9 ms·

Is Travel Writing Dead?

56 points by Thevet 10y ago

jhbadger 10y ago
I get the complaint, but some of those cliched "In the footsteps of..." books are actually pretty good. I recently read Douglas Mack's "Europe on Five Wrong Turns A Day", in which the author tries to visit Europe in the modern day using a 1963 copy of Arthur Frommer's classic "Europe on Five Dollars a Day". It wasn't just the obvious "things are more expensive now", but really about how the whole idea of travel is so different from in the 1960s.
- ryanlol 10y ago
  >It wasn't just the obvious "things are more expensive now" Doesn't seem obvious at all, five 1960 dollars is around 40 2017 dollars. 40 dollars per day can be a plenty.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    Sure, but the author was eating three course dinners in Paris and staying in sunny hotels in Florence with those $5 a day. Try doing that with $40 nowadays. The difference is, of course, mostly in the rates between the dollar and the European currencies, rather than simply an increase in costs locally.
    - trendia 10y ago
      > mostly in the rates between the dollar and European currencies I think this might be true in some countries -- it used to be way cheaper to go to countries in Eastern Europe before they joined the Euro. But I believe that Germany and France would have always been rather expensive since they had rather strong currencies. As far as the Euro is concerned, USD / Eur is the highest it's been in 10 years [0]. [0] http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=EUR&view=10Y http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=EUR&view=10Y
      - icebraining 10y ago
        The book was written in the mid-50s, back in the days of the Bretton Woods system, and barely a decade after WW2.
  - VLM 10y ago
    The problem with touring Europe on $40/day is a fairly typical contract software developer might pay $1800/month or $60/day for family health insurance. The point being that if you're wealthy enough to have a roof over your head and food and medical care, which a significant fraction of the American population doesn't have, then trying to nickel and dime it when traveling doesn't make any sense as an over-hyper-optimization. I'm in good financial shape so most Americans can't replicate this but I went to Ireland a couple years ago for a week, it was all the time I could get off work, I dropped oh at least a couple grand. From memory the plane tickets were like $700, so that's a hundred bucks a day even if all we did was panhandle at $0 per day. If I have to work 51 weeks a year, when am I going to spend the money on that prevents me from dropping $500/day instead having to spend $5?
    - notahacker 10y ago
      Sure, but the whole point of "Europe on Five Dollars a Day" and "Southeast Asia on a Shoestring" and their ilk was opening up the idea of leisure travel to people who aren't working 51 weeks a year on contract programmers' salaries and feeding their families, and might instead have a few months off after their studies or in between low paid jobs.
hprotagonist 10y ago
"The places in-between", and other works by rory stewart, are modern and excellent.
mycall 10y ago
I just want to point out that there are many other forms of travel writing. Epic, aimless, business building, scientific inquiry, collection gathering, family business, enlightenment, etc. Reductionism tends to sell everyone short.
laurentdc 10y ago
Meh, it seems to me that vlogging is the new travel writing. YouTube has plenty of channels of people travelling the world and telling stories with their GoPro. They're using videos on a social platform instead of text and photographs on a book. It's just a medium change, to allow for quicker consumption and to engage more with the viewers I guess.
pjc50 10y ago
Three problems: 1) There's very little money for writers anymore, except the extremely successful 2) Travel writing golden age was when the world was exotic and hard to visit - but now we're saturated in travel TV, cheap flights, blogging and especially Instagram posts. If you want to see what the world looks like somewhere, you can get a pretty good idea from the internet. VR tourism if it happens will only make this worse. 3) Finally, globalisation has worn down the exoticness of places. Everywhere has a McDonald's. And we're heading into a time when the pendulum of public opinion has swung against the foreign. How can you sell travel writing to a Brexit market? (The author has reminded me of Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose Words of Mercury I need to finish.)
- jgalt212 10y ago
  per point #1, Travels by Michael Crichton (who didn't need the money) is one of the best travel writing books I've read. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7665.Travels http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7665.Travels
- Drumlin 10y ago
  > How can you sell travel writing to a Brexit market? I think you misunderstand Brexit and other similar movements. People are pushing back at the technical homogenisation caused by that full force of globalisation. These movements are, in my opinion, a subconscious fight against the harshness of technical progress. If countries focus on their local and national communities once more, they can rediscover culture and the uniqueness of their existence - the sort of authentic experience that tourists crave when they travel thousands of miles. In a way, it's a possible solution to point number three.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    Could you elaborate on "technical homogenisation" please?
    - Drumlin 10y ago
      When I say 'technical' - I mean everything from: politics, law, technology/tools, economics, education, medicine, infrastructure, employment etc. All these areas are being homogenised (or standardised) for progress and it's on a global scale. If you want to read more, there's an old book called "The Technological Society" by Jacques Ellul - it's a sociology book, there are many similar ones but that one sort-of covers the topic the best.
Existenceblinks 10y ago
It would rather be boring and real dead if the travel writing wasn't dead. It will make you feel like something being unfinished while it should be. What if we _ideally_ discover all routes that human want to know. What would happen next after we all have been there - the edge of galaxy. Is life going to be such boredom or we would find yet another dimension to explore? I don't know, _that unknown_ actually makes me excited to explore next. My 3rd world country is just way far behind westerners in this travel stories scene, it is just in hype state and ads content networking shit is going on around. Please lets finish this scene and move on.
Overtonwindow 10y ago
I say no. If you've never read Bill Bryson, you're missing out on a unique perspective of travel writing. It's not so much the locations but the personal narrative that I enjoy.
coldtea 10y ago
>(...) certain titles enjoy a reputation as ‘travel’ classics while falling way below more general standards of literary achievement. Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts depends on these standards being dispensed with entirely. Say what? If anything, it's the inverse. Most travel best sellers are trite. Fermor's writing is with the best of them, and not confined to travel writing at all.
idlewords 10y ago
No.
cheriot 10y ago
Yes, it's largely dead. Killed by the same economics that are killing most writing niches. It's either a paid advertisement, the writer never went, or it's sensational to the point of misrepresenting the subject (so you'll think the author is awesome and subscribe to email updates). There's a handful of valuable sources left. roadsandkingdoms.com is one good one.
jordache 10y ago
crazyguyonabike, the thousands of travel blogs, podcasts, youtube, instagram. The travel narrative is pretty alive and strong these days
VLM 10y ago
In the pre-internet era travel was a code word for open mindedness toward other cultures. A fairly standard trope in travel writing was freaking out the reader to a perfectly acceptable level at the time of writing. This is obsolete today. Due to globalism we're moving our culture over there to replace theirs and moving their people over here to replace ours. Open mindedness is seen as wrong, "no platforming", utter intolerance toward anything non-progressive and if they're equally progressive over there, there's nothing new to experience there. People who would have found travel interesting in 1970 when I was young now experience unusual non mainstream cultures by visiting various 4chan boards and looking for people who still use the N-word in 2017, or who go camping, or are NEETs. What travel as a verb still happens in 2017 is now about western style decadence or social signalling and both are heavily organized. If you want decadence you read the resort reviews about how good the all inclusive drinks are and proximity to nude beaches and dance clubs and such, its all heavily organized and indexed and sorted and CRUD-app-ified. Who wants to read a book about a quirky end user scrolling thru yelp or airbnb? If you want social signalling, perhaps you need that trip to Africa for volun-tour-ism for that ivy league application, you contact people who organize that from top to bottom, social signalling has been pretty well product-ized. Some of the death of old style travel writing is the death of optimism. Sure my grandpa was one of the few who could go to Scotland for a month with my grandma, it was semi-realistic to afford for joe 6 pack. The days of the middle class ever being able to afford that are long gone along with the optimism; retirement means if you economically and physically survive the medical industrial complex, you get cat food and ramen at best, not a semi-realistic a trip to Scotland. When people are banned from an activity its human nature to claim to stop desiring it until it becomes real; millennials are too poor live in the burbs, they've been totally screwed over; response, we never wanted to live there anyway nah na nah na na. Plus or minus some gaslighting by people with a bridge to sell to suckas. Permanent decline in standard of living means you'll never travel internationally except maybe as a refugee, natural human response, I never wanted to anyway, not gonna read the book extolling the virtues and excitement of travel, etc.
- edblarney 10y ago
  Even though there is a lot of truth in your comments, I know a lot of people to 'travel' and they do it rather normally. No instagrams. Just regular travel. "Permanent decline in standard of living means you'll never travel internationally" This is total rubbish. People are travelling way, way more than ever before. I live in Montreal, one of the poorest metro areas in North America and the 'millenials' here travel a LOT. They prioritize it a little more than other things, and it's easily affordable. Travel is cheaper and more accessible than ever.
imranq 10y ago
There's a book series called 'America's Best Writing" each year for science, literature, etc. There's also one for travel which is really good.
- Pamar 10y ago
  I tried to google for America's Best Writing but nothing substantial came out. Can you please help me finding more about this series?
  - tedmiston 10y ago
    I think OP is referring to this series: The Best American Travel Writing 2006 (The Best American Series) https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0618582150/ref=mp_s_a_1_11?ie=UTF8&qid=1486950410 https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0618582150/ref=mp_s_a_1_11?ie... We read these in a travel writing class I took in college. Each book is a collection of top stories from that year organized by the editor and there are subseries as well. Edit: Found the official site. Don't be misled by the pricing. Slightly used copies can be picked up for next to nothing. Highly recommended. https://www.hmhco.com/at-home/featured-shops/popular-series/best-american-series/ba-travel https://www.hmhco.com/at-home/featured-shops/popular-series/...
- deleted 10y ago
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- deleted 10y ago
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morgante 10y ago
Travel 'writing' as a literary exercise might be dead, but travel blogging as a professional pursuit is in its heyday thanks to credit cards. Sites like OMAAT[0] or TPG[1] make great revenue off writing about the practical aspects of travel (planes, hotels, etc.) and referring people for credit cards. This is enough to subsidize plenty of "traditional" destination blogging as well. If you want to do travel writing, learn a little about credit cards first. [0] http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/ http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/ [1] https://thepointsguy.com/ https://thepointsguy.com/

56 points by Thevet 10y ago

I get the complaint, but some of those cliched "In the footsteps of..." books are actually pretty good. I recently read Douglas Mack's "Europe on Five Wrong Turns A Day", in which the author tries to visit Europe in the modern day using a 1963 copy of Arthur Frommer's classic "Europe on Five Dollars a Day". It wasn't just the obvious "things are more expensive now", but really about how the whole idea of travel is so different from in the 1960s.

ryanlol 10y ago
>It wasn't just the obvious "things are more expensive now" Doesn't seem obvious at all, five 1960 dollars is around 40 2017 dollars. 40 dollars per day can be a plenty.
- icebraining 10y ago
  Sure, but the author was eating three course dinners in Paris and staying in sunny hotels in Florence with those $5 a day. Try doing that with $40 nowadays. The difference is, of course, mostly in the rates between the dollar and the European currencies, rather than simply an increase in costs locally.
  - trendia 10y ago
    > mostly in the rates between the dollar and European currencies I think this might be true in some countries -- it used to be way cheaper to go to countries in Eastern Europe before they joined the Euro. But I believe that Germany and France would have always been rather expensive since they had rather strong currencies. As far as the Euro is concerned, USD / Eur is the highest it's been in 10 years [0]. [0] http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=EUR&view=10Y http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=EUR&view=10Y
    - icebraining 10y ago
      The book was written in the mid-50s, back in the days of the Bretton Woods system, and barely a decade after WW2.
- VLM 10y ago
  The problem with touring Europe on $40/day is a fairly typical contract software developer might pay $1800/month or $60/day for family health insurance. The point being that if you're wealthy enough to have a roof over your head and food and medical care, which a significant fraction of the American population doesn't have, then trying to nickel and dime it when traveling doesn't make any sense as an over-hyper-optimization. I'm in good financial shape so most Americans can't replicate this but I went to Ireland a couple years ago for a week, it was all the time I could get off work, I dropped oh at least a couple grand. From memory the plane tickets were like $700, so that's a hundred bucks a day even if all we did was panhandle at $0 per day. If I have to work 51 weeks a year, when am I going to spend the money on that prevents me from dropping $500/day instead having to spend $5?
  - notahacker 10y ago
    Sure, but the whole point of "Europe on Five Dollars a Day" and "Southeast Asia on a Shoestring" and their ilk was opening up the idea of leisure travel to people who aren't working 51 weeks a year on contract programmers' salaries and feeding their families, and might instead have a few months off after their studies or in between low paid jobs.

hprotagonist 10y ago

"The places in-between", and other works by rory stewart, are modern and excellent.

mycall 10y ago

I just want to point out that there are many other forms of travel writing. Epic, aimless, business building, scientific inquiry, collection gathering, family business, enlightenment, etc. Reductionism tends to sell everyone short.

laurentdc 10y ago

Meh, it seems to me that vlogging is the new travel writing. YouTube has plenty of channels of people travelling the world and telling stories with their GoPro. They're using videos on a social platform instead of text and photographs on a book. It's just a medium change, to allow for quicker consumption and to engage more with the viewers I guess.

pjc50 10y ago

Three problems: 1) There's very little money for writers anymore, except the extremely successful 2) Travel writing golden age was when the world was exotic and hard to visit - but now we're saturated in travel TV, cheap flights, blogging and especially Instagram posts. If you want to see what the world looks like somewhere, you can get a pretty good idea from the internet. VR tourism if it happens will only make this worse. 3) Finally, globalisation has worn down the exoticness of places. Everywhere has a McDonald's. And we're heading into a time when the pendulum of public opinion has swung against the foreign. How can you sell travel writing to a Brexit market? (The author has reminded me of Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose Words of Mercury I need to finish.)

jgalt212 10y ago
per point #1, Travels by Michael Crichton (who didn't need the money) is one of the best travel writing books I've read. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7665.Travels http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7665.Travels
Drumlin 10y ago
> How can you sell travel writing to a Brexit market? I think you misunderstand Brexit and other similar movements. People are pushing back at the technical homogenisation caused by that full force of globalisation. These movements are, in my opinion, a subconscious fight against the harshness of technical progress. If countries focus on their local and national communities once more, they can rediscover culture and the uniqueness of their existence - the sort of authentic experience that tourists crave when they travel thousands of miles. In a way, it's a possible solution to point number three.
- pjc50 10y ago
  Could you elaborate on "technical homogenisation" please?
  - Drumlin 10y ago
    When I say 'technical' - I mean everything from: politics, law, technology/tools, economics, education, medicine, infrastructure, employment etc. All these areas are being homogenised (or standardised) for progress and it's on a global scale. If you want to read more, there's an old book called "The Technological Society" by Jacques Ellul - it's a sociology book, there are many similar ones but that one sort-of covers the topic the best.

Existenceblinks 10y ago

It would rather be boring and real dead if the travel writing wasn't dead. It will make you feel like something being unfinished while it should be. What if we _ideally_ discover all routes that human want to know. What would happen next after we all have been there - the edge of galaxy. Is life going to be such boredom or we would find yet another dimension to explore? I don't know, _that unknown_ actually makes me excited to explore next. My 3rd world country is just way far behind westerners in this travel stories scene, it is just in hype state and ads content networking shit is going on around. Please lets finish this scene and move on.

Overtonwindow 10y ago

I say no. If you've never read Bill Bryson, you're missing out on a unique perspective of travel writing. It's not so much the locations but the personal narrative that I enjoy.

coldtea 10y ago

>(...) certain titles enjoy a reputation as ‘travel’ classics while falling way below more general standards of literary achievement. Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts depends on these standards being dispensed with entirely. Say what? If anything, it's the inverse. Most travel best sellers are trite. Fermor's writing is with the best of them, and not confined to travel writing at all.

idlewords 10y ago

No.

cheriot 10y ago

Yes, it's largely dead. Killed by the same economics that are killing most writing niches. It's either a paid advertisement, the writer never went, or it's sensational to the point of misrepresenting the subject (so you'll think the author is awesome and subscribe to email updates). There's a handful of valuable sources left. roadsandkingdoms.com is one good one.

jordache 10y ago

crazyguyonabike, the thousands of travel blogs, podcasts, youtube, instagram. The travel narrative is pretty alive and strong these days

VLM 10y ago

In the pre-internet era travel was a code word for open mindedness toward other cultures. A fairly standard trope in travel writing was freaking out the reader to a perfectly acceptable level at the time of writing. This is obsolete today. Due to globalism we're moving our culture over there to replace theirs and moving their people over here to replace ours. Open mindedness is seen as wrong, "no platforming", utter intolerance toward anything non-progressive and if they're equally progressive over there, there's nothing new to experience there. People who would have found travel interesting in 1970 when I was young now experience unusual non mainstream cultures by visiting various 4chan boards and looking for people who still use the N-word in 2017, or who go camping, or are NEETs. What travel as a verb still happens in 2017 is now about western style decadence or social signalling and both are heavily organized. If you want decadence you read the resort reviews about how good the all inclusive drinks are and proximity to nude beaches and dance clubs and such, its all heavily organized and indexed and sorted and CRUD-app-ified. Who wants to read a book about a quirky end user scrolling thru yelp or airbnb? If you want social signalling, perhaps you need that trip to Africa for volun-tour-ism for that ivy league application, you contact people who organize that from top to bottom, social signalling has been pretty well product-ized. Some of the death of old style travel writing is the death of optimism. Sure my grandpa was one of the few who could go to Scotland for a month with my grandma, it was semi-realistic to afford for joe 6 pack. The days of the middle class ever being able to afford that are long gone along with the optimism; retirement means if you economically and physically survive the medical industrial complex, you get cat food and ramen at best, not a semi-realistic a trip to Scotland. When people are banned from an activity its human nature to claim to stop desiring it until it becomes real; millennials are too poor live in the burbs, they've been totally screwed over; response, we never wanted to live there anyway nah na nah na na. Plus or minus some gaslighting by people with a bridge to sell to suckas. Permanent decline in standard of living means you'll never travel internationally except maybe as a refugee, natural human response, I never wanted to anyway, not gonna read the book extolling the virtues and excitement of travel, etc.

edblarney 10y ago
Even though there is a lot of truth in your comments, I know a lot of people to 'travel' and they do it rather normally. No instagrams. Just regular travel. "Permanent decline in standard of living means you'll never travel internationally" This is total rubbish. People are travelling way, way more than ever before. I live in Montreal, one of the poorest metro areas in North America and the 'millenials' here travel a LOT. They prioritize it a little more than other things, and it's easily affordable. Travel is cheaper and more accessible than ever.

imranq 10y ago

There's a book series called 'America's Best Writing" each year for science, literature, etc. There's also one for travel which is really good.

Pamar 10y ago
I tried to google for America's Best Writing but nothing substantial came out. Can you please help me finding more about this series?
- tedmiston 10y ago
  I think OP is referring to this series: The Best American Travel Writing 2006 (The Best American Series) https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0618582150/ref=mp_s_a_1_11?ie=UTF8&qid=1486950410 https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0618582150/ref=mp_s_a_1_11?ie... We read these in a travel writing class I took in college. Each book is a collection of top stories from that year organized by the editor and there are subseries as well. Edit: Found the official site. Don't be misled by the pricing. Slightly used copies can be picked up for next to nothing. Highly recommended. https://www.hmhco.com/at-home/featured-shops/popular-series/best-american-series/ba-travel https://www.hmhco.com/at-home/featured-shops/popular-series/...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

morgante 10y ago

Travel 'writing' as a literary exercise might be dead, but travel blogging as a professional pursuit is in its heyday thanks to credit cards. Sites like OMAAT[0] or TPG[1] make great revenue off writing about the practical aspects of travel (planes, hotels, etc.) and referring people for credit cards. This is enough to subsidize plenty of "traditional" destination blogging as well. If you want to do travel writing, learn a little about credit cards first. [0] http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/ http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/ [1] https://thepointsguy.com/ https://thepointsguy.com/