I don’t read travel blogs. What a bloody stupid idea! Why would you masochistically read one’s joy of traveling when you’re stuck at home with a broken DVD player, a noisy neighbor, your own evening before going back to work next morning plus a mother-in-law and, in at least one documented case I know, with two mothers-in-law, an ex and a current one? And that’s not mentioning religions where you may have more than one current anyway… and that would be fine! Or why would you even read the misfortune of some sponsored guy from Alaska who missed the plane to Barcelona, where he had a connection to Reykjavik for a one-day conference on blogging and ended up at Ibiza instead, all paid off, with no return options for ten days?
Another reason I don’t read travel blogs is that they tend to be on the same page in the local newspaper with the adverts from the main two travel agents in town.
Yet the main reason I would never advise any of you, smart readers of this mockoblog, to ever touch any travel guide (and a travel blog is a travel guide disguised as a nice one way chat, with no responsibility, a bit like a lawyer is almost a kind of a surgeon, just almost, you know) is that when and if you actually come to visit the same places, your experience has nothing to do with what you have been taught by the failed writer who’d been there before. You know they are failed writers when you see their author’s name less than two inches close to the word ‘blog’ and I’m sure this applies to journalists as well, although, with my limited access to the Internet, I couldn’t tell 100% whether this applied to online blogs as well. I’ve heard from a couple of friends that bad stuff may happen on the Net, which may imply that even well-known guys may be tempted to… But I digress!
I meant to tell you about how I went about booking my flight from New Zealand to Europe, but I ended up in some one-eyed polemic with a bunch of chaps I don’t know anyway. So I’d better tell you how useful a famous travel guide was to me when I was travelling to Bangkok a few years back.
I was flying a KLM/Malaysian Boeing 747 from Heathrow to Sydney and, due to my advanced age I had managed to get a seat by the aisle at the top of my compartment (do you call them compartments in planes? I guess not, but who cares) so I could stretch my deep vein thrombosis affected legs. Next to me, on my right, there sat an English girl who must have been on her way to both Miss Universe and Miss Sister Theresa Aspiring Fellowship (if such a union exists, the resemblance here is purely unintentional). She was carrying this Whatever Travel Guide Thailand between the knees on blue jeans, with a long index finger stopped firmly at some page and the rest of her marble-like fingers resting with an abandoned palm upwards on the arm of my seat. At her wrist many woven coloured cotton bracelets were trying to give me a signal I could not quite understand at first.
(To be continued.)
(Photo above – courtesy BBC News)
