TRAVEL BLOGS
Daily Telegraph - December 2006

Some of you may be familiar with travel blogs - online diaries maintained by travellers all around the world, updated regularly for a potentially unlimited audience.

For those unacquainted with the phenomenon, imagine if all the imagination, ingenuity and hard work that went into creating the era of international travel and the internet communications revolution was employed for the sole purpose of flying a girl called Trisha from Wisconsin half way round the world so she could describe the Pyramids as “cool”.

Travel blogs are the slide shows of the new millennium, an invitation to come round to my house and see 147 sunset pictures plus several shots of me pretending to “hold up” the leaning tower of Pisa. Their banality stupefies. How is it possible, for example, that Linda from Winnipeg might do something as interesting as cross the globe on a bicycle and yet spend half her time discussing flat tyres and the actual brand of pump she uses?

As tedious as they undoubtedly are, there is, nevertheless, an oddly compelling element of voyeurism in the travel blog. Blogs written by foreigners about Australia, for example, are a window into how the world sees us.

“Australia is so different from India!” offers one Irishman, doing little to challenge the stereotypes that have given his countrymen their own category of joke. Meanwhile, a pair of whining English bores considers no aspect of their life in Darlinghurst too petty not to be shared with billions of people. At one point we are told of their evil housemate who didn't buy washing up liquid “even though we specifically asked her to”. Their italics.

Without doubt my all-time favourite travel blog is by an American husband-and-wife team, Amanda and Griffin Schutt. Amanda's world travels accompanied her mysteriously silent and, I suspect, totally henpecked husband (he likes to eat something called “Snickerdoodles”), never fail to amaze. On her arrival in Turkey, for instance, Amanda is stunned to discover that it is a Muslim country. Who knew!

Initially she is fearful but soon succumbs to the charms of the Turkish people. Meeting some bent-backed peasant women who present her with a poppy flower, her heart is cracked open. “Would you have thought that even these working, laughing, kind-hearted women were Muslims?” she intones.

Mandy's pleas for harmony and reconciliation with the Islamic world reach fever pitch one long bus ride while listening to U2 on her iPod. “Bono is asking me, almost knowingly as another mosque flies by my window, ‘Where is the love?’.”

It is difficult to know which aspect of Amanda's blog is more compelling: her seemingly infinite dimness or the responses it inspires. “Awesome, they have Starbucks!!!” notes one enthusiastic reader.

They say everyone has a story to tell. Whether they should really tell it is an altogether different matter.

© Brendan Shanahan 2008