Here’s the thing about travel blogs: anyone can start one, but very few people can make money from them.

There was an interesting debate going on on David Whitley’s blog a few weeks ago about exactly how much travel bloggers are earning, and despite claims from a few well-known exponents of making some serious coin, I find it hard to believe that many people are making a genuine living from blogging.

It’s no surprise, of course, that the big topic of conversation in travel blogging circles is monetisation – how to turn your hobby into a living. There are eBooks on it, seminars being conducted, advice being dished out by highly qualified and not-so-qualified members of the community.

I’ve heard a few different ideas, but none more brash than those of an Amsterdam-based blogger I met at a travel media convention in Canada recently.

Thing is, the popular travel bloggers are now being invited on “famils”, the travel writing slang for junket travel. They get free flights, free accommodation, and a free tour of their destination, usually taken care of by a country or city’s tourism organisation. It’s the same way a lot of traditional travel writers get around, and frankly, accepting trips like these is the only way to make a decent living as a travel writer.

Tourism boards are now recognising the influence and exposure that bloggers provide, and have begun offering them the famil treatment as well. So far, so good. Only thing is that for bloggers, a free trip doesn’t put food on the table. It doesn’t pay the rent. It helps ensure fresh content, but it doesn’t make you any cash.

The blogger I met in Canada’s solution? Payment. From the tourism boards, airlines and hotels – the hosts – to the bloggers, direct. He reckons that within a few years, tourism boards will not only be hosting trips for travel bloggers, but they’ll be paying them a daily retainer to visit. Say, $100 a day to secure the privilege of a blogger’s attendance.

His reasoning, obviously, is that bloggers have few other avenues for making money, and if tourism organisations want to harness their audience and their influence, then they’ll have to pay to keep the bloggers in business. He also thinks that with several organisations competing for top bloggers’ attendances, it could turn into a price war.

There’s also the idea of personality. Traditional travel journalists are just bylines in a larger section of a magazine or newspaper. Bloggers, this guy says, are the star attraction of their own show, and therefore deserve to be recognised as such – with money.

It’s a nice idea.  However, it’s a bit pie in the sky.

With a few exceptions, most tourism organisations are cutting back on their spending, hosting fewer journalists each year. All have tight budgets to stick to. Right now, the idea that these guys will start effectively paying a salary to travel bloggers seems like wishful thinking.

Plus, are travel bloggers really well-known personalities? They might be big fish within their own community of fellow cyber-scribes, but does the average Joe really take much notice of the face behind the website? I’m not so sure.

There’s another problem, too. Once you’re on the payroll, all notions of objectivity as a writer – already questionable on junkets – are thrown out the window. Start accepting payment for travel and coverage, and you become little more than a PR agent for whomever is handing out the cash. You’re hardly going to be critical.

Like I said, being paid to attend junkets is a nice idea. Until you really start to think about it.

With all the violence in the world, with the poverty, the natural disasters, the threats of terrorism and the GFC, it’s sometimes worth taking a moment to reflect, and to take in the wisdom that only a Japanese pachinko parlour can impart.

I think there’s something in this for all of us. Have a great weekend everyone.

It’s common knowledge amongst Australians that our Kiwi brothers are a bunch of sheep-shaggers. Just ask anyone, they’ll tell you. Bloody sheep-shaggers.

We have no proof, of course, but since when has that been a problem? It’s a ready-made insult, and one we won’t easily let go of.

So it’s a bit of a shock when you travel to South Africa. I was on a dive boat there recently with a bunch of Aussies when the Afrikaans skipper took a quick look around. “Geez,” he said, “we’ve got a lot sheep-shaggers on here.”

“Huh? We’re all Australians, mate.”

“Ja, I know. Sheep-shaggers.”

Turns out, Saffas think of Australians as the merino molesters and have a whole bunch of jokes about us, whereas we’d always been of the belief that it was the Kiwis.

Anyway, it’s a dumb argument. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say none of us are actually guilty of bothering the livestock.

But it does go some way to explaining the answer I’ve been getting from a lot of people to something I’m pondering at the moment: What are the quintessential Kiwi experiences for travellers?

I’m trying to come up with a list of must-do Kiwi experiences, the things that make the country what it is, and the people what they are. We’re talking things like learning to make pavlova, finding a kiwi in the wild, going bungee-jumping, learning the haka, going to a hangi, eating a cheese roll…

Disappointingly, however, the answer I’ve had most often from the people I’ve asked has been: “Shag a sheep.”

I reckon we can do better than that.

What’s this all about? I can’t really say, but it looks like I’m going to be heading to New Zealand for an extended period of time soon, and I’m trying to set myself a good list of quintessentially Kiwi challenges to achieve (and write about) during my time there.

I will go bungee-jumping. I will find a kiwi. I might even apologise for the underarm incident.

And I’d very much appreciate any suggestions you might have. As long as they have nothing to do with sheep.

In Australia, we take barbecues pretty seriously. It might look like the simple act of grilling meat, but not being able to work a barbie is like not being able to tell your Nick Riewoldt from your Nick Farr-Jones, or not playing two-up on Anzac Day: unAustralian.

Things on the Aussie barbie front might have progressed lately from the old sausage in bread to fancy schmancy products like haloumi, but the central tenant is the same: we know how to barbecue.

At least, I used to think so. Then I went to Argentina.

Now, these guys know their way around fire and meat. Think you’re going to get away with a gas barbie in Argentina? No chance. It’s hot coals all the way, not even flames will do the trick.

It’s one thing to get a good steak at a restaurant, but you can almost guarantee that every backyard in Argentina is serving up better meat than you’ll find in Oz.

Nick works the asado like a pro

I had my first proper backyard asado at my mate Nick’s house in Mendoza. Nick’s garden houses the same pyramid-shaped brick apparatus you’ll find at every self-respecting Argentinean’s place: the asado.

It’s big, it’s ugly, and it’s not the kind of thing you’ll be able to lug down to the park to grill some souvlaki on on a weekend. It does, however, do amazing things to meat.

First things first: start the fire. This is done with newspaper, kindling, and some wood bought from the local servo. While Nick plays the waiting game as it burns down to hot coals, he grabs the meat – giant slabs of beef bought from the butcher around the corner – and douses them in special “parilla” salt.

With the coals ready to go, he scrapes a few of them under the grill, then slaps on the steaks. It’s a long process – the steaks slow-cook for 20 minutes or so – but the results…

Nick slices the meat on a wooden board sprinkled with chopped herbs and red wine, then dishes little bits out to everyone in the backyard as they hit perfect eating temperature. They’re salty, smoky, herbacious and meaty. In other words: freaken awesome.

Give up Aussies, we’ve got nothing. The Argies are the Barbecue Kings.

They do some weird stuff overseas. From Thais putting ice in their beers to the Dutch having little viewing platforms on their toilets, there are always cultural quirks you have to get used to when you travel.

But this one’s just ridiculous.

I was in Argentina a few weeks back, and got stuck in more than the odd traffic jam. The one in Mendoza was crazy – everyone on the freeway slowed to a crawl, then we were forced into one lane by the police, and eventually, a good half hour later, trundled past a bunch of cars parked on the side of the road, their drivers standing around and frying meat on portable barbecues, having a chat.

Apparently that’s not Argentinean council workers on smoko, that’s a protest.

I read about it later in the Buenos Aires Herald (above – which, incidentally, I got plenty of gold from). When Argentinean workers decide to stage a protest, they don’t picket their workplace, or gather in a square – they get in their cars and they block off traffic.

This inevitably causes chaos, but no problem, the whole thing is sanctioned (nay, supported), but the government and the police.

So every time some workers have a bone to pick, traffic descends into a bumper to bumper riot.

Now, I would have thought the idea with a protest would be to elicit some public sympathy, and the last way you’d want to do that is extend everyone’s commute by a few hours by needlessly blocking the highway and causing a traffic jam.

But hey, I’m not Argentinean. What would I know?

As my long absence from blog updates might suggest, I’ve been travelling recently, and what a freaken trip! I was lucky enough to be invited by Chimu Adventures to go along on one of their Antarctica voyages, and it really was one of those once-in-a-lifetime things.

The trip had everything: snow, ice, icebergs, penguins, seals, and the consumption of home-made vodka. More on that later though.

For now, as I’ve been struggling to come up with anything in words (a problem, given my profession), I thought I’d post a few photos from the trip instead. These are six of about 1200…

Penguins: the coolest animals in the world

Just hangin' out by the beach

Did I not tell you they were cool?

Getting around on the Zodiacs

Little ice with your drink?

Plenty more to come soon…

This is going to come off sounding like an appalling whinge from an ungrateful tosser, but… what the hell. It’s never stopped me in the past.

Because I’ve managed to find one of the only small things possibly wrong with getting paid to travel to exotic locations around the world for a living: getting ready for those trips.

In four days’ time I’m flying out to Buenos Aires, where I’ve got a couple of days to chill before heading down to Ushuaia and then boarding a ship and sailing to Antarctica, all care of the lovely people at Chimu Adventures.

To say I’m kind of excited would be like saying Charlie Sheen is kind of mental. The trip is going to be incredible, without doubt a dream come true.

The crap I’m grappling with right now, however, is more the stuff of nightmares come true, as I attempt to write enough columns, blogs and stories to keep myself in business for the three weeks I’ll be off the radar somewhere in the Drake Passage.

Most people’s jobs are the same, I guess: going away overseas doesn’t reduce the amount of work you have to do, it just reduces the amount of time you have to do it in.

So this week I’ve written three blog entries for the Herald, three columns for the Sun-Herald, finshed off a story for the YHA magazine, plus done some freelance sub-editing. All while trying to organise all the things I’ll need in Antarctica (warm clothes, UV lens for my camera, penguin repellent).

Then there’s some invoicing to do, late payments to chase up, an old washing machine to try to sell, a dodgy internet account to sort out, and I have to remember to buy a jar of Vegemite for my mate Nick in Argentina.

Like I said, I’m a giant whinger. But shit I’ll be glad to hop on that plane on Sunday…

Travel’s fun. At least it is to me. It’s about going out into the big wide world and enjoying yourself. Nothing too heavy.

For others, though, it’s serious business. It stirs deep passions – it’s worth getting angry about. At least, it is for some of the people who read my blog on the Herald.

I’ve got a favourite reader, a guy who calls himself “Bill Kane”. Bill Kane has been reading my blog for pretty much the entire four years it has been around, and he hates me. Hates me. And he’s good enough to write in pretty much every single week to tell me how much.

Ironically, Bill is also one of my biggest fans, if you count mouse clicks. He’s keeping me in a job.

Most people don’t hate me that much, but they will break out the abuse if I write something they disagree with.

Take this week for example. I wrote about “countries that will change your life”. I know, I know, you go and make these bold statements and you have to expect people are going to disagree with you.

But what really brought the crazies out was my mention of Germany. Not, mostly, for it’s place in the list – mostly for what I wrote about it. Here’s the entry:

You want life-changing? Walk around Dachau or Mauthausen*, the former Nazi concentration camps. Walk through the Topography of Terror in Berlin. Walk the length of the East Side Gallery. Then have a look around you and think about how the country has transformed itself.

Now, what I was getting at was that although Germany has a horrible not-too-distant past, it has changed immeasurably, and is now about far more than those things. It’s a place of natural beauty, of lovely, friendly people, great beer and an impressive arts scene. And you’ll appreciate that even more for having seen what the country has put itself through in the past.

Come to think of it, I probably should have written exactly that. Then I wouldn’t have got emails like this, from “Wolfgang”: “You are a simple fucking moron of the highest order. Get an education or get off the web. Have you ever even been to Germany?”

So here’s my advice: if you’re going to put an opinion out there, make sure you spell it out.

*I know, I know, Mauthausen is in Austria, not Germany. Maybe Wolfgang was right…

It’s the hardest thing. You look at other writers in papers and magazines, and you think, “Okay, I could do that. But how?”

Kicking off your career as a travel writer is a slog, no doubt about it. And there’s no easy way around it. It sounds glib, but it really is going to take hard work, a bit of talent, and about 100 times that amount of luck.

I got my start in journalism up in Brisbane, working as a junior writer at a suburban magazine called Brisbane News. That’s where I took my first clumsy steps as a travel writer, too (in between the real estate write-ups and “what’s on” columns), taking the odd junket as a trade-off for a crappy salary and writing about it for the magazine.

Those stories were nothing spectacular, but they were a start. What really got things going, ironically, was quitting.

I left Brisbane News to spend a year travelling. Before that, however, I managed to organise a meeting with the travel editor of the Courier-Mail, and he promised me he’d consider any story ideas I swung his way.

Things didn’t exactly take off from there – I was way too busy having a good time to pitch or write many stories – but I at least got a few published in full newspapery goodness (including one on the gorillas in the Congo, above), and I was away.

Next up was a move to Sydney, taking a casual job on the Sydney Morning Herald sports desk. Still not exactly every travel writer’s dream, but it did give me the chance to chat to a few of the people in the know, so that when I had the idea for the Backpacker blog, I knew who to go to.

Fortunately that idea was given the green light, and four years later I’m still writing it. It was a case of right place, right time, right contacts and right idea.

Obviously not everyone’s going to have those circumstances, and I’m always getting asked how people can get their start in the industry.

The good news is, all the tools are right there in front of you, in the form of a computer and an internet connection. If you want to get into freelance travel writing, you need to start a travel blog. Now.

If you really enjoy writing and have plenty of travel experience, this won’t be a problem, and it’s the only way writers with no experience can guarantee that their work gets published. Get on the net and publish it yourself.

That way when you start pitching travel stories to newspaper and magazine editors, you can point them in the direction of your blog to sample your writing. That’s got to be better than asking them to blindly trust your skills.

It also shows your travel experience, and your dedication to the writing craft, as well as your writing style.

There’s another benefit to kicking off a blog, too. If you’re good enough, you won’t even need those newspaper and magazine editors.

My mate Anthony has been running The Travel Tart for only two years now, and is already fielding offers from all sorts of tourism agencies to send him around the world for free.

Ant’s a great writer who’s dedicated to what he does and works hard on it, and he’s shown what you can do when you strike out on your own. Get involved, I say.

Do you have your own travel blog? Give it a plug below!

Christmas is great, innit? You eat like Kyle Sandilands at Sizzler, you drink like Mel Gibson on a… well, Tuesday, and you persuade yourself that all the work you know you should be doing can be put off until some time in the very distant future.

And so it is that I look over my past blog posts and realise that I haven’t written a thing for this here digital diary in a solid month or so.

Now, I don’t go making New Year’s resolutions, mostly because I know that however much I promise myself I’ll start eating better, drinking less, and saving up for that apartment I should be investing in, I know with absolute faith that I’m not going to do any of those things. So I don’t even bother.

Instead, I’m going to make a New Year’s “blogolution”. It’s a simple one, too: write more.

Because I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t post nearly enough on this website. I’m hitting about once a fortnight, if I’m lucky. I’ve been thinking about why that might be, and I’ve come up with the cold, hard truth: I don’t get paid for it.

I’m lucky enough to get paid for all of my other writing, so when it comes to the stuff that I do for fun… Well, it always ends up at the bottom of the list.

I’ve actually struggled with the content of the blog – I know it’s a travel blog, but if I post all of my travel stories on here, what will I have left to sell? Corny as it sounds, this stuff is my bread and butter (although it’s only really a crouton and butter at the moment).

But I’ve come up with an idea. They say “write what you know”, and while I’m not entirely sure who “they” are, I think they might be right. And what I know right now is life as a freelance travel writer, which, after about five years of trying, I’m finally beginning to crack.

Coincidentally, that’s also what the majority of people who write to me ask about: How do I become a travel writer? What’s the pay like? How did you get into it? How do you get free holidays?

So here goes: this year, I’m going to answer all those questions and more. This blog, for better or worse, is going to be dedicated to life as a freelance travel writer. It will be both a diary of my life as a writer – where I’m going, the eternal struggle to sell stories – plus a forum to answer your questions. I’ll be as honest as I can, give it to you straight. I’ll even have a few guest posters on board to answer the questions that I can’t.

This year’s going to be an exciting one: I’m going to Japan in a few weeks, I have a massive trip to Antarctica coming up in March, and it looks as though my second book project will be getting off the ground as well. If that doesn’t make for good material, I don’t know what will.

To kick the year off, I’ll throw it open to your questions about freelance travel writing: either leave them as comments at the bottom of this blog, or email them to me at bengroundwater [at] gmail.com.

Happy New Year everyone! Plenty more posts to come (I promise).

PS. Should probably explain that pic up there – it’s from a place called Days At Sea in South Africa, probably the best place I’ve ever stayed, and it was free. Yep, this travel writing malarky’s not bad…