Travel bloggers organizing travel bloggers to leverage travel blogging for travel.

It's not just the old problem of how to monetize your blog. It's the special travel blogger's problem of needing to pay for the raw material for your writing, and these people can barely talk about the problem of writing well (or usefully) about things they've been given free in anticipation of good publicity.

You have to get deeply into this NYT article to get to the really complicated commerce that made me write the post title above:

In order to make a go of it, some [travel bloggers have] contractual partnerships with outfitters like G Adventures, which created Wanderers in Residence in 2010. The program currently includes five bloggers, who lead tours, do speaking engagements and write blog posts for the company (the bloggers are compensated monthly)...

A different sort of outlet is IAmbassador, which [a travel blogger] started in 2011. The program...  organizes bloggers and pitches campaigns to tourism boards. There are now about 40 bloggers participating in the resulting sponsored trips, Mr. Jenkins said; he has also formed partnerships with travel blogging networks in Germany and Brazil.

I'm not a travel buff and I don't care about travel blogs or other travel writing, but I understand the appeal of real life activities with other bloggers and the desire to have good travel companions, and why shouldn't some bloggers make money organizing trips? It's just another form of packaged vacation, but part of the organizer's clout is some sort of offer of good press. Once the freebie is acquired, do the bloggers feel compelled to be nice? I'd be inclined to be the blogger who calls bullshit on the other bloggers on my tour who effused too much. Maybe I'd get banned (as a troll).

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"The traveler never gets there."

Says Henry, commenting on last night's post about the traveler/tourist distinction.

Henry is a reader of this blog who has commented in the comments section here, back when my blog had comments, and who listened to what I said here:

I'm not going to endlessly discuss why I had to shut off comments on this blog. If anyone wants to argue with me...

Argue or otherwise talk to me...

... they can open up their own blog, write their comment there, link to me, and send me the link. I'll interact with them if they write well and say something interesting and not the same old thing that bogged down my comments section. That's essentially what Glenn [Reynolds] has done over the years — outsourcing the commenting. The would-be good commenters are to be bloggers themselves, and they need to show their stuff and be linkable, not hop on the high-readership platform that he's built up.

Or the semi-high-readership that I built up. It was, I said, time to run free of the semi-comfy home here at Althouse... time to travel... and never get there. I'm not there. I'm still traveling, and this next stretch of the road is narrow and rocky, and it's just me and Meade here in our little 2-seater. We can't drive a big busload over the terrain ahead.

As Henry said in his email to me, sharing that first link, above, it was perfectly easy to set up a Blogger blog. It might take one minute, and then you're off. Don't sit there in that old broken-down bus wondering when it will start up again. Climb out, stick out your thumb, and Google will whiz by presently and give you a ride.



It's a cool ride, and who knows where you'll go... and never get there.

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"What do you think the difference is between a tourist and a traveler?"

"I think a tourist is usually someone who is on a time budget. A tourist is out to see sights, usually which have been enumerated for him in a guidebook. I think there’s a deeper degree of curiosity in a traveler."

So it's a continuum, and if you want to move to the extreme good side of that continuum, perhaps you ought never to leave your home town. The quote is from Philip Caputo, author of "The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, From Key West to the Arctic Ocean," and he's dialoguing with William Least Heat-Moon, author "Blue Highways: A Journey into America."

Heat-Moon reframes the tourist/traveler distinction in terms of destinations: "let’s pick Arizona — those tourists are likely to head for the Grand Canyon, whereas a traveler in Arizona might light out for Willcox. Why somebody would want to visit Willcox, I don’t know, other than to see what’s there. Ask questions: Who was Willcox? What kind of place is it? A tidy little place, by the way."

You go to all that effort to drive way the hell out somewhere, and then you just check out some little towns? Why didn't you just go to all the little places within a close radius of your hometown? That's what doesn't make sense. Heat-Moon comes right out and admits he sees no sense in his own idea.

Here are these 2 big travel writers, and they trash the tourism and hew to the old cliché that one ought to be a traveler, not a tourist. But they can't really explain the worth of this travel that isn't tourism. Unspoken is the reality that for each of them, travel is their work, if they are travel writers. Those who get paid for a particular type of work may find it hard to explain the value of the activity to someone who isn't getting paid but must in fact pay.

They do recommend writing as a way to "deepen the travel" — but writing is a way to deepen whatever it is you do, wherever you are. How do you decide what it is you will do? Let's say you buy into the importance of depth. Is traveling around, going slowly, going to small places, journaling, really worthwhile? Most of our depth comes from the life we live at home, and if we were really observant we would never run out of things to perceive and contemplate at  home.

2 of my favorite quotes are on this topic. First, from my favorite movie "My Dinner with Andre":

I mean, you know, there was a time when you could have just, for instance, written, I don't know, Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen! 

Talk about close observation, sharp writing, and sticking within a short radius at home.

And I'm sure the people who read it had a pretty strong experience. I'm sure they did. I mean, all right, now you're saying that people today wouldn't get it, and maybe that's true, but, I mean, isn't there any kind of writing, or any kind of a play that--I mean: isn't it still legitimate for writers to try to portray reality so that people can see it? I mean, really! Tell me: why do we require a trip to Mount Everest in order to be able to perceive one moment of reality? I mean...I mean: is Mount Everest more "real" than New York? I mean, isn't New York "real"? I mean, you see, I think if you could become fully aware of what existed in the cigar store next door to this restaurant, I think it would just blow your brains out! I mean... I mean, isn't there just as much "reality" to be perceived in the cigar store as there is on Mount Everest? I mean, what do you think? You see, I think that not only is there nothing more real about Mount Everest, I think there's nothing that different, in a certain way. I mean, because reality is uniform, in a way. So that if you're--if your perceptions--I mean, if your own mechanism is operating correctly, it would become irrelevant to go to Mount Everest, and sort of absurd! Because, I mean, it's just--I mean, of course, on some level, I mean, obviously it's very different from a cigar store on Seventh Avenue, but I mean...

The other quote is from one of my favorite books, "Walden," by Henry David Thoreau: "I have travelled a good deal in Concord..." Concord! Not even Massachusetts. Concord. Of course, he didn't have a car.

But then again, he didn't have the internet.

Unspoken: Does Althouse ever leave Madison?

ADDED: A reader quotes my "Those who get paid for a particular type of work may find it hard to explain the value of the activity to someone who isn't getting paid but must in fact pay" and says that "made me think of this sublimely wonderful passage from Moby Dick":

Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid, -- what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!

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