Going local travel

Well done Argentina for scoring an Oscar at the weekend for El Secreto de sus Ojos. The award for the Best Foreign Language Film does, indeed, go to the country not an individual filmmaker.

And this isn’t the only little-known thing about this category. I’ve just been researching it for an article in The Linguist magazine. 

Here are some oddities:

• Each country has to narrow down their entire annual output to just one representative. This can be problematic. Do you pick the film that went down best with the home crowd or the one that is most likely to please Americans? Should Spain go for a crowd-pleasing Almodavar film every year or risk it with an unknown?

• There were over 60 films on the longlist this year. To be involved in narrowing these down, Academy members must have seen 80% of the category’s film screenings. This recently prompted The New York Times to suggest that votes must come mainly from retirees with time on their hands.
• To be classed as ‘foreign’, 50% of the film’s dialogue has to be in a language other than English. Previously this had to be the country’s official language, but this was amended shortly after Italian film Private (2004) was disqualified because its main languages were Arabic and Hebrew.
  

The category is unlike any other, but, for all its faults and complications, it can still provides a great boost for little-known industries - both domestically and internationally.

Vanessa Ragone, executive producer of El Secreto de sus Ojos, told me some weeks ago the film is already “one of the biggest hits of contemporary Argentine cinema”. In the week of its Oscar nomination, DVD sales in Argentina were outselling other current domestic titles almost tenfold and the film returned to 20 cinema screens. Imagine how that will grow now. And overseas too.

Personally, I’m not convinced it was THE greatest foreign film of the year, but it definitely deserves to be a success and I’m delighted to see Argentinian cinema get recognition on such a global platform. I was also pleased to see a Peruvian film nominated for the first time with La Teta Asustada (The Milk of Sorrow).

Yet, as this BBC article points out, not all Peruvians were pleased.

Rolando Arellano, a marketing expert and columnist, responded to the Oscar nomination by saying the film did not show the reality of a developing country with strong economic growth. Instead, he said, it "reverted to the stereotypical image of a problematic nation with very poor and extremely downtrodden people who live with the ghost of official and unofficial terrorism".

Interestingly one of my Argentinian housemates just said she was pleased that Argentina won this year with a film that had nothing to do with its past dictatorship. The only time Argentina’s won an Oscar before was for The Official Story which was a heart-wrenching tale of children stolen during the ‘Dirty War’.

Some critics are suggesting El Secreto de Sus Ojos (or indeed some of the other strong contenders) should have been in the Best Picture category too. Especially as this year the category was upped from five to ten nominees. As yet no foreign language film has ever won best picture. Maybe next year…

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for other ‘world cinema’ tips, check out this excellent blog http://dzong2.blogspot.com which throws up lots of other strong contenders from the Oscar longlist. 

I’ve had a few emails this week from people working in tourism in Chile. They are desperate for it to be known that Chile is not a no-go area for tourism despite last week’s tragic earthquake.

Their situation is very different from that in Haiti, where an instant return to tourism-as-usual was disputed. Why? Because on the Carribean island people were still dying in the streets when the cruiseliners returned.

What the two have in common, however, is distorted news coverage. For an excellent analysis of how Haiti’s tale was told to international audiences, see Charlie Brooker’s simply brilliant Newswipe.

Liz Caskey of Culinary & Wine  Experiences is based in Santiago and is keen to set the record straight of how things currently stand in Chile:

 

If you have traveled to Chile, have a trip scheduled here, or know people that do, please encourage friends, family, and colleagues to still come. The images the media is "exporting" is simply not accurate since many people do not understand the country’s geography and where the quake is contained. They stick all of Chile in the disaster boat and this is completely false. The majority of the country is functioning perfectly normal, with the exception of the affected areas within 100 miles of the Concepción area and the coastline hit by the tsunami. Don’t let TV paranoia ruin what makes Chile so wonderful. 

Tonight Chile is holding a huge Teletón to raise millions of dollars to provide temporary housing for every family who lost their home. You can donate via their site or via the Red Cross. Meanwhile, keep an eye on Liz’s blog, eatwineblog.com, for updates.

Gualeguaychú - the name hardly trips off the tongue (or off your fingers when typing). Maybe that’s why Argentina’s carnaval remains so little-known?

Argentina’s carnaval festivities are concentrated here, in this riverside town, four hours outside of Buenos Aires. I went last Saturday and was absolutely astounded by how much it exceeded my expectations. Last year I briefly went to ‘carnaval’ in Buenos Aires. It consisted of just one roped off street, a small band, and lots of people spraying cans of foam. It was fun for an hour or so, but hardly Rio de Janiero.

Gualeguaychú, by contrast, did feel like Brazil. There were giant floats; an exuberant, extrovert crowd; booty-shaking music; and gorgeous lithe women in teeny-tiny bikinis. It felt like an X-rated Disney parade.

It also struck me as the ideal carnaval experience for first timers. It’s cheap, it’s easy and it’s safe (if you exercise normal, big-crowd caution). And, if all the decent hotel rooms are booked up, just go for the day. Around $220 pesos gets you a daytrip from BA with Ayres Viajes.

The carnaval parade itself takes place in a sort of make-shift stadium with a runway where the action takes place. There was certainly a lively atmosphere but there were also a lot of empty seats. Surely not enough is being done to spread the word? I was in BA all of last Jan and Feb and yet I never ‘got around’ to going.

I clearly didn’t know what I was missing. Here are some more pics….

I have a tip for you. I haven’t had much luck with it until now. None of my friends heading to Peru have taken me up on it. Why? Not because they don’t believe me, but generally because when it comes to visiting Machu Pichhu they’ve tied themselves into rigid schedules. A few days in Cusco to acclimatise, then straight on the Inca Trail, then out of there. Onward to Bolivia … or wherever.

Fine, if you’re tight for time and have your heart set on the Inca Trail, but if you do have some spare days, I totally recommend spending some extra time in Sacred Valley, especially if you can base yourself in the lovely Ollantaytambo. I’ve just written about it at length in TNT magazine.

Here’s an extract on why Ollanta won me over:

For most backpackers in Peru, seeing Inca ruins means one thing: trekking. Mostly this involves the Inca Trail, which, as satisfying as it is, also involves three nights’ camping and some fairly strenuous hiking at high altitude. This is why Ollantaytambo – which sits conveniently on the train route from Cusco to Machu Picchu – comes as a welcome respite. To soak up incredible historical ruins here, all you need do is slightly tilt your head. Some of the country’s most spectacular 15th-century ruins are built into the surrounding mountains and the town is framed by Inca terraces, which rise up the hills like giant stone steps and carry extra significance as one of the few places that the Incas defeated the Spanish conquistadors.

Ollantaytambo bills itself as a “living Inca town”, and walking its narrow, cobbled streets feels like being in a large, open-air museum – albeit one where you’ll see people carrying their laundry or riding a bike through the exhibits. It’s one of South America’s oldest continually inhabited sites, and is known for the best- preserved examples of kanchas (traditional stone houses built around a central courtyard). It’s an impressive sight even before you remind yourself that everything here – each perfectly carved stone block – was constructed without the wheel or iron tools.

You can find lots of local travel tips on Ollantaytambo on LeapLocal.org as the site’s founder lives there and runs the town’s new Apu Lodge Hotel.

Where next? A video introduction to the semantic web (aka Web 3.0)

Thanks for everyone who commented on the Guardian Travel Blog looking at ‘where we are now’ with travel networking. So far we’re up to 40-plus comments  and it seems everyone had something interesting to say.

So where are travel networks going wrong? Here are some early conclusions:

• There’s an overwhelming amount of information. It’s hard to find what we want. 
• They aren’t personalised. We want to be able to filter according to budgets and taste. 
• The quantity of tips often outweighs quality.
• Some offer incentives for members who post the most, encouraging people to post for the sake of it.
• Niche sites often aren’t active enough to sustain interest.
• We find it hard to trust information from users we know nothing about.

It’s no longer enough to just ‘collect’ information. These sites need to do something with it. At the moment there are too many copycat networks. Someone needs to come in and shake it up again. I feel like a kid in the back of a car crying "Are we nearly there yet?" about Web 3.0. (Yes, I’m the ultimate backseat driver telling people how to run their travel networks when I’d never dare make one myself.)

Yesterday when I asked people on Twitter who they trusted for travel tips, someone came back with ‘friends and locals’. I’d say it depends on whether your friends and local contacts share your taste. A friend could recommend somewhere with the very best of intentions but completely miss the mark for you. That’s certainly happened to me before. 

Rummble looks like a promising step forward. According to one blog commenter: "Their mobile app is supposed to guess what kind of place you’re looking for based on time of day, past behaviour and the opinions of contacts." Apparently you build up a "trust network" by rating other users’ tips. Interesting…

And then there’s Google Buzz. Well, that certainly doesn’t seem to be doing anything to streamline people’s networks. Instead it wants to keep you in eternal contact with just about everyone you ever sent an email to. Also it suddenly gives you access to everyone’s Reader, but what if they only like reading about rugby? That’s of no use to me. Google made a massive PR faux pas by trying to take too much control and not allowing us to opt in. They automatically signed us up to their battle against Facebook whether we liked it or not.

Yes, in some ways we want our social networks to be ahead of us and coming up with helpful suggestions, but they can’t too cocky and take over. They must know their place: we are the masters; they are the helpful servants.  Ok, these servants could turn around and blackmails us any day with the obscene amount of personal data they have gathered up, but still we like to pretend we’re boss.

In case you missed it, there’s was an excellent Facebook v Google debate on the Times website earlier this week.

Is Couchsurfing now mainstream? 1.5m users is huge number for something supposed to be ‘alternative’.

But it depends on what circles you mix in.

A couple of years ago, I found myself often having to start from scratch explaining the concept to other travellers in hostels. Couchsurfing was by no means new then, but it was still fairly underground and generally kept apart from the hostel world. You were either with it (and therefore not staying in hostels) or you weren’t aware of its existence.

Now there’s more overlap. People dip in and dip out. Those that don’t use it themselves have at least met others who have. And the word itself is no longer alien - even if people still don’t understand it fully.

If you’re a traveller currently staying in lots of hostels, I’d be interested to see if you agree and if you are coming across more couchsurfers now than before.

It was an article on Peter Greenburg’s travel site entitled "Couchsurfing for grown-ups" that made me return to this subject and think about how Couchsurfing is evolving. I like to see people recognising that the concept is not just for skint students and all ages groups are getting involved.

However, after reading the piece, I’m not sure why it has this headline. It’s a nice, introductory article but never qualifies how or why it is for "grown ups".

In fact, one of the casestudies, Morgan, comes across as a example of how not to use couchsurfing.

I stayed with someone in Japan who was using people as secretarial slaves. In exchange for staying, I had to work six hours a day in her tiny room filling out applications and sending out grants.

Eh? That’s not couchsurfing. That’s just bizarre. I’d be straight out the door.

But apparently Morgan agrees to it for a while, then falls out with his host over conflicting religious beliefs, moves out and spends a night in a cupboard box in a homeless park.

Who knows what Morgan’s circumstances were, but I hope the idea of checking in to a homeless park for the night while on a RTW trip doesn’t catch on. 

Anyway, if you’d rather not follow in his footsteps, follow these easy steps:

• The first rule of Couchsurfing is to read the profiles and the references, ask questions if unsure, and don’t stay with a person if they seem in any way dodgy.
• The second is to have a back-up plan. Don’t couchsurf when you don’t have a reserve fund of cash to pay for a last-minute alternative if things don’t work out. If you can’t afford one night in a hotel, it’s time to go home.

And that’s the way to couchsurf the grown-up way.

Photo: By Daquella Manera, Flickr, Creative Commons.

When I took my trip home to England for Christmas, I realised it was the first time I boarded a plane in over a year.

I shouldn’t have been that surprised. One of the reasons I decided to base myself in South America was so I could do more overland travel and fly less. This turned out to be even easier than I thought. Last year I mangaged to travel extensively across Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. Once even I hopped to Patagonia for the weekend.

It’s all down to the good, old long-distance bus. Admittedly those in Bolivia and Peru were a little lacking, but Argentina’s system is - as countless travellers in South America have discovered - outstanding.

Argentinian buses have certainly become more expensive over recent years but they still remain the best I have ever experienced. Argentinians seem surprised when I tell them this. "They are sooo much better than the buses in the US," I qualify. This really knocks them for six.

My last trip was 16 hours overnight, from Buenos Aires to San Juan with these guys (www.SanJuanMardelPlata.com.ar). For £40 each way, the "cama VIP" service provided an armchair-like leather seat that fully reclined, a hot meal, a glass of wine, onboard movies and, in an interesting new twist, wifi access. Ok, the wifi access was sporadic, the food was plain and the wine wasn’t the province’s finest, but nonetheless, six years after boarding my first Argentinian bus, I remain impressed. If you’re going to traverse this vast country overland, this is certainly the way to do it. 

The thing I love most about living in Buenos Aires is you can choose to take an overnight bus north, south, east or west and you’ll end up in the jungle, the plains of Patagonia, the Andes or the heart of the Uruguayan pampas. It’s an amazing feeling waking up somewhere so different and it has so much more impact that boarding a plane. In Argentina, it’s particularly important to appreciate the vast, empty spaces in between the sights to really get a feel of the land.

I’d encourage anyone to take at least one long-distance bus in Argentina, even if they are only on a short trip. Puerto Iguazú is a good choice from Buenos Aires.

Recently I’ve heard rumours of it being cheaper to fly to Iguazu than to get the bus. This would be a shame. I’d hate to see shoddy budget flights overtaking the bus industry. Flying with Aerolineas Argentinas already has an extra incentive for locals as they get a reduced rate compared to foreigners.

One thing they don’t have here, unlike the US and Europe, is bus passes that last a month or so.  The difficulty is there is no Greyhound or National Express monopoly here. Perhaps that’s why they’ve made more of a success of it? Competition has kept them on their toes.

Photo: Flickr Creative Commons by Sheep"R"Us

The last of the tourists have been rescued from Machu Picchu and the environs after the floods. But what of the people left behind?

Here’s an update from a friend of mine, Gonzalo Fossa of Mountain Lodges of Peru on what happened in the village of Mollepata, which is located about 2 ½ hours from downtown Cusco:

a) 18 houses totally destroyed and families left homeless.
b) 80 homes damaged and flooded. All goods and cattle lost.
c) 30 acres of vegetable gardens lost due to landslides and many others crops damaged by the rain.
d) 1,500 dead guinea pigs
e) Paths and roads destroyed.

Gonzalo is helping to coordinate collections of:
Food
Tents
Blankets
Medicines
Roofing/shelter materials

There are two collection points. In Lima, contact Sylvia.pastor@mountainlodgesofperu.com; (51) (1) 421-8476. En Cusco, contact nathaly.campos@yanapana.org; (51) (84) 24-3636.

I have also been talking to friends in nearby Ollantaytambo. It’s a similar situation. Houses by the river have been washed away. Livelihoods have been lost.

The foreign press is seemingly less interested in this side of the tale.

Does PR sponsorship undermine the honesty of a travel piece?

Ah yes, that old chestnut. The subject of whether professional travel journalists should accept press trips or complimentary hotel stays has been debated endlessly. (To save me covering old ground, see this piece from the Matador Network.)

What’s interesting is the role bloggers have played in this argument up until now and how that is changing. For a long time, people argued that travel bloggers were the ones really telling readers how it is. They funded their trips entirely from their own pockets and stood far apart from the PR machine.

Now things are changing. Established travel bloggers have such big voices on the net that they are being invited on the the press trips too. Last year a group of bloggers was invited on a cruise in return for coverage on blogs and Twitter. (Although that coverage didn’t go exactly as planned.)

Do these offers undermine the objectivity of travel blogs? It depends, of course, on the blogger. They make their own rules after all. And the same goes for the pros. The pros may have to answer to their bosses, but it is down to them to be honest and to choose what to accept and what not to accept.

And let’s not forget that readers aren’t daft. Whether they are reading a newspaper or a blog, they soon work out which voices they trust and which they don’t. So do the editors. When I was a commissioning editor, it was easy to see which pitches were blindly motivated by the prospect of a glitzy (but often soulless) press trip and which writers actually had a story to tell that readers would want to hear. The latter category may have had PR assistance too, but the difference was I knew they were putting the story first.  

And that brings me to the Gran Tourismo project. Experienced travel writers Lara Dunston and Terry Carter have teamed up with HomeAway Holiday-Rentals to take a year-long trip staying in the company’s properties. Along the way they will be blogging reviews of the houses and the destinations and, no doubt, starting some interesting state-of-modern-travel debates.

Here’s the mission statement:

They’ll be travelling slowly, living like locals, doing and learning things, and giving something back at each destination they visit. Their mission is to explore more enriching and authentic ways of travelling, and make travel more meaningful and more memorable.

Sounds like my kind of travel. However, with HomeAway picking up the tab, one question needs to be answered: could this end up being one big press release for HomeAway?

I’d probably be skeptical of the idea if I didn’t already know Lara and Terry and their work. Although we have never met in person, I’ve corresponded with them both a lot over the past couple of years, particularly Lara, and I regularly read their blogs. They take their trade very, very seriously are are also highly aware of the relationship between the travel press and PRs, so have laid down some strict ground rules.

I’ve been reading their first few entries this week and they have been very transparent. More so than most print journalism. They have even mentioned other home exchange sites.

We’ll have to stay tuned to see how it’s going a year down the line. But the point is Lara and Terry have something to say. Yes, they’ve landed a great gig and yes they’re going to have an amazing time, but there is going to be a lot of good, practical advice and interesting travel debates to come out of this too.

This is definitely one to watch. And also potentially a landmark example, setting standards for  transparency, which other bloggers, PRs and pros could follow.

Photo:  HomeAway Property 87092 in Marrakech. Middle: Lara & Terry. PR shots from HomeAway on Flickr.

This week sees the launch of Candela Live, "Britain’s first online Latin American and Spanish lifestyle magazine".

It looks like a great port of call for Latino expats and travellers missing the food, culture and music that they got to love on their trips. Alongside some interesting features and news round-ups, it lists forthcoming events, from Cuban photography exhibitions to story-telling in Spanish for children.