Away on Business

A Great Mystery Solved

2015-10-19T14:32:00.001-07:00

Finally: the hotel equivalent to the better mousetrap.

Hotel toasters have always been problematic, tending to vast hulking boxes with conveyor-belt delivery permanently blazing away like continuously operating steel mills even when no one's even thought of singed bread for over half an hour. Not only an environmental disaster in miniature, they entirely fail to produce proper toast, typically just warming the bread on the first pass, and then cremating it on the second.

I thought the toaster at a rather marvellous Hotel Bellevue Palace in Bern earlier this year was a big improvement: a fire-engine-red Kitchenaid device of the standard domestic slot arrangement, but which drew in and expelled the toast of its own accord (which a pleasant elevator-like chime) and had subtle controls. Only a little experimentation was needed to get it right.

But finally, here, at the Crown Metropol in Melbourne, someone's found the obvious answer to producing toast just as you like it: Let you see it cooking, and provide a big friendly STOP button to punch if it looks as though things are going too far.

So far perfect toast every morning, which makes for a good start to the day.

Trivial, I know. But that's travel writing for you.

Cuckoo Clocks

2015-06-21T02:08:00.000-07:00

I see that it's nearly three years since I last posted here, and a quick check suggests I've been to 27 countries, several of them twice, and published on most of them.

Blogs, it seems, have had their day already (they never really had it at all, with me). It's all about social media and 140 characters or a quick pic and a caption these days.

But I just wanted to remark on the importance of charm in getting through airports. In some countries it's what you say (especially if you're trying a local language), in some it's how you dress, and in others it's what you've bought. At Frankfurt it seems to be the latter.

I was worried at check-in that my carry-on luggage was now too much, as it included two cuckoo clocks. But mentioning that they were cuckoo clocks (Kuckucksuhr) produced smiles. 'Take them on board--the crew will find somewhere to stow them.' Thank you Lufthansa.

While undressing and dismantling for the x-ray I was asked, 'What's in those boxes?' 'Kuckucksuhren.' All smiles.

At the other side I waited some time for the boxes to come through, but I could hear the staff joking about it with each other and see them looking at the screens. 'Don't they have cuckoo clocks in Canada?'

But I was selected for a random test and marched off with one of my boxes while they checked for any trace of explosives. 'Kuckucksuhren,' I said. Everyone smiled, and the test was over in moments.

Old China Hands

2012-06-25T22:56:00.002-07:00

A few days ago the Wall Street Journal ran my review of a really dreadful new book on China, Jonathan Fenby's Tiger Head, Snake Tails (Judging China by its Cover). This is essentially a compilation of information lifted largely uncredited from the work of those who actually speak Mandarin and spend significant amounts of time in China doing research; and of entirely unreliable figures from Chinese sources regurgitated uncritically. There's only the very occasional hint that the author has travelled in China, and nothing to suggest he noticed much of what was around him when he did. There's not an original thought to be discovered in the book, which might have been written by absolutely anyone with an interest in China and a reliable Internet connection with which to read journalism on China.

It occurred to me that this is the ultimate in Old China Handism—a state of mind in which a short residence in the country is thought sufficient to pose as an authority on any aspect of life there to anyone who hasn't been in the country quite as long, who is just visiting, or who sits at home ready to be impressed that a foreigner can manage life somewhere believed to be quite so alien, and who will believe anything they're told. Little do they know how much of this knowledge is entirely hearsay, concocted by people who have little contact with the culture and who know nothing of the language, but repeated in expat bar and club until it gains the force of truth. All too many conversations are one-upmanship beginning with a cautious 'How long have you been here?' and ending with a claim to victory based on sly implication that the opponent simply doesn't understand China as profoundly as the speaker.

Once such people often published books, but these days they strut about on-line providing wildly inaccurate information about shopping and the 'right' price for a taxi to the Great Wall, attempting to suppress dissent by sheer weight of numbers, and by mentioning just how long they've lived (their heavily air-conditioned, 'hardship' posting, car-and-driver, secure-compound) lives in the country. They claim expertise on the latest pizza restaurant but can say almost nothing about local restaurants save a few which are in sudden vogue due to their supposed accessibility only to those in the know, and mainly used to show off Old China Hand credentials to visitors.

These days, though, the Internet replaces propping up the bar exchanging gossip with other wiseacres. Google search can turn anyone into an Old China Hand, and since there are now more journalists with excellent Mandarin skills, supported by carefully selected intelligent and honest local assistants, and who have a long-term commitment to China journalism and original first-hand research, the quality of Old China Hand pronouncements on Chinese topics beyond prices for fake pearls ought to be improving. But there are, of course, still numbers of journalists who are parachuted in for short periods, who have to rely far too much on assistants who are in the pockets of the authorities, and whose reports only amount to the most flatulent generalisations, often quoting Chinese sources entirely uncritically. And then, of course, there are those English-language Chinese sources whose every figure must be assumed to be false until cross-referenced and triple-checked. The ersatz Old China Hand frequently fails to make these distinctions, although that won't stop him writing puffery in a book review for Amazon, seeking reflected glory, or in this case writing an entire book based on other people's work.

After I'd written the review I allowed myself to look at what else has been said about the title, and was not surprised to find that the former Observer and South China Morning Post editor had been able to wangle lavish praise in print from former colleagues and contacts, including some who really should have known better, and who in some cases have now dropped significantly in my estimation (not that I expect that to lose them any sleep).

But it's not as if any knowledge of China is necessary to see that this book is tosh. It merely throws every argument and tidbit of information that can be found at one side of an argument (only providing sources for a very few), and then similarly throws every argument and distantly related fact it can find at the other. It entirely fails to assess the quality of the figures it (mostly unattributably) quotes, fails to plump for one side or the other, or to provide any meaningful interpretation. No one needs to be a Sinophile to observe this, nor to see frequent glaring errors of logic.

Luckily I'm not entirely alone in a critical response. Paul Mooney's (heavily cut, I'm told) review in the South China Morning Post came to the same conclusions ( Tiger Head, Snake Tails: China Today, How it Got There and Where it is Heading):

One does not get the feeling that Fenby ever visited China while researching the book. While he occasionally mentions being in China, it's usually just an aside, with few details. He mentions visiting the Labrang Monastery in Gansu province, but fails to describe the rich colour of the monastery town crowded with crimson-robed lamas. Likewise with his visit to Kashgar, the centre of Uygur culture in Xinjiang. As a result, much of the book reads asif it's come out of newspapers or web pages.

A bit of a shock, then, to read Julia Lovell saying in The Guardian:

There is a risk that a book summarising such a monumental story might get bogged down in dry, statistical detail. Fenby avoids this through lively, first-person reportage and vivid vignettes.

She must have been reading a different book.

I ended up with 15 pages of notes, many grouped under the headings Non Sequiturs, Padding, Blindingly Obvious, Debatable, and Occasional Important Points. An 800-word review couldn't begin to do this justice.

I mentioned a non-sequitur about Chinese take-aways in the UK, but my favourite example was in a paragraph that was cut:

A discussion of lack of trust in Chinese society citing examples of counterfeit goods and the theft of brand names fails to notice that the copies of châteaux and indeed of whole European villages it goes on to discuss are fakes in an entirely different sense—neither developers nor buyers represent these as the real thing.

Examples of padding included a discussion of Taiwanese pre-history hardly relevant to a discussion of contemporary mainland China, and extensive material on Chiang Kai-shek obviously too tempting to someone who had already written a biography of the man, but considerably more than needed.

A further example of the blindingly obvious also cut from the review:

It’s no surprise that those behind attempts to hack commercial information subsequently traced to China are “likely not to be run-of-the mill hackers who prefer to go for bank accounts and credit cards.”

I also enjoyed: The economy and politcs, both domestic and external, are inextricably linked. When things go well, that benefits both. When there are problems both suffer (p.3), and an observation that planes fly over mountains (p.364).

It's amusing to find much in the same vein in a piece in China Daily (Heads or Tails?) Indeed it's hard not to cackle:

Fenby says it is very difficult to make predictions about China, adding that many are too simplistic.

Making predictions is indeed so difficult that he certainly tends to avoid making any in his book.

"I think whether the glass is half full or empty depends on your mindset.

Luckily China Daily is free, or you might resent having paid good money for this sort of observation. But it gets better:

"I had a conference call with a Latin American client recently who said my outlook for China in 2012 was bearish," he recalls.

"I gave the same analysis to someone later in the day, and he said it was the most bullish analysis he had heard in a long time."

And if you read this entire book you'll still remain just as confused. This is precisely its problem.

But you may be clear that the opinion of a man who even gets the size of China wrong; who invents an entirely new meaning for the phrase 虎头蛇尾 he purloins for his title; who appears unaware that the Yangzi was dammed decades before the Three Gorges was built (hundreds of thousands of cruise passengers could have told him that); and who appears equally unaware that Sun Yat-sen was only Provisional President of China and never President (it was Yuan Shikai who first held that post) would not be worth having anyway.

But why go on about this? Over the centuries of Western contact with China the majority of books on the place have been ill-informed and generally dreadful. But the struggle is to get reporting on China from people who commit themselves to the place, become intimate with the language (which is a necessary condition for having a clue what it going on), read and interview original sources, and who believe nothing they haven't seen for themselves. There's been some progress on this front—progress which a book like this, already itself being quoted as a source despite being largely sourceless, dramatically sets back.

PR tip 4

2012-06-05T21:23:00.004-07:00

I see it's two years since I last added to this list, but here's a tip for national tourism bureaux looking for PR agencies overseas.

Several of you, to my knowledge, are making a classic mistake. You're hiring a big-name agency because it's a big name, and perhaps you think both that prestige will rebound upon you and that you'll be getting top-end advice and assistance from a company with a global track record of success.

But you should begin by asking yourself for whom these agencies have been successful. And whether the clients for whom they've been successful are relevantly similar to yourselves.

The answer will usually be 'no', and the major dissimilarity between yourselves and the clients that so impress you, and amongst whose powerful and illustrious names you think it would be good to be listed, is that they have lots of money, and you don't. So long as they remain amongst the agency's clients, these big-spending corporate giants are going to claim most of its attention. You're a minnow in a pool of sharks, and it's the junior staff for you.

What you want to be is the largest goldfish in a far smaller pool. You don't want a global name with high overheads and high hourly rates. You're getting a great deal less for your money than if you hire a small operation for whom you are the largest client, and for whom you are providing a significant proportion of the its total revenue: preferably the majority of it. You'll pay less for its services. You'll have the full attention of the company's principals, and they will do everything they possibly can to keep you happy.

They'll keep me happy, too. I'll get prompt and helpful replies to email queries. I'll get to talk with people who have actually taken the time to get to know your destination and its tourism products well. They'll help me develop story ideas, and what they don't know, they'll research.

With the big boys I'm often lucky if I get a reply within a week. Sometimes I'm lucky if I get one at all. You might have thought that replying to journalists' queries, especially on such innocuous and non-controversial subjects as the communication of positive messages about a holiday destination, would have had absolute priority. If it does, I'd love to know what comes second.

There's one destination I've been to on several occasions, originally represented in my part of the world by a one-person company who could not conceivably have been more efficient and helpful. Once she'd thoroughly sounded out my bona fides, determined I wrote for outlets she wanted to reach on that destination's behalf, she researched every story idea I had and filled it out with worked examples, suggested several stories to me related to angles the destination wanted to push, but was responsive to what I thought I could run and what didn't interest me.

After a few years of successful cooperation, the country decided to take things in-house, and sent out a civil servant instead, who quite possibly had far too much on her plate in terms of dealing with the industry as a whole, but certainly had no time for the press, and was completely disorganised. Getting things arranged became something of a struggle.

But matters became worse still when after a while it was decided to hire a PR agency again, but a very big-name one.

The person I deal with there cannot systematically read an email and reply to the questions it contains. She seems to think that I have an hour to spend chatting on the phone on a 'get to know you' basis—she wants to know what television shows I like, and so on. I neither know nor care about such matters, and all I want to talk about is business, not make friends. I'm not short of friends: I am short of time.

She is profoundly ignorant about the destination, not even knowing in which parts of the country major cities lie. She cannot answer any question about the destination without having to go and ask someone else first. She has no story ideas to offer, and does not pay attention to what sorts of stories I say I'm looking for, nor to where I say I might want to go. On my last trip the itinerary came in so late there was little time to do anything about it, and it contained several profoundly irritating made-for-tourists day trips of precisely the kind I don't usually cover. Luckily there was much other good material because this is a fine destination full of colour and interest. But what I found of that was more in spite of the agency's assistance than because of it. I couldn't see that it added any value at all. Indeed it bordered on being a hindrance.

Unfortunately in recent years my experiences with three of the big name companies tell me it is very often like that with them. The value all goes the other way, with the agency feeling that having the travel PR/destination marketing accounts of sovereign nations looks good on the portfolio when they're chasing the accounts of the Motorolas, Microsofts, and McVitie's of this world who have spending power orders of magnitude greater than most government tourism bureaux.

Often, when I arrive, you'll sit down with me for a general chat and in passing ask if I got everything I wanted from your representative back home. I'd love to tell you the truth, but the fact is I cannot. Suppose I quote chapter and verse of lacklustre, embarrassingly ill-informed responses, and cocked-up and aborted arrangements, and suppose you then take this to a higher level and sit down for discussions with the agency on my version of its shortcomings.

Do you think it will take that well? Or do you think that perhaps instead I'll be blocked from all future trips and that word will be put around the industry that I'm difficult and unproductive (really nothing's further from the truth), so that instead of fending off invitations I'll have to go begging for them? Some PR companies that make a complete hash of things have no scruples about stabbing journalists to save their accounts.

So instead, without naming names, let me ask you to re-assess your strategy. Never mind impressing the tourism minister with a glittery name, think instead of value for money. Talk to the journalists who arrive and ask them in complete confidence to tell you frankly of their experiences. To be sure not all the junior members of the big name companies are entirely lacking in gumption, and some of the journalists certainly are lacking in that commodity themselves (there's no point in asking bloggers anything) so the results may vary, although the big fish in a small pool argument still applies. Become the most important client at an agency that will care desperately about keeping you, and at which the people you deal with are the same people who deal with me.

I think we'll both benefit.

Back to Japan

2012-06-05T20:57:00.005-07:00

Earlier this year I repeated in part an organised trek along sections of the Nakasendo (中山道), taking a shortened winter version of the walk organised by Walk Japan. While it's fashionable to decry organised travel in any form (see comments others have left on some earlier posts), there are times when an immense amount of value can be added, and this is what Walk Japan does, providing native-level Japanese speakers, immense amounts of academically sourced background information, and access to parts of Japan (especially traditional inns and bathhouses) that in some cases might be loathe to accept foreigners if they were not confident they'd been schooled in the niceties of Japanese etiquette (sleeping, bathing, and eating in particular). Despite a great deal of travel in Japanese backwaters over the last 20 years, and despite remembering my first Nakasendo trip with a pleasure that could only lead to the second being disappointing, the winter version, with long tramps through 30cm-deep snow drifts over multiple passes, and through silent, whitened countryside, was memorable in its own right.

This is the text of a short piece, linked above, that subsequently appeared in the Wall Street Journal until the title 'Walk Me Through Japan,' just one of a number published in several locations partly intended to help revive tourism to Japan in the wake of the tsunami. Shame on me, in fact, for taking so long to publish anything on that topic here.

Walk Me Through Japan

In the suburbs of Nakatsugawa, about 300 kilometers west of Tokyo, a wooden signboard carries notices of the kind common in travelers' haunts across Asia, such as the right prices to pay for porters and transport. But in famously orderly Japan, where crime against visitors is almost unknown, it's a surprise also to see warnings against muggers and drug dealers.

But these notices are merely reproductions of edicts from the Tokugawa shoguns once in control of traffic on Japan's ancient Nakasendo, a footpath-highway between Kyoto and Edo (now Tokyo). Their relevance expired 150 years ago along with the shogunate itself, but some sections of the old route have remained unchanged since its creation in the 17th century.

Just across a footbridge over a busy highway, orderly suburbs with their gardens of tiny topiary peter out and the asphalt turns to earth with a soft coating of leaf litter and pine needles. Then as the path leaves tidy farmland and winds gently up through ever wilder landscape to an 1,100 meter pass, sections are paved with centuries-old irregular stone blocks, whose rounded edges once provided purchase for straw porter sandals. A light dusting of snow decorates path-side statues of red-bibbed Jizo, the Buddhist protector of unborn children and travelers, and Kannon, protector of pack animals and porters.

Originally only the feudal lords of Japan and their retinues were allowed to use this mountain highway, but for 20 years now specialist operator Walk Japan (www.walkjapan.com) has led small groups on an increasingly popular trek through well-preserved historic post towns and over remote mountain passes, whose beauty inspired woodblock prints by Hiroshige and others.

Nights are spent at creaking wooden traditional inns, many of which have been run by the same family for hundreds of years. They have changed little since their founding, except for the handy addition of wi-fi and heated lavatory seats.

The first day of the shorter winter version of the walk, recently revived as the first anniversary of the tsunami approaches and foreign visitors return to Japan. The walkers reach the hamlet of Shinchaya at mid-afternoon on the first day. There, the multi-course evening meal, taken seated on the tatami-matted floor while wearing a cotton yukata gown and haori jacket—as travelers have for centuries—is fit for a king, let alone a lord. It includes wild boar from the surrounding forest shot by the still spry 70-year-old host himself, whose family has run an inn here for eight generations.

His ancestors would have seen feudal lords and their retinues pass by on their way to and from Edo. The Tokugawa shoguns created their highway network partly in order to keep restive aristocrats busy by compelling them to make extended visits, and to leave family members behind as hostages. The expense of travel and of maintaining twin establishments drained resources that might otherwise have funded insurrection. More than 30 different lords were instructed to use the Nakasendo, with their travel carefully scheduled so that the post towns would not be over-stretched.

In summer tour buses drop groups at the top of the steep hill at Magome, the next post town. But in winter there's almost no one about, although buns stuffed with piping hot meat or vegetables are still on sale. Once broken open they steam in the wintry sunshine, and fuel the walk over Magome Pass.

Halfway to the next post town, a 250-year-old tea house offers tea, pickled radish and sour plums, along with mochi rice cakes in its smoky, earthen-floored interior.

The path snakes down prettily through giant stands of bamboo to Tsumago, perhaps the best-preserved post town of all, completely free of any sign of modernity. A magnificent inn used by feudal lords has been turned into a museum with explanations of the highway's history.

After Tsumago there's a downhill walk through farmland and forests to Nagiso to pick up a local train to Kiso-Fukushima, where an ancient barrier station has been recreated. Here samurai bristling with the fearsome weaponry now on display examined travel documents, searched for unlicensed guns and illegal Christian paraphernalia and checked the sex of more androgynous males to make sure that no hostage wives were being smuggled out of Edo.

In winter the guards dealt with only a dozen or so travelers a day, and they are as few now. At other seasons a lord's retinue might number 3000—in 1862, 17-year-old Princess Kazunomiya's party of 15,000 plus porters took a full three days to pass.

Two days later the trip ends in Matsumoto atop the tower of a magnificent wooden castle built in the 1580s, the oldest surviving in Japan and named Black Raven for its layers of darkly lacquered wood.

Many modern-day visitors merely ricochet between Tokyo and Kyoto by bullet train, but Japan seems almost purpose-built for taking things slowly. Its volcanic countryside offers gentle climbs to passes with fine views that always compensate for the effort made, as well as mineral-rich geothermally-heated spring waters cleverly piped straight to baths at each night's accommodation, and which provide the perfect balm for any aches at the end of a day on foot.

The brash and glittery modern Japan of tune-playing crosswalks and talking vending machines seems not just of a different time, but of a different country altogether.

Blogging for freebies

2012-05-23T15:56:00.007-07:00

The lack of enthusiasm for blogging is evident in the long gap between posts. A quick read suggests that there's a fair bit of work needed to tidy up earlier postings, too, which were often done in haste and not adequately proofed.

Since the last posting I've been in Japan, Hong Kong, China, and the USA twice each; and in Australia, Macau, the UK, Poland, France, and The Maldives. The lack of even a single word on any of these trips is an indication that I prefer to write for a living, and with travel, administration, not to mention family responsibilities there's little time to waste on financially unproductive activities.

Apparently, however, there's a whole world out there of people who blog in order to be noticed, and whose principal activity when not blogging is doing anything that will drive traffic to their blogs; notably tweeting. In many cases the purpose of the blog is to attract sufficient attention so as to bring free gifts and some advertising revenue. Many of them (I find from looking at the links given in various tweets) are absolutely appalling: unpublishable in any other form. But if enough traffic is generated, from the point of view of destinations, outfitters, and properties hoping for increased sales, it's a case of 'never mind the quality, feel the width.'

Now one website is offering a service which claims to provide a measure of influence, and with coverage in Wire and elsewhere its name is about to join Twitter, Google, Facebook, as part of everyday speech, or so it seems to think. If the boosters are to be believed our Klout score (www.klout.com) is already being taken into account by employers and by those looking to get persuasive coverage on-line for their products and services: get high enough Klout and couriers will be arriving at your front door laden with desirable kit for you to write about.

However, we're entering a world in which influence is only measured by interaction with others, and only on-line, essentially through Twitter, Facebook, and Linked In. It's about being mentioned in other's tweets, about being re-tweeted, and about getting responses to posts on other social media.

I joined Twitter early, and left it again almost straight away. It is probably already obvious from looking at this blog that 140 characters is not my preferred medium of expression, and I'm not interested in communicating the trivia of my day. I've discovered, though, that a significant number of my friends and colleagues do most of their communicating via Twitter. Some are now required by their employers to keep the profile of their organisations up by constantly tweeting together with links to the organisation's site.

But just as so much blogging is about discussing what others have written, so most tweeting is about drawing attention to such comment or its subject, and re-tweeting links posted by others. A small amount of original content mostly goes round in circles with very little added value. In the Klout world, however, the persuasiveness of the content has nothing to do with its inherent value. Well-informed and well-expressed criticism has less value than vapid gossip if it is re-tweeted fewer times.

I find this world picture one of fascinating horror: a little like being unable to look away from a car crash. The Klout score above which the couriers start ringing the doorbell is 50, we're told. The average Klout score is 20, but every successive increase in value becomes harder to obtain. Given that the average person in the world isn't even on-line, I was surprised to find I had an initial score of 12, well below the average. This was despite having published several articles across North America this year, as well as in the Asia edition of the Wall Street Journal, reaching audiences of millions and beyond the wildest dreams of more than a handful of bloggers. But off-line influence apparently doesn't matter, even when the articles also appear on-line. And there's apparently no account taken of the relative persuasiveness of items appearing under the auspices of organisations with large, long-standing reputations in the real world, compared to items under the banner of Joe Bloggs' Blog.

This may be the world wished for, and the world predicted to come to pass, but it isn't here yet, and it will be a worse world if it ever arrives. However, and playing the game by its own rules, I re-joined Twitter, and within two days my Klout score had rocketed to 42.

Life isn't really like this, but since I heard a story from a colleague that he'd been turned down for a press trip because he didn't blog, I've been asking various PR people I've come across (rather a lot, unsurprisingly) about the emphasis they place on bloggers versus those being published in print media, and I've yet to find anyone who puts any weight at all on blogs.

Last year I visited Scottsdale for the third time, and about two weeks ago two resulting stories happened to appear in Canadian media at the same time. As the people at Scottsdale are always well-organised and helpful (and likeable), and as I'd been thinking that they'd gone a long time without seeing a return on their investment (not that any is ever guaranteed) I took the time to send a note with links to the two stories.

I received a delighted reply. I then received an equally delighted email from one property mentioned in one story. I received another from a property that got a passing mention in the second story, rather disproportionately small given the amount of effort it had put in, I felt (but that's just how it goes sometimes). Finally today I received a letter personally signed by Managing Director of one of the properties. I imagine this was written for him by the PR person, but nonetheless the effort had been made.

I'll perhaps discuss in another post why all this is unnecessary but the point is that these people are in no doubt where clout's important. And it's with four million newspaper readers across Canada. The on-line presence is just a bonus.

Picasso vs. Potter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ACCESS

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

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

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

Seattle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A 'put-on'? Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preserving China's Humiliation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philadelphia

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

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

'Again?' comes the puzzled response.

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

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

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

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

'Eight,' was the reply.

'Not for long,' intoned the ghoul.

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

And why am I going yet again?

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

The morals of this story are:

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

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

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

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

I'm quite looking forward to the trip back.

The romance of travel

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

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

Anyone remember when travel was actually glamorous?

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

Ramblings on Rio

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breakfast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Easter Island

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Holiday

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

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

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

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

I'm actually looking forward to travel for once.

Afternoon off

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

I shouldn't be doing this.

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

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

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

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

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

That's nice.

PR tip 3: Get a global strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How 2009 looked

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

Travel by numbers

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

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

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

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

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

PR tip 2: Don't bargain with me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PR tip 1: Look it up

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is 'Real Travel' Revisited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soft openings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An embarrassment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liveable City

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