After the rain at Swallow Falls

In a country with as much rain as Wales – Snowdonia is the wettest area with average annual totals exceeding 3000 mm, according to the Met Office) – you may as well make the most of a downpour. On our rainy holiday there last week, we detoured down the Llanberis Pass to visit the abundant Swallow Falls, near Betws y Coed. It was in full eddying, thrumming, spraying glory following the rain, as you can see in the video below. Marvellous!

Journey into the Cantal, Auvergne mountains

From Clermont-Ferrand to Murat takes about 90 minutes by train, and cost me £17 one way. Then it was a transfer by car to Bruno and Valerie’s Auberge d’Aijean, our inn for the night. Just past Murat, you can see the snowline appearing for the first time.

The winter here has been mild. It is still scenic in a wintry way but I can imagine how this notches up quite a few extra beauty points when covered in snow. Still, Valerie guided me on a nature hike this afternoon, which was pretty and helped me acclimatise from my sedentary job to actually walking. Tomorrow morning we get to snowshoe on the Puy Mary volcano peak.

So, the press trip is about to start – the two other journalists are arriving in half an hour and we will begin with a Nordic bath, which I believe is a a sort of alfresco hot tub, before chef Bruno’s dinner.

Apologies for awkward wordflows. I’ve been speaking in broken French for two days and my writing is stuck in transit.

Uzbek music video is no.1

I’ve only posted 20 or so videos to YouTube – anything from waves crashing on Brighton beach to a flock of birds flying over my house – but the surprise winner is this video of two Uzbek musicians. I took it in passing on a borrowed Flip pocket camera at the World Travel Market in 2009 and it is by far my most popular YouTube video – with more than 6,000 views.

And the moral of this story is: the best video camera is the one you have with you.

A tropical downpour in Grenada

Sitting in the courtyard of the Grenadian by rex at midnight, the rain began to pour. Our tour guide told us “It’s the weather for two nose and 20 toes…”

Turn the volume up for the full experience – and listen out for big sounds from tiny frogs at the end…

The most amazing video you will ever see about Birmingham

This appears to have gone out on Sky 3, I’m not sure when, but is Pure Fried Comedy Gold.

Someone in my Twitterstream pointed it out a while ago but their video link seems to have been removed, so catch this one while you still can – it’s the only one I could find.

http://rd3.videos.sapo.pt/play?file=http://rd3.videos.sapo.pt/46H7EmOPmH01O9PQA3yT/mov/1

It features an amazing but quite scary cast of regulars of The Sportsman pub in Brum as they expound on their favourite pub subjects of cider, eating rabbits and lightbulbs, and falling off a bridge onto a railway and into the path of TWO trains.

You’ll have to watch it to get the visual punchline to the story.

Tourism slogan: “Visit Brum – if you think you’re hard enough.”

Enjoy.

The life of a surf photographer in 6 mins

A few days ago I was impressed by Joshy Washington’s list of favourite travel-related videos of 2010. But then I spotted this little beauty.

Astray Films’ short story about Mickey Smith, a surfer who photographs his world, is pretty awesome (in the genuine sense of the word) and is now kicking off my own list of videos to admire and be inspired by.

‘Dark Side of the Lens’ has a poetic narrative, amazing pictures and makes me want to do way something more interesting instead. I also like the way it is quite journalistic, thanks to Astray Films involvement, perhaps. It picks a single subject and explores it from many different angles in order to try to understand it – and I think it works really well here. Less is more. Perfect.

Or, as one comment says: ‘Fucking WOW!’

Go watch it.

Some ideas for travel videos

I’ve just been checking out a selection of best 2010 travel videos over on Matador – and it’s got my mouth watering for adventure and better video editing skills.

Check them out – there’s everything in there from tilt shift cities to adrenaline sports, lone backpacker reportage to breaking out of the rat race.

Here’s one of my favourites – a very well edited piece about street food.

A trip into the clouds at Mont Caroux

Travel details: this journey to Toulouse and beyond was part-sponsored by Bmibaby.com. More posts here.

10 New Year’s travel resolutions for 2010

Chris Guillebeau over at The Art of Non-Conformity blog says to think big – and that’s why he’s set himself the monumental and not inexpensive task to visit every country in the world by April 7, 2013 (122 out of 192 countries so far.) He reminds me of a crazy Swiss backpacker I met on my own travels whose concept was to hitchhike across every country in the world.

Then there was the lovely Twitchhiker who I interviewed earlier this year at SXSW in Austin. He’d decided to travel as far from his hometown in Newcastle upon Tyne as possible in 30 days (which turned out to be an island off New Zealand), relying only on the kindness and direction of Twitter users.

The trouble is, knowing my sticking power with New Year Resolutions, I don’t want to be massively ambitious here and fail before I’ve even started. But I would like to do >something<.

Looking through the #decadeinstats (tomorrow is New Year’s Day 2010), it seems not many people are marking their big moments in travel terms but in terms of hatches, matches, dispatches, number of degrees and hearts broken. (Click the pic to see a snapshot.)

But some ideas are bubbling up, such as Lloyd Davis’s Tuttle train trip
to SXSW Interactive in 2010. And my colleague Katy Molloy’s New Year career break to go help fight child prostitution in Cambodia.

So here are my unthought-out ideas so far – see what you think:

10 TRAVEL RESOLUTIONS FOR 2010

1. Hometown tourism
I love travelling to other countries but by its nature this is often superficial – suppressed by time, lack of local knowledge and trying to do too much (or little). Sometimes the best stuff happens on your doorstep so I think it’s time to write up the stuff that makes my city special and fun for others to visit. Birmingham: It’s Not Shit, for example, is a rather ace Birmingham blog. The author Jon Bounds has just finished one project (11-11-11)  in which citizens board the 11 outer circle bus route for 11 hours on 11/11 each year. Next year he’s launching Dexy’s Midnight Run – a 5km run into town dressed as Dexy’s at midnight on June 21st.

2. Queen of the Bizarre
One of my travel editors once named me ‘Queen of the bizarre’ because of the less mainstream ideas I used to pitch to him. Maybe it’s time to return to that niche. Having recently come across the quirky calendar of eccentric English events for 2010, I’m tempted to either cover or perhaps even enter some of these. Think I’d be quite good at shin-kicking at Robert Dover’s Cotswold Olimpicks… It’s gonzo journalism and why not? If it’s good enough for Hunter S Thompson, it’s good enough for me.

3. More snow-shoeing
I really want to go show-shoeing! Someone please send me snow-shoeing! I did it in Slovenia for my 40th and it’s my favourite thing to have done outside of joining the opera this year. It’s great for the heart and aerobic fitness and it beats jogging round the block. How can I turn this into something a little more sexy though? Extreme show-shoeing? The New Year snow-shoe diet? Sponsored snow-shoe walk?

4. Transparent journalism
Journalists on press trips aggregate masses of information yet tend to generate only a few hundred words. I’m thinking ditch the polished prose (like there ever was polished prose) and blog what I’m going to pretentiously call the ‘vignettes of research’, from incidental little quotes and tips to insider trip photos that I collect along the way.

5. Blog my travel diaries
I have around 50 notebooks packed away in a trunk. I’m sure there’s some interesting highlights that can be edited out of there – with the power of hindsight etc. I also have some features that were commissioned and not published. I’m thinking I’ll publish them here under a creative commons licence. Hey, let’s play with copyright and see what happens.

6. Find the most boring holiday in the world
The problem with being a travel writer is that you can never switch off – there’s always something interesting to collect, note down, share, or someone to interview, or a new angle on a mass market place. My mission is to have a proper holiday in 2010 – and that means finding something/somewhere with zero write-up value. I suspect it’s impossible. Any ideas?

7. Career and holiday combined
My trip to SXSW Interactive in 2009 was a double work whammy of writing up tech stories and also producing a feature on Austin itself. I learned so much there and it has given me a whole lot of context for working on all the digital projects that came through my agency in 2009. This year I’m looking for a Content Strategy Conference holiday destination – presumably somewhere in the States but I’m open to suggestions. That’s right, I want to go on holiday to a conference.

8. Take more video (and find a media trainer)
I’ve started to take and edit video – here are my fledging attempts at World Travel Market 2009 – but ideally I’m looking for someone to do a skills swap with me, ie, help me learn best practice for producing multi-media content (especially mini interviews) and I’ll help you with anything from web writing/editing and spelling/punctuation to beginner’s guitar lessons. Maybe I’ll write your headlines for you or something. I like writing headlines.

9. Guest bloggers Q&A
I do like a good Q&A – or is it just me that gets sucked in by those pages in magazines that asks (the rich and famous usually) what have they learnt, what mottos do they live by, have they ever said ‘I love you and not meant it’, how would they like to be remembered, type thing. Maybe something like this would be good for travel, local knowledge, etc.

10. The big idea
I’m buying myself time with this one, but in the next 12 months I’m looking for a big ongoing travel project that I can document into something substantial. It might be photographic, it might be ultra-budget or first-class luxury, it might be historical, or it might be eccentric. This is probably the resolution I’m most likely to break but the idea of a sabbatical of some kind is on the agenda. I have the time if not the energy.

That’s it for now and for 2009. I’d love to hear your feedback or suggestions. Until then happy new year for 2010.

Around the world in 44 tourism slogans

Earlier I posted my bemusement about tourism taglines. There is probably some kind of data curve to measure the success of these. But after overdosing on one after the other at World Travel Market at London’s Excel recently, I have a few thoughts.

First of all, here’s the slideshow of WTM taglines: ‘Around the world in 44 marketing slogans’. UPDATE: I returned to WTM in November 2012 and collected 105 tourism slogans from around the world #WTM12 – though this post is probably a better read!

You can also see/download the individual pictures from my WTM Flickr set (non-commercial Creative Commons license).

And here’s my earlier post on tourism taglines being the emperor’s new clothes in a web 2.0 world.

If you can’t be bothered looking through the images, here’s the breakdown on the great and the good, the incomprehensible and the forgettable – the full list follows at the end.

The ‘no idea what that tourism slogan means’ section

Certain countries were adept at being vague as a means to sell their destination:
Anguilla Feeling is Believing
Florida Keys Come As You Are
Hungary A Love for Life
Taiwan Touch Your Heart

My favourite though was ‘Indonesia: Admit It You Love It’. Luckily I do love Indonesia and happily admit it, but what does this mean? I quite liked its ‘Unity in Diversity’ slogan a couple of years back – which sums up Indonesia’s 17,000 islands but perhaps doesn’t sound particularly attractive to a tourist. As the Jakarta Post reports, it doesn’t have a great track record in coming up with the marketing goods. In 2008 it was also ridiculed for getting its grammatical knickers in a twist with ‘Celebrating 100 Years of Nation’s Awakening’. Still, don’t let the terrible taglines put you off – Indonesia is an amazing country to visit.

One-word wonders
These countires tried to encapsulate their country in a single word – or in Malaysia’s case, a number (one, obviously!):
Brazil Sensational!
Incredible India
Cool Japan
WOW Philippines
Uniquely Singapore
Amazing Thailand
1 Malaysia

My personal favourite in this section is: ‘El Salvador Impressive!’

Double headers
With all the main superlatives gone, Italy and Germany both went for two-word slogans – neither particularly enticing, though affordable may successfully tap into the economic downturn affecting the travel industry:

Italy Much More
Germany Affordable Hospitality

Mother nature sells herself
The most successful slogans are often ones that evoke the place in some way. Countries blessed by mother nature seemed to have the easiest sell.
Montenegro Wild Beauty
New Zealand 100% Pure
Switzerland Get Natural
Belize Mother Nature’s Best Kept Secret

Come here!
Then there are the literal commands to visit – no inducement given:
Visit Florida
Discover Peru

Do these actually work? At least ‘discover’ hints at hidden depths, but ‘visit’, come on Florida, that’s just plain lazy.

Neighbouring factions
There seemed to be some competition between neighbouring countries also:

Albania A New Mediterranean
Croatia The Mediterranean As it Once Was

Namibia Land of Contrasts
Tanzania Land of Kilimanjaro Zanzibar and the Serengeti

Finding the pun within
Being a sub-editor, I respond to a good pun or wordplay – and successful slogans are often annoyingly memorable in this way. Personal favourites here included Jamaica’s mysterious rhyme of  ‘Once You Go, You Know’. Know what exactly? I don’t know but I’m fairly sure it’s hot, happy and hedonistic.

And full marks to Slovenia, for finding the love within and being the only one to evoke Donna Summer’s disco classic in ‘I feel sLOVEnia’. Surely there are more here: for the smut factor, have a play with Aruba, Virginia and Malaysia.

Tips for a good tourism slogan

In light of the amount for knocking that tourist boards get for their marketing slogan attempts, if you’re a destination marketer, then maybe check out this How Stuff Works post on How ad slogans work before you shell out a fortune on rebranding.

The full list
Here’s the full list – of the slogans I managed to snap anyway (feel free to add more in the comments). And if it all gets too much to bear, I promise a very enticing tourism slogan awaits right at the bottom:

Albania A New Mediterranean
Anguilla Feeling is Believing
Aruba One Happy Island
Belize Mother Nature’s Best Kept Secret
Brazil Sensational!
California Find Yourself Here
Canada Keep Exploring
Croatia The Mediterranean As it Once Was
Ecuador Life at its Purest
Viva Cuba
Egypt Where It All Begins
El Salvador Impressive!
Visit Finland Breathe
Visit Florida
Florida Keys Come As You Are
France Rendez-Vouse En France
Germany Affordable Hospitality
Grenada Rhythms of Spice
Hong Kong Best Place Best Taste
Hungary A Love for Life
I heart New York
Incredible India
Indonesia Admit It You Love It
Italy Much More
Jamaica Once You Go, You Know
Cool Japan
See the world. Visit London
1 Malaysia
Maldives Sunny Side of Life
Montenegro Wild Beauty
Namibia Land of Contrasts
New Zealand 100% Pure
Romania Land of Choice
Discover Peru
WOW Philippines
Uniquely Singapore
Slovakia Little Big Country
Slovenia I Feel Love
Smile! You are in Spain
Switzerland Get Natural
Taiwan Touch Your Heart
Tanzania Land of Kilimanjaro Zanzibar and the Serengeti
Texas (visual representation of ‘Everything’s bigger in Texas’ – I think)
Amazing Thailand

And the funniest tourism-related ad slogan I came across in the course of this research? Here it is courtesy of St Johns Hotel in Solihull…

St Johns Hotel: sleep with us – you won’t regret it!