on, coasters are cheaper (and often more attractive).

Traditional book publishers, it seems, still think there’s a market for books. We just have to figure out how to make the book do what it does best, they say — and leave the rest to the newer media. “We want to structure [new books] to more accurately reflect just how they can be most effectively used in the age of the internet and GPS devices,” my publisher wrote in a recent email.

So what does a book do best?

Even back when a handy bit of last year’s beta might’ve spared you some rather momentous inconvenience— i.e. you better get out of Independence, MO, by the first of May (oh, and avoid the so-called Hastings Cutoff), or by December you’re likely to be snowed in and chewing on the twice-boiled bones of your traveling companions — even back when a hand-sketched map on the back of a linen cocktail napkin was all you had to go by, it was never much of a substitute for wide-open eyes, an ingrained feeling for north, a sturdy constitution (or a big gun), and a modicum of common sense.

Personally, I’ve found myself in a number of situations in which the AAA guide to Baja or a particular water-stained bouldering guide to Joshua Tree has proven eminently more useful in the starting of a fire than as originally intended.

Not that it wouldn’t have been useful, back in the day, to know how to make words for “is the water safe to drink” in Paiute, or “I’m so sorry I stole your melons you can have my half-starved mules in exchange no worries” in Comanche. Not that it wouldn’t have been helpful to have an opinion as to how much bacon to lay in for the journey, how much flour and how much gunpowder. Or these days, just how necessary is it, really, to winterize that rental RV?

But it’s always been the traveler’s responsibility to take the guidebook, however seasoned, as just one among many sources of information (and perhaps not the best, or most up-to-the-minute).

As a traveler who prefers to ferret things out on his own, to skip the well-paved interpretive loop and instead wander off-trail in search of the overlooked and overgrown, I can’t say I’ll much lament the passing of the genre (assuming, that is, that the rumors of its demise have not been greatly exaggerated). Give me a half-decent map, a good 19th-century explorer’s narrative, a gallon of water and maybe a headlamp for good measure, and I’ll set off across the landscape giddy into the unknown. When I get that hankering for a decent Philly cheese steak or a sixer of empanadas de pino, I’ll risk altercation and embarrassment and ask a local — long before I try to hack my way to something useful through the thickets of TripAdvisor or Yelp.

As the author of an old-fashioned printed-and-bound guidebook, though, I worry. I wonder if it may finally be time to decamp. Or (gulp) to reinvent.

Across the board, the instincts of trad publishers (and really, who am I to argue?) are to go glossier, sexier, with catchy mag-style layouts and full-color photos. They want less text, fewer individual listings (where the reader might have to sort through and make a decision from a well-honed lineup), and more authoritative top-ten round-ups, more what-to-do in 24 or 36 hours — in other words, the sort of ephemera that I, personally, flip through more for the breeze it creates on my face than for the information I might take away (and then I throw it in the recycling bin).

Jaymis / CC BY 2.0

The problem with glossy photos in a guidebook — aside from the needless redundancy, the straight representation of landscape or swimming hole or hotel facade, the real version of which I hope to see in person, for myself — is that color-printed paper is not as good for starting fires as black and white.

To quote fellow traveler and veteran freelancer Robert Earle Howells from a recent online interview: “I was always less interested in places per se than in backstories, history, legends, and people.”

For my money, this is what good travel writing works for — in whatever format, but especially that which aspires to travel with you in your handbag or your glove compartment, thus to “guide” you through new and otherwise foreign landscapes.

For me a good travel guidebook works to fill in the context of a place, to help me understand what’s at work below the surface, rather than merely to instruct me where to eat or sleep, or to provide dots for me to connect along the way.

But what do I know? I hardly ever use guidebooks. How about you?

Image: Marco Bellucci

AFTER NINE MONTHS of working with students at MatadorU, along with another 3+ years of working with contributors at Matador in general, I’ve started to recognize some of the same patterns, the same things writers are doing–or avoiding doing–over and over.

I wanted to collect some of these patterns into simple questions to ask while you’re editing and revising your writing. These questions are most relevant to travel narratives, but can also be applied to really any form of travel writing or nonfiction.

1. How is your story revealing character?

Oftentimes beginning writers use structures that only observe characters and places “from a distance.” But it’s through close up interactions–characters acting and reacting to one another, that we learn who characters are. How is your story structured, and does that structure allow characters’ hopes, dreams, motivations, and emotions to be revealed?

2. Do your descriptions of characters stay superficial, or do they reveal subtext, such as their relationships?

3. Is the way you’re describing scenes / characters / places based strictly on the way you saw them, or are you also thinking about the overall effect the descriptions have on the reader?

Does describing, for example, every detail of a character’s “traditional garment” help or hinder the way your reader accesses the story?

4. Are you seeing other characters in a way that obscures your perspective?

Is your narrator describing people in a way that is romanticizing their lives, appropriating their problems or struggle, or making assumptions based on their cultural heritage or racial identity? We explored 8 ways of seeing people that can undermine your writing.

5. Are you recognizing that places, like people, continue to evolve and change, or are you “fixing” them in time so that they seem static?

This is another common trait of marketing style language–pulling places out of their temporal context so they seem less like an “entity” and more like a “product.”

6. Are you reducing places, stories, cultures, and characters in such a way that they simply become symbols and / or props for your philosophy, story, or ideas?

7. Are there cliches?

Are you describing things with cliches instead of concrete language or correct terminology? Are you using cliched expressions to “cover” places where you simple need more information?

We created a list of cliches that we’d prefer not to ever see in travel writing again.

8. Are you being transparent about your motivations to write the story, and your material connections to those in the story or who have sponsored it?

9. Are there cliched “constructions?”

Do you use certain forms of rhetoric that suggest rather than declare or in some way exploit emotional triggers of the reader? These are so common in marketing and advertising that they often enter other forms of writing subconsciously. Here’s a list of three of these common constructions.

10. Are you using fallacious logic?

When making points, have you constructed your argument based on faulty logic?

Community Connection

For more writing tips, please see our comprehensive resources for writers.

Image: aayushgoel

THE WOMAN on Sudder Street in her yellow sari, with her little baby, with her hand outstretched, is tiny.

But she is many women.

She is waiting for me when I sneak out of Flury’s with my chocolate brownie.

Her voice rubs against my feet at night when I return home from visiting Bharat and Vinita, at Earthcare Books.

In Calcutta, the pavement speaks to you.

Where her body ends, a space begins that I leap through. Or try to. Inside the space is the border I packed without knowing it.

For a rupee or two, she will help me set it up. It is a lazy border. Completely without a philosophy. Pragmatic as toothpaste.

Actually, she falls away so easily. “No,” you say. And she is gone.

It’s dismaying. Why do I always say “No?” Even when I give her rupees, it’s always after first saying “No.”

Community Connection

Please visit our Focus Page on Travel to India for more.

Image: drew.anne.

YOU STARE at the screen and it seems to stare right back. Writer’s block comes in various forms, from simple lack of inspiration, to the fear of committing words to a page.

When I am stuck, uninspired, or just plain tired of writing I fall back on a few different methods:

1. Freewrite

Write anything. No rules, no topics, no expectations…just words. Silly words, serious words, sad, sappy words. Write a love letter, a poem, a whimsical verse …just get your fingers flying. Start with scribbling on a page or recounting your day in a private blog. Once the words start lurching from your psyche then you’re halfway to destroying writer’s block.

2. Scheduled work-time

Writing is work. Sometimes it seems driven by creative engines from outside yourself. But more often it is just hard work. Scheduling time for your work to be done is an important step. Do you have time set aside for “just writing?”

Pencil in writing on your weekly calendar. Dedicate a certain time of day to your blog/novel/article and sit down to work no matter how much you don’t want to. Go one step further and join a writing group.

3. Reading

Nothing fires me up for my own writing more than reading. I believe that time spent reading is just as important than time spent writing. Let the ideas and characters of others seep into your mind and plant seeds that will sprout in your own writing endeavors.

4. Mixed media

Take photos, listen to music or ponder brush strokes at the local art gallery. Go see a play, a slam poetry contest or hip hop show. Sketch in your journal, rent a movie and scrap book. Surround yourself with art and life. Mix up your media and inspiration will find you.

Here are a few useful online resources I found that just may help you un-stick yourself.

CREATIVITY PORTAL: Topic starters, generators, picture prompts and creativity resources for the writer

SKRIBIT: Skribit is a tool for bloggers who want help coming up with post topics. From their website: “Skribit cures writer’s block by tapping your blog’s readership for post suggestions. Once you have received a few suggestions, your readers may also follow suggestions to make sure you know exactly what topics are popular with your readers…”

WRITE TO DONE: 31 Ways to Find Inspiration for Your Writing

CREATIVE WRITING PROMPTS: 346 quick and easy writing prompts.

THE STORY STARTER: 763,591,140 creative ideas and writer prompts. Click for endless (and at times absurd) story starters.

FICTION WRITING.COM: Top 10 Tips for Overcoming Writer’s Block

WRITING FIX: “Home of Interactive Writing Prompts”

WRITER’S DIGEST: 10+ pages of writing prompts and exercises.

And finally here are a few quotes on writer’s block:

“Just write. It’s not about sitting around waiting for the muse. The people who are really good labour over what they write.”

~ Amy Ray

“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.”

~ Erich Fromm

“Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working.”

~ Pablo Picasso

“Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you. Figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.”

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Community Connection

How do you deal with writer’s block? Please let us know in the comments.

The Old Curry Orchard, Yosemite N.P. Author photo.

You’ve probably never heard of the National Parks Promotion Council. I hadn’t either, until the other day, just a few weeks before National Parks Week, when I received a press release, ostensibly from Washington D.C. (but sent from the email address of a California-based independent P.R. professional, the “Interim Executive Director”), proclaiming the formation of a “new organization to promote America’s National Parks.”

The necessity of such a thing at this particular moment in history may be worth questioning. The fact is, whether it’s the recession, fluctuations in the value of the U.S. dollar, or what Yosemite videographer Steven Bumgardner calls “the Ken Burns effect,” or who knows what combination of factors, the parks are bracing themselves for the busiest summer in the history of the system, with upwards of 300 million customers expected by the end of 2010.

More than 33 million viewers have watched at least one episode of “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea” (have you?). Who knows how many hundreds of millions more have seen the advertising in magazines, on TV, at gas stations and ATM machines nationwide.

In 2009, Yosemite alone bore the weight of nearly 3.9 million pairs of mostly sensible shoes, with a quarter of a million cars entering the park just in the month of July. This year, for the first time in more than a decade, the number of visitors may clear 4 million.

The short of it: business is booming for the handful of concessionaires who hold the contracts to rent beds and showers in the parks, and to sell burgers and pizza and cuddly, overpriced stuffed bears to the hoards.

And Ed Abbey, meanwhile, his bones somewhere in the Cabeza Prieta desert of southern Arizona, is contorting in his sleeping bag.

So again, I think we have to ask (before we can even begin to revisit Abbey’s notion of banning cars in the parks and instead giving every visitor a bicycle): do America’s National Parks really need an aggressive promotional campaign?

Kenny Karst, the ever amiable P.R. manager for DNC Parks & Resorts at Yosemite, Inc. (DNC being the exclusive concessionaire for that park and all manner of other nodes of entertainment and recreation across the globe), points out that even McDonald’s and Coca-Cola continue hard-selling their products through good times and bad.

So too our national parks, he argues, favoring a quote from his boss, Dan Jensen, C.O.O. of DNC’s operations in Yosemite, about how “Yosemite is comfort food.”

PROMOTE, v. [from the compact OED on my desk, which I can barely read (the glass is upstairs above the fireplace)]: to further the growth, development, progress, or establishment of (anything), to further, advance, encourage. To further the sale of (an article) by advertising or other modes of publicity, to publicize.

Some of which — i.e. to encourage — seems like a good idea, right? The rest maybe not so much. Or am I missing something? Are we trying to sell our national parks? Back to ourselves?

The precise goals of the NPPC, as stated:

1) “to address downward trends in park visitation” [For more than ten years the numbers had been going down: The kids, it seemed, were more into video games. The rapid-growing impoverished and underemployed segment of the population? Maybe they just needed a nudge.]

2) “to recommend promotional funding strategies, seek partnerships and craft campaigns that serve to stimulate visitor appreciation and appropriate use of the treasured landscapes and educational resources across the National Park System.” [my ital.]

Putting aside for a moment why this might be a good idea — or not — we might ask: how does this organization propose to do such thing? Well, thus: “with resources and in ways presently not available to the National Park Service.”

Appreciating Half Dome. Yosemite Local

As it happens, the National Park Service is woefully, chronically, shockingly underfunded — to the tune of $500-$750 million annually, according to the National Parks Conservation Association, with “a backlog of maintenance and preservation projects of approximately $9 billion.”

Visitor appreciation and appropriate use

From the beginning, park administrators have been saddled with the impossible task of, on the one hand, preserving these places in as pristine a state as possible, and on the other hand providing access to all citizens.

The landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, in his Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove: A Preliminary Report, 1865, argued that all improvements — and there should be many, he said: roads, bridges, cabins, signage, restaurants, the works — must be made in such a way that “should not detract from the dignity of the scene.”

Again, Edward Abbey on the “dignity of the scene” at what is now Arches National Park, as it was more than forty years ago (pardon the long citation, but it’s well written — and hilarious, in a tragic sort of way):

“Where once a few adventurous people came on weekends to camp for a night or two and enjoy a taste of the primitive and remote, you will now find serpentine streams of baroque automobiles pouring in and out, all through the spring and summer, in numbers that would have seemed fantastic when I worked there: from 3,000 to 30,000 to 300,000 per year, the “visitation,” as they call it, mounts ever upward. The little campgrounds where I used to putter around reading three-day-old newspapers full of lies and watermelon seeds have now been consolidated into one master campground that looks, during the busy season, like a suburban village: elaborate housetrailers of quilted aluminum crowd upon gigantic camper-trucks of Fiberglas and molded plastic; through their windows you will see the blue glow of television and hear the studio laughter of Los Angeles; knobby-kneed oldsters in plaid Bermudas buzz up and down the quaintly curving asphalt road on motorbikes; quarrels break out between campsite neighbors while others gather around their burning charcoal briquettes (ground campfires no longer permitted — not enough wood) to compare electric toothbrushes. Down at the beginning of the new road is the new entrance station and visitor center, where admission fees are collected and where the rangers are going quietly nuts answering the same three basic questions five hundred times a day: (1) Where’s the john? (2) How long’s it take to see this place? (3) Where’s the Coke machine?”

This new promotional organization is broad-reaching, to be sure, with a board of directors “comprised of representatives of national park cooperative and friends associations, tourism/hospitality entities, state tourism offices, gateway communities, the National Park Service (in an ex-officio capacity) and others interested in national parks,” operating with “guidance from finance, research and marketing committees comprised of nationally respected persons.” Do they all truly have the park’s (and the people’s) best interests in mind? We hope so.

As the author of a guidebook to Yosemite and Death Valley, and a forthcoming iPhone guide app, as a journalist trying to make a living writing about travel and adventure and land use in these sorts of places, I should perhaps be seeing dollar signs. As a local resident, I should be glad to think that one day my community — and my parks — might be sustained in a healthy way by more and more tourism. But I find I am wary.

Thoughts?

The author in Sagres. Photo: Isaac Dunne

I WAS HAVING ISSUES. Even Edwin could see that from the beach. Every time the dark lines of the sets approached, I could feel my heart start to palpitate. Images of wiping out and getting pummeled underwater would flicker through my mind.

As the waves passed under me, I’d think: no not this one. The next one. I swear. It was happening more frequently every day, working so hard to get to the line-up, only to choke once I got out there.

For the previous few weeks, I had been living with Edwin Salem, a well-regarded big wave surfer in Puerto Viejo de Limon on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. It would be my final destination on a six-month trip around the world.

After years devoted to being a lawyer and then a non-profit director in demanding New York City environments, I had been laid off during the previous summer. I grabbed the opportunity to do what I actually wanted for the first time in recent memory, and with very little planning, bought a one-way ticket to Copenhagen.

I was venturing into the unknown, which I knew would be difficult (but maybe helpful) for someone as alpha as me. But it was that letting-go of all my previous certainties that seemed to bring me special experiences as well as unexpected practice in surfing.

While in Denmark, I stumbled on the windy fishing village of Klitmoller, where I discovered cold waves and year-round surfers who welcomed me into their homes and community. Then, during my drive across the northern coast of Spain, I fell in love with the intersection of artful cuisine, surf culture and Belle Epoque architecture in the Basque Region, where I extended my stay just to explore the beaches from Bilbao to Biarritz.

Experiencing countries with a surfboard seemed to both connect me with locals and also immerse me in the nature of autumnal Europe. Plus, it was plain fun.

But something changed in Lisbon. Almost two months into my solo traveling, the winter holidays began to approach, reminding me of home and the life that I had left there. I was staying with a pro-surfer and friend-of-a-friend named Ash, who urged me to come out to Costa de Caparica, certain that I would find Portugal’s breaks unforgettable.

Costa de Caparica. Photo: Jules Bal

This was true. The waves at Costa were unforgiving, the heaviest and fastest beach breaks I had ever witnessed.

The water temperature felt lower than the North Sea’s in Denmark. Gone was the turquoise peeling of the Bay of Biscay in San Sebastian. In its stead were the deep navies and grays of a part of the Atlantic that never felt the warm push of the Gulf Stream.

While I sat shivering in those late-November line-ups with Ash and his friends, the skies would split in orange and blue halves earlier each night. The shadowed bars of the waves would march towards me and I began to feel pressure in a way that I never had before. It was the same type of performance anxiety that used to give me insomnia during law school, but this time I couldn’t seem to meet expectations in the same way.

As the steep, hollow waves would roll in, I would scramble to get out of their way, sometimes getting tossed around. For every wave I would catch (and often fall off of), I pulled out of three or four.

My halfhearted attempts were met with halfhearted wipeouts. I felt wimpier every day, and at the end of each session, I’d pile myself into Ash’s backseat in silent frustration. We would drive without speaking for a while before he’d gently say that I was strong enough but that I had a commitment problem.

I had to agree, but I couldn’t pinpoint my issue. In so many aspects of my life, this trip included, I had thought of myself as adventurous and decisive. All of sudden I was crippled with fear and questioned whether I even knew what I was doing, and, more importantly, whether I was ever as brave as I had thought.

The author in Sagres. Photo: Isaac Dunne

When the humbling and cold experiences of Lisbon, followed by the coastal town of Sagres, were done, I decided to chalk it all up to Portugal—maybe surfing anywhere in that country was just not for me.

I felt guilty and secretly grateful that I didn’t have to deal with any of these questions until I got to the mellow breaks of Australia’s Gold Coast in January, where I was meeting my best friend. I could just ignore it and settle into my comfort zone without anyone calling me out or challenging me.

When I returned to New York, however, I was instantly thrust back into the hectic pace of the City as well as disapproving conversations with my family about my abandonment of them and my legal career. While some friends seemed inspired by my tales, others had become distant. I realized the gravity of the choices I had made during the past Fall—leaving behind a lucrative career and loving boyfriend—to be, I admit, selfish.

I carried the weight of those decisions to Costa Rica, and right into the home of someone whose very passion it was to challenge himself. After observing me at Playa Cocles, Edwin told me that he could see fear in my eyes, like I always wanted to bail. He suggested that maybe it was something personal that was holding me back and that I would need to confront it first on land and then in the water.

I told him he was right before bursting into tears, crying more deeply than I had in months. His comment made me admit (to both of us) that I had made a real gamble in the process of breaking free from my unsatisfying trajectory.

Of course, the gamble had been valuable: I was happier and healthier than I had been in New York, made new friends and rediscovered old ones, and, at the very least, had gained confidence in my writing.

But traveling also brought with it big risks—mental, physical and now aquatic. I had always met my academic and athletic challenges head-on, but in this case, I had hit a wall that seemed insurmountable on so many different levels.

Perhaps it was that I had been paddling out into greater uncertainty with every last-minute flight I took as I traversed the globe. Making all those big drops into the unfamiliar had been exhilarating on one hand but had also resulted in a lot of personal turmoil. I looked up Edwin through my tears and shrugged. “I’m just really tired.”

He responded, “Forging your individuality is a painful process. It’s scary and hurtful when those you care about question you and what you’re doing. Surfing is about the same thing. You have set aside your fears and grapple with what’s in front of you.”

Again, he was right. Traveling, and doing it alone, has and will always be net-positive experience for me—as will surfing. Both are fun and rewarding, if allowed, and both involve taking chances, taking some poundings and coping.

I nodded at him then wiped my face against a bare arm, promising out loud that I would work on it. I continue to go out on a daily basis since then. And although the dark lines and heavy lip of the waves are rarely less punishing at Cocles, when I swear I’ll catch the next wave, I have started to mean it.

Community Connection

Please check out some of Matador’s surf stories from Spencer Klein, Another End of the Road, and When Maximo was our Captain.

Image: Chris Radcliff

Call for TBEX Keynote Pieces

Over the weekend we passed this link around the team alot: Call for 2010 TBEX Keynote. TBEX founder Kim Mance explains:

You do not need to attend TBEX ’10 to submit work for inclusion in the Community Keynote (though we’d love to see you). Simply review the list below and submit one of your favorite blog posts that fits into a specific category. All work must be original, written by you, and published on your blog (whether old or new). There is no compensation for entries chosen (beyond TBEX fame and a link), and author retains their own copyright. One submission per person, only!

.

The “Internet” as Nobel Prize candidate

In case you haven’t heard already, in a bit of anthropomorphism that could only occur in postmodern society, the “internet” is “in the running” for a Nobel Prize.

Tom Gates’ actual email: notes from SXSW

[Tom Gates emailed this to the team this morning. Links added for reference]

Just back from SXSW and some pool party where I apparently drooled over somebody who was on The Hills (embarrassing):

1) Hal and wife = SO ANNOYING to meet somebody that compatible, nice, refreshing and wonderful. Only reminds me of what I’ve yet to have done in the world. If Kate would be a man, I might be able to start on a relationship…
2) Lindi = “How, like, do we crash this Rachel Ray party”? Then, 30 seconds later, we crashed it.
3) The Music Industry is so hilariously fucked that it is amazing to be a part of this team. Publishing may be crazed, the Travel World may be zonked but…when you spend a week with musicians sucking teets for attention, you realize just how square we all have it. I spoke with so many people who are supposed to be experts in so many fields of the music world…we have them surrounded. Everyone at Matador: PLEASE, please remember that we have it in the bag. We’re not right about everything but…eh. You guys. I’m not much for how to express the “stoke” thing but…you don’t know how lucky we are. To work for a group where everyone can voice their opinion, where genuinely important decisions can be made in three email blasts…at some point I hope to form a coherent email about all of this but this week I was again reminded by how much we are unique, not only in the travel world but in THE WORLD.
4) Matador needs to address the concept of Mancook. Paul?

Have a great week everybody.

Photos courtesy of the Author.

[Editor's Note: The following story is taken direct and unedited from the journal of my longtime friend Segundo. After the earthquake in Haiti, he, along with several of his friends--all with medical and rescue training, spent 10 days volunteering north of Port au Prince. I debated asking Julie Schwietert to run this as a First Person Dispatch at Matador Change--as "people making a difference" is the central theme of that series. But the way these notes kept returning to the theme of "journey" made me publish them here. -DM]

2-9-2010

On a plane to Miami. Spent yesterday packing with a mid-day ski to allow the mind a rest from too much thinking. It was good to be in the quiet, the snow, amidst the pines. Japhy helped me load up the duffel bags with medical supplies in the eve. I think it was really important for him to take part in a process that has been emotionally charged yet kept under wrap for the 3 of us.

2-10-2010

Spent the day arranging travel for tomorrow and taking it easy. I think we are all a bit nervous. We really are venturing into the unknown. We will take a bus tomorrow at 7am that supposedly will have us arrive in Petion-ville (a suburb of Port-Au-Prince) around 2pm. From there we hope to find transportation for the 9 of us and our 17 bags full of supplies. There is a lot of concern about losing things along the way.

2-11-2010

St. Mark Haiti— today has truly been surreal! Rap music currently blares and the sound of continual traffic and horns completely dominate the air and it’s almost midnight. Sweat sticks to my body along with dust, smog and engine fumes.

I am inside my tent which is pitched on concrete behind concrete walls—it’s been a 19 hour day beginning on the streets of Santo Domingo waiting for our ride to the bus station at 5:30am. Next to our hostel is a museum dedicated to the Revolutionaries who risked and lost their lives to end the brutal dictatorship of Trujillo. Large portraits on the walls outside the museum of Minerva, Patria and Maria Teresa– “Las Mariposas”– revolutionary sisters who gave their lives to end tyranny. For justice. There is another haunting photo of a revolutionary in an electric chair—his eyes are bulging in terror. He was to be an example of those who tried to defy Trujillo. Their incredible bravery gives me courage.

8 hours into our journey and I am trying to navigate myself through the absolute chaos of the Dominican/Haitian border crossing. Thousands trying to leave in a swirl of dust, sun and fumes—like a scene from mad max or something. With the help of a savvy Haitian women we are stamped out of the DR and into Haiti as a team of Medicos.

There was something unnerving about walking around that chaotic scene with 9 passports and hundreds of dollars in my pocket. It was good to have a member of the team along to watch my back.

2 hours later we begin to see signs of collapsed buildings and thousands upon thousands in the streets—-walking, sitting, camped out and just staring at our bus as we drove by. Never have I seen such a concentration of people and vehicles in one area—it’s all a strange dream. Piles of rubble, collapsed buildings, tent cities, blaring horns, vehicles overflowing with people, aid trucks, police, military, motorcycles, bikes—yet there seems to be some sort of flow to this madness. People who have always dealt with the chaotic element.

I’m not really sure how to explain the intensity of landing in an unfamiliar city that is in complete crisis with seventeen bags of supplies and no knowledge of the language or any “real plan” other than you must take a complete leap of faith—which is not to say be naive—just that things will work themselves out in the end. You enter a disaster area you enter chaos! To be swarmed by folks just trying to put food in their and their families’ bellies anyway they can—hopefully by taking this group to where they need to arrive—is a nerve rattling experience. It is beyond description.

You have to believe in the goodness of people I feel in order to overcome the stress of being completely out of your element. You make your choice—and pray that the man who told you that the ones you have chosen will slit your throat and rob you the minute you leave the bus station—has only said that because he lost the opportunity to take this group of extranjeros to their destination.

And so with the help of a young “soon to be Haitian Doctor”(currently finishing his studies through the Cuban free medical school program) I met on our bus ride, we negotiate 400 US dollars for 2 vehicles to drive us and our 17 bags north to St. Mark.

The journey through Port-Au-Prince to St Mark was truly indescribable. I have no words—did I dream the last 3 hours? Did I really see, feel and experience the awesomeness of a city brought to the ground by Earths power! An exodus of people—thousands just walking north,east and south. There were always people walking no matter how far we drove. And the traffic was beyond the scope of reality. I’m not sure it was real.

Yet somehow, 4 hours later—after a nerve racking separation of our 2 vehicles, a complete loss of communication with half our team,after a tire rotation among the rubble on a side walk in the middle of the city, we made it the maybe 60 miles to St. Mark. My head so full I needed Excedrin to stop the pounding. And now 19 hours after waking up I will try to close my eyes and remember the smiles I saw throughout our journey of a resilient people who have known mostly suffering and poverty—yet exude a solidarity and strength seldom seen to me before.

2-12-2010

St. Nicholas Hospital—Shama is the name of the little six year old girl whose hand I held as she screamed in pain while they prepped her for surgery. My first face to face encounter with suffering in Haiti.

Somehow she was dragged under a truck that had hit her home and killed 2 others. She is the only one who survived. The driver was never caught—he kept on driving leaving her little body to die. She lost the majority of skin on her belly and some on her thighs. She was laying on a gurney in the pre-op room and I walked in caressed her little hand and looked into her dark eyes—held back my tears and smiled. She started to play with my arm hairs which seemed to calm her down.

I was asked to go into surgery and help in any way I could. The doctors skin grafted from her bum and the back of her thighs. Then sewed the skin onto her belly and legs. I’m not sure how long we were in the operating room—hours! When they were finished she was wrapped from her knees to her chest in gauze and bandages.

The Doctors said she would be in a world of hurt once the anesthesia wore off. I never thought that as an EMT, I would find myself learning the ropes of a surgical nurse assisting Doctors while they performed surgeries in what was described to me as “primitive” at best. I felt lucky to have a nurse feel compelled to show me “the ropes.” To teach as she had once been taught.

Today I saw wounds that I never would have imagined had I not seen them with my own eyes. I spent the entire day in the OR room, eyes wide helping in any way that was needed. This is what our team was doing throughout the hospital. Doing things we never would have imagined—but just jumping right in.

The suffering is incredible yet I still here laughter. It has been one month to the day since the Earthquake. “Misery has been Haiti’s companion for 200 years” is what Odson our host said to us last night. “Yet we still know how to laugh cause we are a strong people.”

2-13-2010

Another day in the O.R. For me. I couldn’t do it! I don’t really know how i’m doing it right now! To humble myself? To face fear? I am 100% out of my element—out of my comfort zone and am not sure how it will all process into my core just yet. I’m just trying to make it through each day as courageously as possible. To endure—like the people of this country have been doing for 500 years—like little Shama—like the young Haitian Dr.s who are doing their year of service after receiving a free education in Cuba.

2-14-2010

Hallmark is not making any money in Haiti today. This is survival here. The emergency department is completely crazy! People just pouring in—wounded–gaped open – its as if there is a perpetual cycle of trauma here. The Surgical team left yesterday and we are left to fend for ourselves for the next 4 days. We will change and clean out bandages Try to prevent any further infection. The post surgery infection rate has been near 100%. Each ward is filled to the brim with patients and their families. People are sleeping on floors. Families taking care of their needs—feeding,cleaning,changing clothes and sheets……helping others as well—a true coming together.

It’s feeling more overwhelming (if that’s possible) without the Boston team here. I think our team is doing exceptionally well but it was real nice to have the guidance of seasoned Doctors and nurses. Today I chose to spend more time focusing on Physical Therapy with Angeline. 11 years old with a broken femur and beautiful smile. More time on children than on gaping wounds and gnarly infections. That is not to say wounds were avoided—impossible!

Today while working with Angeline some young translators asked me to come and help with someone in the Emergency department. I arrived to find a large women with her shirt pulled up and her eyes closed. The family asked if there was something I could do. I checked her pulse—she was dead! They asked me to check again on her other side. I did—nothing….. I pulled down her shirt and told them i was sorry. There was nothing that could be done. They looked at me in a state of shock. I put a hand on someones shoulder and apologized again. Death was a big reality here. The morgue I hear was overflowing.

This morning while walking down the street towards the hospital a man stopped me and asked if I could take his blood pressure. I obliged and quickly a line formed in the street. For the next half hour Aron and I began taking blood pressures and heart rates for folks while Odson translated.

This place is continual noise—non-stop! Horns, voices, music, vehicles, mopeds, roosters, radios, feet continually moving, babies crying, kids screaming—somehow I manage to fall asleep and each time I stir in the middle of the night the noise is still there. Maybe there is a lull while I’m dreaming dreams I can’t remember. We are in a fish bowl here. 9 Americans who come from complete privilege. Something different to take the mind off the reality of their situation. A simple Bon Jour or Bon swa will bring a smile that will feel real good.

2-15-2010

Shama is beginning to have a systemic infection. We changed her bandages today and thank-God for narcotics—for the ability of Stacey on our team. She screamed quite a bit until the sedation started to kick in. Her goofiness towards the end of us working on her was enuff to make me laugh—so as not to cry.

As a team I felt we rocked today! We got done what needed to be done. What would have happened had we not been here to follow up on all the surgeries? What is to happen in the long run? How does this level of care, transfer over? I have no idea! What is happening, what has been happening, what will continue to happen is beyond overwhelming.

All day we worked on Earthquake victims and their wounds. Another woman died today. And I think it was for the best, yet who the hell am I to even think that? As I watched her family running around and screaming, wailing, throwing themselves to the ground, convulsing. Grieving for the last 500 years of sorrow. Somehow I feel that that is the gift of death here. To allow these incredibly resilient people to fully grieve for all they have had to endure and will continue to. This is a country that knows mourning.

I can barely keep my eyes open despite the chaos of noise around me. I think I will just have to plow through cause stopping might give me to much time to think about the enormity of this situation.

2-16-2010

Another day of wounds and screaming. beginning to feel less chaotic—are we getting used to this madness? We have been going all day non-stop for the past five. The last three have been just us working with the Haitian staff. I have become somewhat numb to the awesomeness of the wounds we are seeing.

The surgeons arrived this afternoon—and we are feeling relieved that these extreme trauma cases will be handled by Doctors. We are thinking of heading to the outlying communities.

Shama is febrile today—she needs more care than can be offered here. Angeline continues to improve. I am toast!

2-17-2010

The new team helped us clean up Shama today—she was a mess of urine and feces. We re bandaged her and left a bigger opening in her bandages to make it easier for her family to clean her. I spent the rest of the day helping orientate the new team to the way the O.R. works here. Nothing like the states as I could tell by their expressions. I was marveling to myself that here I am “showing the ropes” to experienced surgeons. They were thankful and I felt good “to teach as I had been taught.”

I was in the O.R. for an attempt at a skin graph when the electricity went out again. They put a plate into a young girls arm who had broken both bones in the earthquake and finished the day with a re-amputation of a leg wound that had become completely infected.—-to tired to write—lots of blood today

3:30 am if it wasn’t for some group snoring it would almost be quiet. Someone somewhere close by has a radio playing—i can actually hear the sound of insects humming. The road is actually quiet of vehicles, horns and motorcycles. I can hear roosters crowing all over the place. It turned out to be a long day yesterday with really no break. I missed working with Angeline and hope to see her today. An eleven year old smile goes a long way in this crazy place. I’m not really sure I should be in the O.R. today—but we will see what the universe has in store.

2-18-2010

It was only a 5 hour day because we left around 1ish. It got a bit hectic with the St. Louis team and I think the Haitian staff had it. I feel it was for the best because we are toast—spent. I think they need to integrate a bit more and use this as a teaching opportunity for the local staff.

7 days non-stop! it’s hard to believe the work we have been doing. Today I was asked to pack an open amputation! Solo! Just stuff gauze into that fish mouth—wet to dry OK” I’m so glad Leah showed up to land a hand.

So in the last week I have been in on operations, amputations, skin grafts, plates put into arms and legs, cleaned wounds as big as craters, done Physical therapy, watched people die and families mourn, heard women, men and children screaming in pain and have just plodded along like I am in some waking dream. Wake, eat, head to the hospital, come home, wash-off the day, wash my scrubs, eat, sleep, get up and do it again.

2-19-2010

7 am—the heat is in full force—been up off and on since 3:30 am. Sleep has become quite challenging-the first few nights it was easy to just pass out. Now i find myself waking—mind spinning and unable to fully fall back asleep. I’ve been watching two little girls playing happily in their dirt/rock yard. A mother hen with her chicks in tow following behind peeping and looking for anything amidst the piles of trash. The children continue to play tag. Every now and then one of them stops to love on the scrawny little puppy wagging its tail as they chase each other. Buckets of water are hauled in for baths.

I think of Japhy—think of kids in the U.S.–think of how simple we tried to keep it—how hard it gets with each passing year to keep it that way with the suffocating influence of modern society. Here among all this poverty and tragedy to see children happy—joyful, is humbling.

I’m realizing the only time I have really felt afraid for my life has been in vehicles driving on these chaotic roads. No longer do I have the carefree attitude that I had while hitch-hiking during my Peace Corps years. Here it feels as if every corner we round is a close call.

We headed out to the country today—to the village where Odson grew up. We drove a battered pot-hole filled road to a dirt one and in about an hour arrived to a cluster of mud and stone huts in the blistering heat and dust. It wasn’t long b/f we were completely surrounded. Wide eyes of all ages staring at the group of gringos before them. It was good to watch as Odson reunited with his 80 something year old grandmother, his nieces and nephews and cousins. He announced that we would be checking blood pressures and tending to wounds. Word spread fast and soon we were surrounded by hundreds of folks from the surrounding areas.

I never felt so closed in—I had to ask a man who spoke Spanish and was helping me translate—to please ask the people to allow me a little space. They would back up a bit and before I even finished with one person I would be completely enveloped in people. To feel this intensity while a language I don’t understand is being spoken emotionally around me as people wrestle to be the next in line is an experience in and of itself. For the next 3 hours or so we checked blood pressures, cleaned wounds and consulted people who had various health concerns.

In the EMS world the phrase “sudden onset” is used to explain how one might be feeling. And that is exactly how I felt has a dizziness came over me and the feeling as if an all out brawl was beginning in my stomach. I was done and only wanted to escape the constant eyes. I was relieved to finally head out and tried my hardest not to lose it on the bumpy ride back. At one point I heard Leah scream as we got awfully close to a large truck heading straight for us. Back at the compound I got quite sick. It is good to be traveling with paramedics and a nurse as 2 bags of I.V. and some meds had me feeling much better. I crashed early for another fitful night of sleep.

2-20-2010

It is hard to believe it was our last day at the hospital. The St. Louis team was definitely glad to see us back and it seems as if they have gotten into a routine of their own. I went to check on Shama and Angeline and was pleasantly surprised to see Shama sitting up and smiling with her Aunt. It seems as if she is on the road to recovery. I only pray that there is follow up on her dressing changes after the St. Louis team leaves, which is only a day after us.

I changed out Angeline’s Ace bandage and cleaned over her wound, the stitches have been removed and her leg is healing nicely. We did a loop around the ward on her crutches and some more leg stretches.

Afterwards I went back to the pre-surgery room and spent the rest of my time helping with patient care as they were being sedated in order to take of bandages and clean out wounds. Our time to leave had arrived and we made our rounds saying good bye t the many people we had formed bonds with—translators, doctors, nurses and most of all the patients.

It was truly bittersweet in that I am ready to be home—I miss my family and community—I am tired! Yet I know that this is only the beginning of a very long road for the Haitian people. A journey they have been on long before the earthquake occurred. It has been and honor for me to walk a small part of this journey with them—they truly are a people that embody courage and perseverance and they do it with grace and humility.

2-21-2010

Last night we played music and sang and danced and laughed with Odson and his family and community. We spent the late afternoon swimming in the beautiful Caribbean waters of Haiti—invited by a Haitian Doctor and his wife. And it was glorious! A perfect way to end an incredibly intense 10 days. To sing and dance—to laugh with with the people…….

We spent 11 hours on a bus driving back to Santo Domingo. We skirted around Port Au Prince and all sat staring out our windows looking at buildings that once were—tent cities, lost in our own thoughts. Horns continue to blare the air thick with dust and exhaust—people everywhere. I know we all leave Haiti changed—how could we not? I look forward to the quiet of 9000 feet. Of pine forests and aspen meadows. To the voices and feel of my family. Of some time to reflect on what has been an incredible journey .

Community Connection

For a perspective on how Matador’s Julie Schwietert organized a response to the earthquake, please read Organizing Matador’s Haiti relief effort.

THIS IS basically an open question for Matador community members, as well as prospective members, including bloggers, writers, filmmakers, and photographers.

Our current terms of service provide copyright protection to anyone who posts content to Matador. This basically means that once you post something at Matador it’s illegal for someone else to re-post, reprint, or in any other way re-publish your work outside of Matador (although you as the author are free to republish it anywhere you want).

This policy, however, goes against a philosophy we believe in, mainly that online publishing and the communities that support online publishing should be based on transparency and set up in such a way as to, in CC’s words, “increase sharing and improve collaboration.”

The upside to having your content available via CC is that other blogs and websites would be able to republish your work, providing you with more links and an increased footprint on the web.

Our fear however, is that writers, photographers, and others who do not want their content to be shared, would not continue to participate actively in our community.

With all of this in mind, please take a second to help us know what you think:

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Thanks for taking the time to let us know your thoughts. We invite you to further explain (if necessary) your ideas in the comments below.

Sara B. May, “After the Storm (with TTV framing props to seriykotik1970 on flickr)”

I’d snuck into Los Angeles from the west, over the water, in a twin engine turboprop piloted by professional madmen. They’d found a window in the storm and flown right through it. LAX looked like Costa Rica in the green season: standing water on the runways, weeds iridescent and blooming along the fence, air all black and gold, light coming in sideways under the sky.

There was a yacht beached between the breakwater and the airport, its starboard gunwale dug into the sand less than a mile from the marina, its mainsail still luffing off an abandoned port tack. Later, I would learn that the wreck had been there since some previous tempest, left as if to warn all foolhardy captains who would set out into weather.

Sara B. May

I’d spent too many long hours, years ago, running solo up the channel from Long Beach in fog thick as paste. I’d crossed the shipping lanes blind, no instruments, no GPS, nothing but the compass on the wheel to steer by — and the angle of the swell sloshing across the bow.

I’d motor for a few minutes, then cut it and drift, listening for the breakers off Point Vicente, or a lonely bellbuoy, or the chop of an inbound oil tanker set to run me over. Ultimately, it was the whine of jet engines coming into LAX that brought me home.

I’ve had enough black nights in rolling seas for my little lifetime. I’d be just fine with never again having to beat my way down a coastline in a gale, or to wrestle with the bowline on an errant skiff in a landscape of fifteen-foot combers.

But when the advisories go out, when the chairlifts shut down because of wind, and the chain laws go into effect, I still want nothing more than to suit up appropriately and get out into it.

I was on a simple mission to retrieve a car. It was my wife’s car, the family car, the one my boys call “Blue,” the one with the bad tires, the failing heater fan, the archeology of plastic animals, pistachio shells, and cheerios beneath the seats. The one with the leaky windshield, the duct-taped rear window, the occasional spoon-in-the-garbage-disposal noise from beneath the hood (except when we take it into the shop for diagnosis).

I found the thing right where I’d left it, beneath a sagging, overgrown arbor of bougainvillea. I shoveled the wet leaves and debris from the windows and drove to the beach. The city was quiet, battered, bracing for the next round.

Out at the sharp end of the Venice Pier I drank a bottle of wine with an old friend. We held the edge of North America all to ourselves, the far-from-peaceful Pacific Ocean roiling beneath us, the swell rising, gray fading into dark, the promise of something big coming in.

We quickly overcame our sense of propriety, rolled a twenty dollar bill (or was it a ten?) into the empty bottle, corked it, hurled it out beyond the surf. One day the earth would dry out again and some scavenger or city employee would come upon yet another piece of trash on the beach.

Was there something grand and momentous we could say to that person from our great vantage in the past? Not that we could think of. A simple greeting seemed sufficient, and an exhortation to — why not? — spend it all in one place.

The storm flipped SUV’s and lifted boats onto the beach, NASA

By the time I finally got on the road the next day, having spent the morning gaping at the epic swell, stocking up at Trader Joe’s, wading across ponds to and from the lunch buffet at Tandoor-India, the next wave was upon us.

A full-on winter storm warning was back in effect all across the Western United States. Interstate 5 was closed at Castaic because of heavy snow and whiteout conditions on the Grapevine. 395 was barricaded north of 203.

From the radio came warnings of dangerous water spouts as far inland as downtown, of power outages across the city, of imminent debris slides along the burned-out scarp of the San Gabriels. Animal shelters were flooded. Planes were being struck by lightning.

The advice was simple: batten the hatches, hunker down, do not go outdoors, do not travel.

All I was lacking, I figured, were my snowboots (which in my haste I’d left at home) and a roll of duct tape. Otherwise I was good to go.

Here’s what I posted on my Facebook Page, on my way out the door, quoting in caps from the NOAA weather advisory:

“Waves hitting 20 feet at El Porto. Heading back upriver now into a PROLONGED PERIOD OF HEAVY SNOW AND GUSTY WINDS…CREATING VERY DANGEROUS TRAVEL… in a car with bald summer tires, a bizarre sound coming out of the engine, and a rear window that’s taped shut. have chains, blankets, iPod and red bull. should be exciting.”

The comments, which I didn’t see until much later that night, after finally digging three feet of snow out of my driveway and pulling that godblessed old vehicle into the garage, were mixed:

“Danger. Keep clear of this person.”

“good luck!”

“Sounds stupid if you ask me.”

“Adventure!”

“I agree with Terry. Find a place to hunker down.”

“Keep rubber side down.”

Most of John Muir’s writings are far too mawkish for my taste. But the man knew how to find deep adventure in his backyard. “[W]hen the storm began to sound,” he once wrote of a fast-rising wind event in 1874, “I lost no time in pushing out into the woods to enjoy it.”

Not content to enjoy the spectacle from the ground, the scraggly naturalist climbed to the top of an old Doug Fir, a hundred feet up into the sheering sky, and for hours thrilled at the violent buffeting of the storm, tossing about “like a bobo-link on a reed.”

Whitewater tumbled down the highway in Soledad Canyon. I boated my way upward, against the current, counting wrecks along the road. The tires planed nicely.

At the old railroad town of Mojave, self-proclaimed “Gateway to Space,” slush came from the sky. The ceiling was low and black, as if pressing down on the roof of the car, but visibility was perfect.

Up into the Owens Basin the world was empty, save for me and the glistening road, the occasional Joshua tree casting a long shadow in the vivid orange light.

At 3:30 I got a call from my wife, in Mammoth. She’d managed to get the kids from school and was plowing over to a friend’s house in 4-wheel low. “Stay somewhere,” she said. “It’s insane.”

Past Coso Junction the rear window slipped free its sodden duct tape bonds. The air came in fresh and wet and cold. I found a pair of my youngest boy’s socks, stuffed them between the glass and the doorframe to hold the window in place.

In Bishop the snow was coming down in fist-sized flakes. I stopped at Kmart, bought a cheap pair of workboots and a roll of duct tape. Beneath a street lamp I wrestled snowchains onto the tires, then set off for the long crawl up the grade.

The last mile to the house is always the trickiest. I came up around the back way, in untracked powder deep as the car’s front bumper. A section of chain blew just below the entrance to Timber Ridge. Thwack, thwack, thwack it went against the wheel well.

But I made the crest, floated the last switchback home, the last downhill stretch like spreading frosting on a cake. I promised the next day to go out only on skis.

Photo: Ignacio Conejo

CHEFCHAOUEN: Blue-washed buildings and the Rif mountains of Northern Morocco. This is a place of tranquility. Founded in 1471, Chefchaouen was once a place of refuge for Moorish exiles from Spain and is now a growing travelers’ hub.

I’ve always wanted to blog from this place, the Berber heartland, just to experience this landscape and culture.

Between blog posts I imagine there would be hikes to neighboring villages and swims in the Mediterranean.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

Where do you want to blog from before you die? Let us know in the comments.

Photo: The Wandering Angel

THE BOY gets up to groan open the hotel gate for me. The same boy works at every hotel I ever stayed at in India. Thin, brown, silent, his smile besieged by a muscular frown.

I lean into the 5:30 darkness of a Calcutta morning. A rickshaw driver says, “Mother House.” A second rickshaw driver says, “Mother House.” I think of two clocks announcing the hour.

Inside their metal pull bars on Sudder Street, they want to take me to Mother Teresa’s Missionary Sisters of Charity House. My Jewish face, nose pointing towards leveled ghettos, is no impediment.

My face is linked to a pocket of warm rupees. Their empty bellies are beginning to turn in my pocket. Mother Teresa and the goddess Kali are the two female power spots of this city. The face of the old nun looks down at you from rotting walls, restaurants, the entrance to her home for the dying by the Kali Temple in Kalighat.

I once watched as some visiting American priests rolled out of their taxi, bodies low to the ground, running as if they had come under rocket fire. They were spooked by the mob of Hindu pilgrims with their blood-red flowers for Kali.

I will sometimes stand by the Howrah Bridge and notice how quickly every spare inch of space gets covered with people. I am sure if I don’t move fast enough, I will drown beneath Indian footsteps. In my mind, I write the lead for The Telegraph: Elderly journalist trampled to death. He was just too slow.

Which brings me back to 5:30AM outside the Diplomat Hotel. Between travel shops and biscuit and drink shops, shuttered, there is empty space. A phenomena as amazing as a Calcutta snowfall. Light-headed, I visit the awful plaster bust of Tagore. It seems he wrote some of his poetry at number 10 Sudder, my address.

The rickshaw drivers wait like well-mannered ghosts for me to finish up with Tagore. Then, maybe, I will be ready to rouse the nuns at Mother House from their chaste beds.

Community Connection

For more on India, please see a recent photo essay on Holi, the Festival of Colors.

Cover of the same travel journal I’ve had since 5/9/08. Address on front: Rauli 596 entre argomedo y santa isabela, my friend Gustavo’s old apartment in Santiago, and the first place we stayed after coming to South America almost 2 years later.

I DON’T KNOW how much of an audience there is for this, but if I could I’d just publish excerpts and pages from people’s travel notebooks here every day. On certain levels that would be my ultimate vision for the Traveler’s Notebook. I have several reasons for this, but really they’re all just extensions of a need for transparency in writing about travel and place. I feel like people’s raw journals reveal perceptions and truths that oftentimes get obscured or diluted when they go to “flesh them out” into an article. I think this has to do both with people’s expectations as far as what seems “publishable,” as well as fear about letting people know what they really think.

The Longest Running Travel Notebook I’ve Ever Had

Below are various excerpts from a journal that has particular meaning for me. I started it in May of 2008 when we lived in Seattle. The very first entry was written at Elwha River campground after the first night of camping with my daughter Layla. I later remixed it into a blog at Matador.

Since then I’ve filled other journals, but for some reason keep coming back to this one, using it for everything: cut lists for carpentry projects, telephone numbers, directions to surf spots, maps of rivers, little notes of what people say, sketches of ideas for cabins, Layla’s crayon scribbles. I let it all mix together and don’t really worry about it. This is how I work:

Colorado (War, 9,200 ft.) by the numbers

# of days spent – 30
# of days snowboarded (in July) – 3
# of hitchhikers picked up along peak to peak Hwy – 4
# of times picked up while hitchiking – 2
# of feet of elevation – 9,200
# of miles you have to hike from there to go snowboarding – 4
# of times bear got into people’s cooler’s, trucks, food – 6
# of times bear ripped lock of trailer door – 1
# of times bear ripped entire door and frame off trailer – 1
# of lag screws used to fix / reinforce -4

Notes taken in Marietta, Georgia on 8/5/09 [with Layla's crayon scribble at bottom]:

“When he was a kid his daddy and preacher just sat him down and explained things to him, and he swallowed the worm and just pulled the whole bobber underwater.”

–Will on a kid’s Christianity

“Flow Chart of Distracted [originally "Divergent" but struck through] Thinking. A chart with three columns designed to represent textually how my mom and I communicate sometimes:

[(a) dialogue, (b) internal thought, (c) internal reaction to internal thought] and the text: “We’re going to a 50th wedding anniversary tonight. This couple’s kids live all over ¹ but they’re all in town this weekend…1. they probably couldn’t stand their parents → 2. no, don’t think like that.

Map of “La Confluencia,” drawn by Omar the day before I paddled the Rio Azul for the first time.

Notes written on 10/26/09 in Florida in a moment of total depression.

A deadness now. In the words mainly. Waiting for them to come back. Flipping back through this journal and realizing how much travel makes the words flow. Something about movement, leaving and arriving. None of this sounds right though. None of it expresses exactly where ‘we’re at’ right now. Someone just commented on my last blog if i’d read the “summer of black widows.” What summer has this been? Summer of bears. Summer of Japhy’s 13th birthday. Summer of the old crews getting back together in Colorado. Now it’s fall. It’s all flowed together like always. It’s been the worst fall of my life so far. The worst fall of Lau’s life. Fall of ultrasounds with no heartbeat. Fall of miscarriages. Fall of swollen knuckles. Fall of Vodka and Cranberry. Fall of getting Mom’s Infiniti up to 50 miles an hour around a curve in the neighborhood while wife and child are screaming in the car. Fall. Fall. Fall. Fall. Fall. Fall. The other night it was bad but then we had nothing left and so just walked around Siesta Key all empty. The sun had gone down and for a while we lay on the beach looking at clouds in the moonlight. When you see what speed they’re moving across the sky and feel like maybe you’re moving that speed too, it brings back that travel feeling like everything is alright again for a little while.

Sketch of cabin idea when it occurred to me to have two different lofts interconnected by a bridge. Drawn in Jan 2010.

Final note: my latest entry in this journal is a cut-list of fence boards for our land in El Bolson, Patagonia.

community connection

Please check out more of Matador’s journal pages.

If you’re interested in submitting, please email scans of photos resized to 930 pixels wide to david at matadornetwork dot com.

New logo of Periodismo Humano

Cinnaminta

Julie Schwietert showed me this site last week.

Cinnaminta is, in their words:

a free online service which enables you to request your poems, original writing, celebrations, acts of remembrance, prayers, messages or anything else to be read out aloud in places around the world which are special for you but which you cannot easily visit.

What I find most relevant about this site is the seemingly random way people use the requests, not just for readings, or to yodel across a canyon, but to ask for pictures, video, and sounds from particular places. I feel like the whole concept is a new way of exploring people’s relationship to place.

Periodismo Humano

Periodsimo Humano, or “human journalism” is a soon to be launched journalism project from Javier Bauluz, the only Spanish winner of the Pulitzer Prize. The project will be a non-profit org espousing the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights as its only “guideline.”

Last week they tweeted “why do you want a human journalism?” and then remixed the responses into the post Why a Human Journalism? A Post Written by 200 people. Here is an excerpt:

Queremos un periodismo humano porque necesitamos volver a saber por qué quisimos ser periodistas. Porque no nos resignamos. Porque andamos jibarizados a base de siglas y datos. Porque se puede ser responsable, ético, honesto, concienciado y, además, ser feliz. Porque es bueno que se conozca el código fuente de aquellos que nos informan: sus dudas y sus miedos. Porque el periodismo, como la vida, empieza por las cosas pequeñas

Translation: “We want a human journalism because we need to go back to knowing why we wanted to be journalists. Because we didn’t stop believing. Because we don’t go shrinking everything down to dates and abbreviations. Because you can be responsible, ethical, honest, conscientious, and still be happy. Because it’s good to recognize the doubts and fears behind that which informs us.* Because journalism, like life, begins with the little things.”

*not 100% sure of that particular sentence.

This project looks like a major opportunity for Spanish speaking and bilingual journalists wishing to work with a transparent and brilliant community.

Follow them @PmasDH

8 Key Terms for Determining Legitimacy in Journalism

Sarah Menkedick sent me this article last week on determining legitimacy. I really like this post, particularly in the way it rejects the notion that “professionalism” is equivalent to “legitimacy.”

Jay Rosen writes:

These thoughts grew from a comment thread at Nieman Lab. The post in question was titled: The news Good Housekeeping seal: What makes a nonprofit outlet legit? Such things as: adherence to the Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics, submitting entries for professional prizes and holding a press credential from a federal or state body were said to be good proxies for legitimacy in journalism. I objected to this:

I don’t think “professionalism” is a feature of legitimacy at all. We could say it’s one way of attempting to secure legitimacy, but the equation: professional news person = legitimate provider of news does not work.

Rosen then gave his 8 key terms, beginning with veracity:

I’d start with the will to veracity, also known as truthtelling. Truthtelling even when it hurts or causes problems for your friends. Real journalists tell us what happened because it actually happened that way, and not some other way. All forms of legitimacy derive from this one.

Follow Jay Rosen: @jayrosen_nyu

National Day of Unplugging

Finally, I saw the national day of unplugging is “scheduled” for later this week. You don’t have to be Jewish to participate.

Community Connection

Please send media / links to david at matadornetwork.com

Photo: edmondson photo

AS SOON as Bridget and I arrived in Chau Dok we were jinxed. Coming from Phnom Penh by boat we landed in the Mekong Delta with $24.

After catching two pedicabs and renting a room for the night we had only $15 left. The first order of business was to hit up an ATM.

In 2007 there were 3 ATM’s in Chau Dok. I know this because I went to all three. All day I swiped my card and pleaded with bank officers to no avail.

It was decided that the problem was likely isolated to Chau Dok and that I should try an ATM in Saigon, 6 hours away. We left that afternoon. If we stayed a night in Chau Dok, we might not have had enough money left to eat and buy two $5 tickets to Saigon.

The guesthouse refunded our room reluctantly.

We arrived to a rain flooded Saigon after midnight. The bus station is some ways off from the city center, of course, so we needed a taxi. The cabbies know they can charge us what they want so with no other options we threw our packs in the trunk and agreed to pay our last $10 for a ride into the city.

After we harassed a dozen ATM’s, we still didn’t realize that there was not a single cash machine in the country that would work for us. Our bank keeps a small list of countries that they will not allow transactions from, Vietnam is at the top of that list.

The taxi driver pulled up to Pha Ngu Lao, backpacker central. It was late and people were drunk and everything was loud and staggering.

Let’s get one thing straight: I wasn’t giving this cabbie our last ten bucks. No way. Not happening. The cabbie looked at me, me at him, and then both of us at the trunk, locked with our backpacks inside.

I sent Bridget to try more cash machines. While she scurried off I lay my face on the cool metal of the taxi roof and closed my eyes.

Welcome to Saigon kid; you’re fucked.

Across the street was Guns and Roses, a black fissure of a bar that blasts, you guessed it, Guns and Roses.

Two men, one tall, one taller, lanky and drunk, with large adams apples and twin smoldering cigarettes watched me from a table outside the bar. Their faces were angular and unshaven and bruised looking, like they had recently been punching each other. They both sported orange mohawks and soccer jerseys.

They were staring at me. Great.

They threw back their drinks, stood (steadying themselves on the table) and started my way.Great. Bridget made it back just as the drunk-punk welcoming committee reached the taxi.

“You guys need some money.”

Not really a question and the shorter one was already pulling bills from his jeans.

The cabbie pocketed the cash and unlocked the trunk. The two men walked us to their guest house and paid for our first night.

“Come back to the bar, let us buy a round. You look like you could use it.”

Later, much later, as the moon set and the sun was rising, as I watched with veiled fear and fascination as our benefactors smoked crack off a trembling piece of foil, I thought about old Sunday school axioms.

The Lord works in mysterious ways.

My savior’s eyelids flutter as a plume of rock-smoke escaped his smiling lips.

“Welcome to Saigon. Not everyone is as nice as us.”

Crossing the pass on the way to Yubeng, Yunnan, China. Photos by Tim Patterson.

THESE TRAVEL STORIES are imbued with the way a traveler can feel when looking at the world as if for the very first time.

Some of the authors are young, and sometimes the writing isn’t the most polished or grammatically clean. Instead, I chose these tales for their passion and honesty.

Making friends in the Yi Village homestay.

Enjoy the stories.

1. Pointing at Difference and Finding Inclusion by Rebbeca Jacobson

Race is awfully difficult to transcend. Glimpse correspondent Rebecca Jacobson felt accepted by a group of woman in Malawi once, but it was her perspective on another white woman that brought on the laughter and high-fives.

2. I am not what you want me to be, unhappy. by Aaron Ulysses Miller

I am not what you want me to be, I will never be that person, I will never want new things, I will never need nice things, I will never own a house, or a car. I live out of my backpack and I like it that way. I am poverty. I am poor. I live not off a 9 to 5 job, but off a when I’m hungry, I find food.

3. how now brown cow by Kimberly Kenny

Travel is a rush of sensation, of thoughts, images, people, memories…nostalgia sets in fast, and memories last, even when there’s always somewhere new to go.

This post from a student on the latest Mekong Semester makes me miss both the island of Don Daeng and the joy of traveling with teenagers.

4. The Distance from Dachau to Darfur by Peter Delevett

Peter Delvett visits Dachau and experiences how simple travel choices can lead to long-lasting shifts in perspective.

5. messenger by Christina Rivera

I started reading Christina’s blog five years ago, but met her for the first time last year, in a restaurant in Varanasi. Few travelers are more inspiring.

Community Connection

Got a link to a great travel story? Please let us know in the comments section below.

Who are the people who make you look at your ‘hood differently? Photo: Francisco Collazo

Lara Dunston, travel writer and guidebook author, and her husband Terence Carter, a travel photographer, lined up a pretty sweet deal for 2010.

They’re traveling the world courtesy of HomeAway Holiday-Rentals, visiting 24 destinations in 12 months and “living like locals” by staying in home rentals rather than hotels.

It’s an enviable project for many travel writers and photographers, but one of the caveats built into the agreement with HomeAway is that the Grantourismo project would provide opportunities for other people to travel, too.

Earlier this week, Lara and Terence announced the first in a series of travel writing contests sponsored by Grantourismo and HomeAway.

Each contest will have a specific theme, and the prompt for this contest is “The ‘Hood.” “Posts in this category,” they write, “explore everyday neighbourhoods and the people who live in them, the idea being to inspire people to get out of the tourist zone and off the beaten track, to get an insight into everyday life, and to interact with locals….”

You can read full details about submissions and prizes on the Grantourismo blog.

Community Connection:

Don’t forget the Nick Gallo Award, which is given for the best submission about Mexico. The deadline for that contest is March 15; full details are in this contest announcement.

Image: Michael Spencer

As reported on by the New York Times and the British Journal of Photography, last week saw the World Press Photo disqualify Stepan Rudik, one of the winners of this year’s contest, after concluding that he had digitally manipulated his work.

Rudik’s disqualified entry, called “Street fighting, Kiev, Ukraine”, was shot for the Russian news agency RIA Novosti. It had won 3rd prize in Sports Features before being ruled out.

The manipulation involved removing the foot of one of the subjects in a photo, which broke the competition rule that stated: “The content of the image must not be altered. Only retouching which conforms to the currently accepted standards in the industry is allowed.”

Rudik has announced that he is not arguing with the decision of the jury and has decided to make the original photograph public in order to save his reputation as a photographer. You can see it here.

I think it’s both savvy and brave of Rudik to face up to the WPP decision in this way, but the decision itself is interesting too, in that it gives an insight into the world of photo reportage and image correction generally.

For instance if we peek at the original, it’s in all honesty a fairly average shot. The manipulated image is much more dramatic than the original, honing in on the essence of the original scene without necessarily misrepresenting the “story” Rudik wants to tell.

Yet it raises some questions: why didn’t Rudik shoot more frames, from different angles? Why didn’t he focus in on the fighter’s hand at the time? Why didn’t he even leave the foot in the final shot, since there was so much manipulation it would have been barely noticed?

Also, it seems not to bother the WPP jury that the photo has been cropped, desaturated, vignetted and granulated to create a vastly different image to the original (in terms of appearance, if not subject or theme). They only ruled it out on the grounds that the small portion of foot was removed.

Their rules about “currently accepted standards in the industry” seem a little vague don’t they? And you have to wonder what the real difference is between, say, cropping out all the other unwanted elements in the original and taking out a few cm of errant footwear. As can be seen over at Peta Pixel, the decision has opened up a whose can of worms on issues of authenticity and photographic post-processing in general.

Community Connection

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter in the comments box below.

We spent Christmas in a hotel in San Francisco. It was called the Edward II, which Dad, the scholar of English Renaissance theatre and history, found both be- and a-musing. We visited the MoMA, walked across the Golden Gate, and hiked the Marin headlands on an unseasonably fine afternoon. Christmas dinner was pasta and a bottle of Barolo in a North Beach restaurant.

A couple days later, we were in my Mazda Protegé headed south for Los Angeles. I was at the wheel. Which made sense: it was my car, and Dad was used to driving on the left. But it felt all wrong.

When I was growing up in Belfast, the understanding was I would make my own way to school unless it was pouring rain, in which case Dad would drive me. But if I kept him waiting in the car — because I was drying my hair or finishing my French homework — he would just leave.

On board, the rules were clear: I was to be at least minimally agreeable. Once, in a state of outrage about some or other injustice on Dad’s part, I decided to punish him by ignoring him. Before I knew what was happening, he’d pulled over and ordered me to get out — or apologize at once. I apologized.

He taught me to drive when I was seventeen. But the passenger seat was not a place he was accustomed to. His feet would instinctively reach for pedals where there were none. When I took a corner too fast, he would say, “That was appalling! Appalling driving!” Or he would press the back of his head against the head rest, close his eyes and murmur, “Oh God.”

The summer before I went to Oxford, he went away for a month and left me his car. One day, I took the entrance to our driveway at the wrong angle and smashed into the brick gatepost. It seemed like the worst possible thing that could’ve happened. Sobbing, I called my mum in France. “Tell him,” she said. “He won’t be angry.”

She was right — more or less. I reattached the bumper with duct tape and picked Dad up at the airport. He didn’t say much until we got back to the house, where he took a long look at the gatepost. Then he looked at me. “But it doesn’t move,” he said, finally. “I don’t understand how you could hit it, when it doesn’t move.”

I decided we should stop in Santa Barbara for lunch. We’d visited the redwoods and the elephant seals, and had spent the night in a grim motel in Pismo Beach. There didn’t seem to be an exit marked city center or downtown, so I picked one at random. Which might work in a small, concentric European city but is a recipe for disaster in American suburban sprawl.

We found ourselves in a maze of residential streets, like an experiment in house cloning. Finally we spotted a man washing his car. Dad got out and asked for directions.

Dad in Big Sur on 27 December, 2000

“Go down here and go right,” Dad said. Which brought us to another street identical to the last.

“You said ‘go right,’” I said.

“At the end of the street.”

“That’s not what you said.”

“Yes it is.”

“No it’s not, Dad.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!”

My dad didn’t belong in California. He liked European cities, long histories and short espressos, mastering the topography with a paper map and a strong pair of shoes. He was six-foot-two and unfailingly self-confident. But California made him seem small, even frail.

“If you don’t like it, you can get out,” I said, pulling over before I’d had a chance to think.

He got out of the car, very calmly, and walked away down the street.

I had no idea what to do. The sensible thing — backing up, apologizing — seemed out of the question. So I drove around the corner. And there my pride evaporated as quickly as it had flared. I did a U-turn and went back. He was gone.

There was nothing to suggest a means of escape — no bus stops, no taxis, not even any other moving vehicles. I drove slowly around the block. Then I returned to the place where he’d got out. Nothing. I pulled over, and proceeded, quietly, to lose it.

My mind constructed worst case scenarios: I’d wait and wait and eventually have to drive back to L.A. on my own. I’d get back, check my phone messages (I didn’t have a mobile), there’d be no word. Maybe he’d turn up late that night, or the next day. Should I call the police? What if he never showed up at all and we became the subject of one of those unsolved mysteries?

I could see no way out. Perhaps I would spend the rest of my life in a white Mazda, waiting for my father.

As I sat there, contemplating the possibility that I had just destroyed one of the most important relationships in my life, I saw Dad come out of a nearby house. He exchanged a few words with an unseen person, then walked quickly and confidently down the drive to my car and got in.

“Dad! I was so worried.”

He seemed surprised. “Were you? I had to use the lavatory, that’s all. A very nice man let me into his house.”

I drove on without a word. What was there to say? Clearly, what had loomed for me as an irreparable rupture in father-daughter relations was, for him, not much more than a well-timed bathroom break. We found the closest thing to a city center that Santa Barbara had to offer, and decided it was not worth the detour. Neither of us mentioned the incident again.