Enrichment Voyage, Part 3: Jamaica's Vital Signs

If you're just joining the voyage, you can catch up on the previous Enrichment Voyage posts over here. Or, if you prefer, you can also start from the top and read all the stories, oldest to newest, in one long post.

Location: Montego Bay, Jamaica
Today's telling detail: The rebar

THE STREET
We're only about a mile from the port in Montego Bay when we spot the first unexpected sign, on a street corner. It's not the content so much as the placement and the precise form that are striking: atop the crossroads sign at intersection is fully-formed, 3D, larger-than-life KFC bucket. As we drive on, into the urban heart of the town, we notice that seemingly every street sign has advertising space at the top, as  though the roads themselves are brought to you by Juci Patties or Rainforest Seafood.

THE BRIDGE
On the outskirt of town, we stop at the Great River Bridge, where the eponymous river drains into the Caribbean. The area here is incredibly lush, in that tropical way: palm trees, sugar cane, all manner of tall grasses and trees that I can't identify, the whole backdrop a showcase of every conceivable size and shape of leaf, every possible shade of green, with the occasional grace note of bright pink bougainvillea.

This is what we wanted to see. There are six of us along for the ride, and when we got into the van at the port, we asked our driver and guide, Mark, to take us out of the city. We want to see more, we said: the remote villages, the overgrown hills, the potholed, precarious road less traveled. Mark is an an affable native of Montego Bay, casual but professional in jeans and a untucked white button-front shirt. I guess him to be around forty.

The Great River Bridge, is our first stop. We park down the road a bit, where the highway shoulder is wider, and as we walk back toward the bridge, we pause to take in the rest of the scene. There's a field with two small soccer goals and a pair of goats roaming around. There's a three-sided and slightly ramshackle hut that is empty now but evidently transforms into a restaurant later in the day--a hand-painted sign reads "Las Vegas Jerk Shop." Out front, there's a grill fashioned from the metal inner part of a car wheel; a piece of rebar bent in half sits on top. Mark says this is called a coal pot. When we drive back this way a few hours later, we'll see a few people standing in the hut and smoke rising from the coal pot, a large hunk of meat on the rebar.

What most intrigues me, though, are the signs by the bridge. One identifies the body of water: GREAT RIVER. The sign doubles as an ad for Grace, a large food manufacturer in Jamaica. (See the photo at the top of this post.) Across the street is a sign reading, "Welcome to St. James," the Jamaican province we've just exited (the country has fourteen provinces in all); as we crossed the bridge, we had seen an identical sign saying, "Welcome to Hanover." In each sign, the Os are Pepsi logos, and a photo of a glistening, oh-so-refreshing Pepsi bottle stands to one side of the text.

Throughout the next several hours, as Mark drives us around the region, into the mountains, along remote roads, we'll see this over and over: municipal signs of all manner doubling as billboards.

THE SCHOOL
Our group includes four Enrichment Voyage speakers: me; Susan, the artist-in-residence; Bob, a writer; and Dean, an author and photographer. Dean tells Mark that he'd like to visit a school, as part of his ongoing work to document people and cultures--when he's back in the States, he does presentations to schools, showing pictures and telling stories about what life is like for kids in other countries.

Mark laughs slightly the first time Dean says this, but then shrugs. Sure, let's find a school. By now, he's gotten used to some of our goofier tourist requests and our interrogation regarding Jamaican culture ("What kind of fish is that guy carrying?" "Are there many shipwrecks here?" "Are the police corrupt?")

The security guard at the gate of Merlene Ottey High School greets us with a quizzical look, but she lets us in anyway, pointing us to the school office, a one-story building painted in the brightest of yellows, with a grey corrugated-metal roof. Beyond the office are a few slightly larger but otherwise identical buildings, with students in brown uniforms walking around the the campus.

Dean offers his spiel to the principal, works his charm, and we're in. We wander the grounds for a few minutes, escorted by the principal, who answers our questions and introduces us to students and teachers. We visit a shop class and a drafting class, where Susan chats with some students about their drawings. The principal is quick to point out that there's also a computer lab and the standard curriculum of math, science, writing. Her pride in the school is evident.

As we leave, I turn back to look at the school and see that a slogan has been painted  on a low wall in the courtyard between the classroom buildings. It says: "Determination to succeed through commitment and service."

THE HUT
We drive on, higher into the hills, farther along the winding, narrow roads, the encroaching trees often forming a deep-green tunnel. Every now and then, a few houses appear--and they really do seem to appear spontaneously: it's all leaves and branches, leaves and branches, and then a hut suddenly bursts from the undergrowth. Sometimes, they're clustered together, forming a village; other times, there's just a lonely abode perched on the edge of the road, dangling above the steep drop-off below.

More than a few of these buildings are pieced together with scrap lumber of varying conditions, and many of these are tiny--not just one room, but so small that if any adults sleep there, it'd have to be standing up or lying across the diagonal. And several of these huts--structurally questionable and with no nearby neighbors--bear bright-red signs with white text: "Top up your Digicard Here." There does not appear to be any other commerce going on inside the buildings--no items for sell, no services offered. Just an all-but-empty hut with a red sign.

I'm confused and intrigued. In my mind, where I'm from, "Cell phone store" equals "Gleaming Verizon storefront at the mall"--or, at the very least, "Phone card store" equals "Random convenience store that also sells a gazillion other things."

After seeing a dozen of these signs, I ask Mark. Are they really selling phone cards here? In these overgrown, rolling hills, where the houses are, few, far-flung, and more than a bit ramshackle, do that many people have cell phones, let alone service?

Mark looks at me like I've asked the goofiest tourist question yet. "Yeah, mon," he says. "There's good coverage. People go to those stores to buy more minutes. We don't have contracts like in the United States--you just go to these places and get more time."

THE SKY
Near the end of our day of driving, Mark takes us into a posh subdivision overlooking Montego Bay. The housing here is considerably larger and typically surrounded by large fences.

Several of the houses appear unfinished. There's a complete ground floor--doors, windows, everything, and the places appear to be occupied. But it looks for all the world like the second story has been pulled off by some sort of impossibly precise tornado, which left behind only a forest of rebar protruding from the first floor.

We had seen this on the smaller houses in the countryside, too, over and over: one-story structures with rebar sticking out the top. But seeing them here, and feeling that same sense of confusion and wonder, is a good reminder that intriguing, unexpected, and culture-revealing things are to be found wherever you travel, not just the so-called "real" places out in the countryside, but even here in suburbia.

Of course, as Mark patiently explains, the second floor never existed. Yet. In someone's dreams, though, it does. The rebar is aspirational; it is the foundation of the future, the root of what's to come. Though it has no written words, this is the most important, telling sign we've seen all day. It says: When we have the money, we will keep building. And we know that day's coming, someday soon enough.

Enrichment Voyage, Part 2: A Little Night Music

Location: At sea, en route from Nassau, Bahamas to Montego Bay, Jamaica

Today’s telling detail: The crowd’s sudden hush

The piano bar on Deck 6 is all but empty. There are about six of us including me, Sandra Day O'Connor, and a few of her friends. No one else, possibly because many people are still in the dining room, just down the hall, lingering over the first of three formal dinners we'll have on this voyage. At least a few cruise-ship traditions/expectations/stereotypes have carried over to the MV Explorer, and formal dinners are one of them, even if "formal" here is defined fairly loosely. A piano bar is also expected, of course, although this one has a sign above the black grand piano labeling this a study area named after a Semester At Sea donor.

But for this voyage, at least, it's a real piano bar with a real pianist, David, an Englishman with a tan blazer, a grey mustache, and low-key demeanor, even when he's playing--no body-rocking showmanship here, just sublime music. That's not to say he isn't graceful--he is, emphatically, his hands flowing across the keyboard like water over rocks, effortless and mesmerizing. 

This evening, he's playing the classics. I think I recognize some Gershwin, some Cole Porter, maybe some Hoagie Carmichael, probably some Nat King Cole. But I don't really know. The songs sound awfully familiar to me though I don't recall the lyrics or the title of most--they're tunes I've heard in the background of countless movies, or maybe at my grandparents' house years ago, or possibly ... Well, I'm not sure where I've heard them, but some sort of Nostalgia Lobe in my brain is buzzing in the most pleasing way.

For a few numbers, David's wife, Leanne, joins him on vocals. She's every bit as good, her voice lush, her phrasing expressive. She sings what she says is the first song she ever sang for David, “Embraceable You," and then we all sing “Ain't Misbehavin'." Well, everyone else sings, because they know all the words, while I kind of mumble until we get to the chorus, at which point I finally join in, shyly: "Ain't misbehavin', sending all my somethingsomethingsomething!" 

A few people walk by, just leaving dinner, and sit to listen. Many of them are quite nicely dressed--men in suits, women in cocktail dresses, not the usual ship attire.

Leanne puts down her microphone and goes to sit down, to which Sandra Day O'Connor says, "You should go sing some more”

Leanne laughs and says the only thing you can say to that: “Yes, your honor.”

I see a large and especially well-dressed group coming down the hall, a couple of dozen students from Morehouse College, who are on the ship as a sort of December term. Several of the young men are wearing maroon blazers with the Morehouse insignia.

Leanne finally has permission to take a rest, and David is between songs. One of the Morehouse men asks if he can sing something. David shrugs. Sure, if it's a song he knows, too.

"How about 'Amazing Grace'?" asks the student. He's tall, in a black suit, with an orange and navy blue bowtie.

He picks up the mic and looks at the ground, suddenly nervous. I'm nervous for him. It's a song we all know and have heard sung brilliantly. No pressure or anything.

He looks at David, takes a breath, puts the mic to his mouth, and closes his eyes.

What happens next will become shipboard lore for the next week. Did you hear about ... ? Were you there? Was anyone actually there? Did it really happen?

I was there. It actually happened. He was absolutely astonishing, his voice confident but with a plaintive edge, each word seeming to carry the weight of the world, beautifully.

There is not a dry eye in the place by the time he gets to the end. He motions to David to do it once more from the top, faster this time. More of a rollicking, gospel flourish. Our moist-eyed hush turns into an giddy buzz, all foot-tapping and body-swaying. And by the end, we're all on our feet, applauding with everything we've got. 

Enrichment Voyage, Part I: Strangers on a Ship

A scene of heartbreak: there are lines for a game (under the
stacked deck chairs) but it ain't shuffleboard.

Location: Nassau, Bahamas
Today's telling detail: Grid lines on Deck 7

The first day on the ship reminds me of my first day of college. A day full of potential, where the overwhelming newness of it all is made manageable by the realization that it's all equally novel and strange to everyone else. The strangeness and novelty are both ice-breaker and social-leveler. We're all in this together, a communal sense of discovery and confusion. We don't have any social networks already established. So ... will you be my friend?

I meet Mary and Kelly first, before we board the ship in Fort Lauderdale. They're a married couple from Charlottesville, Virginia (Semester At Sea is based there, at the University of Virginia) and staff on this voyage--she's the ship's librarian; he's the ever-patient computer lab guru. (Since they're probably reading this: Hi, Mary! Hi, Kelly! Did I get all that correct?)

We bond over, among other things, my quest for shuffleboard. Over lunch in the Garden Lounge, shortly after we board, I confess to them that for the last several weeks I have been telling my friends that my goal for this trip is to play shuffleboard with Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. (Why? Because. Obviously.) Mary and Kelly think there might be a court, but probably no equipment. They would know: they've been on the ship before, as staff for Semester At Sea. As we finish our meals, Kelly says, with a gleam in his eyes, "Well, I know what we need to do next: find the shuffleboard court."

Off we go on our quest.

*

In the next day and a half, as I get my bearings and my sea legs, I will make other new friends in equally unexpected ways. (And hello to all of them who read this, too.) For example:

Barbara, who I meet the first night, while the ship is en route to The Bahamas. As I'm heading to the purser's desk to ask a question, I pass a group of several people chatting in Tymitz Square, the ship's central rotunda. A woman with short dark hair, who I guess to be around sixty, steps out from the group, holding a postcard. "Excuse me," she says as she hands me the postcard with a mischievous smirk. The postcard is a drawing of Manneken Pis, the symbol of Brussels: a small statue of a urinating toddler. Not at all coincidentally, he's in my book about traveling Europe. (Why? Because. Obviously.) I stare, speechless. When my brain finally unfreezes, I think: I have a stalker! and then, recovering, I think the more apt thought: This is one of the most thrilling, charming ways I've ever met someone. And she wouldn't have given me this if she hadn't really liked my book. We start chatting and she mentions that she's a Lifelong Learner--a Semester At Sea participant over 40 and not enrolled in a college but auditing the courses on the ship. Then she gestures to her friend Connie and says that they were about to head back to her room for some wine and cheese. Would I like to join them? Of course I would.

Chuck and Ce, who knock on Barbara's door just as we're trying to get a bottle of wine open. Chuck has the magic touch and gets the deed done. He's also naturalist and one of the other featured speakers. They've come to retrieve an ornate wooden bench Barbara has been storing for a mutual friend, but they stay for wine and cheese. (To recap: I meet Barbara via a postcard and Chuck and Ce because of a bench. Strange first encounters are the root of friendship.)

Mandy, a bartender at the Glazer Lounge, the large bar area at the front of Deck 7. I wander into the lounge while exploring the ship after saying goodnight to Barbara and company. It's a quiet space--empty aside from Mandy, who stands behind the bar. He's middle-aged, soft smile. His low-key demeanor and efficient movement when making my caipirinha indicates he's been doing this for a while. He has: more than ten years with Semester At Sea (caught up in conversation, I forget to write down the exact number). I ask if he has any particularly interesting stories, and he casually mentions a rogue wave. He has my attention. It was back in 2005. More than 60-feet tall. "I thought I was going to die," he says, slightly shrugging, the soft smile seeming to take on an edge of pain.

Erica, another author who will be speaking, and who I meet while we're working at one of the tables for passenger check-in the next day, in Nassau. We ask for everyone's ship IDs, then check a little box regarding something I no longer recall. One of the people we card turns out to be William Webster, the former head of both the CIA and the FBI, a fact that we learn from Sandra Day O'Connor, who is standing nearby. (All of this is true, I promise.) Later that night, we sit next to each other during the opening festivities and introductions. We turn out to have identical sense of humor--and, because of this, a tendency to lean over to each other and offer commentary regarding what's happening onstage. For the record, it's not all snark. But maybe, just maybe, there's a bit here and there, when deserved.

Jim & Adrienne, who sit in the front row of my first talk the day after we leave Nassau. They attend Erica's lecture that morning and befriend her; she tells them to come to my talk for more of the same sense of humor. They tell me I'd better be funny. I tell them to lower their standards. I'm only slightly joking, because the truth is, I'm nervous about this lecture. I know the basic material, but I've never given this given this talk before (about the social history of guidebooks). In fact, until about 3am this morning, it wasn't, strictly speaking, entirely written. But Jim and Adrienne laugh--at all the right points, even--and it seems genuine. Ditto for most of the other people in the audience.

*

One of the lines that goes over well is my comment about how, this being a cruise and all--"It's a voyage, not a cruise!" someone yelled from the back--I had hoped to play shuffleboard. With Sandra Day O'Connor.

What I don't say, because it's too painful, is what I discovered with Kelly and Mary that first afternoon:
There is no shuffleboard on the MV Explorer.

In my memory, as I stood on Deck 7, taking in the scene, I said it out loud, my voice edged with dejection, the words ragged and dragged out: "There is ... no shuffleboard ... on the MV Explorer." I was staring at a large rectangular grid painted on the ground. This was the possibly-a-shuffleboard-court thing that Kelly and Mary recalled from their previous voyages. It was a grid with numbered squares, yes. But it was empirically not a shuffleboard triangle.
My dream was crushed.

"Maybe we could get some chalk," someone said. "Or some tape."

"No, they probably won't let us do that."

My mind churned through the possibilities; it's still churning when I make that joke at the lectern. There has to be a way. My shuffleboard dreams may be only a few weeks old, but they will NOT ... die ... easily.  

Enrichment Voyage: Prelude to a Cruise

Location: Fort Lauderdale

Today's telling detail: Izzy's faint smirk

In a hotel lobby that embodies vacationing at its most melancholy--an out-of-order cigarette vending machine along one wall, a gift shop called Forget Something? along another--a rotund man with flat-top hair is calling out names of cruise ships. He speaks each one into his microphone with the fervor of a carnival barker, his pastel shirt sweaty from the strain of his enthusiasm.

"Okay, next up is The Infinity! Oooh, you folks are gonna love this. It's a great boat with really good food and eight restaurants. You'll eat very well, I'm telling you."

The barker's name is Izzy. His job is to gather the hotel's patrons and herd them into the white vans waiting outside. The vans will take us to the Port of Fort Lauderdale, just a few miles down the road, to our respective dates with the all-inclusive, sun-dappled, rum-punch, chaise-longue version of manifest destiny that is the Caribbean cruise vacation. Nearly all of the hotel's patrons, the shuttle driver from the airport told me last night, are on their way to or from a cruise ship. Fort Lauderdale is the biggest cruise port in the nation, he said, probably the world. For him--for everyone at this hotel--it's job security.

Izzy's expression falls when I inquire about my ship. "Yeah, that one, I've heard of it," he says with a facial twitch that I recognize as the customer service industry's mask for a sneer. "That's the educational one, right? It's not a real cruise ship."

*

Izzy is correct on both counts. The ship is called the MV Explorer and it's best known as the floating campus of Semester at Sea. It is 590 feet long and 25,000 tons--plenty big, to be sure, but notably smaller than The Infinity's 965 feet and 91,000 tons. And the journey upon which I am about to embark is not--as I will be informed repeatedly by various of my fellow passengers, most definitely not--a cruise. It's a voyage, if you please. Officially: an Enrichment Voyage. Over the course of the next twenty-six days, we'll visit ten countries and cover more than seven thousand nautical miles before disembarking in San Diego.

The Enrichment of the name will be provided by a wide range of workshops and lectures. The speakers include a wide range of deeply impressive people: bestselling authors, a Buddhist monk, esteemed researchers and academics from various fields. And the father of modern reality television.

And Julian Bond, the civil rights leader whose long line of credits includes being a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the chairman of the NAACP.

And Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

And then there's ... me. The resident travel writer. I'll be giving a few talks and leading some workshops on, well, travel writing.

I'm excited, even if Izzy is doing his best to dampen my mood. If I'm to be honest, though, I'm also slightly terrified. It's intimidating company, for starters--whimper-inducing, hypertension-creating intimidating.

I've also never traveled quite like this before. The only other cruise I've been on was a long weekend thing from Seattle to British Columbia and back, with my parents and my sister and her family. I passed the sixty hours or so (1) on deck, bundled in a jacket and shivering, as one does in the Pacific Northwest in October, and (2) indoors, in slow-motion pursuit of my just-learning-to-walk toddler nephews.

This Enrichment Voyage, I'm thinking, will be rather different, in ways that I can't even begin to comprehend. Longer. Sunnier. Lonelier, since I won't know a soul, and Maren won't be joining me for two weeks.

Izzy's disdain, oddly, has put me at ease. The impression he's giving me: It's a small ship. It's full of nerdy weirdos. I think: My kind of people. 

*

Over the course of the next three weeks and change, I will eat tamarind ice cream and kiss a fish and decline the opportunity to buy freshly-skinned iguana at a public market. I will go zip-lining and drum-hunting. I will meet impoverished children who clamor into boiling, sulfurous-steam-belching mud pits to gather hot clay for tourists. I will cry at the sight an unspeakably beautiful library. I will challenge Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to a game of shuffleboard. I will drive through active volcano zones and browse countless cheesy souvenir shops. I will fall in love with a city in Colombia, much to my amazement, and be terrified by a city in Panama and be exhilaratingly baffled by a city in Peru. I will become exceedingly fond of just about everyone on the ship--my fellow passengers, the crew, the staff.

I will give lectures about the art of storytelling, and then have genuinely amazing and odd experiences that defy easy retelling, as if mocking the very points that I was trying to make at the lectern. And in the course of the coming weeks, here on this blog, I will do my very best to recount them nonetheless.

Expect short posts capturing interesting moments or impressionistic snapshots of the ports, the people, the ship life. My goals: new material every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for the next--count 'em--nine weeks or so. (If I say it out loud, it might actually happen.) And if you were on the ship, please feel free to chime in; I'd love to hear your comments and your own stories.

All right. Let's start the engine, untie the ropes, and get this voyage underway.

----
N.B. Just so we're clear, since I was a speaker, Maren and I were traveling as guests of the Enrichment Voyage, for which I remain profoundly grateful and about which I'm still kind of amazed. I mean: Julian Bond. Sandra Day O'Connor. And me. I still don't think that makes sense. But I'll take it. 

So You Want to Be a Travel Writer

Greetings from a boat (er, SHIP, as I have been corrected multiple times) on its way from Panama to Ecuador. Yesterday, we passed through the Panama Canal, which was one of those experiences that is superficially uninteresting--I've been through locks and dams before; I've seen lakes and hillsides; I've gotten my life's worth of close-up views of overloaded cargo ships--but, when you look even slightly below the surface, more than a bit amazing.

I mean: THE PANAMA CANAL! What a marvel of engineering; what an absurd concept; what a hell of a history. 

Anyway. I'm a speaker on an Enrichment Voyage. Today's talk is titled "So You Want to Be a Travel Writer." I've stolen the title from Lee's post written during our European adventure, and I'm reprinting his entire post below. Enjoy! 

[By Lee]

Say you are, hypothetically, on an online dating site trying to find interesting people. You aren’t lame enough to NEED an online dating site, of course. You’ve got TONS of options. But let’s pretend. You might, hypothetically of course, type in “writer” in the search criteria in the hopes of turning up someone interesting. You might be surprised at the number of hits you get.

Until you find that every mention of the word “writer” appears somewhere in a sentence like this: “I’m an investment banker but what I really want to do is be a travel writer.” Or “My dream is to be a travel writer but right now I’m in sales.”

Everyone wants to be a travel writer. Travel writers get to go all over the place and see amazing things and have adventures and people pay them! Who wouldn’t want to be a travel writer? You probably want to be a travel writer. At least you think you do.

I’m into week two of traveling with a man who actually makes a small portion of his income selling articles about travel and let me tell you: you do not want to do this.

We’ll skip immediately past the hours of rewriting and research done in a lonely room in a cheap apartment in a city that is not glamorous but is just home. We won’t dwell on the fact that these solitary work hours are probably twenty times more common than an hour spent traveling. Let’s focus on the good stuff; the travel itself.

We walk something like eight miles a day, eating at least one of our meals, if not all of them, on our feet. Doug can write while walking and often does, pulling out a small spiral bound notebook as he navigates cobblestone streets. He goes through approximately a notebook every two days. It’s sick. Doug takes something like twenty pictures a day, often simply as visual notes. These eventually have to be catalogued. That note taking time doesn’t include the two hours Doug spends turning those notes into word documents on his laptop while I make bad jokes from the other bed and fall asleep.

But at least we’re being put up in a nice hotel, right? No. Feel like returning to dorm living? Travel writing is the job for you. Right now six German boys are wrestling in their room down the hall. We share a bathroom with them and with travelers from two other rooms. But at least we’ve got a balcony, right? No. We’ve got a window so old I’m afraid I’ll get lead poisoning by looking at it.

But trying new things is fun, right? Well, how often do YOU do it? People don’t really like to do new things. New foods cause upset stomachs, new sights take time to process, new people take energy to meet and get to know. Go down the street and ask the average person how many new things he or she has done in the last three days. Travel writers do not have the leisure of picking a few, shiny, hygienically treated new things to experience. They must be willing to try everything and anything, always. There’s no structure, no rest. When a travel writer wakes up in the morning, he often doesn’t know where he’s going to get breakfast. From the moment Doug’s eyes open, he is at work.

You don’t want to be a travel writer. You want to be paid to travel and, occasionally, opine. Who wouldn’t want that?

Those who ARE travel writers do not work in sales and talk about it. They go into debt to travel and write. The last thing they do each day, after putting their tired feet under their thin rented sheets and before closing their aching eyelids is think, “I hope someone pays me for this.”

But in the morning they do it again anyway. It is a wonderful life, but it is not for you.

Crowd-sourcing then and now

I just read Arthur Frommer's latest newspaper column, in which he takes on crowd-sourced review sites such as TripAdvisor:

As for me, I find it increasingly difficult to rely on the user-generated sites. Scanning the reviews of a particular property, I frequently find that some 40 or so people claim it to be one of the best they have ever patronized, while another 40 or so people claim it is the worst they have ever patronized. Which to believe? Some defenders of the user-generated sites have composed elaborate formulas by which they eliminate the best and worst extremes, and simply look at reviews by people conferring only moderate praise or blame on the property. But then, what is the utility of using the site?

Though I'll be attacked as having a self-interest in this question, I will continue to rely on the judgment of experts — experienced journalists, in most instances — and not on the reviews of amateur and inexperienced critics.

Something about that sounded mighty familiar, so I went back and looked at some of my book notes. My 1963 edition of Europe on $5 a Day had its own version of user-generated tips at the end of each chapter-- Arthur was receiving some five thousand letters each year by 1967. As with internet comments, some of these comments were genuinely insightful, and some were ... not. Like this one from the Amsterdam chapter of E5D:

We are the oldest active firm of diamond manufacturers in this city. . . . As a form of publicity, we have a permanent Diamond and Diamond Manufacturing Exhibition, installed in the original premises of the firm, which are situated on the banks of the Amstel River. . .

This goes on. It highlights the hours, the air conditioning (“a novelty for Amsterdam”), the demonstrations by the diamond-cutters. “It's like the original spam comment,” Lee said. Arthur apparently agreed. In 2009, he told USA Today:

The whole emphasis on user-generated content is foolish. I was the first person to use it with the “readers' selections” in Europe on $5 A Day, in which I printed verbatim letters from readers. I was so proud of it. I even said they were better than mine because I was going to 40 or 50 hotels and a reader would remember one place that stands out. Then we realized it was being massively manipulated. Hotel (operators) were getting friends to send in recommendations. About 25 years ago we dropped it.

To fight the current spate of questionable, anonymously-offered travel opinions, some web sites are trying out old tactics. Such sites “aim to eliminate much of the annoyance of online trip planning by winnowing the selection of hotels and destinations to an edited list,” The New York Times breathlessly reported in 2010. “Call it the curated search.” Uh-huh. Or call it, you know, a guidebook. How soon we forget the time-tested tool when presented with its new, flashy offspring.

Splurge on Socks: A Commencement Speech for Travelers

I was honored to be invited to give the keynote speech for last night's Meet Plan Go event in Minneapolis. Here's what I said: 

When I was asked to deliver a keynote speech here, I panicked. I kept imagining it like a commencement speech. In my mind, it was already snowing here in Minnesota, so you were all wearing stocking caps, and at the end, you tossed them in the air while my final platitudes faded and the opening notes of "Pomp and Circumstance" blared over the PA system.

Finally, I gave in and went with it. So here goes.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Meet, Plan, Go class of 2012 ...

Splurge on socks.

This is the single most important piece of advice you will learn this evening, so remember this and this alone. You must not skimp when it comes to socks. Blisters will Mess. You. Up. Universal truth.

Everything else is negotiable, everything else is subject to disagreement and debate. All of us who have ever set foot outside the house have an opinion, forming a cacophony of voices all too eager to spar about the one proper way to travel, the specific things you must see before you die, the singular manner in which you must behave when you travel.

Most of it, though offered with sincerity and good intentions, can be ignored. All of it is true and all of it is false. The key, of course, is figuring out which is which for you. Know what to dismiss, what advice to stare down with furrowed brow and knowing gaze and say, “Thanks, but no, I’ll do it my way.”

Also: buy bottled water. Always check the seal before you drink.

Squat toilets are tricky. Proceed with caution.

To travel is to ignore some fundamental part of your own instinct, some survival mechanism grafted to your DNA. Someone in your family tree, way back, was eaten by a bear or a tiger. It must have happened.

Stop worrying. It won’t happen to you. Probably. No matter how overwhelmed and scared you feel about the prospect of travel, about going to far-flung places, it’s almost certain that things will be weirder and more wonderful than you expected and will--for real--work out in the end.

And no matter how cocky and adventurous you’re feeling, you’ll still mess something up. You'll have moments of abject terror or paralyzing awkwardness. That I can guarantee.

You’re going to be the stupid tourist. You’re going to get into trouble. That’s okay. That’s the point. It's a necessary stop on all roads worth taking. It’s where the best stories come from.

Maybe you'll blog, maybe you won't. Either one is fine, no matter what your relatives say. 

Send postcards. Send one to me. I’ll write back.

About those socks: Don’t get white, don’t get cotton. I like Smartwool. They didn’t pay me to say that, but if they want to send me a lifetime supply, I won’t turn it down. Comfort is important in socks. If your feet aren’t happy, you’re not moving.

Every day on the road, do something uncomfortable and unfamiliar to rattle yourself.

Every day on the road, do something comfortable and familiar to ground yourself.

Go to an American restaurant in a foreign country just for the utterly perplexing sensation of seeing a familiar template twisted and skewed until you’re not even sure what it means to be American anymore.

Eurail passes are a hell of a deal. Switzerland, in general, is not.

Carry one and only one fortune-cookie platitude in your wallet at all times. Like this: find your own path.

Maybe you’ll single-handedly hack your way through the jungle to a quote-unquote "undiscovered" village in Borneo. Maybe you’ll dance the electric slide with your grandma outside the starboard snack bar on a Walt Disney cruise ship. Maybe you’ll do the R-T-W thing--’round the world, baby!--with your best friend from college. Maybe you’ll just hitchhike down the road a stretch, to that neighborhood where you’ve never been for one reason or another, and walk into the VFW for a pitcher of Miller and a round of darts with a Korean War vet named Tiny.

That’s all good. That all counts, no matter the destination, the budget, the amount of time, the company you keep. Manifest destiny comes in many flavors. Find yours; don’t worry about others. Realize that you can get lost and make new discoveries on the beaten path, just as you can be jaded and all too comfortable in the most exotic places. Whatever you’re doing, wherever you’re going, embrace it. Love it on your own terms. Take the opportunity to look below the surface. Of the sight, of the experience, of yourself.

Buy Tiny his beer. Buy other travelers drinks. Even if you’re not generally social--in fact, especially if you’re not usually social, because, well, carpe diem and all that--talk to the people you meet--the tourists, the locals, everyone. Sit at the bar. Bartenders are better than any guidebook.

Go to Venice once, to bask in the beauty. Only stay one day, though, because beauty is more fleeting than you think.

If you’re ever stranded at the Atlanta airport, your best food bet is the Atlanta Bread Company, by Gate 24.

Never fly through Atlanta.

Keep calm, carry on.

Pack light, carry on. Add your socks last. Stuff them into shoes, shove them into every nook of your packed suitcase. Wool compresses wonderfully.

There is so much information out there, so much scolding, so many proclamations. Seriously, ignore most of it. All that matters is your own inner voice. Learn to sift through the information overload in a way that is meaningful and useful to you.

Anyway. Don’t worry about it. You’re going somewhere. You’re following your dream, your passion, your folly--whatever that may be. You’re becoming a better person.

Be wary of anyone who tries to tell you that something will make you a better person. 

Be wary of anyone who says “I’m a traveler, not a tourist.” Never say that. I will hunt you down.

Get lost at least once each day.

Don’t panic.

And when you’ve figured out where you are, after all that walking, look down at your feet, all cozy and comfortable, and be glad that you splurged on those fancy socks.

And then put one foot in front of the other, propelled by your own curiosity. The world awaits.

--

NB: For those who were wondering, yes, I was more than a bit inspired by this.