World travel and writing: Where two passions merge
By Laurie Gough

Talk and Workshop
World Travels and Travel Writing: Turning One Passion into Another
San Miguel Writers’ Conference
Feb 22–24
Contact: jody@sanmiguelworkshops.com 

Have you always wanted to write about your travels but don’t know how to begin? The idea of travel writing may seem daunting, but in many ways, it’s much easier than writing fiction. And, believe it or not, writing about your travels is one of the easiest ways to break in as a writer.

Unlike fiction, where the story and characters all have to come out of your head, when you’re traveling, so many elements of your story are already there: the setting, the characters, even the plot. Finding the “plot,” or the story, can be tricky. Sometimes you don’t find it until you’re back home and you begin to reflect on your journey and come to see it more clearly.

I find that my two passions, traveling and writing, feed off and enrich each other. How? When’re you’re on the road, everything around you takes on a vibrancy you may not have experienced since childhood. When you’re in a new place, you absorb fresh life around every corner, you see everything from a crooked angle. Time stretches out and your senses sharpen. In other words, you’re paying attention. And paying attention is a travel writer’s job. If you intend to write about your travels, you’ll be even more aware of the details of the moment. You’ll look more closely, listen more attentively, taste more carefully and continually reflect on what you’re experiencing. As a result, your travels, and your writing, will be deeper and richer.

Here’s a little test: think back to what you did today. Can you remember any visual specifics of your day in San Miguel? What other customers were in that market when you bought those mangos? It’s common to develop tunnel vision—jostling through the world without really seeing it. As a writer, you must fight this human default and constantly observe, note situations and details that evoke emotions and imagination. In other words, be awake in the present.

A common mistake aspiring travel writers make is to go on a trip and write about it, assuming everyone will be interested in what you’ve written just because you’ve been to some place exotic. You have to assume the opposite: nobody is interested. It’s like showing someone your travel slides. Simply writing what you did each day of your trip is not interesting. You have to tell a story.

What makes a good story? Sometimes you stumble upon a great adventure, or you the narrator want something, some inner or outer quest in mind—even if it’s as simple as wanting to see what a place is like—but often you’re seeking something specific. You go through all kinds of hardship looking for it. Obstacles get in your way. In the end, you either get it or you don’t. Either is fine. Sometimes you discover what you thought you wanted wasn’t what you wanted at all, and like the Rolling Stones song, you may find something else in the end. You can’t know what it is beforehand, but you know it when you see it. Here again, traveling and writing go hand-in-hand—having a quest in mind not only makes for a good story, but for rich travels.

How to set up your travel story? Think about the way you would tell the story around a campfire, so people will hang off your every word. Engage your reader with every sentence. You can start in the middle of the action—the climax—and go backwards from there to fill in the background, or you can start chronologically. I was once “drugged” and hypnotized into buying carpets in Morocco. I chose to write this story chronologically, but I made sure to give a hint of the danger to come in the first paragraph. More than anything else, readers keep reading to find out what happens next.

Lead the reader into the wonder and terror of the place you’re describing, remembering that your experience can only be conveyed through concrete details. Details bring your story to life. Keep your senses open for the small things that evoke atmosphere—aromas of food cooking, oil burning lamps, pungent fruit, briny salt air, bird calls, fog horns, sirens, babies crying. Atmosphere is all around you; you just have to recognize it. Pepper your story with atmosphere, but don’t overdo it.

Bring people into your writing whenever possible. How humans are acting on this planet never fails to enliven a story. Try to find some good in a place or situation, even if everything is completely lousy. You don’t want your readers to be as exhausted as you were on that nightmarish bus ride through Sumatra. If you look hard enough, there’s always an up side to every journey (although sometimes it feels that the only up side on a disastrous trip is that it’ll make a great story some day.) Often it’s humor—the sheer absurdity of a situation—that saves you. The hefty woman squeezed next to you on the stifling train has just puked into the lap of her sari and now wants to borrow your purse…why? Most often, it’s the humanity of people that saves your trip, some small act of kindness when you need it most.

When you’re traveling, new sights touch off thoughts that otherwise would never have entered your mind. Traveling can generate a whole constellation of ideas about how people work and raise their kids, worship their gods, live and die, have fun in life. So when you write about a place, try to draw the best out of it, but also let it draw the best out of you.

Laurie Gough wrote Kiss the Sunset Pig, the award-winning Kite Strings of the Southern Cross: A Woman’s Travel Odyssey, and 18 of her stories have been anthologized in literary travel books. Lauded by Time magazine as one of the new generation of intrepid female travel writers, she has written for The L.A. Times, salon.com, The Globe and Mail, The National Post and Canadian Geographic. See www.lauriegough.com.  

Center for Global Justice visits organic tomato cooperative
By Betsy Bowman, Ph.D. 

Center for Global Justice trip
El Pípila Peñon de los Baños
Sat, Feb 14, 9:15am
Calzada de la Luz 42
Info:150-0025
300 pesos

The Center for Global Justice invites you to join them for a visit to the organic tomato coop El Pípila Peñon de los Baños S.P.R. de R.L. in the rural community of Peñon de los Baños, north of Los Rodríguez.

The project at Peñon de los Baños was enormously helped by the Center for Global Justice, and it shows the work the Center does in rural communities, in addition to the educational programs we host in the winters at the Biblioteca Pública, the student internships we run in the summers and the international conferences we host. 

Many farmers in Mexico are fortunate to live on land that they own collectively with their neighbors. These collective land-holdings are called ejidos, and they are the crowning achievement of the Mexican Revolution, which was fought for “Tierra y Libertad” (land and liberty). In 1938, Mexico’s most illustrious president, Lázaro Cárdenas, started a process of land redistribution whereby large landholders and the Church were expropriated and the land was given to the peasants who worked the land. These tracts of land are owned collectively, and each family has its own. Peñon de los Baños is a typical ejido with 40 original families and 30 additional families of their children. It covers slightly more than 500 acres. They have 500 cows and make a living selling raw milk. This number of cows doesn’t support all the residents, so a small group of them have banded together to start an organic tomato-growing cooperative.

Another president of Mexico, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, changed the Mexican constitution in 1992 so that ejidal land can be sold to outside investors, a requirement of the US for Mexico to join NAFTA. Consequently, ejido land can now be sold. Many of Peñon de los Baños’ neighbors have done just that and are now farm laborers on the land they used to own. The folks at Peñon de los Baños want to avoid this future at all costs. 

The Center for Global Justice met this industrious group in late 2006. Over the winter of 2007, visitors accompanying the Center for Global Justice to Peñon de los Baños donated US$5,000 to the Center’s revolving loan fund, the Fund for Community Support. Others donated additional monies. The Fund for Community Support then loaned the newly-formed coop US$9,000 to build a greenhouse. The Bernard Weisman Foundation also loaned money. The Center for Global Justice then connected them with a network of agricultural coops in the state of Hidalgo and its Empresa Integradora para el Desarrollo Rural S.A., headed by Patricio Bravo. This network, which started in the fall of 2003, now has 30 greenhouses growing mainly tomatoes, and also chiles and nopal. The Empresa Integradora and Patricio Bravo have helped the group at Peñon de los Baños to get government funding to build eight additional greenhouses. They are now starting on this project. 

Other members of the ejido are impressed with the success of this original group and want to join the coop. The six original families are happy that within a few years their relatives will be able to return from the United States and have work at home on their ejido. It is this kind of development of small, productive enterprises that will allow Mexicans to return from the US and allow other Mexicans to stay on their land and not emigrate.

Join the Center for Global Justice on “El Día de la Amistad,” the day of friendship, when we visit our friends at Peñon de los Baños. See for yourselves what the Center for Global Justice does and what a small group of determined people can do. The 300-peso fee covers lunch, transportation, translation and guides. Come by the office at Calzada de la Luz 42 to buy your tickets. Space is limited. We will leave around 9:15am and return by 4pm. Arrive early and have breakfast in the Center’s Café de la Luz, which opens on Saturday at 8am. 

Travel News You Can Use
By Judy Newell

Mexico Travel News

Mexico City boasts cleaner air 

Air quality in Mexico City has improved remarkably during the past 15 years, according to an Associated Press report. Some emissions have been reduced by 75 percent and the metropolis—which rivals Tokyo in size—is regarded as a role model for Beijing, New Delhi and Lima. Even Barcelona and Prague apparently have more polluted air.

Lying in a valley about 1.5 miles above sea level, Mexico City faced enormous problems. To improve matters, a huge oil refinery was closed, power plants switched from using oil to natural gas and many factories, with the help of tax incentives, moved elsewhere. Automobiles remain the biggest problem. Now cars must submit to inspection every six months and all but the newest models are forbidden to operate one day each week. Efforts are underway to improve public transportation with the building of more subways and a minimally polluting express bus line. 


Airlines in trouble 

Mexican Transportation Secretary Luis Tellez is recommending a merger for Mexico’s airlines, suggesting that it may be the only way they can survive the current economic crisis. Suggestions by government officials, however, are no longer regarded as orders.

Four airlines—one of them the veteran low-fare carrier Aerocalifornia—have suspended operations during the past year and there is much speculation that Aviacsa, another low-fare veteran, may be next. Aeroméxico meanwhile reportedly plans suspending its recently-inaugurated service to Shanghai while the new low-fare airline Interjet is delaying plans to launch service to the United States until the second half of this year, if not later.

The government in recent months divested its interest in both Aeroméxico and Mexicana—both had gone bankrupt—but was barred by the anti-monopoly commission for selling both to a single owner. At the moment, neither is earning a profit.


Fonatur marches on with Teacapan project 

Fonatur, the National Tourism Development Fund, has received a 1.2 billion-peso credit from another government agency that will allow it to move ahead with its project at Teacapan, about a 45-minute drive south of Mazatlan in Sinaloa. Plans call for the creation of a master-planned resort area along the lines of Cancun, but more than double its size. Environmentalists are worried, but that’s another story.

Within about 15 years, according to Fonatur, the complex will have 44,000 rooms and generate 3 billion dollars annually in foreign exchange. The first 1,500 rooms should be completed by 2012, according to Miguel Gomez Mont, Fonatur director. President Felipe Calderón was scheduled to attend the cornerstone-laying ceremony on February 3.


Elizabeth Taylor’s Puerto Vallarta home to become hotel

Lots of folks have heard of Casa Kimberly, once the Puerto Vallarta home to actress Elizabeth Taylor, and the adjacent Burton House (once owned by actor Richard Burton and connected to Casa Kimberly by an elevated “love bridge”). They’ve been acquired by Janice Chatterton, owner-manager of Hacienda San Ángel, the neighboring luxury boutique property. 

The renovation of the two villas, which Chatterton expects to complete by fall 2010, will provide 12 suites, a new restaurant, and a renovated pool area and fitness center. Both Casa Kimberly and the Burton House were purchased by Burton after he filmed Night of the Iguana in Puerto Vallarta in the 1960s and began his tumultuous and passionate affair with Taylor.

Casa Kimberly’s exclusive “Elizabeth Taylor Suite,” once the star’s personal retreat, will be accessible via private elevator, making it suitable for privacy-seeking celebrities and VIPs visiting the area. All rooms will be fully equipped with the same museum-quality artwork, rare antiques and deluxe amenities found at Hacienda San Ángel. 



International News

Travel agents can save you big bucks, for a fee

Savvy advice and careful research by a professional travel agent can save time and money. Like any professional, they charge fees.

It makes sense. “You wouldn’t walk into a lawyer’s office and expect them to give you free advice,” said Chris Russo, president of the American Society of Travel Agents, or ASTA, a trade group based in Alexandria, Virginia.

But at times travel agents do give free advice. Because they earn sales commissions from some cruise and tour companies, they often charge nothing to book these. Not so with airline tickets, which generally don't earn commissions, and complicated itineraries that might take hours or days to assemble.

Travel agents, who sell nearly 40 percent of all travel, can be helpful. But knowing when to engage one and what to pay can be confusing. Some good advice is to contact your agent to book cruises and vacation packages, for which the agent charges nothing, and foreign trips, where their services are invaluable.

In today’s internet world, you can book your own point-to-point air tickets. But even then, some agents work with air consolidators and can offer private airfares not available to the public.

As suppliers tighten up on sales commissions, most agents are charging a fee. Depending on the agency and the service, you might pay nothing, a flat fee, a percentage of the trip cost, or by the hour.

Here’s what to expect and why:

Air tickets: Nearly all travel agencies charge fees, typically $50 or more, to book international air tickets. That's because major airlines stopped paying sales commissions on tickets in 2002. Issuing a ticket isn’t cheap and could cost an agent $30 per booking when their expenses and the fees to access the ticket clearinghouse are factored in.


Cruises and tours: Last year less than a third of agents charged fees to book these trips. But that number might be increasing for cruises as agents become caught between falling fares and sales commissions. Cruise lines deduct many items such as taxes and port fees before they calculate an agent’s commission.

With some fares less than $100 per person per day, the agency might not break even. An agent who books a $299 weekend cruise might earn a commission of about $12, but the transaction might cost his company $30. Some agencies charge fees to make up the difference.

Hotels: More than half of agents last year charged service fees to book lodgings. Whether you’re likely to be charged depends on the type of hotel. Because big chains and luxury lodgings often pay sales commissions, your agent might book these for free. But small independent hotels, budget places and bed-and-breakfast inns usually do not pay commissions, so expect a booking fee for those.

Trip planning: Last year two-thirds of agents charged for this service, one of the most valuable to their clients. Individual agents decide what to charge, depending on the trip. For itineraries that require significant research and don't bring in enough commissions to cover costs, the charge could be $30 to $50 an hour. Well-connected agents may charge $100 per hour, which is non-refundable but could be applied to the trip cost.

One international tour operator sends out a statement saying: “Thank you for contacting the custom travel department at … We would be more than happy to assist you with planning a custom itinerary to … for your client. We would require a $200.00 non-refundable design fee in order to customize a quote and itinerary. This fee would be applied toward the reservation should your client choose to confirm services.”

The bottom line: Feeling exploited? Don't. The average travel agent makes very little profit in this thin-margined enterprise, ASTA says. When you pay a service fee, “we're not getting gold rims for our Mercedes,” Russo said.

And you might get priceless help.

Deal of the Week Recharge your batteries and “gather ye rosebuds” Travel is the one investment that still has a great return.

I try to take a real vacation each year to recharge my batteries and clear my head. Like most folks around here, I don’t consider it a luxury but a necessity. Plan your annual recharge now before the day-to-day stresses of running your life take over. There are some great travel deals out there if you know where to look.

I encourage you to stop and smell the roses and celebrate our wonderful future and new leadership in America. In fact, you can “gather ye rosebuds” along with me on a lovely garden tour in June, at the height of the summer blooming season.

You’ll drink in the sight and scent of evocative English roses at their peak. Think hundreds of varieties of roses, glorious stately homes where you can wander centuries-old gardens, and the quintessential Hampton Court Flower Show, organized by the Royal Horticultural Society.

"Gather ye rosebuds while ye may" is specially created for you to experience England’s fragrant summer flowers and roses with a group of friends and fellow garden enthusiasts from San Miguel de Allende. And with every booking made, a contribution will be made to the garden club of your choice.

The 10-day itinerary, July 2–12, is limited to 25 travelers. Because this is a custom-designed private tour, it will not take place without a minimum number of guests. Please contact me at judynewell_03@msn.com  if you are interested in reading the full itinerary.

Travel Advice

Tourists should try to fit in

Leave your khaki shorts at home: If you’re traveling abroad, you should avoid dressing like a tourist—and not just because it embarrasses your kids. With kidnappings on the rise, looking like a local could be one of the most important precautions you can take during your vacation.

The vice president and product manager for kidnap, ransom and extortion at the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, gives these tips to avoid becoming a victim:

• Don’t be flashy. Drive a generic vehicle and avoid wearing fancy clothing, logos, baseball caps or anything that makes it clear you are from outside the country. Stick with wearing something neutral.

• Stay at a local hotel rather than an American chain. Kidnappers are more likely to stake out places popular with tourists. Avoid accommodations with women-only areas. Female travelers on their own are often viewed as more vulnerable, and kidnappers may be able to bribe room service to give them access to these areas. 

• Be wary of gypsy cabs. A car that looks like a professional cab could just be a ruse to take you to a dangerous place. Have the restaurant or hotel call for a licensed taxi instead.

The Chubb Group estimates that kidnappings for ransom have jumped to about 8,000 to 10,000 reported cases in the past few years. Robberies have also become more violent. It's gone from an annoyance or inconvenience to something pretty scary.

The top five countries for kidnapping are Mexico, Iraq, Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela, according to Chubb Group of Insurance Companies.

Sources: Mexico Tourism New, Travel Pulse Daily, Chicago Tribune, The Seattle Times, Associated Press 

Judy Newell heads the travel company Perfect Journeys, which specializes in discounted rates for airfare, hotels, tours and cruises worldwide, as well as luxury and adventure travel. Contact her with comments or suggestions at JudyNewell_03@msn.com  or go to her website www.PerfectJourneys.net.