Is it goodbye to guidebooks, getting lost and grotty youth hostels?

As the decade draws to a close, I asked whether the Internet and mobile phones are robbing travellers of adventure for a new article for MSN Travel.

Thanks to a new generation of sophisticated technologies, some of travel's greatest traditions are under threat. When was the last time you kept a hand-written journal on your travels, received a dog-eared postcard with someone's excited scrawl on the back or arranged your holiday snaps neatly in a photo album? Before they disappear from the scene forever, here are a few travelling traditions that I'll sadly miss:

1. The photo album
The digital revolution has certainly made holiday photography much cheaper and simpler, but it's also leading to the decline of one of travel's greatest traditions - the photo album. With sites such as Flickr and Picasa fast becoming the most popular way of sharing our happy snaps, fewer and fewer people take the time to print their holiday photographs and transfer them into albums. Yet it's still hard to think of a better way to reminisce about your travels than flipping through the pages of a time-worn photo album.

2. The postcard
They were once as much as part of the holiday experience as sunbathing or tasting the local cuisine. But thanks to the mobile phone, email, Facebook and Twitter, the humble postcard is facing extinction. Research quoted in Coast magazine shows that postcard mail has dropped by 75% in the past decade alone. While they are not instantaneous, like a text message - there's no guarantee they'll even arrive home before you do - nothing says "wish you were here" quite like the postcard.

3. The unplanned road trip
Remember when half the point of a road trip was to get lost down some interesting byway? Thanks to GPS, however directionless meandering down hidden roads has lost much of the thrill it once had. If it looks as though you've stumbled into a dangerous Hicksville somewhere or conveniently ended up in a city's most crime-ridden neighbourhood, you need merely fiddle with your GPS and that familiar tinned voice will tell you, more or less reliably, how to get out. GPS might be invaluable when you're truly lost, but it also takes the adventure out of travel and shortchanges you of stories to tell when you get home.

4. The total disconnect
Before mobile phones and Skype, many travellers were faced with making an expensive long distance trunk call from a roadside phone booth if they wanted to speak to friends and families back home. These days, staying in touch has never been cheaper and easier. On the plus side, travel has become safer: you face less chance of getting stranded somewhere if you can get out your mobile and call for help. On the downside, one of the greatest lures of travel has always been how out of touch you can be. But between instant messaging and texting home, to updating Facebook and tweeting, many of today's travellers don't know how to untie the apron strings and take in the new environment they find themselves in.

5. The travel journal
With more 200 million travel-related blogs out there, the once personal travel journal appears to be moving overwhelmingly online. Internet diaries are a great way to keep your friends and family up-to-date with how your holiday is going. They can track your movements and see photographs and videos of where you have been. Sophisticated as e-journals - to coin a term - might be, they are pretty clinical compared with a hand-written diary, whose very scuffs, stains and faint smells bear witness to where you've been. Hand-written journals are also less self-conscious and more personal than any travel blog will ever be. Moreover, they probably encourage more intrepid travel: as long as you remember your trusty pen, you can update your journal anywhere. No need to hunt down an internet cafe or restrict yourself to places where such technology can be found.

6. The guidebook
Long before the internet and web-connected phones, the travel guidebook was the way we navigated our way around the world. If you wanted to know when the train to Bucharest departed or where to find a bed in Berlin at 2am - you'd reach for your Lonely Planet. With up-to-date information now just a click away, however, the once-beloved traveller's bible is slowly waning in popularity. In the past year the guidebook giant Lonely Planet reported a sharp drop in sales, from £142m in 2008 to £128m in 2009. While it and other guidebook companies are now offering sections of their guides as PDFs and iPhone applications, the tactile heft of the guidebook - its very bulk suggesting endless exciting possibilities - is decidedly lacking. Besides, you can't swat a fly or prop up a table leg with a mobile phone or netbook!

7. The foreign language phrasebook
You've just arrived in Rio and jumped into a taxi but you don't speak a word of Portuguese and your driver doesn't speak English. No need to flip through a phrasebook these days and fumble with impossible pronunciations: simply whip out your portable electronic translator and let it do the work for you. Many of these pocket-size translators, available in hundreds of languages, provide both verbal and written translation. And no doubt they're very handy - but they might encourage you to become even more linguistically lazy. If you really want to learn the language, you have to immerse yourself in the culture.

8. The unencumbered backpacker
Once upon a time, backpacking was about exploring the world with as few possessions as possible. But today's techno-savvy generation of independent travellers, with their trolley bags, laptops, web-phones and MP3 players, are more encumbered than ever. According to AA Travel Insurance, all the backpackers trotting the globe at any one time are lugging around flashy gadgets worth more than £1 billion. Weighed down with all those gizmos, think how much time you'll spend worrying about losing them.

9. The old school hostel
Keeping pace with the new, web-connected traveller, the backpacker hostel has undergone an extreme makeover of its own. Sporting espresso cafes, tour desks and free Wi-Fi, many of today's hostels resemble bland international airport lounges. Don't be surprised to find your fellow travellers are too busy tapping away on their laptops to play a round of pool. While it's certainly good riddance to bedbugs, the old school hostels with their laidback attitude and great social vibe had much more personality.

Tourists of reality part II: St James

One of my favourite places in Cape Town is the False Bay coastline which is flanked by the Silvermine mountain range and dotted with fabulous little seaside villages from Muizenberg through Kalk Bay all the way down to Simon's Town. While I was living in the city I'd often spend my weekends exploring the coast; having breakfast at the Olympia Cafe & Deli, rummaging through the antique shops and second-hand book stores or stopping in for a Windhoek (yes, I know Castle Lager is the national beer of South Africa – I’m just more partial to Windhoek) at the Brass Bell.

For most people though, False Bay's main drawcard is its string of sheltered, family-friendly beaches. With the water around 5-7 degrees warmer than on the Atlantic Coast on the opposite side of the peninsular, it's hardly surprising that it became Cape Town's first fashionable bathing area. There are several magnificent beaches in the area, such as Fish Hoek and Boulders Beach just past Simon's Town where you can swim and sunbathe with a resident colony of penguins. But by far the prettiest and most photographed beach is St James with its brightly coloured bathing houses and tidal swimming pool (see above).

While the stretch of beach itself is not very wide and can get quite crowded in summer, St James has become one of Cape Town’s landmark tourist attractions with its colourful beach houses popping up time and again on postcards, books and paintings of the city. The "tourist reality" captured by these images evoke a romantic vision of the Victorian seaside which is strangely at odds within the context of its modern southern African setting. Yet in an endeavour to sell the past to the present the "touristic reality" has been selectively framed so as to focus squarely on the old-worldly charm of the bathing houses while simultaneously erasing all traces of modernity including the Cape Metro train line that runs directly behind the beach (see below).


I wonder how keen Tourism Cape Town would be to show this reality of their picture-perfect tourist view?

Tourists of reality: reframing travel photography

Following on from some of the comments I received from my last post, I thought I'd shed more light on Susan Sontag's concept of 'tourists of reality'. That is, through the proliferation of photographic images we unwittingly become 'customers' of a 'recorded' reality. In the case of travel photography it is a reality that is formulated, packaged and sold, in the form of glossy travel brochures and postcards, by slick marketing companies and tourism bodies keen to tempt us with the scopophilic pleasures of a holiday in their country. Thus, while Africa has become a continent of wild animals, exotic peoples and vast savannahs, Australia is represented by a monolithic red rock, endless deserts and a coathanger bridge.

Lara Dunston recently touched on this subject on her Cool Travel Guide blog with a post on Blue Chairs: imagining Greece, the perception & reality where she questioned the authenticity of the blue cafe chairs in Greece, which are an omnipresent feature in all brochures and postcards produced by the Greek National Tourism Board. I have to admit I was totally sold on this image and went snap happy for the cute Mediterranean blue chairs while I was in Greece!

Yet so effective has this form of photographic marketing been that we invariably end up spending much of our vacation time searching out so called 'sights' in order to capture these touristic images for ourselves. Because without capturing them we'd have no proof that we did in fact visit that particular place, town, city or country. After all, if you travel to Paris the only way you could possibly prove you'd been there is with a smiling snap of you standing in front of the Eiffel Tower; right?

A few years ago I explored the same theme in an article published by itch magazine in Cape Town in which I studied the city's visual representation in postcards. While postcards of the city showed all the iconic sights such as Table Mountain and the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, what they in fact presented was a piece of a puzzle that forms only a minor part of the mosaic that is Cape Town. So I purchased several of the most popular postcards of the city and set out to discover what had been left outside the focus of the touristic lens.


The most overdetermined of all Cape Town's touristic sights is the omnipresent Table Mountain. Its monolithic form graces almost every postcard, travel brochure and coffee table book produced on the city. While the mountain has been captured from almost every possible angle, the most dramatic and most photographed view of Table Mountain is easily the view from Bloubergstrand on the opposite side of Table Bay. It gives you a panoramic wide-screen view of the whole mountain with the city nestled cosily at its base.

With the postcard as I my guide I made my way to Bloubergstrand to view and capture the 'touristic reality' (see the image above). Once I arrived at the sight I discovered that there were numerous 'view points' from which to obtain the picture-perfect rendition of the 'touristic reality'. I quickly snapped a couple of pictures then plonked myself down on the sand and sat back to await inspiration for my 'alternative realities'. As if on cue another tourist/photographer, armed with an expensive camera and heavy tripod, walked casually up the beach. Stopping directly in front of me, he turned towards the ocean and carefully surveyed the scene before him. Then having decided he had found the perfect 'viewing position' he quickly set up his tripod to capture his own version of Table Mountain's 'touristic reality'.


Immediately inspired, I jumped to my feet and hastily rolled-off a couple of shots of the same scene, though this time reframing my viewfinder to include the tourist/photographer (see above). Then suddenly sensing that my unwitting subject had become aware of my presence (and not wanting to be exposed as a crazy photographer with a peculiar fetish for taking pictures of strangers) I quickly turned around and randomly pointed my camera skyward. But as the lens slowly came into focus I was pleasantly surprised by the new 'alternative reality' that filled my viewfinder. All the time I had been facing forward and focusing my camera on the 'realities' that lay within the usual touristic view of Table Mountain I had been unaware that as the sun was slowly setting the sky behind me had been staging its own magnificent display. Through my viewfinder I now watched mesmerised as the clouds stretched endlessly across the late afternoon sky. Fascinated by their elongated forms, I snapped at my camera again (see below).


The sad thing is, if I hadn’t been doing this project at the time I more than likely would not have seen this amazing sight let alone have captured what has turned out to be one of my favourite and most requested photographs. While photography will always be an integral part of the travel experience, as will the predetermined touristic sights, what I learned from this project is that as travellers we need to open ourselves up to the possibility of life outside of the viewfinder. So the next time you are in Paris and confronted with the Eiffel Tower, I challenge you to buck the trend and discover what is not within the touristic frame. Turn around and take a picture of what is behind you – after all you never know what you might capture!