Posts tagged travel writing
Writing and Photography Contest Roundup—2/2/2012
We just posted the winners of our Winter Parks and Weekly Worldwide writing and photography contests. Thanks so much to everyone who entered, we really enjoyed seeing and reading about your cold-weather explorations (even the hardcore snow kiting and ice climbing—brr). If our furry oracle is correct, we’ll be looking forward to at least six more weeks of the underappreciated, ethereal quiet beauty of parks in the winter.
- Winter Parks: 1st Prize Photography: Alex Eriksen
- Winter Parks: 1st Prize Writing: René Jasper
- Weekly Worldwide: 1st Prize Photography: Rachel Chang
- Weekly Worldwide: 1st Prize Writing: Stephen Drum
This week we’re running another Weekly Worldwide Contest with many new places added. You can see what’s close to you and enter here:
- Writing 1st Place: $50 Contract
- Photography 1st Place: $50 Contract
- Deadline: February 8, 2012
In the meantime, we’re busily judging the California Wine Contest and last week’s Weekly Worldwide and will make an announcement by 2/8/12. Thanks so much for the great turnout!
This Week’s Writing and Photography Contests
California Wine Writing and Photography Contest
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- Writing prize: 2-day hotel stay at the Tradewinds Carmel, 2 passports to the Carmel Wine Walk-by-the-Sea, and a $100 writing contract to cover Monterey County’s wine scene.
- Photography prize: $150 at Restaurant 1833 in Monterey, CA
Weekly Worldwide Writing and Photography Contest
- Photography Prize: $50 contract
- Writing Prize: $50 contract
Writing Contests: East Coast Sandwiches and West Coast State Parks + Deep Thoughts
Thanks to all who downloaded our iPhone app! We’re now working like crazy on the next big thing. It’s going to be much more participative every step of the way. Here’s what we’re thinking:
- The check-in market is cornered. The world doesn’t need another Foursquare clone.
- Unedited reviews: Sometimes useful, often faked or spammy, almost always demoralizing to wade through. See TripAdvisor or Yelp’s four stars and a rant.
- Guidebooks/newspaper travel sections: Based on an antiquated, elitist model that relies on a handful of people (often just passing through or relaying hearsay) to cover a huge geographic space. Prone to obsolescence, inaccuracies, shilling, and sameness.
We want to collect the experiences that drive people to check places out and report back on them. To put it succinctly:
People + Places + Love
A place will only appear on Trazzler if:
- our editors scouted it out and loved it.
- a person scouted it out and loved it and our editors agreed.
- a person scouted it out and loved it—our editors disagreed, but smart people convinced them they were wrong.
- an expert (like a tourism bureau or local blogger) suggested it and our editors agreed.
Frankly, most places won’t make the cut. Instead of listing every place in the big wide world and waiting for people to check in, we want you to send you on assignment to check places out. Instead of interacting with a chosen few, our editors work with everyone, devising creative contests that feature places we care about—and reward the people who love a place enough to capture its essence in photos or words.
Here are two contests that are happening right now (soon there will be more all over the world that you can enter right from your phone or Trazzler.com):
East Coast Local Institutions: Sandwich Edition: Writing Assignment—$250 Contract + a Free Philly Hoagie Getaway
West Coast Endangered Places Contest: California State Park Edition—Writing Assignment: $500 Contract
Deadline for entry: November 30.
14 places where you can succumb to the fleeting power of flowers
Photographer: Fiordiligi0127 »>Go to Slideshow: Flower Travel
It takes a special kind of traveler to plan a trip around a phenomenon as capricious and fragile as seasonal flowers. As spring arrives in Japan, many foreign tourists will stay away this year, but—despite the recent series of terrible tragedies—Japanese meteorologists are still tracking the “cherry blossom front” as it slowly pushes north over the islands, waking the countryside from the slumber of winter.
The metaphor of a spring emerging from a cold winter and the ephemeral nature of beauty and life have always had a particular resonance for poets, artists, dreamers, spiritual sorts, nature lovers, and even politicians. Over the past century, the country of Japan has sent tens of thousands of flowering ambassadors around the world, creating gardens of cherry-blossom peace and beauty that bloom every spring in unlikely places like Newark, Toronto, Philadelphia, Macon, GA, and Istanbul. Even a town of serious workaholics like Washington, DC takes a brief pause to embrace the hanami spirit with plenty of suit-clad serious types lounging carefree for a few spring days in the shadow of the Jefferson memorial under the pink clouds of falling petals. It’s hard to imagine a more pure cultural impulse than sharing beauty—from one culture to another or the communal experience of crowds of people letting nature interrupt their daily routines.
Here are 14 places where flowers dominate the landscape, remind us of the endless cycles of nature, and command the attention of even the most distracted humans, at least for a short time. »Go to Slideshow
Abandoned Mines in the West: Roadtripping America’s Boom and Bust Landscape
Photographer: ConstantineD»Go to Slideshow: Abandoned Mines in the American West
As early as the 1920s, roadtrippers headed “out west” to explore the ruins of America’s boom-and-bust 19th-century gold rush. Alongside successful mines, towns sprang up in the middle of nowhere in a matter of months and many crashed just as precipitously when the easy gold or silver was exhausted. Today, there are over 500,000 abandoned mines in the US. Most are on private property, blocked up, or too dangerous to venture into, but others have been shored up enough to visit.
Seeking them out is a good excuse to explore some of the most remote, forgotten parts of America, deep inside state parks or down long dirt roads. These places tell the story of a turning point in American history; just at the time when the federal government was using the myth of “manifest destiny” to justify expansion of the US territory from coast to coast, another myth—that of a real El Dorado—drove the frenetic settlement, economic exploitation, and industrialization of the wild western expanse.
Countless movies and novels have delved into the diverse cast of characters who populated the mining towns and prospecting camps scattered throughout the American West. Their free-wheeling debauchery and restlessness is in stark contrast with the empty quiet of the skeletal present-day ruins left behind.
»Go to the slideshow
—Megan Cytron, Editor of Trazzler
Chicago Juxtapositions Writing Context Redux
Congratulations to all of the winners of our Juxtapositions Writing Contest and a big thanks to our sponsor, the City of Chicago, and all who took the time to enter and vote.
Editors’ Choice Grand Prize:
Falling Into a Book Lover’s Rabbit Hole in Detroit, Michigan
Editors’ Choice Runners-Up Prizes:
Going Pagan for Holy Week in Andalusia, Spain
Discovering a Rocky Oasis in Las Vegas, NV
The People’s Choice winners are:
brendanmcguigan
bmunchausen
Places of Protest: Digging into the grassroots “People’s History” when we travel
Photographer: Fritz Berlin Fan»Go to Slideshow: 11 “People’s History” Places
Historian and activist Howard Zinn died a little over a year ago and his voice is sorely missed. It’s tempting to wonder what he would have to say about the recent uprisings and movements in North Africa and the Middle East (and the US for that matter). His philosophy in a nutshell: “Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.” While specific facts can be disputed from his famous work, A People’s History of America, Zinn did a great thing by shifting our perspective from that of the prestigious few to the experience of the anonymous majority. It was a grassroots story of America (and the world) that identified groups of people who banded together time and time again when there was no other recourse and agitated for change.
When we travel far from home, it can be hard to make contact with a historical reality that is deeper than royal china collections, presidential knick knacks, nationalistic propaganda, and kitschy reenactments. Museums are filled with the beautiful and seductive detritus of power. The stories of these “fugitive movements of compassion” (as Zinn called them) of ordinary folks who toiled in the shadow of the elite are less glamorous, but much more interesting and harder to tell. No presidents slept in any of the places in this slideshow… these are stages where the people are the protagonists—protesting, rioting, demanding, creating, organizing, and changing the world. »Go to Slideshow
—Megan Cytron, Editor of Trazzler
Breaking the box: 10 buildings from the past 15 years that bend the rules
Photographer: Micha L. Rieser»Go to Slideshow: 10 Buildings that Break the Box
“The straight line belongs to men, the curved one to God”—so said Antoni Gaudi, who in the late 1800s designed his mammoth stone church, the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, using a non-Euclidean geometry of hyperbolas, spirals, and curves. Over the course of the twentieth century, plenty of architects have toiled against the visual tyranny of right angles and straight lines. Frank Lloyd Wright urged architects to “break the box,” designing houses like Falling Water with the corners cut out, letting nature in through the window (and driving pragmatic homeowners crazy with a mosquito-friendly lack of screens).
The past 15 years have been especially interesting and productive (and controversial), as technology has allowed architects to squash the box, twist it, destroy it, deconstruct it, bend it, bury it, suspend it in the sky, or ignore it altogether.Go to Slideshow: 10 Buildings that Break the Box
Buildings featured:
Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain
Therme Vals, Switzerland
Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis, MN
Église Saint-Pierre, Firminy, France
Jewish Museum, Berlin
Seattle Central Library, Washington
City of Arts and Sciences, Valencia, Spain
CCTV Headquarters, Beijing, China
Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, Spain
Arthur and Yvonne Boyd Education Center, Australia
Crafty travel: 14 places around the world where you can learn to make beautiful things
As all kindergarten teachers know, few activities bring people together in a state of zen-like contentment like sitting in a circle making things with our own two hands. No matter how exotic the locale, when we travel, it is this kind of basic human moment that sticks with us the most. Over the past decade, savvy communities of artisans around the world have discovered that burnt-out post-industrial travelers are interested not only in buying handmade crafts, but also in learning to make them. This is good for those of us in dire need of craft therapy, but it has also turned out to be a solid model for small-scale community-based tourism.
Travel, at its best, is an exercise in wish fulfillment. In a world of mass-production, the romantic notion of escaping to a far-flung destination and making contact with a community of craftspeople using ancient techniques is a compelling fantasy. While they may not be the Arts and Crafts utopias envisioned by the likes of John Ruskin and William Morris, the good news is that places like this really do exist and the possibilities are endless: batik workshops in Senegal, pottery classes in Turkey, incense making in Vietnam, glassblowing in Italy, weaving in Guatemala, drum making in South Africa, or quilting in Alabama. This slideshow pulls together fourteen spots around the globe where you can travel and immerse yourself in a craft.
Photo by Andre Natta
January/February Freelance Assignments
Thank you to all who applied for our January/February round of weekend-getaway freelance writing assignments. There were so many high-quality pitches this time—more than ever before—that it was quite difficult (bordering on agonizing!) to narrow it down to just one person per region. Without further ado, here they are:
Northern California (Lake Tahoe) Brigid Fuller
Pacific Northwest (Willamette Valley) Spencer Foxworth
NYC/Boston (Vermont) Rob Liguori
South Florida (Miami) Stephanie Dunn
Southern California (Santa Barbara) Tien Nguyen
A bit about our selection process: We first do a preliminary reading of all of the submissions. At this time, we select a group for a second reading. Then we pick of favorites from among this batch and “trazzlerize” them (that is, we make them Trazzler trips or send them to get photos). These trips rise to the top of the list of submissions and the editors give them another reading (or two or three…) to narrow things down further. In the end, about 10-20% of the submissions become Trazzler trips and make it to this final round. While we aren’t able to provide a lot of feedback on individual trips (we wish we could, but we’re a small team and are perpetually swamped), we have written extensively about our editorial criteria and philosophy:
http://www.trazzler.com/about/writing-guide
http://www.trazzler.com/about/writing-nuts-and-bolts
http://blog.trazzler.com/2009/08/trazzler-nycgo-summer-contest.html
This last link, in particular, goes into a lot of detail about why most trips don’t make it to the final round. If this is the case, keep trying!—many of our freelancers and contest winners have entered multiple times before winning. We love it when a writer “gets” our (admittedly quirky) editorial style and focus—even if it takes a couple of tries.
Which brings us to this month’s assignments… We’ll be doing another huge round of 20 weekend-getaway writing adventures—we’ll announce it here and on our Facebook and Twitter accounts in the next few days, so please stay tuned…
15 Hotels With a Macabre History
Hotels are places of transgression. While there doesn’t appear to be a medical term for people who suffer from a fear of hotels, there’s something about these transitional spaces, teeming with intimate human moments, that can make us feel a bit uneasy. Hitchcock knew this—his sketchy, rootless characters breezed in and out of hotels and boarding houses. In “Psycho” (and later Stephen King’s “The Shining”), the specter of an empty motel off the main road produced a sense of dread and foreboding.
If a hotel has been around long enough, it’s probably safe to say that someone died there at some point—and most don’t make much of a fuss about it. Some places, however, have a way of holding on to their sad stories—and embellish and fictionalize the facts to feed our morbid curiosity.
Each of these 15 hotels has a dark past—they are all, also, lovely places to spend a night, if not an eternity. Several are said to harbor ethereal remnants of the people who perished there, others bear physical scars from real violence, and a handful go down in infamy as the site of a messy, high-profile celebrity death.
Hell on earth: 15 gates to the underworld
The more curmudgeonly among us might call the holidays, to (mis)quote David Foster Wallace, “a sneaky keyhole view of hell.” These days, hell is whatever we want it to be: other people (Sartre), ourselves (Oscar Wilde), a half-filled auditorium (Robert Frost). So much of our idea of hell comes from literature, rather than religion—Dante’s and Milton’s allegories, in particular—it’s hard to imagine a time when hell was more geological than metaphorical. Not so long ago, it was thought to be a real physical place beneath the earth’s crust with secret entrances in caves, volcanoes, underground rivers, and bubbling pools of boiling mud.
In the 12th century, Medieval Europeans (not unlike air travelers this spring) were terrorized by the prospect of Iceland’s increasingly active volcanic hellmouth, Hekla, spewing ash and evil all over the continent. In the 1500s, a Spanish friar exploring Nicaragua allowed himself to be lowered into an active volcano on a rope, just to get a closer look at the lake of fire and find a way to exorcise the demons. While science has demystified many of the natural occurrences that were once interpreted as emissions from Hades, these 15 gates to the underworld remind us of the power of the earth to command our fear and respect—and shape our stories.
1. http://www.trazzler.com/trips/lago-daverno-italy-in-pozzuoli-campania-it
2. http://www.trazzler.com/trips/hekla-volcano-in-suurland-is
3. http://www.trazzler.com/trips/volcan-masaya-in-nindir-masaya-nicaragua
4. http://www.trazzler.com/trips/rodin-museummuse-rodin-in-paris-ile-de-france-75007-fr
5. http://www.trazzler.com/trips/exploring-the-skocjan-caves-in-slovenia
6. http://www.trazzler.com/trips/actun-tunichil-muknal-in-cayo-bz
7. http://www.trazzler.com/trips/el-prado-in-madrid-comunidad-de-madrid-es
8. http://www.trazzler.com/trips/owakudani-valley-in-hakone-japan
9. http://www.trazzler.com/trips/bumpass-hell-trail-in-old-station-ca
10. http://www.trazzler.com/trips/val-d-enfer-in-maussane-les-alpilles-france
11. http://www.trazzler.com/trips/gao-miao-temple-in-ningxia-china
12. http://www.trazzler.com/trips/hell-in-ky-1
13. http://www.trazzler.com/trips/wat-si-khom-kham-in-mueang-phayao-thailand
14. http://www.trazzler.com/trips/hells-gate-national-park-in-naivasha-kenya
15. http://www.trazzler.com/trips/yellowstone-lake-in-yellowstone-national-park-wy
Close Encounters With Primates in the Wild
View the Slideshow
When our ancestors climbed down from the trees and set into motion an incessant wandering in search of greener pastures, most humans lost touch with our fellow primates. Perhaps this is why finding ourselves face to face with furry long-lost cousins can be so compelling. How could we not recognize ourselves in those faces, fingers, and familiar gestures? While homo sapiens sapiens has spread all over the rest of the earth, 90% of the world’s primate species live in tropical forests—fragile ecosystems that are hard to navigate without a prehensile tail or grippy toes, and which chainsaw-wielding bipeds seem hellbent on destroying. To get to the habitats where wild primates live often requires an arduous journey off the beaten path to remote national parks, reserves, or rehabilitation centers. Many of these places are learning how to save the forests by encouraging a new kind of sustainable tourism—one that makes conservation a more attractive option for local communities than poaching and slash-and-burn deforestation.
Travelers unaccustomed to living with monkeys in their midst can get into some pretty entertaining trouble when the opportunity for contact arises. The animals often come out of neighboring forests and into tourist towns plying their furry wiles and foraging for easy snacks. A magical monkey moment can quickly morph from the mystical meeting of the minds depicted in Gorillas in the Mist to the menace of the Planet of the Apes. Sticking with more conservation-oriented protected areas will get you closer to the family groups and simian social clubs in their natural setting. Here they put the kibosh on full body contact and feeding the animals, but in return you get to observe the comings and goings, grooming, mating rituals, and general goofing off of non-captive primates. It’s far more entertaining and insightful than any reality TV—though strangely similar plot-wise, what with the nit picking, scuffles, primal screams, intense snuggling, and silly posturing.
November/December Freelance Assignments
We have another round of freelance writing assignments up for grabs this month. Some are ending next week, so get your submissions in soon. Read more here:
Any writers who applied for the last assignment and had a submission that was promoted to “Trazzler Trip” status will automatically be considered for the same region this month (though feel free to add more information to your bio or additional submissions if you think it might be helpful). Winter is perhaps the best season to escape the reality and routine of everyday life—we can’t wait to read about these beautiful spots. Thank you again to all who took the time to submit a trip or participate last month. Please keep writing!
