Current, which produces high quality independent journalism such as the Vanguard series, laid off 80 people today. Many of the cut backs hit the LA branch as Current pursues a new strategy of outsourcing more content. This means many creative professionals will need a new vehicle for their videos.

Enter MatadorTV

Ex Current staffers take heart, MatadorTV seeks your talent! Every lay off has a silver lining, now you have the time and energy to produce original content for MatadorTV. MatadorTV is a burgeoning community for travel lifestyle media. Our new site seeks to filter, present and produce the most compelling travel videos, the perfect place for to find solace among the tribulations of joblessness.

And even if you didn’t get the pink slip today, we still want your original content. So visit the site and contact us if you have an idea for a video or links to your completed work that you think would feel at home on MTV.

Fill the frame.

Oftentimes the easiest way to get a striking, attention-grabbing image is to get as close as possible. Fill the frame with your subject’s face, or, as in this case, focus on a single captivating feature.

Photo : Stuck in Customs

Provide context.

Other times, the key is keeping your distance and allowing your subject to go on about his / her activities.

Photo : Christian Bachellier

Capture subject’s personality.

The most engaging travel portraits reveal subtext, personality. Here we not only see the details of this stoic man’s face but also the curiosity that plays just beneath the surface.

Photo : jonrawlinson

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

What techniques do you utilize for portraiture? Please share in the comments below.

Image Robert Burdock

FROM THE BEGINNING, travel writing has been a key shaper of people’s perception of the world beyond their borders and of history itself.

On one level was enterprise. As merchants forged trade routes and returned with goods and reports about fantastic places and culture, this in turn compelled leaders to send more explorers. Classic examples of this include Marco Polo (13th century) as well as the crónicas of friars such as Fray Ramon Pane in the 15th century, then later, William Bartram, and Lewis and Clark.

On another level was religion. Muslim pilgrims making their hajj to Mecca wrote copious descriptions of their journey as did East Asian Buddhists devotees traveling to India to visit holy sites and to study with Buddhist masters.

Compared to our current “small world,” the lands and cultures across oceans and even over the next mountain range must have appeared vast and mysterious to people in previous generations.

But now that the world has been thoroughly google mapped, how does the modern travel writer fit into this tradition? Is ancient travel literature even relevant to study?

T.S. Eliot, in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” asserted that writers must immerse themselves in the whole of the literary tradition. That being conscious of that tradition is key to awareness and appreciation of your own time and place.

In subtle and profound ways we constantly draw resources and inspiration from the literary tradition as a whole. Eliot argued that it is better to be aware of your tradition, to consciously exist within it, than to contribute to it blindly.

This means to better realize our craft we must develop a consciousness of the tradition, from Marco Polo to Pico Iyer.

Eliot writes:

“…he is not likely to know what it is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but what is already living.”

A short list of travel writers throughout history

Rutilius Claudius Namatianus ~ A Voyage Home to Gaul

Marco Polo ~ The Travels of Marco Polo

Ibn Battuta ~ A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Traveling

Richard Hakluyt ~ The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries

Matsuo, Bashō ~ The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches

Mary Wollstonecraft ~ A Short Residence in Sweden

Herman Melville ~ Omoo

Mary Kingsley ~ Travels in West Africa

W. Somerset Maugham ~ On a Chinese Screen

Heinrich Harrer ~ Seven Years in Tibet

John Steinbeck ~ Travels with Charley: In Search of America

Laurens van der Post ~ The Lost World of the Kalahari

Jan Morris ~ Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara ~ The Motorcycle Diaries

Of course this list is by no means comprehensive and by all rights could literally be a mile long. Thousands of travel stories populate our ancient genre, but you gotta start somewhere. Enjoy interacting with the tradition of travel writing and let the words of travelers past permeate your life and writings.

Community Connection

What titles and authors do you feel are still relevant to travel writing?

Please share your comments with us below.

I CAUGHT this vid on YouTube and wanted to point out that some really solid VO can keep your audience interested and establish a narrative flow.

Aside from being fun to watch, this travel video is an excellent example of what can make a great travel video. Notice that from the get go the VO establishes who the characters in the story are and their relationship to one another.

Also notice that interviews play a key role in telling the story of the brothers adventure. You won’t always have the camera running when something important happens. What you can do is take some establishing footage after the fact and splice it together with an interview where you describe what is not being seen. The audience has a good imagination and will fill in the gaps.

While the footage is good, I believe what makes this video exceptional is the attention to narrative and story. A solid narrative voice can go a long way my friends. For more video tips read Tips for Travel Video: The Elements of a Story. And don’t forget to check out MatadorTV; presenting the very best travel videos.

Image jiruan

Twitter Lists is a brand-spanking-new feature that allows you to follow groups of Twitter users that are compiled in various lists. This lets you to follow segments of Tweeple that share an affinity and create your own Lists for others to follow.

You can create a List for your fav bloggers, your family, your jilted ex’s…you name it. Because the latest tweets of everybody on the List are displayed in real time, Lists is a great way to get an overview of what a group of related people are talking about.

One of the beautiful things about Lists is that by following a list you are not actually following every person on the List. You are following the List itself. This means you don’t have to add the individual to your main tweet stream, you may simply check in on the List as often as you wish.

I invite you to follow a Matador Team list I have created. By following this list, you can readily see what all of Matador ninjas are tweeting about.

If you don’t follow Matador on Twitter, crawl out from your rock and click here.

RECENTLY I THOUGHT: Does what I write matter? Aside from being a way to express myself, does my writing actually serve a purpose?

It seems to me that most travel writing doesn’t matter. Personal adventures, marketing couched as ‘destination pieces’, and ‘look-how-cool-my-trip-was’ essays seem to make up so much of amateur and even professional travel writing.

Most people don’t seem to mind their travel writing doesn’t matter. They are writing to relive the experience for themselves, or to ‘be creative’, or to try and make money. Which is fine. I do the same.

But I have to ask myself: Why am I writing? Why should I continue? How can I take the next step in my travel writing?

I would like to become much more relevant. I want what I write to matter. And by “matter” I mean be important, relevant, timely, and meaningful to the community at large. To help evolve literary forms, to encourage readers to gain new perspectives. But how?

This is not a post with answers. This is a post with questions.

• Where are the spaces we can fill that traditional writing leaves vacant?
• What stories can we tell that matter?
• What should our goals as individuals and as a community be?
• How can we make our travel, and the writing that comes of it, more timely and relevant?
• What are the elements of relevant travel writing?
• How can we incorporate those elements in our writing?

I put it to you. Please respond in the comments with your thoughts and if your travel writing does indeed matter, tell us why.

Here are 4 of 157 videos Thomas has on his YouTube channel. Aside from shooting his own video, Thomas wants you to learn the techniques and gain the tools to fund your travels with video production.

How to make money with travel videos

Tutorial 1: Setting up your tripod and panning

Tutorial 2: How to record good audio

Here is an excellent example of Thom’s work:

Adelaide to Alice Springs Outback 4WD Safari

Visit Thom’s website, Filmingholidays.com or hit him up on his YouTube channel.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION

Get your fill of travel videos with 7 Most Inspiring Travel Video Channels on YouTube then once you are filled with inspiration, edit your own footage and upload to our YouTube group!

In the Cambodian border town of Poipet, Bridget and I share a cab ride with an excitable and elderly Frenchmen named Pierre. Triumphantly old and traveling the world alone, he is strenuously hard of hearing and very happy to be in Cambodia. Climbing into the car he looks like a Parisian Mr. Magoo; squinting, holding his camera askew and always stepping accidentally over danger, not into it.

We zoom in a punished old sedan, jumbling about bumping heads on the dirt highway while Pierre shoots photos and shouts, “Extraordinary!”

Pierre, Bridget and myself were all told by the same smiling Cambodian that the bus had broken down. We opted to pay five dollars each for a ride to Siem Reap. Pierre’s camera clicks indiscriminately as the puddles and paddies go by.

“This is really something, huh? Cracker Jack! The quality of light is perfect. Extraordinary!”

I don’t think any of his pictures are going to turn out.

Photo three wolves

On our second day of mountain biking around the temples of Angkor we were stopped on the bike path when Pierre shouts from behind,

“Jason, Bernice! I made it! Isn’t this the something, huh? Extraordinary!”

His knees and the rusty rental bike creak towards us.

“I saw you yesterday but you were a blur Jimmy, to be young again…oh well. Isn’t this extraordinary?”

I couldn’t help but think that Pierre in his shambling persistence to see it all was putting that apocryphal adage ‘Do it while you’re young’ on its head. Might he have something sage-like to impart on the topic?

“Hey Pierre, what would you say to those who tell me to ‘Do it while I’m Young?’”

“Huh?”

“I said, um, in regards to travel, what do you think of the statement ‘Do it while you are Young’?”

“Huh? Wait.Where?”

“People are always telling you to do it while you are young. What do you think?”

“Oh, well, I don’t know Jesse, I don’t think so. You go on ahead though, I should head back. I move pretty slowly you know.”

His face mustering the balance needed mount his bike is all the answer I’m gonna get.

Community Connection

Is boots-to-the-ground travel for the young or the young at heart? Let us know in the comments below.

I had the pleasure of filming and editing videos for Black Rock TV, a new burning man “news and events” video series. I walked out of the desert with hours of footage and after a month I have some great videos to show for it. Please check out Black Rock TV.com and show some love!

I would love to hear what you think of the videos.

Check out more vids at www.blackrocktv.com

Community Connection

Matador has Burning Man covered! BNT’s Best Of The Week: Burning Man Roundup, 5 Things Cities Can Learn From Burning Man, One Week in The Desert: a Burning Man Documentary.

The thought of Dustin and I ascending moonlit scree slopes occupies my mind during the 4-hour drive from Seattle to Mt. St. Helens. I was born the year after Helens blew its top. Just missed it.

When I was a kid the eruption held a sense of monumental awe that folks just couldn’t shake. Every year around the anniversary Old Man Burtchett would point over the ridge of Douglas firs where the ash rose up and circled the earth. He heard it boom.

Who proposed to climb to the rim of the crater in the dead of night, I can’t remember. Dusty had made the relatively easy climb the summer before with no snow and no problems. But now it was February and we had snow shoes and poles if not our best interest in mind.

1:30am. We set off past the fleet of RV’s that hum gently with sleeping snowmobilers. After a few miles the trees break and the face of the volcano begins to pitch upward. Deep gullies slope away and great valleys open up to our headlamps.

Ridges of rock in sporadic slashes. The wind starts to shove. Left then right then up from behind into all the little chinks in my clothing. We hug the ridge now because 5 feet on either side is a sheer drop.

Now the angle of our ascent blocks all view of what lies ahead. It’s all just up. It’s all just dark. In the Big Drop Off little trees grow at absurd drunken angles. My light doesn’t reach the bottom. I have my concerns. I keep thinking that we are going to step right off the edge of the world and not know it. It is all up up up until bang, you’re there, but you don’t see it coming. At least that is what I heard.

I insist we hunker behind a slab of rock and make coco. There is a shy smear of gray to the east, just behind Mt. Adams and I want to sip coco as the sun comes up.

The summit is a tempest. The mountain levels off and then you realize you are standing on a 20 foot cornice that hangs off the edge of the crater. The wind sprays ice. I am so shaken by the wind speeds, the cold and the fact that I am literally hovering about a smoldering lava dome that my footage is scant at best.

Dustin and I crawl to the edge of the volcano like little boys and peer over.

Community Connection

Ever climbed a mountain before? Wanna try… 6 American Mountains to Climb for Big Adventure & 11 Most Dangerous Mountains in the World for Climbers

A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise. Because that is how life is-full of surprises.
-Isaac Bashevis Singer

A plot is nothing but a normal human situation that keeps arising again and again….normal human emotions—envy, ambition, rivalry, love, hate, greed, and so on.
-Louis L’Amour

Plot-driven commercial fiction needs to have large stakes, something that’s a threat to the lead character from the outside.
-James Scott Bell

A woman never remembers the pain of childbirth and a writer never remembers his plots.
-James M. Cain

I think plots are made up of strings of events, elaborated by description and dialogue.
-Stuart Wood

A plot isn’t merely a string of occurrences; it is a carefully orchestrated telling of events that might include breaking up their temporal order, taking out certain pieces or emphasizing other pieces. It is that manipulation that a simple story becomes a plot.
-Robert Kernen

Since a novel is a recreation of reality, its theme has to be dramatized, i.e., presented in terms of action….A story in which nothing happens is not a story. A story whose events are haphazard and accidental is either an inept conglomeration or, at best, a chronicle, a memoir, a reportorial recording, not a novel….It is realism that demands a plot structure in a novel.
-Ayn Rand

I distrust plot for two reasons: first, because our lives are largely plotless, even when you add in all of our reasonable precautions and careful planning; and second, because I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible.
-Stephen King

Know the story—as much of the story as you can possibly know, if not the whole story—before you commit yourself to the first paragraph….If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you?
-John Irving

Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story — a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.
-Eric Hoffer

If life is just a stage, then we are all running around ad-libbing, with absolutely no clue what the plot is. Maybe that’s why we don’t know whether it’s a comedy or tragedy.
-Bill Watterson

My life has a superb cast but I can’t figure out the plot.
-Ashleigh Brilliant

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.
-Anais Nin

It’s a holiday today, the anniversary of the death of some general or another, so the street markets in Saigon have shriveled to a couple dozen hopeful vendors displaying baskets of veggies. The men drink beer and watch soccer. The woman do what ever women do when men drink beer an watch soccer, which typically is everything. I wander a few blocks from my apartment through side streets with my camera.

A woman slicing lettuce sees my camera and holds up a slack jawed, mostly naked baby for my appraisal. I snap a few pictures. She grins.

A man beckons me to photograph him and his limes. He squats and displays a winning smile, an onion in one hand, a lime in the other.

Down the block it goes. Take a picture of me! Now me! Wait- the baby too, look at this puppy, get all of us and the puppy!

I’m grabbed and shown a bulky Australian man as if to say -”Look! One of your own kind!” We shake hands and he asks me to sit for a beer and fried meat.

“They think we know each other. They think all the white people know each other. They’ve shown me four other tourists in the last half hour, your the first one that stopped.”

I want to say I’m not a tourist but instead I raise my camera to take another picture.

Community Connection

Where is your favorite place to wander about and snap pix? Refine your skills with Brave New Travelers Shoot Better Travel Photos With 5 Essential Travel Photo Tips and get some inspiration from Photo Essay: Trekking Langtang in Nepal.

In the tradition of Get Your Pen Moving we are introducing Micro-Notes, travel stories of extreme brevity. Much like flash fiction, micro-notes tell a complete story in just a few sentences.

Please have your Notes in by Tuesday, October 13th. Submission details below.

Take a powerful and extreme example from the six-word story by Ernest Hemingway:

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

What We Want

How you convey your story in three sentences is up to you. Keep in mind that we like ‘place.’ The setting of the story should be so concrete and defined as to almost feel like a character.

Community Connection

Please submit your micro notes to david [at] matadornetwork.com with “submission: micro-notes” in the subject line. Selected submissions will be published in a compilation here at Matador after the 13th.

Adam Roy ~ Matador Sports

Chicago boy and mensch. Adam edits Matador Sports. He’s currently living in Buenos Aires.

Ill-Advised Adventures : www.illadvisedadventures.com/

Austin Chu ~ Matador Goods

Austin Chu, American nomad documentarian, has recently premiered his new film The Recess Ends. Keep up with the success of the film and Austin’s new adventures.

The Recess Ends : http://therecessends.com/blog/

Carlo Alcos ~ Matador Trips

Writer and campervanner, Carlo loves to hike where the air is clear, the ground is crunchy, and the water is cold.

Carlo’s Blog : http://carlo-alcos.com/

Christine Garvin ~ Brave New Traveler

Matador’s first lady of holistic living, Christine holds a Masters in Holistic Health Education and is a certified Nutrition Educator.

Living Holistically : http://www.holisticwithhumor.com/

David Miller ~ Matador Senior Editor

Founding editor of The Traveler’s Notebook and senior editor of Matador, David’s blog consists of daily ‘illuminations’ and occasional beats. Catch up with David downstream as he and family prepare to settle in Patagonia.

David’s Blog : http://www.miller-david.com/

David Page ~ The Traveler’s Notebook

Author and alpinist David Page has written for the Discovery Channel, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Men’s Journal, and The New York Times.

Sierra Survey : http://www.sierrasurvey.com/

Hal Amen ~ Matador Trips

Hal’s blog brings his life as a writer and volunteer in South America in delicious, bite size bits. His writing and travel advice are more than enough to get me thinking itineraries…

Way Worded : http://wayworded.blogspot.com/

Ian MacKenzie ~ Brave New Traveler

Mastermind web designer, accomplished writer and new media producer, Ian blogs about pop culture, new media, philosophy, and religion.

Ian’s Blog : http://www.ianmack.com/

Joshua Johnson ~ The Traveler’s Notebook

Joshua’s blog reflects a rambunctious roustabout with delusions of grandeur. Follow his rants as he adjusts to life in L.A.

Joshywashington : http://joshywashington.wordpress.com/

Julie Schwietert ~ Matador Managing Editor, Matador Change, & Matador Pulse

Julie’s blog allows readers a look at the intimate fragments and flashes of inspiration on writing and life.

Cuaderno Inedito : http://cuadernoinedito.wordpress.com/

She also blogs about being a new mom and reveals why a neighbor thinks she should wear a corset on this blog:

9mos : http://9mos.wordpress.com/

Kate Sedgwick ~ Matador Nights

Irreverent and hilarious, that is how I would describe Kate’s blog. Learn how to use a toilet brush and bidet on the same page? Score!

Yes. There is such a thing as a stupid question : http://yesthereissuchathingasastupidquestion.wordpress.com/

Lola Akimade ~ Matador Goods

Lola brings it with beautiful photography and writing. Lola’s work has appeared in Vogue, National Geographic Traveler & Travel Channel’s World Hum, just to name a few! Her blog is a tome of travel wisdom.

Geotraveler’s Niche : http://lolaakinmade.com/

Sarah Menkedick ~ Matador Abroad

Sara’s blog, which is co-penned by Jorge Luis Santiago, is a dedicated tribute to the creative process and the journey. Posa Tigres is filled with vivid photography and writing. Enjoy!

Posa Tigres : http://www.posatigres.com/

Tim Patterson ~ Matador Abroad

Tim is an adventurer, writer and rugged travel instructor for Where There Be Dragons. Tim headed back to Asia to lead the inaugural Mekong Semester program WTBD.

Sleeping in the Mountains : http://sleepinginthemountains.blogspot.com/

Tom Gates ~ Matador Life

Taking a lap around the world and writing at least one book in the process, Tom writes about food, music, and just about anything. He’s currently in Berlin.

Wayward Life : http://waywardlife.wordpress.com/

Community Connection

Keep in touch with the Matador team as we big up life and whatever else on our personal blogs. Don’t have a blog of your own? Start one on Matador today.

It was a pleasure to burn.

-Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

-Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

-George Orwell,1984

You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.

-Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.

-Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

-J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.

-William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

-William Gibson, Neuromancer

All this happened, more or less.

-Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.

-Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

-C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?

-Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things

You better not never tell nobody but God.

-Alice Walker, The Color Purple

On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.

-Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

-Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

Community Connection

These are some of my picks.Ttime for you to weigh in: what is your favorite opening line from a novel? What makes a great opening line?

I don’t know why I came to Montagnana. Yes I do. It has a hostel. It has a hostel in one of the best preserved medieval walls in all of Europe. In the plains between Venice and Verona, Montagnana is a lush lawn lapping against a rise of brick.

As the restaurant begins to fill and yell and simmer over with bay leaves, mozzarella and garlic, I’m lost in self-pleased, melancholy reverie, sinking back into the wicker chair waiting for the waitress. Why did I come to Montagnana again? Oh, yeah, the wall.

Brown from a lifetime of Montagnana afternoons, she is tall, dark. She moves like a slender tree. The smile that breaks across her face and never fully retreats breaks my heart.

I love you

I want to marry her before she can take my order.

I eat a whole pizza, drink two beers and as the restaurant begins to fold in and clean itself I slowly nurse a third.

Why did I come to Montagnana again?

Oh, yeah, her.

The stars are sharp and low and loud. Her. I imagine her riding out of town with me on a ‘63 Desert Triumph. I see my life in a modest villa with Waitress Girl. I don’t want to leave the restaurant. Should I order another pizza? My beer is going warm.

I pay and force one foot and then another. I want to say something to her, just something to let some of this feeling out into the world.

Do you have a boyfriend, because I think I love you.

She flits in and out of view, carrying plates, pocketing change, looking tired. My foot sneaks forward an inch or two. I grind the gravel with my toes in little circles. She disappears with a load of dirty plates.
I walk away, like I hoped I wouldn’t but knew I would.

Community Connection

Have you been smitten while on the road? Did you have the courage to say something, or did you keep it bottled up? Either way, do you regret your choice?

It’s time to write. I wait for an image, a phrase, some remembered thing to jerk my hands against the keys but nothing comes. My palms itch, I try to sip from an empty coffee cup and curse at the lawnmower across the street that growls like a dog munching on my gray matter. I suddenly know I will never eke out anything worth skimming over, let alone reading again.

I suck.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.
- John Steinbeck

Do you ever ask yourself ‘am I good enough? Do I have anything worthwhile to say? Will people like my writing? Will people read my writing?’

The great Peruvian poet, César Vallejo, in the first quatrain of his sonnet “Intensidad y altura” wrote:

I want to write, but it comes out foam,

I want to say a great deal, but I get stuck;

There’s no spoken cipher that’s not a sum,

No written pyramid without a core.

Every writer grapples with graphophobia. You are attempting creativity and honesty in one careful motion. It’s like marching into a jungle with a half full canteen and no compass. You don’t know where you are going or what you will meet.

This is the solace: we come to this place, as writers, together. We name the fear, we pin it down with pens and move on, further into that dark jungle, happy for the fear and danger. The fear tells us we are moving closer to the place we want to be.

Writing is easy, you just stare at a blank screen until your eyes bleed.
-Douglas Adams

Across the street the lawn mower hits a rock but grinds forward.

Community Connection

Do you struggle with graphophobia and writers block? What does it feel like? What exercises do you use to overcome these struggles? Share your experiences in the comments.

Time is short and so are our communications; emails are often non-grammatical bursts of information. Status updates are ephemeral and often trite. Blogs can help you express and communicate, but usually aren’t written for a specific person.

Nothing electronic is as intimate as a letter for personal communication. There’s the tactile sensation of the paper. The swirl of the script. Nothing will ever replace it.

Follow These few simple rules and write a letter anyone would be touched to receive.

a.drian

1. Take your time.

Writing a good letter takes time. Your recipient will value the thought and time you spend with your letter so allow as much time as you need.

2. Craft good salutations.

Be creative with your salutation, it sets the tone of what’s to come. Let your salutation describe the person to which you are writing i.e “My Dearest Mother.”

Accordingly, at the end of your letter describe yourself and your feelings toward the person you are writing ~ “Your Loving Son” or “Your Faithful Lover Who Waits with Passion Burning.”

3. Make it personal.

Your letter should come from the heart. Dig deep. Try to express your emotions and thoughtfully describe your thoughts and the journey you are on.

No one wants to get a letter that sounds like it could be to anyone, so go ahead, get personal.

4. Don’t make it all about you.

Ask your recipient how they are doing. Inquire about their circumstances as you last heard…how is the new baby? Did that nasty rash ever clear up? Make your letter a two way street, ask questions that beg a response. Don’t just have a monologue, begin a conversation.

5 Write it by hand.

Do not type your letter. Subpoenas are typed, not letters. And don’t email it! Then it is an email and not a letter! Write your letter by hand in the most legible, pleasant script you can muster. Find a good pen, one that writes smoothly and evenly. Don’t use a pencil. Pencils smudge and should your letter be the stuff of legends you don’t want it to fade over the years.

Community Connection

When was the last time you received a handwritten letter? Who are you going to write you letter to? What’s the best letter you ever received or sent? Let us know in the comments.

What is your first memory of the internet? Holler at me if you thought computers were only for “Oregon Trail”!

Every reader, certainly every writer, has their book. Your book is not simply your favorite story, but your source of literary inspiration, your measure of what can be achieved by a writer. Reading it for the first time is something as remembered as when you lost your travel virginity.

My Book is John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. This novel influenced the course of world literature and my life. Reading it moved something within me that no other book has. It knuckled me up for a fight and got my fingers flying. It gave me a context for the great literary tradition of social action, and it planted the seed within me to try to flesh out a few words of my own.

When unsure about my writing, my life, I go back to my book. What is your book? Where were you when you read it? What happened? Please tell us about it in the comments below. What is it about your book that keeps it numero uno?

Community Connection

Find more reads at BNT’s 50 Greatest Travel Books Of All Time.

Photo: mr. nightshade

Tonight the tents and RVs and camps are empty.

Tonight ice melts in unattended coolers. Filthy lawn chairs hold silent counsel over vacant plots of dust.

Tonight 43,000 burners gather in ever widening, concentric circles. The Man stands with neon and lumber arms stretched toward the sky.

This is what I have been waiting for.

Flicking a cigarette into the desert wind, a veteran burner tells me he could almost skip it. He says it has become a passe spectacle, that the Burning of The Man isn’t the point.

But I wouldn’t miss it.

And from the bursts of fire, a quarter mile distant, comes glimpses of the tens of thousands who wouldn’t miss it either.

Even the jaded old burners, a little bored, a little self important, wait restlessly for the fire.

Photo: william.neuheisel

We stoke the collective need for The Man to Burn with our upturned eyes and raised hands and dancing feet.

Firefighters in haz-mat suits and shiny beetle shell helmets hold a wide perimeter around the Man.

Are the firefighters apart of this?

Are they too feeding the fire, or merely waiting to clock off?

As the call comes through on the walkie talkie does their breath catch? Even a little?

Boooooom!

Ahhhhhhh…*

Red gold green works of fire explode above the Man. Downwind smoldering debris falls.

We scream.

For the joy, the slaked anticipation, for the thing that was built to burn, we scream and scream.

The fireworks conclude in an inferno, a torrent of flame curling in on itself in a roiling plume, breathing heat and light on the upturned (screaming) faces.

For a moment everything is fire.

The Man burns to the ground and we rush in, ignoring the commands of the firefighters to stay back. It’s not time! they shout. They only shout once then look on helplessly, shrugging at each other.

Counterclockwise we circle the fire.The air is warped with heat.

A perfect, naked pixie twirls her lithe frame before the curtain of fire.

Community Connection

Have you had an experience at Burning Man you would like to share? Please hit us up in the comments below.

Get your Burning Man fix all year right here on Matador: The First-Timer’s Guide to Participating at Burning Man, BNT’s Best Of The Week: Burning Man Roundup,13 of the Coolest Art Installations in the History of Burning Man.

Travel Diary

Being alone in New York pushed Keng-Ming Liu into a dark corner and he released his anxiety by communicating with my friends throughout world. He condensed his thoughts and feelings into travel diaries…

Travel

An amusing way to spend 25 seconds…how many times do you see George Bush?

Amsterdam

An animated account of a trip to Amsterdam including an encounter with fellow backpackers, the red light district and witnessing one of the benefits of visiting the Netherlands – legalized pot! Produced by Hilary Leben for Lonelyplanet.tv.

Travel

‘Travel’ is a short animation made using an overhead projector based on my personal thoughts and experiences of travelling. It is a stop-frame pieced together in After Effects. This animation is part of a larger project; visit kellyangood.co.uk to see it as a whole.

A Invitation to Travel.

Animation film by David Gautier based on the famous poem by Charles Baudelaire.

Community Connection

Are you a movie buff? Then you should most definitely check out The 20 Most Memorable Travel Films (That Aren’t Really About Travel)& 8 Bollywood Movies to Watch.

Strange recorded tape when I was in Paris for you.
By marin & sybila

Travels
By Wing Yin Yau

Cairo Street
By hatzputra

It Goes Without Saying
By Una Lorenzen

Zaragozoom!!
By Javier Fernández Fañanás

Community Connection

I see you are a strange one too…in that case you want to check out MatadorPulse Archives of Weird Stuff.

Image h.koppdelaney

As a family we dug in for a fight to the finish that would last 500 long days. Slowly, the disease stole all my father’s faculties until he sat shuddering in a wheelchair, one arm limp around my shoulder as I hoisted him up and carefully walked him to the toilet.

Death hung in the rooms of my childhood like October fog and settled into the creases of our young faces like fine dust. After it was all over I had to get out. Out of the house, out of the state, out of the goddamn hemisphere.

Everyone deals with profound grief differently. There is no right way, but there are plenty of wrong ways. Only one thing occurred to me, Italy.

What I would do in Italy was beyond me, all I knew is that I had to go.

Photo Gret@Lorenz

Italy elated my mind, piqued my imagination and began to sketch for me what it could be to live again. I was twenty.

The stigma of death was never far and often while standing in a cathedral or trying to will myself to sleep, I was keenly aware that I was running. I knew behind my constructed guise of a carefree traveler I was a young man under a curse.

My grieving mind took to the natural wonders and the tumbled vestiges of earlier times with the frenzy of an addict. Each fresco, each statue, each bored Madonna was so far from the stale, malignant rooms I had dwelt in that I nearly worshiped them.

Photo tres.jolie

Verona: I climb the stairs to the height of the first hill and wash my face in the flow of a tiny fountain. Further and further up until I meet the ruined ghost of a castle, survived only by a great perimeter wall. I hoist myself up. I relish the final passages of a book that I had been taking my sweet time with. Reading the last line maybe ten times I shut the cover and look out on the afternoon.

Somewhere far but not too far a bell rings. Something good sneaks into my heart and I feel close to that good, held by that good and a part of the infinite sum of the good. Then, like an inspiration, I think of my father. An undercurrent deep within me stops, and my mind hitches at the change in velocity.

I feel myself stop running.

I stay on the ledge of the old castle wall for a good while. When I do finally leave it is with the unhurried pace of a man who strolls for pleasure, not runs for his life.

Photo snowking24

Do you hear that?

The clatter of a busy market. Wheels going 60 miles per hour on badly patched highway. Do you hear the whooping laughter 3 blocks distant tittering off into uncontrolled giggling?

If you have your iPod on you don’t.

Don’t get me wrong, I love music. Hans Christian Anderson said “Where words fail, music speaks.” and I couldn’t agree more.But those ear buds are a barrier to the outside world, cutting the listener off from the unique cacophony that flavors each place.

I was late to the iPod party.I purchased my first, an unassuming gray little shuffle, just 2 months ago. And yes, while jogging and cleaning it feels like a godsend to have Bonobo and Led Zeppelin crooning and thumping, feeling the exquisite audiophile euphoria of the iPod user.

Photo Martin Krzywinski

But at what cost?

On a recent cross country early dawn bus ride I rested my forehead against the cool rattling glass. Looking about the bus at the other travelers, most of them napped or stared into the distance with white ear buds dangling.

I was jealous, yeah. I was also conscious that by bringing favorite songs with them across the world they tint the newness of the place with the familiar.

They were in effect cutting themselves off from something both subtle and profound. Something essential to travel. Sound.

How can this effect your travel writing?

You cannot know a place unless you hear it, unless you listen and let it speak to you. Oh, you can see a place, sure. And you may describe it in pithy, incandescent detail. But you cannot fully experience a place unless you actively listen. Not to what you want to listen to,but what you would hear if you were to surrender and sit still.

The creaking, swooshing, chatter of travel is a vital part of the experience and can color your writings.

Try this.

Shut your eyes. Sit and listen for 5 minutes. This may seem like a long time, hopefully after a few moments you will become accustomed to being a listening thing and new layers of sound, new secrets, will reveal themselves.

Let those secrets inform your travel writings.

And when there is nothing to hear…enjoy! Let the emptiness be your playlist. The great French mime Marcel Marceau put it well, “Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.”

What do you think? Am I just a crotchety ol geezer or am I on to something? Do you travel with your iPod?

Community Connection

Well if you are gonna listen to your iPod, you may as well make it good! Check out 10 Music Blogs to Keep Your iPod Stacked with Fresh Beats.

Burning Man may only last a week in the barren Nevada desert but Black Rock TV will broadcast all year with new videos and updates. Pat the Digital Vagabond and I have teamed up capture the magic from the worlds most unique art festival and present it in regular webisodes.

BRTV is also a place for the thousands of hours of Burning Man videos that will be captured by the 50,000 creative souls Black Rock City attracts. The site invites visitors to register and upload there own edited footage or raw videos.

Once registered you can upload from the site or embed from Youtube, Vimeo ect…The intuitive upload application also gives the uploader the option to offer their video to be remixed by other users, creating a database of footage to be utilized by all.

BRTV’s gonzo team of VJ’s ( including myself, Pat the DV and the Roads Scholars ) will shoot the news and events from the playa the week of Burning Man.

Hit us up in the comments if you are going to Burning Man!

[Feature Photo: John Curley]

Community Connection

Interested in becoming a VJ for Black Rock TV?

Already have a video from past a past Burning Man you would like to share?

Photo:ssh

Dust off those travel videos and share them to our YouTube group.

Firstly, grab a YouTube channel if you don’t already have one, it’s free and is like setting up an account on any other social networking site. Think of a snappy name, upload some videos and subscribe to Matador…now you are ready to join our group!

In this video I cruise around our channel on YouTube, show you where our group is and watch a few of the 80+ travel videos that have been shared so far.

NOTE: I took this screen capture with an application called Jing, and the result of screencapping video is a bit jumpy. The videos on YouTube are as smooth as butter on a babies big toe.

Well, whatcha waiting for? Show us what you got and look for more travel videos from Matador.

I was clued into Christoph’s YouTube channel from a comment left on my recent post
5 Amazing Time Lapse Travel Videos by Marissa ( Thanks M! )

Christoph has 117 videos on his YouTube channel, most of them quick random encounters on his long walk in China.

It is rare that a video is over a minute, most are but 15-20 seconds, non sequiturs ranging from squirming caterpillars to rain forest water falls. Each snippet is an unadorned moment, captured and presented with a sort of humble grace.

Follow Marissa’s example and hit me up with links to your favorite travel videos in the comments! Follow Christoph’s lead and present your travel footage to the world through Matador’s YouTube group.

There is something magical about time lapse. Time lapse captures time and motion, presenting an environment in flux from a perspective that is not possible otherwise. Enjoy these exceptional time lapse videos I found on Vimeo.

London Timelapse by Xtrax London

Eclectic 3.0: The Roads Less Traveled by Ross Ching

Travel and Music Time lapse by Dave Schwep

Cook Inlet -Turnagain Arm – Portage Valley Timelapse

Sur le fleuve Niger by strictly_homemade

Bomb crater in Phonsavan, Laos. Photo by author

Phonsavan is a few straight lines in a valley that is fringed with soft green hills. On these few straight lines are a couple hundred concrete cubes; restaurants, guest houses, mechanics dens, pharmacies and vendors that stock sandals and machetes.

Massive artillery shell casings sit rusted on store fronts, home to shrubs and cigarette butts instead of shrapnel and explosives. A missile suspended on a chain, painted crookedly in red: “good, cheap food.”

The skull and crossbones and the hulking shells appeal to my piratical sensibilities and draw me in to the Mine Advisory Group Phonsavan office.

Mine Advisory Group painstakingly cleans up unexploded ordinance (bombs) from conflict zones of wars past. The litter of war that may sit for decades after arms are laid aside.

Lebanon, Gaza, Somalia, Chad, Sudan, Cambodia, Angola…MAG has worked in 35 countries since 1989.

Illustrations depict the mechanics of cluster bombs. 300 baseball-sized explosives fill the weapon. A few hundred feet above the ground the cluster bomb is split in two and its payload fans out to a 100 square meter radius and then destroys everything. Everything that does not die is taken apart to shrieking pieces.

I face pictures of unsmiling armless villagers. Children. Pictures of men digging around the flanks of a half exposed unexploded missile, 30 years dormant.

A little man walks out from the back of the office space.

MAG provides Mine Risk Education to villagers.

He was about to take his dinner, I can smell the broth, but now he stands a few feet from me smiling to himself, looking at the display in polite, mild interest:

Xieng Khonang is one of the most heavily bombed provinces in the most heavily bombed country in the world.

At least two million Tones of ordinance was dropped on Laos between ‘64-’73.

metric tonne= 2205 lb.

2 million metric tonnes= 4,410,000,000 lb.

I just have to stand here for a minute and bite my lip thinking about 4.5 billion lb. of bombs… what that might look like. Some monstrous emotion wraps around my skull and I’m not really reading anymore, just looking forward.

It is estimated that up to 30% of this ordinance did not detonate. Decades later, unexploded ordinance (uxo) still contaminates rural areas in over half the country. 2,000 lb. shells are sold for $60 at the scrap yard. $100 if they still contain the powder. For many people this is worth the risk.

I feel sick. We did this. Facing the wall of pictures and statistics I clench my jaw and focus on the spot directly in front of me. Still I feel faint.

author and bomb crater in the Plain of Jars.

It’s estimated that the United States dropped 1 plane load of bombs on Laos, every 8 minutes for 9 years.

“Excuse me, where you from?” I didn’t really notice him sidle up to me.

“uuuuh, ” I scratch my eye, and look somewhere. I’m really tired.

“Aah, um… Ameri-”

My body would rather sob than say it. He takes a small step forward.

“It’s ok.” he says.

Community Connection

Laos is an amazing place to travel and volunteer. If it is Laos lore you seek I suggest Big Brother Mouse: A Book for Every Child in Laos & Gonzo Traveler: Chasing The Dragon In Laos

Also, please check out the video “Conflict Resolution,” a profile of MAG, Mine Advisory Group.

Photo: udt_greenberet1123

You have captured amazing footage of your trip, now what do you do with it?

Most professional editors use programs that cost an arm and a leg and require hours upon hours of training.

In the case of the average traveler, simpler is better and free is best.

iMovie

iMovie has a very intuitive interface and many cool features that allow for transitions and titles. iMovie also works easily with iPhoto and Garage Band allowing you to add your favorite pictures and compose your own soundtrack.

iMovie is only compatible with your Mac and is free with a new computer purchase.

User Reviews
“iMovie 09 is genuinely useful and fun.”

“…non-techie older people need only iMovie, but the majority of apple users have the skills necessary to use Final Cut Express.”

Windows Movie Maker

Movie Maker comes installed on newer computers running Windows. Like iMovie, Movie Maker has drag and drop editing features for the casual editor. Common complaints include frequent freezing and crashing.

User Reviews
“Freezes constantly. No exaggeration….probably once every 3 minutes. Makes it impossible to get anything done.”

“Cheap, simple, very irritating”

DOWNLOAD MOVIE MAKER

Wax

Photo: blakespot

Wax touts itself as high performance video compositing and special effects software.

Wax can create 2D & 3D special effects and works in two modes – as a standalone application or as a “plug-in” to Sony Vegas, Pure Motion Edit Studio and Adobe Premiere.

Reviews seem to agree that the interface takes some time to learn, but for special effects this is one of the best, free options.

There are also warnings of piggybacking viruses.

User Reviews
“There are so many options and it comes with over 50 effects! I love it and it is extremely hard to find other free plug-ins for my software…”

“Excellent video editing, with severe rendering issues.”

“Not easy for beginners (like me), but after you read the Help section and practice a lot, you’ll get the hang of it… This suckers just kickin’ my ass right now though.”

DOWNLOAD WAX

ZS4 Video Editor

The new incarnation of Zwei-Stein Video Editor claims to be advanced video editing and compositing software with over 150 built-in video effects.
ZS4 runs on Windows, Linux and OSX and is free to download.

User reviews are pretty scathing and many people seem to have problems running the program… might want to do more research before you download this bad boy.

User Reviews
“User interface designed by Stevie Wonder.”

“Huge amount of effects/filters, infinite level of track sub-mixers, great chroma keying and cool distort effects.”

“Slow and difficult to use.”

DOWNLOAD ZS4

Community Connection

Get your editing juices gushing with the 7 Most Inspiring Travel Video Channels on YouTube

Photo:flattop431

If you are anything like me, you have more than a few tales of travel terror.

Like the time I was cruising down the beach front ribbon of road in Mui Ne, Vietnam.

My mother Cory sits between my wife Bridget and I on the rented scooter as we are try to decide which bar we want to munch calamari in.

Then it hits me.

Well, actually it hits Bridget.
A twenty person mini bus slams into the back of us like a battering ram.
The three of us throw out legs out to steady the wobbling scooter that threatens to go down, putting us under the wheels of the bus.

Too often I have thought to myself in some near brush with travel cataclysm~

“Just what the hell am I doing out here!”

I had a great time chopping up this footage of Bridget and I in Long Hai, Vietnam when the entire town gets word a tsunami is heading straight for them!

How to Run from a Tsunami! from confluence creative media on Vimeo.

One minute we are blogging, the next we are running for our lives!

As soon as Bridget and I made the mile long sprint back to our guest house I set up the tripod. I knew whether a tsunami leveled the town or not I might get some cool footage.

Shooting video while terrified is a good thing to do. Assuming you survive the encounter (good luck!) you will be happy you had the presence of mind to capture the madness.

Scared? Unsure? Panicked?! First things first…grab your camera!

Community Connection

It can be a scary world out there, and having a few phobias doesn’t help either! Check out The 5 Deadliest Travel Fears,5 Simple Ways To Conquer Your Fear Of Flying & The World’s Most Dangerous Hike at your own risk!

Watercolor by Josh Johnson

Watercolor

Watercolors are cheap, portable and easy to use. A few bucks will get you a watercolor set and a few more will get you a decent brush. In the hands of a master, watercolor is a magical medium indeed. In the hands of the rest of us watercolor is both fun and forgiving. I created the watercolor above while watching the sun set in Krabi, Thailand.

Collage

Take ordinary objects from the world around you and arrange them to tell the story of your journey.

Ticket stubs, jotted notes, newspaper clippings, currency, postcards…anything that offers a glimpse into the world you are inhabiting will take on an especially exotic air after you return to your seemingly mundane “normal life”.

Sketch

As our Journal Pages feature shows, sketching is a powerful way to flex your creative muscles and immortalize the moment while traveling. You don’t have to be an amazing artist, you simply need to grab a a pencil and start doodling.

Music

If you are traveling with a guitar or bongos on your back this is obvious, but making music shouldn’t exclusively be left to musicians. We all have the ability to drum a rhythm or hum a tune. Here’s an idea, grab some friends milling about the hostel or campsite and have an impromptu drum circle or sing along.

Music is perhaps the oldest art form and has been a part of building community, telling stories, relaxing and expressing creativity since times unremembered.

Poetry

Poetry grants the poet freedom to express beyond the limitations of form to express beautiful and abstract experiences. Your travel poetry need not be long or formally structured. Boil an epiphany down to a few raw ideas and words that evoke emotion.

Community Connection

What are your favorite no-tech ways to get down with your creative self? Share with us in the comments. And holy amazing analog creativity Batman, check out these journal pages!

Join the Brothers Johnson as they venture into Yellowstone to sneak up on buffalo and stop and smell the geysers.

Josh & Dustin Johnson took a week to do a whirlwind tour of the Big Sky state. Watch their previous videos Montana Road Trip: Heading to Yellowstone & Notes from the Road: To move under the Big Sky. Next Episode: Glacier National Park!

Subscribe to MATADORNETWORK on YOUTUBE.

Getting Spontaneous

Photo:erichhh

Find a comfortable place.
An easy chair, a coffee shop nook, the end of a pier…
now write.

Don’t think. Don’t judge.

Merely allow yourself to experience the flow of creativity that seems to well up from nowhere.

Intuitive writing, automatic writing, free-writing, stream of consciousness, whatever you call it, spontaneous writing can be a very powerful exercise in your writing practice.

Spontaneous writing relaxes the mind and can annihilate writers block because you are not judging or limiting your expression, but simply letting it be what it is. Over time this practice will greatly strengthen your focus and flow on topic-based writing because your mind is conditioned to the act of spontaneous creativity.

This liberating and simple technique gained momentum during the surrealist movement in 1920’s Paris with writer/poet Andre Breton at the helm.

Breton instructs:

“Attain the most passive or receptive state of mind possible. Forget your genius, your talents, and those of everyone else… Write quickly with no preconceived subject, so quickly that you retain nothing and are not tempted to reread. Continue as long as you please.”

Your Turn

Take 5-15 minutes to scribble or type without fear or hope and you may be surprised what beautiful turns of wordplay and inspiration can be discovered by your unconscious mind.

Community Connection:

A thread on the Travel Writing & Photography forum has been created for you to share your spontaneous writing and help create a more supportive community of writers and travelers. Let’s all hold hands!

WITNESS has created a video toolkit to help you to use video more effectively in human rights and advocacy work. Designed for human rights activists and advocates, filmmakers, journalists and citizen journalists around the world, WITNESS is a friend of citizen journalists everywhere.

This video helps you prepare to:

• Decide what and how to film
• Get good audio
• Use a mobile phone to film

Feature Photo by Aplomb

Community Connection

Grab that camera and get filming! Use Matador as your resource for video tips and inspiration.

]]> http://thetravelersnotebook.com/video/witness-video-tips-filming-audio-using-cellphones/feed/ 1 http://thetravelersnotebook.com/notes-from-road/all-aboard/ http://thetravelersnotebook.com/notes-from-road/all-aboard/#comments Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:59:11 +0000 Joshywashington http://thetravelersnotebook.com/?p=2358
A swim out to sea brings new friends off the coast of Hoi An, Vietnam

Under a westering sun, dozens of fishing boats bob in the waves. I swim towards them. Now a good 100 yards from shore, it is just me and the snacking, napping crews whose vessels dot the horizon.

As I am spotted, a rotund, tattooed fellow stands on deck and waves his arms like a man in desperate need of rescue. All eleven men on the boat are shirtless and bronzed like church bells and rub hairless pot bellies with supreme self satisfaction.

The boat’s hull heaves up and down, crashing with the waves. As it dips low I grab hold of the deck rail and am lifted up and out by the next wave.

I’m dripping sea foam on the aft deck and the crew gawks at me like I just jumped out of cake.

A soggy space is made for me in the tight lunch circle. A tall jolly man who is minus one eye is slap-knee belly-laughing and has been since they saw me in the waves. Rice and fish dribbles out of his mouth and down his chest to collect on his belly.



A yellow two liter fuel container is passed forward and clear fluid is poured into a mug that is polished with a grimy shirt.

The one-eyed laughing man sees the fuel jug and doubles over, turning red. A few ample swallows of rice wine sloshes in the mug.

A fuel jug is apt storage for this evil brew, it burns the gullet like propane.

Grimacing theatrically, pounding my chest and shouting Oh my God! in Vietnamese, I slam the mug down like a satisfied cowboy and they chatter and grin and elbow each other.

A much more ambitious portion of hooch finds its way quickly into my mug and the game is now how much of this nasty juice will the gleefully aquatic American drink. I sniff the mug theatrically and look up in mock worry. They guffaw and rice cascades out of their mouths.

I chant, Mot, Hai, Ba, YO!! (1,2,3,cheers!), and fresh gales of laughter follow. Already feeling the notorious effects of the rice liquor, I pat my belly like Santa Claus and stride to the end of the deck.

Instead of getting too drunk to swim back to shore I want my exit to be as sudden and dramatic as my entrance.

They turn in unison, grinning, bewildered and thrilled at my sudden appearance and exit.

I dive back into the sea as a wave lifts us up and up.

A sour burp stings my nose and my stomach clenches into a fist. Turning back to see the crew all crowding to watch me go I wave and wonder if I should have stayed for one more drink.

Community Connection:

I spent 6 months in Saigon teaching English and so can you.

Have a note from the road you want us to review? Send it to david@matadornetwork.com

Want to learn the craft of travel writing?

Sign up for Matador’s new Travel Writing School and get the skills you need.

]]> http://thetravelersnotebook.com/notes-from-road/all-aboard/feed/ 11 http://thetravelersnotebook.com/photography-q-a/e-road-makes-me-lucid/ http://thetravelersnotebook.com/photography-q-a/e-road-makes-me-lucid/#comments Thu, 09 Jul 2009 20:21:46 +0000 Joshywashington http://thetravelersnotebook.com/?p=2266 Travel brings a vivid dream life. Keeping a dream journal can help you remember your dreams once you get home.



Photo: Meanest Indian

As a rule, my nights are dreamless. Oh, I know they say you dream every night. I guess I have to take that on faith.

As a boy my dreams were glorious Technicolor affairs, weaving fantasy, absurdity, terror, and profundity into narratives the might give Lewis Carroll a run for his money. Somewhere, all that stopped, until I set foot in Italy in 2002, my first journey overseas.

Then came the dreams. It was like the dreams were all stuck in traffic and arrived at once.

When you travel without rush or any real consequence of time, your mind shifts to a watching, patient thing.

One tested method for more dreaming is keeping a dream journal. Starting a dream journal is easy and makes an awesome addition to your regular travel journal. Here’s how:

1. Get a notebook or journal specifically to record your dreams in and keep it within arm’s reach of your bed. Dreams fade fast and it is important to record as much as possible as soon as possible.



Photo: akshay moon

2. Write in the present tense and write down every possible detail of your dream. Location, sounds, objects, colors, characters, and your emotional state are important elements of your dream to explore.

What is the feeling it leaves you with when you wake up?

It is OK to scribble random feelings and scattered, lingering thoughts from your dream. Don’t constrain your journal with grammar or punctuation worries. Sketch the landscapes or scenes from your dreams. The more you actively remember your dreams the easier it will be to slip into dreams and remember them with clarity.

3. Be consistent. You don’t have to do it every day but journal as often as possible. Enriching the memory and experience of your dreams takes practice. Who knows? Soon you could have a best selling dream journal like Jack Kerouac’s Book of Dreams.

Dream often and dream big!

]]> http://thetravelersnotebook.com/photography-q-a/e-road-makes-me-lucid/feed/ 6 http://thetravelersnotebook.com/uncategorized/tips-for-travel-video-the-elements-of-a-story/ http://thetravelersnotebook.com/uncategorized/tips-for-travel-video-the-elements-of-a-story/#comments Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:02:11 +0000 Joshywashington http://thetravelersnotebook.com/?p=2242 Whether writing or editing video, good storytellers use the principal elements of character development, story arch & pacing.

Character: When we watch a movie or read a book, we are engaged by the characters and the circumstances they find themselves in.

Think of yourself as a character in a good book.

• What would you like to know about the character?
• What are you doing and why?
• What do you hope to gain from your travel experience?

When you give the audience a look into how you are being affected they can better live vicariously through your trip.

Story Arch: Even simple travel footage benefits from being presented with a beginning, middle and end. Creatively organize your photos and video footage in an order that gives the footage movement

Cut the Fat: Look for moments when you or your subjects are actively engaged into what’s unfolding, and take out the rest. A good rule of thumb is if it doesn’t add to the story, take it out. People like digestible content; three minutes is a good goal for your video. If you have really engaging content, you may be able to grab their attention for five.

Be Consistent: If you have enough footage for several videos, create a style and be consistent. Decide on a title for your series and add some royalty free music. Using the same opening each time will create continuity for each of your videos.

Community Connection

Contemplate yourself as a better travel writer.

]]> http://thetravelersnotebook.com/uncategorized/tips-for-travel-video-the-elements-of-a-story/feed/ 1 http://thetravelersnotebook.com/video/the-hub-changing-the-world-one-human-rights-video-at-a-time/ http://thetravelersnotebook.com/video/the-hub-changing-the-world-one-human-rights-video-at-a-time/#comments Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:16:09 +0000 Joshywashington http://thetravelersnotebook.com/?p=2219 The Hub, presented by Witness, gives human rights advocates a platform for their media.

Eyewitness footage and pictures out of Iran recently demonstrated the necessity of capturing video of conflict and human rights violations.

The Hub is the world’s first participatory media site for human rights. It’s like YouTube but with a soul and on a mission for change.

Individuals and organizations around the world are uploading their human rights stories to mobilize action to protect and promote human rights.

The Hub also showcases instructional videos and empowers users to take action using the technology within their means.

This video addresses

• Assessing if footage is reliable
• How to edit effectively and ethically
• How to distribute your video to have an impact


Editing and Distributing Your Film ~ presented by WITNESS

Community Connection

Everyday people are fighting for a better world. Read 10 Revolutionary Acts Of Courage By Ordinary People for a glimpse at just a few.

]]> http://thetravelersnotebook.com/video/the-hub-changing-the-world-one-human-rights-video-at-a-time/feed/ 1 http://thetravelersnotebook.com/photography-q-a/reporters-center-helps-citizen-journalists-shoot-and-report-the-news/ http://thetravelersnotebook.com/photography-q-a/reporters-center-helps-citizen-journalists-shoot-and-report-the-news/#comments Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:09:04 +0000 Joshywashington http://thetravelersnotebook.com/?p=2152 Reporters’ Center is a YouTube channel dedicated to help users understand the power of citizen journalism and offers practical tips from the world’s best journalists.

Ever captured a natural disaster or a crime on your cell-phone camera or filmed a political protest? Then you’re part of the enormous community of citizen reporters on YouTube, and this channel is for you.