Killing Batteries

[You know about Long Reads, right? Well, this is the Longest Read – in the history of my blog. From my travelogue archives, an edited and re-mastered account of my 78 hour bus ride from southwest Spain to northeast Romania in June 2004.]

The build up

Some travel elitists will tell you that Europe has been done. Every reasonable morsel of discovery and adventure in Europe has been uncovered and subsequently made passé by hundreds of millions of tourists.

The following is what occurs when you remove “reasonable” from that statement.

Indeed, I recently participated in one of the foremost, categorically unreasonable travel adventures in contemporary Europe. There’s a little something for everyone in this package: danger, resourcefulness, tenacity, diplomacy, physical punishment, mental fortitude, white knuckle driving, barf suppression, deliberate starvation, sleeplessness, hygienic challenges, bladder endurance – and that’s just the stuff I can remember now. There’s no telling what will surface during my post-traumatic hypnosis therapy. Self-flagellation? Bestiality? Public toenail clipping?

Yes, the 78 hour, 2,330 mile bus journey from Cadiz, in the southwest of Spain to Iasi, in the northeast of Romania, is the kind of unremitting, confined, spine-grinding, physical punishment and psychological tear-down that would break the will of the hardest prisoner. I’ll save you the suspense and admit right away that I did not fare well. After only 12 hours I would have gladly given up my social security and PIN numbers. After 36 hours I would have sold my grandmother for a Happy Meal and a cold glass of water. So, you can imagine my state after 78 hours.

If one wants to truly push the envelop of stupidity, one might choose to make this trip in the unrelenting heat of mid-June. Compulsive masochists might like to take the journey on a dubious Eastern European bus company. Psychotic losers will of course cap the whole thing off by ending the trip with the first, and possibly the last, meeting with their new girlfriend’s parents when dropped off exhausted, stinking and near raving lunacy at 3:30am on a Monday morning.

Who else thinks this would be a killer reality TV show? Clearly, no sane person would voluntarily undertake this ordeal without a million dollar prize to be had. The decision was pretty much made for me under extreme duress.

I had enjoyed a temperate winter/spring of travelogue editing and wine drinking in Cadiz, Spain, during which time I met and started dating Catalina, a Romanian geo-ecology student. As our time in Cadiz came to a close, I decided – actually, I believe I was ordered – to accompany her home to spend the summer in her hometown of Iasi. That’s the ‘why’. As for the ‘how’…

I did not want to take the bus

I really did not want to take the bus. I wanted a nice flight from nearby Malaga into Bucharest, via Paris, supplemented with a couple non-taxing stints of ground travel. Though I am deeply steeped in the budget travel arena, I am also 34 years old, with a temperamental back and finding it more and more difficult to achieve slumber in anything other than near-perfect conditions. From my perspective, three straight days on a bus in the dead heat of summer would be an excruciating study of previously uncharted cruelty endurance.

I spent two weeks fruitlessly looking for a plane ticket that didn’t have a price-tag that made me audibly gasp. Even if I took a train for nine hours to Madrid and flew from there, I was still looking at a €500 (US$610) plane ticket. Ouch.

Then of course there was the chivalry angle. Sending my girlfriend home all by her lonesome on a sadistic three day bus ride, while I jetted in quickly and comfortably seemed a bit reprehensible, even though she had already successfully made the trip once before and was generally more physically prepared to weather cramped quarters for long periods of time, being she was 10 years my junior, all of five feet tall, with a spine seemingly made out of rubber.

After exhaustively scouring the internet, interrupted by a few bouts of uncontrolled sobbing at the prospect, I made the reservation for the bus and mentally prepared myself for the tribulation of a lifetime.

The journey begins

The final itinerary:

•    8:00pm Thursday – Get on a four hour bus from Cadiz to Malaga.
•    Midnight to 5:30am Friday – Spend the night on the street in Malaga. (Neither one of us felt like dropping €35 (US$43) for a hostel room that we would only occupy for about five hours.)
•    6:00am Friday – Get on the bus to Iasi.
•    6:01am Friday to 2:00am Monday – Suffer through the worst indignity that I have ever inflicted upon myself on purpose.
•    2:01am Monday – After three days with almost no sleep, no shower, no shave and subsisting on a diet of crackers, cookies and the occasional rest-stop, over-priced, expired sandwich, introduce my old, unemployed, American ass to Cat’s stunned and appalled parents.

A person with a mature, finely-tuned sense of self-preservation would have spent his last two nights before such a trip relaxing and hoarding sleep. My last two nights in Cadiz were occupied with two separate, wine-soaked goodbye parties at the beach resulting in supremely drunken, inadequate sleep both nights.

We managed to get from Cadiz to Malaga without any trouble and what I had expected to be an excruciating, sleepless night on a bench in front of Malaga’s bus station with weirdos, prostitutes and drunks (the station closes from midnight to 6:00am) was only mildly unpleasant, even with my already sizable sleep debt weighing on me.

Our first sight of the bus that would be our home for 68 hours was actually very encouraging. It was a double-decker affair and being a grizzled bus travel veteran, I knew that it was imperative that we get the seats on top and up front for the fantastic, up-high, panoramic view of the landscape, maybe done standing with our arms outstretched like in that scene from Titanic for form’s sake.

As we boarded the bus, we were sternly warned that it was a “new” bus and that we should treat it with exceptional care. Barely a minute later, we started to happen upon all of the broken bits, which included my first seat that reclined with difficulty and then fused in that position for the remainder of the trip, an unsettling clanking noise below the dashboard on the second level, the front shade only going half way down which was absolute torture at the height of the afternoon sun, and what was either a tremendously deficient air conditioning system or the driver’s inability to effectively operate it as air seemingly hotter than outside air was pumping out of the vents more often than not.

In the beginning, the amount of personal space was borderline giddying. Malaga was only the first of many stops, of course, but for the moment there were just eight of us sprawled out over a 71 seat double-decker bus. We could each lay full out across an entire row of seats in relative luxury. However, by the time we had stopped and brought on passengers in Granada, Alicante, Valencia, Barcelona and countless smaller Spanish cities over the next 16 hours, it was a different story. The shrinking personal space problem aside, there were a few ripe individuals who appeared as if they had already gone three days without a shower before getting on the bus.

By carefully spreading our bodies and bags across the four front seats, Cat and I managed to make the area uninviting enough to new passengers that we succeeded in keeping all four seats to ourselves. Though this might have also had something to do with the deteriorating comfort level up front. As the sun rose higher and beat down on those gigantic windows, the front of the bus was quickly turning into a heat bath, making the perk of the superior view less and less appealing.

I’m about as likely to get genuine sleep on a bus as I am to get genuine assistance from a German train conductor, but having had less than 10 hours of sleep in the previous three nights, I unexpectedly and very unwillingly lost consciousness the instant the bus pulled out of the station. This was unfortunate in that the scenery while driving across the coast of southern Spain is spectacular. Until we hit the Alps in Austria, it was by far the best scenery of the entire trip and I missed nearly all of it while drifting through various states of oblivion. There were breathtaking mountains, Arabic ruins and the sparkling sea to ogle virtually the entire way and all I saw of it were during the lively, barely awake moments immediately after the driver had taken one of his preferred, jarring turns, causing all of us to list wildly into the window or the person next to us. After each of these hair-raising maneuvers, I would inevitably be faced with some fantastic vista, but then my eyes would abruptly roll back into my head and I’d return to a coma-like state until the next hard turn.

Did I mention it was hot?

I finally came to and stayed awake after our stop in Granada. Once the Sierra Nevada mountains dropped out of sight, the scenery became positively dull. Just the open highway and nondescript countryside with nothing but gas stations and rest stops to break up the monotony. It was like driving through Nebraska, except hotter. Much hotter. It reached 95°F by noon on the first day, and with those giant windows on three sides of us, we seared and wriggled like ants under a cruel child’s magnifying glass. From about 10:30am until 7:00pm the heat in the bus was so unrelenting that I couldn’t do anything. Couldn’t sleep, couldn’t read, couldn’t appreciate the scenery and couldn’t absorb the on-the-fly Romanian lessons that I was trying to wrench out of Cat.

That afternoon, after copious suffering, I asked Cat to go down and inquire about the possibility of coaxing cool air from the vents rather than the hairdryer-in-the-face treatment we had been getting, but she wouldn’t go. Actually, by that point, no one would talk to the bus staff. We were on a hateful Romanian bus line called Atlassib, who, we realized over the next three days, almost exclusively employed ruthless sociopaths. Among the many exasperating indignities the staff inflicted upon us was playing the same CD non-stop for the first 10 hours of the trip. This would have been intolerable even if it had been the Beatles played at a reasonable volume, but it was some kind of super group of Turkish yodelers and Kraftwerk wannabes bashing out nearly identical tunes on what sounded like a 1983 Casio keyboard. The volume was cranked up to mid-evening-at-the-bar level and the speakers were copiously placed above every other row, so there was no escape. When one of their favorite songs came on they’d jack the volume up even higher.

When someone finally went down to plead for a music change and reduction of volume, she was treated with outright contempt. Then the behavior of the Atlassib people deteriorated from hateful to negligent. At a 10 minute rest stop, they closed the doors and started to pull out of the parking lot at nine minutes and 55 seconds while two of us were on final approach to the rear door. Apparently they felt that this passive-aggressive, feigned, near-abandonment was an acceptable manner in which to demonstrate that we had been walking back to the bus too slowly for their liking. As I climbed on the bus, I expressed my displeasure with this tactic with a cascade of vivid observations about their mothers. The language barrier probably prevented the staff from appreciating the nuances of my reprimanding, but my attitude was unmistakable and from then on the air between the staff and me was icy. Fortunately in Barcelona, at the 16 hour mark, there was a requisite full staff change and the next shift was notably less vindictive.

Malnutrition joins the party

The worst, borderline criminal indecency, however, was the complete lack of rest stops at places that served actual food. I was pretty miffed at Cat over this particular situation actually, as she was fully aware of this policy, but failed to give me fair warning. Until very late in the trip, when we were well into Romania, the bus only stopped at protein-deficient gas stations. Had I known that I would be going 78 hours without a proper meal, I would have packed a more nourishing grab-bag of snacks. Cat belatedly confessed that her stomach disagrees with genuine food on long bus and train rides, thus she actually prefers to limit herself to chocolate, potato chips and the like. It never occurred to her that I might desire something more substantial. I’d only packed cookies, crackers, juice boxes, water and apples, all of which were crushed/melted/mushy/piss warm hours into the trip.

As we pulled out of Barcelona, the sun mercifully went down along with the bus’ interior temperature and we were treated to mediocre, but sufficiently distracting Jackie Chan and Jet Li movies to get us through the night run along the south of France. At the conclusion of the movies, I wrenched myself into a pseudo-horizontal position in my two meager seats, which is saying a lot for someone who can’t even touch his toes, and managed to enjoy three hours of sleep before the sun rose when I struggled stiffly upright to discover that we were well into Italy.

Exploring the depths of boredom

The scenery in Italy was no better than northern Spain. Just endless, dull, non-descript highways, fields and gas stations selling nothing more nutritious or energizing than a Snickers bar. As we zipped through northern Italy, we had momentary jolts of excited anticipation as signs for Verona, Padua and Venice came and went, but the best views we got of these places were limited to distant rooftops and broadcast towers. This was a Spain-to-Romania bus, meaning we were not making any stops in cities between the two countries, so we never veered any closer to these places than the perimeter roads would allow.

Late in the day my head jerked out of one of my numerous unintentional, exhaustion and boredom fueled losses of consciousness to see the fast approaching Southern Limestone Alps, which may not be as impressive as the Swiss Alps, but after over 24 hours of flat nothingness, I couldn’t have been more pleased. There was an intermittent, thick cloud cover, but the views were amazing. With my head cocked straight up, absorbing the new distraction, I completely missed the seamless border crossing into Austria.

I had expected that we would take a spectacular, long, winding, ascending and descending route through the Southern Limestone Alps, but instead we proceeded to drill right through the mountain range in surprisingly short order via dozens of long, dark, dispiriting tunnels. Once every few minutes we would burst into open air where we would be surrounded by isolated mountain villages, rivers, waterfalls, steep slopes and glorious greenery, but then we’d abruptly enter another tunnel, reducing us to pathetically squinting off into the distance for the next hopeful pinhole of light.

Border guard etiquette

As night approached, so did Hungary and the unpleasant revelation that certain Eastern European border crossings are still manned by unsubtle shake-down artists. We essentially had two options: sit and rot at the Hungarian border for the rest of eternity while the border guards leisurely went through each passport and piece of baggage, predictably finding something gravely wrong with everything, all requiring substantial paperwork, fines and delays before they would allow us passage or roll up to the border with a lavish cash offering.

The procedure was shockingly organized and matter-of-fact. There was an announcement on the bus an hour away from the Hungarian border that an assistant would come around and collect five euros (US$6.10) from everyone. All the Romanians, glumly familiar with the procedure, coughed up the cash without comment, which was stuffed into a plastic bag and casually accepted by the border guards. Duly bribed, they did a quick and careless sweep through the bus to stamp everyone’s passports without so much as a cursory photo check before we were sent on our way.

We’re all going to die

The entry into Hungary marked the commencement of an unholy series of two-lane, narrow, unlit, crumbling roads, where a double-decker bus and an oncoming semi could just barely pass without tearing off each other’s side view mirrors. This being Eastern Europe, where awareness of one’s mortality hasn’t progressed much from Roman times, these hair-raising passages were naturally performed at full speed. The bouncing and knocking around one experiences while traversing roads that are half reclaimed by nature is multiplied when one is sitting up high like we were. The slight wobble experienced on the lower level from a pothole was magnified into a violent lurch on the top level which threatened to dump insufficiently braced people into the aisle.

Our drive through Hungary was done almost entirely at night, but with the way we were being thrown around on the second level, there was no sleep to be had. Most of my attention was devoted to not being brained against the window or pitched across the aisle into Cat’s lap. We spent the night with a death grip on our seats while watching three low-budget movies, each of which had warning messages running across the bottom reading: “If you have rented or purchased this movie or are watching it anywhere but on a demo monitor inside a video store, you are watching a bootleg copy and several agents from the international copyright brigade are going to arrive shortly and execute everyone.” At least that’s what was implied. Atlassib was turning out to be a real class act.

At 5:30 the next morning, we entered Romania shaken and bleary-eyed. The crossing into Romania was another exercise in cruel, back-alley border bureaucracy, but not as greedy and brazen as in Hungary. If a Romanian spends more than 90 days outside of their country, which those working in Western Europe often do, when they try to return to their country they either have to bribe the border guards with €200 (US$244) or get slapped with a passport interdiction confining them within Romania for two to five years, depending on how overdue they are. After a few naughty, tardy Romanians were pulled off the bus to cough up €200, we were on our way on roads that were unfathomably even worse than in Hungary.

By European standards, Romania is a very large country (slightly smaller than Oregon) and we had to stop in each city of moderate size for people to disembark, so it took nearly 24 hours to inch across the country to Iasi on the northeastern border. This crawl included two maddeningly lengthy bus transfers, one of which left all of us standing in a sweltering dirt lot with no shelter for three hours as the Atlassib people paraded us back and forth across the lot with our bags to load and board a bus, then let us sit and bake on the bus for 45 minutes, then order us off the bus, retrieve our bags, drag everything to the other side of the lot and do the same on a different bus. After the third round of this cruel game, there was the distinct possibility of a public execution as all of the hot, frustrated people simultaneously came unglued and started screaming at the Atlassib reps. These delays took us from running a refreshing three hours early to being almost two hours behind schedule.

Arrival, barely alive

Finally, at 3:30am we puttered into Iasi. We were so deep in the throes of sleep deprivation, hunger, aggravation and pathetic feebleness that we could barely talk. Cat’s sweet parents didn’t have me deported on the first pig truck to Bulgaria, but instead helped us home where we ate a hot meal, somehow pooled the strength to scrub off the filth from the trip and then rapidly fell into Snow White-like slumber. It was nearly two days before I had the cognitive capacity to venture out of the apartment.

Perhaps with better preparation, a reputable bus company, decent food options, cooler weather and a bucket of Dramamine this trip would have had a few redeeming qualities. I had almost convinced myself before departure that the novelty of covering Europe from west to east on the ground in three days would provide some great views, memories and adventure, but it was really just one long, sucktastic, sucky series of suckiness. It was the kind of odyssey that can only be appreciated by the caliber of people who find exhilaration and fulfillment in going to the brink of discomfort, pain and insanity and living to tell the tale. And quite frankly, people like that should not be allowed to travel without a chaperone.

[Disclaimer: This might not be the worst hostel in Europe. I can't be sure since I haven't stayed at every hostel in Europe. But it was without question a strong contender when I stayed here in October 2003 and, as with any situation involving unusual discomfort and personal injustice, it resulted in one of my favorite hostel reviews of all time, edited and re-mastered here for your reading pleasure.]

I arrived at the Lyon affiliate of France’s Hosteling International (HI) network looking like I had just escaped a POW camp on foot after four years of captivity. With too much luggage. As is typical with HI properties, the Lyon hostel was located in the most inconvenient part of the city, in this case near the top of the tallest hill for 100 miles in any direction. To get there I had to walk a mile across the city center, then climb the most sadistic set of outdoors stairs that I’d seen anywhere in Europe while awkwardly carrying my coffin-sized, densely-packed wheelie bag, then walk uphill for another four blocks, through a construction zone and then an infuriating walk downhill for two more blocks. I burst in the door, sweating profusely despite the cool October weather, with multiple injuries, limping, filthy, panting and exhausted.

HI hostels are notoriously designed with the bare minimum of amenities, but this particular location was even more uninhabitable than average with its comprehensive and breathtakingly half-assed application of, well, everything.

Where to begin?

For starters, the sinks didn’t have cold water, only hot. Really hot. Hot enough to rinse Teflon off stainless steel. Also, the sinks had those maximum security prison taps that you push in and the water runs for three seconds before petering out, requiring about six pushes to wash your hands or 178 pushes to shave. The situation was made infinitely worse by the water pressure being jacked up with enough thrust to launch a croissant into low orbit. No matter what precautions you took, this pressure made it impossible to use the sinks without water cascading violently over the side, splashing copious water on one’s crotch and even more on the floor. This resulted in each dorm room having a warm puddle in the middle of the room and every resident of the hostel looking as if they’d just seen Richard Nixon’s ghost.

The floor bog situation didn’t end there. The shower stalls, which had no floor barriers and drainage slopes seemingly fitted by vertigo sufferers, sent roughly half the water flowing away from the drain, under the bathroom doors and out into the hall.

The bed sheets were comically too short, so when you torqued on the elastic bottom sheet, it would pull up the thin mattress on both ends into a low U-shape.

The breakfast was barely done to minimum homeless shelter standards. The coffee machine’s preprogrammed dispenser would mete out about three more ounces of liquid than the coffee cups could hold, creating an impressive coffee pond on the dinning room floor and resulting in the entire hostel being ornamented with coffee cup stains. And all they had were the three worst charity giveaway jam flavors in the world: cherry, peach and apricot.

Then there was the staff. The contemptuous, dismissive, asshat staff, who spent far more time attending to the CD player and chatting amongst themselves than helping the anywhere from two to 10 people that always seemed to be standing around the desk waiting for assistance.

To top it all off, in a rather impressive display of HI tag-team suckitude, as I was slowly being checked in, I realized that my HI membership card was still sitting on the reception desk back at the hostel in Bordeaux where, upon my departure, the desk clerk had been too preoccupied with a personal phone conversation to check me out and I ended up just leaving without saying goodbye so as not to miss my train.

Rather than making a quick and simple phone call to verify this, the hateful Lyon hostel staff forced me to buy a new card for 14 euros (US$17.60). As I waited for the disdainful desk girl to find the time to give me my room key in between the more urgent task of rearranging the crap under the desk to make space for her enormous purse, I made a quiet vow that I was done with these wretched Hosteling International hostels for the remainder of my natural life. The afterlife is another story, because if there is a Hell, it is very likely run by French Hosteling International staff.

Disclosure: That even on my best day, my book reviewing skills are amateurish notwithstanding, I am good friends with Doug and have therefore opted to skip doing a book review in favor of an only sporadically serious interview on his travels and scoring his first book, Europe on 5 Wrong Turns a Day.

With the impressive thoroughness of Doug’s replies, I’ll elaborate no further on our tumultuous history, filled with grudges, scars and tinted-windowed van abductions, and launch straight into the far more illuminating interview itself. (NOTE: This is the Collector’s Edition of the shorter, less goofball interview that appeared on World Hum last week. Go there if you’re pressed for time or hate mirth.)

Killing Batteries: What came first, the Five Wrong Turns hook or the resolve to pursue a book deal?
Doug Mack: The hook. I mean, I’ve always liked the idea of writing a book (or, more accurately, to have somehow written a book without actually putting in the effort), but, truthfully, I had never thought about it in tangible terms—it was sort of an idle, unpursued dream rather than a burning ambition. But when I discovered that 1963 of Europe on Five Dollars a Day and first looked through my mother’s letters from her days as a hippie Grand Tourist, that changed in approximately 2.4 seconds—it was one of those light bulb-over-the-head moments that happens in movies but not in real life. BOOK. MUST WRITE.

KB: How old were you when you landed this book deal?  
DM: I was 29 years old. Younger than Mozart when he got his first book deal, younger than Hemingway when he wrote his first symphony.

KB: How much ass did that kick?
DM: Honest answer? Okay: it kicked major ass. I still have a stupid grin affixed to my face (embarrassing as it is to admit). And that’s because I still kind of can’t believe it happened and I’m well aware of how lucky I am—I’m waiting for someone to jump out from behind a bush and point and laugh and say it’s all an epic prank and how could I not notice all the cameras this whole time … but until then, I’m just going to keep this dopey, delighted look on my face.

KB: Having seen so much of Europe now, I have to ask, are you now or have you ever been a dirty socialist?
DM: Yes. Spending time in Europe brainwashed me into believing in the central tenets of dirty socialism, namely, universal health care and widespread availability of gourmet pastries.

KB: These days, it’s tough to get an agent, never mind a publisher, to give you a second glance without an already impressive platform and readymade audience. So, how the Bachmann did you do it?
DM: It’s amazing how far your can get with a little blackmai—I mean, with an interesting hook and a lot of stubborn persistence.

Part one of that: The book has an obvious gimmick (touring Europe with a 1963 guidebook), but it  uses that quirky hook as an entry point into in something larger and more earnest—namely, a big-picture discussion of the social history of tourism in the last generation. Plus, there’s the personal-history element of following in my mother’s footsteps. So there are a number of different angles, but they all tie together—which, I hope, adds up to an interesting hook and, therefore, and interesting book.

The book is also a bit of a spoof of classic travel-memoir tropes: I’m not trekking across a desert, I’m not learning tradition crafts in a forgotten village, I’m not seeking enlightenment or the wisdom of the ancients. This is manifestly not My Year In a Quirky Sun-Dappled Village With Eccentric Locals. Instead, I’m a clichéd tourist through and through (and, in the process, attaining my own skewed version of enlightenment-or-something). And I think that for once, being  absurdist and contrarian actually helped by setting me apart and creating what I hope is an amusing, insightful remix of the standard travel-memoir formula.

So the hook helped. And then there’s Part Two: becoming a workaholic, stubborn, asocial hermit. Just kidding. Mostly. I researched and hustled—that is to say, read wearying numbers of web sites and books with titles like How to Write a Book Proposal in 972 Simple Steps!!—and wrote a proposal and got rejected by a dozen agents and kept polishing and pitching and failing and failing (repeat another dozen times), but trying to, as Samuel Beckett so wonderfully put it, “fail better.” I can’t pretend that I have some magical formula for any of this, but, eventually, after all those months of fail-tweak-fail-tweak, an agent gave me a chance and took me on. The whole process was a combination of lucky breaks and just struggling through, putting in the hours.

KB: Best place for doughnuts in Europe?
DM: Not Amsterdam, I’ll tell you that much.

KB: When you’re famous will you remember the little people that, say, proofed an early draft of your book, let you sleep on their hotel room floor one time in Vancouver and interviewed you just before the book came out to help spark promotion?
DM: The who? Just kidding. Yes, of course, of course. But I thought we agreed not to tell anyone else about that tanker of Strongbow you demanded as remuneration.

KB: [Toweling off from Strongbow bath] What with your love of aerograms and postcards, you appear to be an old school travel aficionado. What three things would you change about modern travel or the travel industry?
DM:
1.  End checked-bag fees. I don’t really mind some of the other additional charges that have popped up. For example, lack of free meals on shorter flights—okay, fine, charge extra for that. Besides, I’m just going to bring something from fresher and tastier from one of the terminal restaurants or from home. But baggage fees? Come on. That’s asinine. Nearly everyone travels with some sort of luggage, and it’s all getting on the plane somehow. So don’t encourage people to carry on even the biggest bags and hold up departure while they try to shove their taxidermy elephant into the overhead bin.

Incidentally, guidebook author Temple Fielding, one of Arthur Frommer’s foremost predecessors and competitors, had his own method for gaming the baggage-fee system. In addition to his two regular suitcases and oversized briefcase, he also traveled with a large raffia basket (full of his luxury-booze stash and a portable record player, among other things). The airlines didn’t know how to categorize the basket (“Well, sir, I don’t even know what raffia is, so we’ll just pretend we don’t see it”) so they didn’t charge him an extra-bag fee. But you’ll have to read the book for the rest of that story.

2. Make digital devices not work abroad. Consider this a modest proposal to help those of us want to be fully immersed in place but can’t seem to find the off button on our electronics: mandate that all phones and computers not work—at all—when transported out of their home countries. Force me to pay for time on an Apple IIE with a mangled keyboard at an internet cafe or to make calls on a tinny pay phone or, God forbid, to talk to a local if I want information.

Not really, of course. I want people in any given place to have the same access to digital communication, and all the benefits it brings, that I do in my home. And I want all of those benefits for myself, the visitor, as well. But there’s a point at which communication-addiction is detrimental to the travel experience—I know, I’ve been there, I’ve wasted (and that is the word) countless hours on mindless internet-hopping and status-updating, pulled away from the people and sights and sounds and culture and language of the place I’m visiting. This even happened during my trip (I talk about it in the book), a trip that was in large part a rebellion against information-overload and an embrace of old-school ignorance and reliance on wits and serendipity. Yet I still got the internet-withdrawal shakes. So maybe I need some help.

3. End the snobbery. Last winter, here in Minneapolis, there was a light rail train wrapped in a huge ad for package tours—golf, shopping, the usual—to Mexico. The main slogan, in foot-high letters: “Mazatlan for travelers not tourists.” Does that expression mean anything anymore? On the first page of my 1963 guidebook, Frommer says that it’s a book “for tourists”; he doesn’t use the word with irony or as an insult, he’s just calling them precisely what they are. There should be no shame in that (as Evelyn Waugh quipped in 1934, “The tourist is the other fellow”–someone else,  not you).

Tourism has always been, to some degree, an act of status, a statement that you have the time, money, and ability to go abroad. With the budget travel boom of the 1960s, though, it exploded and fragmented, open to more people and more ways of showing off, including not just conspicuous consumption but conspicuous frugality. Today, specific travel attitudes and methodologies are as carefully calibrated as attire worn on a first date. Which is absurd. It’s absurd when it means visiting only the most famous cities and landmarks, strictly hewing to the instructions of the latest Frommer’s or Lonely Planet. It’s equally absurd when it means avoiding cities or landmarks for the sole reason that they’re popular. The net effect is the same, an attitude that views travel as a collection of merit badges to be earned, then flaunted: Saw This, Did That, Stayed at the Four Seasons, Slept in a Ditch.
But each attitude completely misses Frommer’s essential underlying point: what matters is not finding something your friends haven’t found but appreciating and understanding that thing—that culture, that place, that food—on your own terms. You can be close-minded even off the beaten path; you can discover all kinds of interesting and wonderful things even on the most tourist-swarmed landmark.

4. Bonus demand: Free. Public. Restrooms. This isn’t specific to modern travel, but it’s still something that I’d change, if only anyone asked me. Especially in places like train stations and restaurants. Everyone, at some point during the day, will need to use a toilet. As a matter of public health and basic human decency, do not make us pay for them. It is a scientifically proven fact that a full bladder is all it takes for even the most staunchly anti-globalization, anti-capitalism individual to rejoice at the sight of a McDonald’s –and its free, clean washrooms—abroad.

KB: At their respective physical peaks, who’d win in a fight between Arthur Frommer and Tony Wheeler?
DM: Rick Steves.

KB: How many guidebook authors does it take to change a light bulb?
DM: Just one, but only after hours of exhaustive research. And all the internet commenters will complain that it was done incorrectly—and that, really, you can just use Twitter for that now.

KB: If you were going to do this trip all over again using modern resources, what would you rely on most?
DM: I would at least glance through a modern guideboook and phrasebook so that I could have a better understanding of the basics of how to understand and get by in a given place and culture. I would also use Twitter or other social media to try to make connections with locals before I left (and those people could also have helped me understand more about the culture and the background). Mind you, I enjoyed having to make the extra effort on all of those fronts—understanding the culture, meeting new people. I had to be very attuned to my surroundings, and I enjoyed that sense that my brain was always working on overdrive to figure things out. Being out of your element has its benefits. But there can and should be a balance, and sometimes I found that being ignorant and out of touch led not to lessons learned or serendipitous discoveries but merely to frustration and fatigue. See: my entire time in Venice, where I was eternally lost and where every restaurant I found seemed to have Maestro Boyardee  running the kitchen.

KB: What country am I thinking of right now?
DM: Italy. Because everyone is always thinking of Italy.

KB: Of the destinations you visited, which one best stood up to the test of time based on Frommer’s 1963 descriptions?
DM: Probably Rome. You turn any given corner there and it’s all but given that you’ll suddenly be in front of some ancient and important and impressive landmark—the Forum, the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps. The same places that have been drawing delighted tourists for hundreds of years. There was a deli there, Il Delfino, that was almost exactly as Frommer had described it, and where all the patrons seemed to be older, like the could have been there since 1963. From the built environment to the general culture to the relatively high number of Frommer-recommended hotels and restaurants that were still open today, Rome was more or less what I expected based on Frommer’s (and my mother’s) descriptions.

KB: And which was the most unrecognizable?
DM: It’s a toss-up between Berlin and Madrid, since both of those cities and countries had decidedly complicated political situations back then (Iron Curtain, Franco …). Obviously, Berlin is twice the city it once was, for tourist purposes. In my guidebook, Frommer notes that you can go to East Berlin as a tourist—the wall was there to keep Easterners in, not visitors out, per se—but that it was bleak and not really worth the trip. If you did go, Frommer recommended that you “register your name with the American MPs at Checkpoint Charlie, tell them the time at which you plan to return, and if you’re not there, they’ll take action. (Let us pause to give thanks that World War III was not inadvertently started by a tardy tourist.) Today, Checkpoint Charlie is a quintessential tourist trap, where you can pay to get your picture taken with guys dressed as American and East German soldiers and then pop across the street for some Subway at the food court called Snackpoint Charlie. (Once again, I am not making any of this up.)

Also, the former East Berlin is the new tourist center of town, in part because that’s where many of the flashiest bars and restaurants are located, and in part because that’s where you can go to get your Cold War kitsch fix, an important part of the modern tourist itinerary. Take a ride in a clunky Soviet-era car; look at some Eastern Bloc architecture; buy some old Soviet military uniforms from one of the many sidewalk vendors. It’s … pretty jarring to see the Cold War themed and packaged as a tourist commodity.

KB: As a fun comparison, in each destination you visited, what would $5 buy you today?
DM:

•     Florence: Some crappy knockoff designer sunglasses from an unofficial vendor by the Arno (but only after you bargained down from the original price and the salesman, with a practiced sigh/grin, says that he’s never, EVER made an offer this low, but …).
•     Paris: A pain au chocolat and maybe a macaron from Gerard Mulot on the Left Bank, along with eternal, wistful memories of same, an enduring, bittersweet nostalgia for that transcendent instant when you first tasted the pastry rapture and for a shining, buttery blink of the eyes, all seemed right with the world. This is all true. Or a couple of condoms from the Eiffel Tower gift shop. Also true.
•     Amsterdam: Aw, bro, I know this kinda shady place down a back alley, you gotta bang on this steel door, but for five bucks they’ll hook you up with a little bag of this, like, super-primo … Gouda.
•     Brussels: A couple of chocolate bars in the shape of Manneken-Pis.
•     Berlin: Two fake East German stamps in your passport at Checkpoint Charlie.
•     Munich: Beer! Or a prostate cancer test from a vending machine at Oktoberfest. I promise this is a real thing. Unfortunately (or not), it does not involve a little robot hand cranking out of the machine, finger extended. In fact, it’s a little stick; you pee on it, like a pregnancy test, which you can also procure from the same machine.
•     Zurich: Ha! Good one. Right, like you can get something for $5 in Zurich. You take a single breath of that crisp Alpine air and it sets you back 8.35 CHF, which is, like, $210.04 at the current exchange rate, though that does include VAT.
•     Vienna:  Your choice of all manner of Mozart-themed tchotchkes. A Mozart wig, alas, will set you back quite a bit more than five dollars, but such is the price of timeless fashion.
•     Venice:  A map, so you can figure out where the *%$@!! you are in that enchanted labyrinth-land. Or a shoddy plastic version of those famous Venetian masks.
•     Rome:  Gelato. Gelatogelatogelato. Go to Gelateria del Teatro, near the Piazza Navona. Five bucks (or, you know, the equivalent in euros) will get you two scoops of creamy transcendence that rivals the Sistine Chapel for literal awesomeness.  (Hyperbole? Of course not.) Try the lemon. Or the chocolate-wine. Thank me later.
•     Madrid: A ticket in the highest, most sun-blasted seats at a novillada con picadores bullfight. Available online through a Ticketmaster subsidiary. (Again, I am not making this up.)

KB: Now what country am I thinking of?
DM: Suriname.  Just to be tricky. Because that’s one country NO ONE can locate on a map (Africa? South America? South Pacific? Jupiter?).

KB: Rate the following on a scale of 1 to 10, with ’1′ being despondent and ’10′ being unbridled euphoria:
DM:

•     Getting a book deal:  10
•     Realizing that you had to write the book: 3
•     Writing a book while maintaining a semblance of a personal life:  3
•     Finishing the manuscript: 9
•     Having to cut 18,000 words from the manuscript: 1
•     Checking edits by some 20 year old that’s never left the Northeast and couldn’t find Zurich on a map if someone dangled a million dollar bill in front of their face: 5(th Amendment)
•     Final proofing of the manuscript, being that it’s the 12947th time you’ve read the damn thing and you just wish you could get on with your life: 3
•     Rating random experiences proffered by people with ADD: 0
•     Holding your book: 7
•     Holding your book up to your nose and snorting deeply: 8
•     Using a pile of your books as a snuggle pillow: 9
•     Going to work, standing in the middle of the office, holding your book above your head and yelling “Hey cubicle monkeys! While you were naysaying my dreams and toiling at your jobs, look what I did! So, you can all just suck it!!”:  11
•     Realizing that this is the last question: -2

DM impersonating KB: Bonus question: Where can I purchase a copy or several of this fine work of literature?
DM: Why, that’s a splendid question. The book is—

KB: Uh, I didn’t ask that question—you put in this part.
DM: Sure, if you say so. It’s now available at IndieBound or Amazon or your friendly local bookseller for a mere fifteen dollars. Mozart wig sold separately.

UPDATE: August 10, 2012 – Digiboo is introducing a wireless download feature from their kiosks, eliminating the need for the flash drive transfer. As of this writing, kiosks are in the Minneapolis/St Paul, Seattle and Portland airports.

Recently, for maybe the third or fourth time since they cured polio, I received an email marketing blast that actually fell within the easily identifiable realm of interests here at Killing Batteries headquarters. Except it was forwarded to me by my travel writing coconspirator Frank Bures, not a PR shop. Ah, well. Keep trying, people. (Except for the PRs that keep pitching me family travel stories. You guys need to be publicly flogged.)

In 2003, when I quit my job, sold everything and took off for over four years of global vagabonding, I brought with me a densely packed DVD case. Even with it being bulky, heavy and delicate I never regretted it for a second. Those movies filled many idle hours on planes, trains and lonely hotel rooms in deserted towns during low season.

Well, now movie-loving, frequent and long haul travelers have a far more elegant solution. Digiboo allows flash drive-armed travelers to spontaneously buy or rent movies and it’s being launched this week exclusively at the award-winning Minneapolis/St Paul International Airport.

Now the really important thing here is IN YOUR FACE EVERY OTHER AIRPORT!!

That said, being that MSP is a hub for an airline that rhymes with ‘Smelta’ and Smelta has historically been an industry leader in leaving people stranded in strange cities, blaming ATC, leaving them with no recourse and no way to retrieve their luggage at 11pm, then locking the doors and going home, I felt it was prudent to check out this boredom-deterrent, movie download thingie as soon as possible. For the people.

Currently there are 11 Digiboo movie download kiosks peppered around MSP, loaded with (at the time of writing) 700 movies, including recent films such as “Bad Teacher,” “Captain America” and “Hugo.” Rentals are $3.99 (new) or $2.99 (catalog) and can be viewed within 30 days of download. The caveat is that one only has 48 hours to watch the movie once the movie has been opened, though the movie can be viewed as many times as one likes in that 48 hour period before the rental license expires. Purchased movies cost $14.99. Rentals can be viewed on only one device at a time, while purchased movies can be watched on up to five devices. New movies are added to the kiosk every week as titles become available.

Utterly intrigued, I all but ran to a nearby hotel earlier today, where Digiboo executives were camped out, for a hands-on test.

The touchscreen kiosks are admirably intuitive. You can search for movies by genre, pull up a list of recent releases, or type in a movie title (or even actor name) into the search field. Once you’ve selected your film, you swipe a credit card, which both sets up payment and registers your Digiboo account without having to type a single character. Your film then zaps out onto your flash drive, a process that, in my case (using a USB 3.0 device) took about 30 seconds. That’s it!

The movie files range in size from 1.5 to 2.1 gigs. If you don’t have that much space available on your flash drive, a USB external hard drive can alternatively be plugged into the kiosk.

But wait! If this is your first time using Digiboo, you’re not quite done. You need to register your laptop before you can view your movie. As frequent MSP travelers know, as wonderful as MSP is in virtually every other way, they criminally still do not have free wi-fi. Until they join all the other wi-fi forward-thinking airports of the world, say San Salvador or Bucharest, Digiboo has a solution.

If you think ahead, you can register your laptop at home, right now in fact, using the Digiboo website. But if you haven’t done this step, here’s the beautiful thing, each Digiboo kiosk is also a wi-fi hotspot. You can’t surf the web, but you can register and also install the Digiboo player app on your laptop without hunting for a wi-fi hotspot or paying for an airport wi-fi subscription. Simply connect to the Digiboo wi-fi hub and zip-zop your laptop is registered. You don’t even need to open a browser.

Plug the flash drive into your laptop and double click the Digiboo player setup exe file. Again, this is a first-time-only task that requires a wi-fi connection, so don’t run to your departure gate until you’ve completed this step using the Digiboo wi-fi hotspot. Even on my foot-dragging netbook, the install only took about 2-3 minutes. Now you’re ready to watch your movie, in my case, The Dark Knight.

Digiboo has only landed the licensing rights to standard-definition movies (so far), but being that I typically travel with my 10” screen netbook these days, I doubt I’ll miss those lost lines of resolution.

Following the initial installation at Minneapolis/St Paul airport, Digiboo will install kiosks in the Seattle and Portland airports in the next few weeks. Further expansion is expected this summer.

Now, is Digiboo a desperately needed airport/airplane entertainment solution or a flash-in-the-pan, geek-bait novelty?

It is, albeit near the very bottom of the list of First World Problems, a bit tedious to be shuffling a flash drive between a kiosk and a laptop for 5-10 minutes just to load and watch a movie. And one analyst rightly points out that consumers are embracing streaming video with breathtaking speed, ostensibly rendering the Digiboo service obsolete before it even gets started. However, any frequent traveler will recognize that massive demand still potentially exists within the captive, in-transit demographic who don’t want to suffer through streaming movies via airplane wi-fi, not to mention the inaccessibility of streaming options like Netflix and Hulu when one is outside of the US. (Though there are work-arounds for truly dedicated, savvy geeks.)

The only reason I’m writing about Digiboo is that I believe I’ll be using this service lavishly from here on out. With my frequent, long trips abroad and utter loathing of paying for hotel wi-fi under any circumstances, having movies sitting on my hard drive has been and continues to be the ideal solution. Until someone invents something better.

For the moment, Digiboo movies will only play on Windows devices. Plans to expand to the Mac and Android OSs are in process.

“What was the worst travel scam you’ve ever fallen for?” Doug Mack asked me during the second round of drinks at a recent “meeting.” The soon-to-be-published travel author had just returned from a trip to Havana, Cuba, where he and his girlfriend had been victim to the “I meant that’s the price per person” airport taxi scam after forking over the originally agreed upon total, and was looking to commiserate.

I paused, trying to think of a gripping story, but came up empty. It’s possible that Doug, like many people before him, believes that I get into a hell of a lot more hijinks while on the road than I actually do. I don’t know why people think this. Believe it or not, I am, in general, the picture of common sense and decorum while I’m on the road. My world travels have been surprisingly, almost uncannily, disaster-free.

Yes, there were the relentless, but relatively tiny bribes I was shaken down for during my first visit to Moldova and Transdniestr (I’ve since developed a defense strategy.) There was that time some jackass tried to snare me with the Greedy Tourist scam in Kiev. I might have been kinda drugged while going through the naughty tourist motions in Bangkok’s notorious Pat Pong district. But in 25 years of traveling abroad I’ve never been robbed, beaten or even had medium sums of money liberated from my wallet.

Usually it’s inexperienced travelers that get caught up in travel scams. Naivety, unfamiliarity, fatigue, greed, drunkenness or an unfortunate combination can lead people to do things they might not ordinarily do. Exchange money at the bus station with a dude sporting a face scar? Buy discounted precious stones to sell for a huge profit back home? Two incredibly attractive women suddenly wanna be your best friends and go bar hopping? Instant alarm bells would go off if any of this happened at home, so why do people fall victim to these situations in foreign countries?

Some travel scams are far more sophisticated. So sophisticated that even travel-hardened veterans sometimes fall for them. Longtime Africa savvy traveler Peter Gostelow recently fell victim to a new wrinkle on the bait-and-switch money changing scheme in Malawi. After six months of living in Romania, in the company of three eagle-eyed companions, one of them Romanian, I was taken for quadruple the normal taxi fare in Bucharest (which still only amounted to about US$35).

In truth, anyone having an off day can fall for a scam, not just traveler newbies. As proof, I solicited travel scam stories from a few travel writing veterans. Here’s a sampling:

Eva Holland website Twitter

“I was freshly arrived in Istanbul, and naturally I was only carrying big bills, straight from the Forex. So when I got hopelessly lost and wound up taking a quick taxi ride back to familiar ground, the driver had to hand over a lot of change. Later, when I went to spend those bills, I learned that they were discontinued notes, now-worthless old lira rather than the new ones that had come into circulation a year earlier. He must have had them ready and waiting for a sucker to climb in his cab — and this time, that sucker was me.”

Paul Clammer Twitter

“Even experienced travellers have to start somewhere, and so it was that I found myself in Morocco in 1994, looking for help in a Lonely Planet guide I’d one day end up co-authoring.

We’d arrived in Casablanca, and almost immediately fallen in with a lovely guy who took us around and introduced us to mint tea. Nothing untoward, but when we met him the next day he needed $30 to pay for a parcel that needed posting – of course we were happy to oblige, and he’d pay us back in the evening. Our rendezvous that night was in a seedy bar, and when we arrived there were plenty of empty bottles on the table. He’d pay us back in a moment, but first a few beers.

And then the details of a complicated drug smuggling scam – he had friends on the docks, who immediately turned up, equally drunk and swaggering and looming over us. Maybe we could actually lend him some more money, as an investment for a bigger shipment? It sounded like an offer we couldn’t (or shouldn’t) refuse. Nervously, we offered another round of drinks, and then when we were at the bar, ran pell-mell out of the door, and straight into a taxi. Thoroughly spooked, we crept out of Casablanca on the first bus the next morning. ”

Zora O’Neill website Twitter

“Egypt is difficult because the people who aren’t scamming you are so incredibly kind, so I live in fear of mistakenly accusing one of the nice people of being a sleazy bastard.

What happened this time: I was there in September 2011, so people were still a bit giddy about the revolution. My first day out walking around Cairo, everyone on the street was all, “Hey, you heard about us in America? What we did? Revolution!”

On a quiet street, one guy flagged me down. He wanted me, an American, to understand how Egyptians worked together. During the 18 days of the revolution, he told me, he and his neighbors, Copts and Muslims, had banded together to keep the street safe. My scam-sensors were on high alert. But he was talking to me about the revolution–he couldn’t possibly be so callous as to be using this as bait. Could he?

Oh, of course he could. Next thing I knew, I was locked in this basement perfume shop, sipping tea and sniffing really dubious lotus-flower oil.

For the first time in my life of visiting Egypt (nearly 20 years at this point), I bought some perfume. It must’ve been a cumulative effect over the decades–the touts finally wore me down. I spent nine bucks on some crappy lavender oil. I did turn down the upsell for the pretty glass bottle. “Well, I had to try,” the guy tending the store said with a shrug.

I wrote it off in my expenses as “Onsite research” and added a note in the guidebook about revolution-related sales gambits. And how you shouldn’t get too mad at the sales guys–they have to try.”

Ryan Ver Berkmoes website Twitter

“First time I took a guided day trip tour. It was from Mexico City to assorted old Aztec ruins and pyramids. I was psyched as the price was great and I’d see a lot in one day. Well what I saw a lot of was really shitty gift shops filled with other glassy-eyed daytrippers looking at a lot of crap, much of it imported from China. Meanwhile the “guide” was collecting his commissions and telling us how this was his “cousin’s place” and other complete nonsense.

Our lovely lunch was a bus-trip-filled slop house with steaming tables of shit that wouldn’t pass muster at Taco Bell. Our stops at the sites were very brief and mostly consisted of warnings NOT to buy handicrafts from the vendors of the official gift stores… (as opposed to his “cousins”)

I learned my lesson and am very picky about ever signing on for day trips. There are good ones, but first ascertain how many retail opportunities will be presented, etc.”

What’s the worst travel scam you’ve ever fallen for? Were you on your first trip or your twentieth?

Oh, look! Another voter-driven, who-to-follow travel Twitter list!

So, here’s the fundamental problem with these voter-driven lists: they’re far more reflective of existing popularity and the willingness to campaign by the contenders than appreciable talent. Sure, voter-driven Top Whatever lists serve a vaguely useful purpose, even if that purpose is often a distant third to page views and link bait. And in this instance, credit where credit is due, several people from the original list of contenders are performing much better on Twitter these days, in my opinion, than the last time I checked in on/unfollowed them, so there’s something to be said for that welcome revelation which I probably wouldn’t have otherwise experienced.

That said, when/if a who-to-follow travel Twitter list is at all necessary, I feel that readers are far better served by a list that’s been carefully cultivated by someone with highly selective, exacting taste, along with a few words explaining why those travel Twitter personalities merit following.

(Who, me? OK, I’ll do it.)

For the sake of disclosure, the attributes I most appreciate (and personally aspire to) in travel twittering are: a pleasing balance between informational, evocative, entertaining and reasonable self-promotional tweets, dispensed, when space allows, with style and wit.

Here’s the problem, or perhaps it’s just my problem… Lots of people do a couple of these things admirably well, but surprisingly few manage to consistently deliver the entire package. Far too many people burden their followers with an overabundance of tedious, off-topic tweets, wearying self-promotion and/or operate as if Twitter is an instant messaging application. A little of this is fine and expected when one engages on Twitter, but there’s a threshold and, frustratingly, too many people have no idea when they’ve galloped through that threshold on their non-stop, express trip to Suckville. These failings, and my daily struggle to manage distractions, are why I have been and continue to be so fastidious with my Twitter feed management.

With that in mind, and in no particular order, the following are some of the travel people who, when I’m hurriedly skimming Twitter, I always stop and read due to the high probability that they’ve tweeted something great. Of course, this isn’t remotely comprehensive, so anyone that wants to point me toward similar feeds, please leave a comment.

David Whitley: The Grumpy Traveller’s Twitter feed is chock full of travel wisdom, frank opinions and hilarity, with an endearing self-effacing touch. The man is a veritable tornado of freelancing activity, so there’s rarely a moment when he isn’t on a trip, planning a trip or just grumpily returning from a trip. Though he’s recently threatened a direction change, I’ve long been a loyal fan of his blog for its insightfulness and, usually deserved, lambasting of various travel industry shortcomings that every writer, PR person and traveler should absorb.

Ryan Ver Berkmoes: Though Ryan mostly ignored Twitter in the beginning, over the past year or so he’s been active and totally nailing it. He managed the difficult trick of cultivating strong Twitter content without the usual newbie mistakes and now his careful link selection, reliable one-liners and the fact that he’s seemingly on the road for 300 days a year for Lonely Planet, make his feed uniformly exceptional.

Grant Martin: Grant has forgotten more about flying and flight booking than most of us can ever (honestly) claim in our bios. He somehow serves as the editor-in-chief at Gadling while still holding down a fulltime, frequent traveling job requiring him to look at stuff in giant microscopes. He’s also not afraid to publicly call people out on concerns/infractions when necessary, which, of course, I love.

Annemarie Dooling: In a sign of how I’m sometimes alarmingly closed off from great people on Twitter, I only started following Annemarie about six months ago. Holding down what seems to be five or six different blogging jobs is probably why she always seems to have a finger on (and tweets from) the pulse of digital and print travel media.

Mike Barish: More “character” than “personality,” Mike’s feed is eclectic and fun, though his affection for SkyMall products is cause for mild concern. Mike’s showmanship, wit and gift for quippy commentary were seemingly made for Twitter, often out-shining whatever link he happens to be tweeting.

Jamie Pearson: My interest in the mommy blogging genre is just a whisker below my interest in kitty fashion shows and just above my interest in NASCAR. So that I find Jamie’s feed to be consistently smart and entertaining is a testament to her personality and tweet selection, even when they are mommy tweets.

Jodi Ettenberg: I’ve spent some time with Jodi and know this isn’t (literally) true, but based on her Twitter engagement, I like to imagine her Blackberry is Velcroed to her forearm, runner style. Her relentless, yet engaging feed, documenting her ongoing vagabonding and peppered with reliably clickable links on a large variety of topics, many of them #longreads, is endlessly impressive and fascinating.

Paul Clammer: Lonely Planet author, NGO worker and baffling appreciator of what I call “unleisure travel.” Paul’s guidebooks include Sudan, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Dominican Republic and Haiti, where he’s currently living, volunteering and firing off evocative tweets.

Zora O’Neill: Yet another seemingly in perma-transit Lonely Planet colleague, with a particular talent for sharing factoids, clever insights and food tweets wherever she washes up.

David Farley: In addition to being an extremely talented travel writer, Farley is the author of one of history’s most bizarre pieces of travel narrative nonfiction, “An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church’s Strangest Relic in Italy’s Oddest Town.” He’s also one of the most (sometimes) brutally honest people I follow on Twitter, which can be both gratifying and sometimes scary.

Pretty self-explanatory.

If you can’t see the video or if YouTube is blocking it in your country, try here.

I heartily recommend World Nomads travel insurance

This is a follow-up to my traveler’s guide to coping with arrest.

Far less disturbing than being arrested while abroad, but statistically more probable, is being detained for a minor or non-existent violation and being intimidated into bribing your way out of the situation. Coping with detainment and bribery can be akin to the patience, bluffing and improvising required of playing Texas Hold ‘Em in a Vegas casino. It’s difficult to give concrete tips or answer questions without repeated use of the phrase ‘it depends’. The other players at the table may be halfwits with great cards, professionals with crappy cards, drunks with no clue or a multi-layered combination of everything.

I’ve bargained my way out of bogus traffic violations in Chisinau, Moldova for $7. Guidebook writer and sham detainee veteran Robert Reid, after coolly waiting out a 45 minute shakedown on the border between Romania and Bulgaria, finally had his passport returned and was then earnestly beseeched for details about the quality of life in California. On the flip side, travelers are returning from Mexico reporting increasing random pull-overs in heavy tourist zones that allegedly ended in an escort to a nearby ATM to withdrawal several hundred dollars, all to the refrain of “No ticket, no receipt, no problem”.

In these cases, it’s important to stay calm. Unless you were caught red-handed in a carjacking or something similarly incriminating, you can rest assured that you’re innocent and that in all probability nothing dire will happen to you. While your impulse might be to resolve the situation as fast as possible and get away, as demonstrated by Robert Reid above, sometimes the most effective method is to just wait. Expect your provocateurs to ham it up with grim head shaking, lengthy whispered huddles and maybe even suggestions that you’ll be taken to the station, but if enough time passes and it’s evident that you’re not panicking or making moves to distribute the contents of your wallet to the group, they’ll stop wasting time on you and cut you loose in favor of searching for weaker-willed prey.

On rare occasion, the official detaining you may not be a genuine official at all. In an LA Times article of October of 2007, on the subject of dubious citations and/or the authenticity of the official in question, deputy assistant secretary for Overseas Citizen Services Michele Bond was quoted as saying, “Try to get the name and badge number and specifics about the officer. The traveler also should ask for a copy of the citation.” If these tactics aren’t fruitful, she added that “You also can offer to accompany the officer to the police station to settle the matter,” an effective deterrent for purveyors of phony citations.

Though seasoned travelers in certain locales swear by the quick-exit method of offering a “donation to the Policemen’s Fund”, it’s important to remember that trying to bribe an officer is a crime. Indeed, it may very well be a much worse crime than whatever minor violation you’re mixed up in. Alternatively, if the offer of a “donation” is presented to you, and you’re in a hurry, it’s a relatively painless way to get on with your life all things considered. A common course of action in many countries, whether you’re guilty or not, is for the officer to take your driver’s license or passport to the station, where you’ll have to go the following day, stand in line and pay a fine to get it back. In those cases you’re inconvenienced and coughing up money. Faced with that prospect, a “donation” seems comparatively generous on the officer’s part.

You may find yourself in the hilarious position (in retrospect) of bargaining for the bribe amount. Never reveal exactly how much money you have on your person. This allows you to claim, truthfully or not, that you do not have the sum that’s being requested which will frequently bring down the asking price – except, of course, in the event that an ATM is in close proximity. Also, if you speak the native tongue, conveniently losing your language skills can work wonders. Don’t utter a single word in the local language, not even ‘hello’. I realize that after years of studying and practicing a language that having to play dumb will challenge both your acting abilities and ego, but exasperating communications breakdowns have gotten me off scot-free, because even the suggestion of a bribe was impossible, much less getting bogged down in lengthy bargaining.

Depending on the locale and the disposition of the officials with whom you’ve run afoul, this lesson in life can either be mirthfully painless or downright harrowing. Staying calm and using your best judgment will probably spare you serious trauma, beyond that… it depends.

[PHOTO CREDIT: elephant bribery by Shark Attacks]

Agonizing over travel insurance? Maybe I can help…

[International readers: though this piece was written for an American audience, I hope you'll find some portions of general interest.]

Before I get started, I’d like to unequivocally state, for both the readers and the person that originally suggested that I write this piece, who fancied that I’d know a little something on this subject, that I have never been arrested while abroad. Detained, yes. Arrested, no.

No matter how straight-laced you are, it’s almost impossible to avoid minor run-ins with authorities if you’re a frequent international traveler. Indeed, in some countries you may even feel as if a sign has been taped to your back reading “Please harass me, pig-cop”. I’ve been held at Singapore’s Changi Airport for not looking like my passport photo – and I was just trying to change planes! (Incidentally, there’s no better weight loss program than four months of high-speed travel in Southeast Asia during the hot season.) I’ve been shaken down for bribes for imaginary traffic infractions in Moldova. I’ve narrowly escaped an apparent police-supported scam to frame me for the theft of “lost” money while on a magazine assignment in Kiev. Needless to say, all of those experiences were unsettling and I never even saw the inside of a police station, much less a cell.

In comparison to those events, being formally arrested while abroad is going to be significantly more disquieting. In addition to the predictable anxiety of having your life turned upside-down, you’re faced with disparate laws, foreign languages and the rare anti-American trumped-up charge, which will cumulatively amplify the pressure of an already unpleasant situation. Usually, you’ll be fairly tried under the laws of the country in question. Occasionally you will not. Events like the case of Eric Volz who, wrongfully accused of murder, spent 16 traumatic months in a Nicaraguan prison are the stuff of Hollywood dramas.

The 1993 book “Nightmare Abroad: Stories of Americans Imprisoned in Foreign Lands” by Peter Laufer details how Americans are often caught off guard by foreign legal systems where, conversely, guilt is presumed rather then innocence. Similarly, these countries are notoriously strict on the subject of release on bail while awaiting trial.

So, what are your rights if you’re arrested abroad? What should you do first? What’s the process for your case? I went to the official source on such matters, the US State Department, and asked Bureau of Consular Affairs spokesman Steve Royster for advice:

“Americans who are arrested abroad should immediately notify authorities that they are American citizens and that they wish to speak to their embassy or consulate. This can trigger a legal obligation to allow you access to consular officials, though we have agreements with many countries to put you in touch with American officials as soon as you’re arrested.”

While this is certainly reassuring, as Mr. Royster goes on to explain, there are things that the State Department can do and things that they unfortunately cannot do on your behalf.

“Our consular officials abroad cannot represent Americans who are arrested, but we can ensure that they are not being mistreated and provide them information on their legal proceedings, including a list of local attorneys they can retain. We can also notify their friends and family back home of their situation if they wish. It’s important to note that under US law we cannot share information about your unfortunate situation unless you give us permission. Americans should get in touch with us if they’re arrested, without fearing that we will tattle to relatives back home without their permission.”

On the subject of treatment during incarceration Royster said, “Our interest is in making sure that Americans are not mistreated, and are afforded access to the legal system wherever they may be arrested without discrimination because of their nationality. When we have concerns that the American’s welfare and safety is at risk, we will make our concerns known to the host government and urge the authorities to provide appropriate protection.”

Though it is extremely rare, Mr. Royster concluded with Americans’ options in countries where there is no US diplomatic presence: “In some countries where we don’t have a diplomatic presence, like Iran or  North Korea, we are represented by another country (a protecting power) that provides basic consular services. Where we have no presence at all – as in Somalia – we try to do what we can from neighboring countries, but cannot provide direct on-the-ground support and therefore warn Amcits (our shorthand for ‘American citizens’) not to travel to that country.”

The Department of State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs web site gives further details about services that the Office of American Citizens Services will perform, including:

•    Visit the prisoner as soon as possible after notification of the arrest
•    Provide information about judicial procedures in the foreign country
•    Relay requests to family and friends for money or other aid
•    Provide regular consular visits to the prisoner and report on those visits to the Department of State
•    Arrange special family visits, subject to local law
•    Provide information about procedures to applications for pardons or prisoner transfer treaties, if applicable

In the grand scheme of things, even if you’re prone to a little drunken douchebaggery while on vacation, your chances of being arrested while abroad are incredibly slim. The US State Department reported that roughly 3,125 Americans were arrested between October 1, 2007 and September 30, 2008, an infinitesimal number considering the grand total of international American travelers and the sizable misbehaving subset of that group. That same number looks paltry when you remove Mexico from the equation, by far the locale where Americans are most often arrested.

For the record, the US State Department’s top 20 list of cities where Americans were most often arrested from October 1, 2007, through September 30, 2008:

1. Tijuana, Mexico: 687
2. London: 256
3. Mexico City: 142
4. Hong Kong: 107
5. Nassau, Bahamas: 92
6. Tokyo: 79
7. Nogales, Mexico: 76
8. Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic: 73
9. Kingston, Jamaica: 70
10. Nuevo Laredo, Mexico: 69
11. Ciudad Juárez, Mexico: 58
12. Dublin, Ireland: 51
13. Guadalajara, Mexico: 50
14. Frankfurt, Germany: 47
15. Matamoros, Mexico: 45
16. Jerusalem: 37
17. Madrid: 36
18. Manila: 36
19. Montreal: 36
20. San José, Costa Rica: 35

On a sober closing note, the US State Department also noted that at least 21 US citizens have died in captivity in Mexico since 2002, including “five apparent homicides.”

Next week, I’ll address the subject of coping with detainment and bribe shakedowns while abroad.

Agonizing over travel insurance? Maybe I can help…

As my ragtag little group of Twitter followers already know, I am leaving in less than a week for a five week trip through Thailand and Burma. I am not taking this trip for an assignment or for research. This trip is what I believe normal humans refer to as a ‘vacation’.

It has been over three years since I took a trip just because. At some indeterminate point in early 2005, I ceased being an aspiring travel writer and transformed into a genuine travel writer. Rather than my travels being ostensibly for me – though travelogued in nauseating detail, partly for the writing exercise and partly in the hopes that the notes would later come in handy for paying work – my travels started being all about a current or possible future paid writing gig. The added weight of responsibility irreversibly changed the way I travel and I’ve been a neurotic, productivity-obsessed, relaxation-deficient ball of travel partner annoyance ever since.

Then a strange thing happened recently. After over a year of praying to Buddha for a break from the ceaseless deluge of paying work that I had wished so hard upon myself, the break finally appeared in the form of the US economic meltdown. There was no project waiting for me when I turned in my latest LP manuscript. Three possible gigs fell through and I’ve been sitting here flogging an ill-timed book proposal intended for increasingly nervous and budget-conscious publishers ever since.

I eventually realized that I had two choices: I could stay here and continue to create non-paying work to fill my days, forlornly wondering when I might get paid again, or I could take an impulsive, extravagant trip – while forlornly wondering when I might get paid again. After much peer pressure, I chose the latter. At least in this case I’ll be warm and eating great food.

I freely admit that I’m very rusty at Traveling Just Because, not that I was ever very skilled at it in the first place. Even before I was travel writing for a living, my impulse to be more or less constantly on the go, maximizing every minute while traveling, earned me the moniker ‘Vacation Nazi’. Resisting the urge to spin my upcoming trip into paying work is giving me indigestion. Worse still, the effort that it’s going to take to not blog about and post photos of my every move may actually cause me to faint. I’m really not sure I’m up to that. How about a compromise? I’ll blog in vague detail? Post pictures, but not label them? Can I do that? Who am I talking to? Man, I need a vacation.

Anyhoo, apart from the stout support network that I’m going to need to relax a bit, I wanted to just call attention to the fact that I’ll be posting lazily, or not at all, starting next week and continuing through the holidays. Or I’ll break down and post constantly. It could go either way.

That said, if this trip through Burma ends up being even half a poignant as last time, you should expect all kinds of pictures and commentary upon my return, so there’s that to look forward to.

In the meantime, I’m going to direct you to my Bangkok travelogue of 2005. It is unabashedly long – no astoundingly long. It was largely written in a state of exhaustion and distraction, so there are typos galore. But, if I may say so, it’s an informational and entertaining read that will effectively fill two or three of your lunch breaks.

Now, I must start my ludicrously meticulous preparations for relaxation.

Agonizing over travel insurance? Maybe I can help…