Spendthrift Shoestring

Unsolicited Advice for my Fellow Travel Bloggers

Do more things by yourself.

Stop spending all your time with expats and other travel bloggers while you're on the road. Seriously. You don't need to be suspended in a cloud of familiarity and collegiality while you're traveling. You're not a business traveler who needs to eliminate all excess stimulation in order to get your work done.

You need to actually experience defamiliarization in one or another way in order to come up with anything interesting, and you probably need to be alone to do this. That smart expat who has been living in La Paz or Nairobi or Dhaka forever does indeed have many delicious secrets to share, but he or she also has biases that you might not be able to identify. He or she is as fallible as they come, same as you. No individual source of information is beyond reproach. You should know this.

You should also probably fail from time to time. Failure on the road is more interesting to readers than seamlessly perfect experiences. And you can't fail or even have much of an experience of any kind for that matter if you don't try to do anything at all by yourself.

Real Housewives of NYC, Olivia Giovetti, and Me

The 'flu is something I wouldn't wish on very many people. I'm just today emerging from a terrible few days of sickness, which were useful for very little. I couldn't get any work done and accordingly fell behind on some freelance work.

I did learn a few things during my sickness hibernation, while I sat, mesmerized yet lifeless, watching all four episodes of the Real Housewives of New York City back-to-back. Among the lessons: certain rich people are not very sophisticated about travel. Example: raving about St. Barts as your favorite place in the Caribbean, because it's, you know, so European. Why go to the Caribbean in the first place? Or why not dig just a little bit deeper and come up with someplace less clichéd, like, say, Les Saintes, an island with a quaint little village and lovely beaches that feels awfully European yet also Caribbean, a place where few Americans travel? It's the desire for a Caribbean stripped of any regional characteristics that bugs me. That and the lack of imagination. Limitless amounts of money mean unlimited imagination, right? Apparently not.

What else did I learn? It's completely kosher to knock your friend for going to St. Barts during the summer—and to actually sound aggrieved because said friend paid $300 (versus your own $2000 outlay) for a night at a hotel, as long as you do it in a confessional and not to your friend's face. Let's see, what else...oh yes, the Lower East Side is scary and bad. I learned that as well.

It's nice to emerge from sickness to see my guest playlist on Olivia Giovetti's amazing blog, High Culture on a Low Budget. HC/LB is chock-full of tips and suggestions for blazing a budget-savvy trail across Europe. If you haven't bookmarked and favorited it to bits, you should. Thanks, Olivia, for the opportunity to reminisce!

9000 Hours in Saigon

My friend T.J. DiChristopher is about to take off for a serious adventure in Vietnam, and he's set up a blog, 9000 Hours in Saigon, to chronicle his time overseas. Though he's still stateside—as of yesterday he's in Scottsdale, if his Facebook profile status can be trusted—he's already writing freakishly smart stuff, like this post.

I can't wait to see what T.J. will come up with over the next 9000 hours.

New Blog Alert: Somewhere Beyond...

My friend Suzanne Russo is currently in the Argentine province of La Pampa, on a whirlwind work/play South America adventure. Happily for us, she's blogging about her travels. Check out her takes on Argentina and other destinations to come at Somewhere beyond...

Over and out.